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Anthony Burgess In The Yorkshire Post

By Andrew Biswell

The circular Brotherton Library, built in 1936, stands at the heart of the city campus of the University of Leeds. The university buildings, including the magnificent library, are loftily dismissed as "a bad moment" by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner in his architectural gazetteer, The Buildings of England: Yorkshire West Riding (second edition, Penguin, 1967, p. 329). Yet beneath the Brotherton’s impressive dome stands a remarkable set of archives, including the private papers of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the records of the Independent Labour Party (among whose prominent members were George Orwell and Graham Greene). The Brotherton Library also holds a complete collection of back numbers of The Yorkshire Post, the most significant regional newspaper of the North of England, whose editorial offices are in Leeds. Like most English newspapers, the Yorkshire Post has no published index, but a few months ago I visited the Brotherton (with Russell Thorne, my research assistant) in search of Anthony Burgess’s "lost" journalism from the early 1960s. The purpose of this short article is to describe – and, for the first time, to catalogue – what we found there.

Burgess was hired by the Yorkshire Post as a fiction reviewer in January 1961. He wrote a fortnightly column on new novels until May 1963, contributing a total of 65 long articles over this period. He reviewed four or five novels in each piece, but it is worth noting that he was simultaneously writing for The Listener and The Observer, as well as working regularly for BBC Radio. While writing for the Yorkshire Post, Burgess also published six novels: Devil of a State, One Hand Clapping, The Worm and the Ring, A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and Inside Mr Enderby.

His fellow contributors to the books pages were a distinguished bunch: they included the novelist and translator Peter Green, the historian Asa (later Lord) Briggs, the Yeats scholar A. Norman Jeffares (who taught at Leeds University in the 1960s), Bonamy Dobrée (an influential critic and close friend of T.S. Eliot), and the literary historian David Daiches. It is clear from this list that the Yorkshire Post’s literary editor, Kenneth Young, had taken care to assemble a stable of high-calibre reviewers. It seems that Burgess had been recommended to the vacant post of fiction critic by Peter Green, who had reviewed Time for a Tiger on its first publication in 1956.

The interest of Burgess’s reviews is considerable, not least because, taken together, they give us a clear picture of what he was reading over the course of these twenty-eight months. Most of the novels he covered have long since sunk without trace, but (as my bibliography shows) a number of significant post-war works came under his scrutiny during this period: Joseph Heller’s Catch 22; Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire; Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook; two novels by Iris Murdoch; John Updike’s first two books; new novels by William Faulkner, Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh, Christine Brooke-Rose and John Braine; and Graham Greene’s non-fiction book, In Search of a Character. We might say, in fact, that this reviewing job laid the ground for Burgess’s long study of contemporary fiction, The Novel Now (Faber, 1967; new edition, 1971). Beyond this, the reviews provide an intriguing chronicle of new fiction, as well as various examples of Burgess’s journalism at its best.

One of the genuinely surprising features of Burgess’s fiction columns is that he often uses them as a means of discussing his own theory of the novel. For example, on 25 January 1962, he writes that most contemporary novels are like "metallic beefburgers, dry pasta, flat television meals […] fashionable maybe, speciously tasty, perhaps – but not likely to stick to one’s ribs." This gives rise to a speculation about what might give the novel "nutritious solidity". His answer involves "More than length, variety of characters, scenic richness." What Burgess demands is "moral depth, a concern with the roots of action and the consequences of unconsidered actions, a willingness to enter the labyrinth."

Reviewing Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 on 28 June 1962, Burgess was once again looking for nutritious solidity, but he was not convinced that Heller had enough of it to offer:

Catch 22 is a satire on War, and its theme is the unheroic one of how to survive it. It is an orchestration of Arms and the Man (Shaw, being an English liberal, was always too moderate) and Captain Yossarian is bigger, tougher, more neurotic, more intellectual, than any chocolate soldier […] He sees the enemy quite simply as the people who have no objection to his dying, and these are to be found on both sides.
[…] All this is fine, funny, bitter, but underneath the implied ethos is there not something of that William Saroyan sentimentality that came out sickeningly in the novel about Wesley Jackson – that ordinary men are all decent whatever their nation, and don’t really love their big-jowled leaders?
One knows that the Second World War was a case of defending the bad against the worse, but what was a democrat to do when faced by Hitler’s children in arms? The thesis of Catch 22 (a brilliantly contrived book) can only be universally valid when the whole world has been absorbed into the American empire.

