'Literary Rivals' by Richard Bradford

I read this when I was in hospital recovering from various procedures and being kept under close observation. I was pretty washed out for much of this time and perhaps did not therefore appreciate the early chapters as much as I might. By the time I reached the later ones I was picking up a lot more mojo and was able to concentrate better. And that may be why I enjoyed those so much more.

This is basically a book of essays about authors who in some way fell out with one another or with people in the wider world more generally. Some of these spats are discussed quite briefly, others at much greater length. It spans the UK and the USA, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with some reference to the twenty-first too, this having been published in 2014.

Richard Bradford is a well-known and well-established literary biographer who has written full length biographies of several of the authors who feature here. He writes with authority, but also interestingly and entertainingly. There is some gossipy stuff included here and there, but for the most part this is a pretty serious exploration of aspects of some prominent literary lives.

The final chapter is a tour de force, being a straight forward account of the 'Rushdie Affair' which followed the publication in 1988 of 'The Satanic Verses' by Salman Rushdie and which resulted in the Ayatollah Khomeni's Fatwa, book burning protests, bans in some countries, Salman Rushdie having to live in hiding for many years and physical assaults on publishers and translators. It is a very full and fair account, I think demonstrating that this was the first sustained attempt by an ideological grouping to 'cancel' someone whose work they objected to.

Before that Richard Bradford introduces us to a figure I had never heard of called John Collings Squire (1884 - 1958) who edited an influential literary magazine in the 1920s and 1930s called The London Mercury. He and his followers (known as 'the squirearchy') were conservative reactionaries when it came to their literary taste. They disliked modernist literature, and particularly experimental approaches to poetry such as those being published to great critical acclaim at the time by people like T S Eliot. Such views are, of course, now deeply unfashionable and that is why presumably Squires was unknown to me before reading this book. I have always, though, had some sympathy with the kind of views he espoused, particularly his championing of more traditional literary forms that the likes of Virginia Woolf disdained and called 'middlebrow. I will look out for more about Squires and investigate him further.

All in all this book is a joy to read if you are a bookish type. It goes way beyond personality clashes to discuss literary movements and public policy issues too. But the fallings out form its backbone and are in all cases pretty fascinating to read about.