On the lookout for amusement

There have always been people enjoying reviews more than books. You may not have time for a book, but a review is much less demanding, and can ‘be more accomplished and more thoughtful than the book on whose existence it depends’, as Mary-Kay Wilmers says.

Since September 2015,1 have been grateful to Karen Hewitt for inviting to Perm Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, and to Mary-Kay personally - first for her brilliant speech at the Seminar, and also for her letters, books, and subscription to the paper. The LRB is the bestselling literary publication both in Britain and in Europe. From the very beginning (1979), it has stood strongly for the tradition of the literary and intellectual essay. Karl Miller, founding editor, then professor of English at University College, London, made the paper’s content and approach more academic; Mary-Kay Wilmers (editor since 1992), more various, relaxed, and provocative. It is a perfect fusion of business, scholarship, art, style, and gaiety.

I have been thinking a lot of the last point, because when Karen Hewitt asks us, the Russians, to write for Footpath, she suggests it should not be boring. At first I was surprised (why should we be dull and tiresome?), but then I realized Karen might be right. The British guests she brings to Perm are fun -in all activities: while reading lectures, conducting seminars, answering questions, making speeches at final dinner. Why are the Brits usually more amusing? Serious and amusing at the same time, I mean. Their gaiety is not to the detriment of their

professionalism, and vice versa. They can go on, in Ivor Potts’ words, ‘being intellectually upmarket without having at the same time to be horribly serious’ [Bad Character 2008: 101]. Is it due to upbringing? Education? Conscientious efforts? Genes?

While reading A Tribute to Mary-Kay Wilmers, prepared by her friends for her birthday, I couldn’t but notice numerous mentioning of her love for gaiety. The most eloquent was Nicholas Spice’s remark in his excellent piece ‘Giving the ephemeral its due’: ‘it wouldn’t be too far from the mark to say that fun and gaiety are what she lives for’ [Bad Character 2008: 117]. I could probably say such words about a stand-up comedian. As for Mary-Kay, she was bringing up her two boys, Sam and Will Frears, Sam having Riley-Day syndrome, and doctors not expecting him to live beyond the age of five - he is now 44. At the same time Mary-Kay was fully committed to editing. Running the LRB is a colossal work, and Mary-Kay leaves nothing out of control, though the atmosphere at 28 Little Russell Street (the LRB office), according to Alan Bennett, is ‘clever and quite playful’ [Bad Character 2008: 11].

While explaining why the most talented contributors write better for Mary-Kay than for other editors, Nicholas Spice goes into detail (worthy to be discussed with our students: do they edit their essays like that?):

Where some editors see it as beneath them to get elbow-deep in the text, preferring the more so-called creative parts of the role - schmoozing with authors, commissioning pieces, planning the structure of particular editions or ensuring the variety of a whole run of issues - Mary-Kay sees these tasks as only half the job. Remaking the text, trimming and clarifying and focusing arguments and architecture, rewriting paragraphs and sentences, bringing everything into conformity with house style, making sure the finished piece looks good on the page, words split and spaced properly: she would find it inconceivable to evade this painstaking grappling with the text. For her, editing is a fully integrated activity, or it is nothing [Bad Character 2008: 117].

Nicholas Spice points out, that ‘all this emphasis on work and the willingness to take pains’ is far from being ‘rather earnest or puritanical’:

Mary-Kay’s absolute commitment to work is a commitment to ridding the world of stuff that gets in the way of fun and gaiety: people taking themselves too seriously, pomposity, hot air, empty rhetoric, bullying rhetoric, people using words lazily and, therefore, boringly, people producing writing that doesn’t work hard enough, doesn’t earn its place on the page. All the work Mary-Kay dedicates to the pieces in front of her is designed to make them lighter: less dark, less heavy [Bad Character 2008: 117].

Isn’t it the answer to the question how not to be dull? To rid the world of stuff that gets in the way offun and gaiety. Isn’t it easier said than done?