This is judiciously put, but it is interesting to compare Burgess’s contemporary review with his later, more enthusiastic, critical statements in The Novel Now (pp. 54-55) and Ninety-Nine Novels (p. 79). In The Novel Now he describes Catch 22 as "America’s most recent major contribution to war fiction," and says that Heller’s approach to fiction is "surrealistic, absurd, even lunatic, though the aim is serious enough – to show the mess of war, the victimization of the conscripts, the monstrous egotism of the top brass."

It seems to me that the importance of the Yorkshire Post review is that it was written before Heller’s novel had acquired its international reputation. Burgess’s initial hesitations and reservations are serious ones, and he’s concerned that historical novels, particularly those dealing with the events of recent history, should give a morally honest account of the real world to which they refer.

The review of Nabokov’s Pale Fire (15 November 1962) goes to great lengths to correct the general perception of Nabokov as the "smutty" author of Lolita, and it draws a firm distinction between the narrator of that novel and Nabokov himself, who is said to be crazy not for nymphets but for words alone. "His love affair with the English language achieves a prolonged consummation in Pale Fire," Burgess tells his readers.

Explaining the complicated interaction between Shade, the deceased author of the 999-line "Pale Fire" poem within the novel, and Kinbote, the poem’s fictional editor, Burgess pronounces this book a satisfying return to form after the slight disappointment of Laughter in the Dark (which he had reviewed in the Yorkshire Post of 23 March 1961):

Some of the satire is uproarious: Nabokov is primarily a great humorist. But the real joy of the book is the joy the author takes in the manipulation of language, the deliberate naughty perverting of literature, the thrown-away build-up of Kinbote’s eccentric personality, the modern America that is always, like some loved furry beast with odd habits, lurking in the Nabokovian background.

Part of Burgess’s pleasure in this novel is the prospect that some readers (aware of Lolita’s scandalous reputation) would be buying it in the expectation of finding smut between its covers, and discovering instead that they had been sold a perfectly chaste satire against literary pedantry.

When Burgess turns his attention to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (on 3 May 1962), he does so with evident mixed feelings. His review finds it difficult to conceal an overwhelming sense that the novel (which has gone on to become one of Lessing’s most prominent books) is a deeply flawed work:

I am late with the new Doris Lessing. I make no apology: it has taken me a long time to read (568 pages of close print) and at the end of it all I feel cheated. This talented writer has attempted an experiment which has failed, essayed a scale which is beyond her.
[…] This is a book of revolt – political, social, sexual. Anna [the heroine] became a Communist in South Africa, seeing in Communism a "moral energy" not to be found in other creeds or in the long-entrenched privileged class. Anna is also concerned with being a "free woman" – rebelling against traditional male dominance – and with achieving maximal erotic fulfilment.
[…] There is no doubt about the great moral virtues here – intelligence, honesty, integrity – but it is the aesthetic virtues that seem to be lacking. The characters do not really interest us: when we have dialogue it is strangely unnatural […] Mrs Lessing’s old singleness of vision, her strength as a writer, is not to be found here.

Again, this review needs to be considered alongside his later critical statements in The Novel Now (pp. 101-02) and Ninety-Nine Novels (p. 86). The second of these declares, with the benefit of twenty-two years’ hindsight, that The Golden Notebook is "an historical document of some importance," though the praise is carefully qualified even so. The real fascination of comparing these critical utterances is that of seeing Burgess’s response to a particular novel as it evolves over time. Whether or not he consistently undervalues Lessing’s ground-breaking feminist novel (and the question must remain, for now, an open one), the original review shows us what he thought in the immediate aftermath of a first reading. Above all, these Yorkshire Post reviews communicate the excitement of encountering a range of literary novels, devouring them at speed, and offering a provisional critique of them.

Although the majority of these reviews seem generous and fair-minded, Burgess was not afraid to administer a kicking on those rare occasions when the book seemed to demand it. Of Graham Greene’s autobiographical fragment, In Search of a Character (reviewed on 23 November 1961), he says: "This is hardly a book at all: combings and cigarette-ends of observation, tired pensées, the spores of a novelist’s creative agony, all set in what we can only think of now as Querry’s country." Querry, of course, is the ecclesiastical architect who is the main character in Greene’s novel, A Burnt-Out Case (1961). The review continues:

Surely Greene has, in his time, told us plenty about himself? True, he has – the drinking, the tendency to easy ennui, the pessimism, sex – but the core will always remain unprobed. We learn a little more in this journal, but never enough. We can never know enough about any major writer, because what makes him a major writer is the innermost mystery of his personality, never to be disclosed.