Mary-Kay either possessed initially, or acquired later, striking diverting and entertaining competences. Colm Toibin’s piece with an eloquent title ‘The importance of not being earnest’ highlights it:

When night fell she was good company. If you found yourself beside her at a table you were in for an evening of quite complicated jokes and a lot of laughter and an utter lack of earnestness. However, if you became earnest ... then she could pounce on you. It must be hard working with pieces day after day, thinking up new ideas, finding new contributors, making the beautiful boys [the editorial young -Т.У.] keep their heads down, balancing the paper, deciding what goes first and what goes in the middle, sternly maintaining the astonishing standard. The night is for laughter [Bad Character 2008: 125].

I guess, such evenings should be not only relaxing (I’m speaking theoretically - I’m a strong introvert, and it is not my variant of relaxation at all), but should be a good training ground for being light and easy. Yet the amount of Mary-Kay’s social skills and hospitality is surprising not only to me. Wendy Steiner in her piece ‘55 Gloucester Crescent’ described her initial visit there:

Gloucester Crescent was <...> silent and solidly middle-class, though number 55 proved anything but. It fairly teemed with people: Mary-Kay’s two teenage sons, Will and Sam, lodgers, an exnanny, friends, ex-friends, neighbours, and a few visitors like me, passing through. <...> Mary-Kay was cooking dinner for the 12 or 14 of us.

In my limited experience, the editors of important literary journals didn’t do that sort of thing, and children and lodgers and nannies didn’t eat with the guests. Neither did neighbours come to supper unannounced, as a writer and a theatre director from up the crescent did halfway through the roast lamb. This was a new notion of sociability [Bad Character 2008: 37-8].

As Wendy Steiner mentioned, the conversation here ‘bristled as much as it glittered, and it glittered quite a bit’ [p. 38]. The atmosphere was wonderfully evoked in Nina Stibbe’s book Love, Nina. In 1982, twenty-year-old Nina moved from Leicester to London to be a nanny to Sam and Will. To me the book was like a guidance to humour of the family, happiness, in away.

Mary-Kay’s influence on people is astounding. Colm Toibin was short in expressing the idea: T wonder if she changed many people’s lives as she changed mine’ [p. 124]. Judging by A Tribute, - quite a lot. Wendy Steiner was quite expressive:

At the table one would find long-standing friends of Mary-Kay’s - inspiringly clear-edged people - along with an assortment of waifs of all ages and classes, miscellaneous souls in the process of finding themselves or divesting themselves of the selves they had previously found. Number 55 was like a chrysalis, and Mary-Kay was endlessly patient - and amused -at the embarrassments accompanying metamorphosis. It was quite extraordinary, over the years, to see so many awkward young lodgers end up as celebrated writers, fostered by the shelter and opportunities Mary-Kay provided [Bad Character 2008: 39].

We can read a number of the then lodgers. John Uptown in his piece ‘On not minding’ specifies: ‘I’ve known Mary-Kay for almost a decade and a half, I suppose, ten years of which I was either a lodger or living somewhere on her property’ [p. Ill], His confession demonstrates Wendy Steiner’s point exactly - his ardent wish of metamorphosis (he felt ‘like the proverbial spare part’ at dinners and social events), and, alas, -‘tongue-tied embarrassment as salvos of conversation burst’:

Do you believe she could influence people if she were boring? Neither do I.

Secondly, while reading him, you realise, how not at all easy gaiety and fun are. You may struggle a lot before you acquire (or never come to) this ‘light, dry humour’. Mary-Kay is lucky with her talent. ‘It comes naturally to her both to undermine and confirm seriousness at the same time’, Michael Neve testifies [Bad Character 2008: 32]. You can feel it in her writing, her sons, people influenced.

I was thinking to ask Mary-Kay why she had gravitated from Faber and Faber towards a paper, and then I read Nicholas Spice: ‘The lifespan of a review is much shorter and more intense than that of a book’ [p. 118]. Mary-Kay Wilmers is admirable for intensity. I think he is right to suppose that ‘what Mary-Kay likes about the LRB is the nature of its being-in-the-world: the fact that its purpose is to entertain and divert intelligent people at their most desultory and impatient. I think she likes its ephemerality’ [Bad Character 2008: 118].

We’d better be, in Adam Phillips’ words, ‘on the lookout for amusement, even where it is least expected’ [Bad Character 2008: 20]. Why not make the repertoire of pleasures more subtle?