The problem with publishing the preliminary notes to a work of fiction, as Greene had done here, is that "a novel is always greater than its parts." Greene, it’s argued, "did not find Querry here, nor Dr Colin, nor the Rykers: they came from a bigger and darker world than Africa – the creative imagination." (Incidentally, Norman Sherry overlooks this review in his authorized Life of Graham Greene, as do the compilers of other reference works on Greene. I should therefore like to claim it as a minor bibliographical discovery.)

Of more direct interest to readers of the Malayan trilogy is Burgess’s review of Alan Sillitoe’s Key to the Door (reviewed on 19 Oct 1961), a novel set both in Nottingham and in Malaya, where the young Sillitoe had done his National Service during the Emergency of the 1950s. Burgess had very much admired Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), but he found the Malayan sections of Key to the Door to be lacking from several angles:

Young Brian [the book’s central character] seems to grouse through a dripping and frightening jungle-and-mountain landscape completely without (if we except his grousing mates) human figures. We hear of the Malayans, and wonder which of the Malayan races he means. Occasionally a Malay, clad for some reason in a sari, glides through.
[…] It is the complete lack of concern or even minimal interest in people other than the ingrowing group of working-class lads that appals. But one is also appalled morally. Brian cannot see the Chinese Communists as enemies. His failure to kill off a terrorist who eventually snipes at his own mates merits no condemnation. The political naiveté of the book is incredible. But, to be just, there is life and a certain poetry […] Nobody is going to deny Mr Sillitoe’s talent. He needs more than talent now: he needs to grow up.

Looking back on the year’s fiction on 28 December 1961, Burgess returned to Sillitoe’s book and made his objections even clearer. The novel, he said, had "completely falsified" the Malayan jungle war. "For those of us who, living in terrorist territory, saw the garrotted bodies of our friends, the political naiveté of a book like this is nauseating. I am aware, of course, that this is not an aesthetic judgement." These passionate attacks on Sillitoe’s position must surely cause us to regard the comedy of Burgess’s Malayan novels in a new light.

Given that Burgess later produced, in 1982, a long novel which described the end of the world from three different points of view, what are we to make of the following short review (published on 27 July 1961)?

Finally, as this is the holiday season, a little self-indulgence. And So Ends the World [by Richard Pape] is one of those delightfully cosy books described as "a prophetic and terrifying novel of cosmic holocaust." It is rather like Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript, though far more stately. The moon, you see, comes out of its orbit. Frightening and lovely, to be taken with a pound of soft centres and some really fizzy lemonade.

This is, in fact, remarkably close to the plot of the Lynx chapters in Burgess’s own The End of the World News. Richard Pape’s novel would surely bear further investigation as one of the sources behind the Burgess book.

It’s worth saying a few words, too, about the forgotten writers who came under review in these columns. I wonder what became of novelists such as Niccolò Tucci ("very large and very impressive") Sloan Wilson (whose novel, claimed Burgess, did not advance the cause of literature one iota) or Glendon Swarthout (who "creates his own climate" and "leaves his own strange taste"), all reviewed on 18 April 1963.

Elsewhere, the reviews throw up a few surprising and hitherto little-known facts: that Burgess had bought and admired Michael Innes’s series of detective thrillers; that he had read Phyllis Bottome’s novels as a student in the 1930s and deplored her prose-style; that he regarded the French "anti-novel" (as practised by Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet) as "an heretical concept".

Burgess was probably right to feel aggrieved at his sudden dismissal for having written about one of his pseudonymous "Joseph Kell" novels (on 16 May 1963). In fact he was far from unique in having reviewed his own book: even James Joyce was not above collaborating on an early review of Finnegans Wake. But perhaps we should reflect instead on the very many reviews he wrote without being sacked. As so often in his journalistic writing, Burgess’s tireless energy and the encyclopaedic range of his interests are the qualities which particularly strike the reader. Unlike most book reviewers, he hardly ever repeats himself: his prose is unfailingly lively, often getting carried away with its own rhetoric, and it goes well beyond the standard clichés of books pages. Reading through these reviews forty years after they first appeared, the thought keeps striking me that each article is crafted to an unusual degree. The best of them would be worth republishing in book form -- if only an enlightened publisher could be found who would be willing to produce a scholarly edition of Burgess’s literary journalism.

In his book, The Metropolitan Critic (1974; new edition with autocritique, 1994), the poet, novelist and reviewer Clive James replies to Burgess’s comments about the conflict between journalism and the supposedly more legitimate forms of literary writing. Disputing Burgess’s much-repeated claims that reviewing was mere hack-work and a distraction from novel-writing, James says: "If Burgess’s literary journalism was meant to be such an inherently inferior activity he might have done us the grace of being worse at it, so that we could have saved the money it cost to buy Urgent Copy and the time it took to enjoy it" (p. 274). James adds that Burgess was "the man who actually gets written the novels that other men only dream of writing," implying that his extensive reviewing work had had no detrimental effect on the quality of his fiction.

Indeed, I would argue that Burgess’s involvement in the business of reviewing other people’s novels possibly altered his own writing for the better. His Yorkshire Post reviews (among other journalistic work) eventually gave us two important books about the state of the novel after 1939. They also gave Burgess a clear sense of what the competition was up to, and of how and why his own novels should be different.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘The New Novels: Reviewed by Anthony Burgess’, Yorkshire Post, 12 January 1961, p. 4 (review of Grace Metalious, The Tight White Collar; Mary Ellen Chase, The Lovely Ambition; Michel del Castillo, The Death of Tristan; Stuart Cloete, The Fiercest Heart; Richard Vaughan, There is a River; Jonathan Wade, Back to Life)

‘Gay Outsider in an Insider’s Job’, Yorkshire Post, 26 January 1961, p. 4 (review of William Cooper, Scenes from Married Life; William Faulkner, The Mansion; Zoë Oldenbourg, Destiny of Fire; Romain Gary, Nothing Important Ever Dies)

‘Works of Protest’, Yorkshire Post, 9 February 1961, p. 4 (review of André Schwerz-Bert, The Last of the Just; Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke; Mongo Betty Muller, King Lazarus; Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?; John P. Marquand, Wickford Point; Erskine Caldwell, Kneel to the Rising Sun)

‘Round the World in Five Novels’, Yorkshire Post, 23 February 1961, p. 4 (review of William Styron, Set This House on Fire; Jim Kirkwood, There Must Be a Pony!; William Ash, The Lotus in the Sky; Katharine Sim, The Jungle Ends; Robert Poole, London E.1)

‘Ustinov Portrait of a Nazi’, Yorkshire Post, 9 March 1961, p. 4 (review of Peter Ustinov, The Loser; Frederic Prokosch, A Ballad of Love; Marie-Claire Blais, Mad Shadows; Joan O’Donovan, The Middle Tree; John Hersey, The Child Buyer)

‘A Rich Quarry for the Novelist’, Yorkshire Post, 23 March 1961, p. 4 (review of Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation; Mika Waltair, The Secret of the Kingdom; Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark; Wilfred Sheed, A Middle Class Education; Isobel English, Four Voices)

‘Another Brave New World’, Yorkshire Post, 6 April 1961, p. 4 (review of Diana and Meir Gillon, The Unsleep; Dorothy Whipple, Wednesday and Other Stories; Roald Dahl, Someone Like You; James Purdy, Colour of Darkness; Alec Waugh, My Place in the Bazaar; Lilian Halegua, The Pearl Bastard)

‘In the H. G. Wells Tradition’, Yorkshire Post, 20 April 1961, p. 4 (review of Edward Hyams, All We Possess; Stanley Middleton, A Serious Woman; Pierre Boule, For a Noble Cause; Romain Gary, The Talent Scout; Michael Campbell, Across the Water; J. I. M. Stewart, The Man Who Won the Pools; Max Wilk, Don’t Raise the Bridge (Lower the River); Irving Wallace, The Chapman Report)

‘Porridge His Downfall’, Yorkshire Post, 4 May 1961, p. 4 (review of Roy Bradford, Excelsior; Balachandra Rajan, Too Long in the West; Storm Jameson, Last Score; Frank Rooney, McGinnis Speaks; Agnar Mykle, The Song of the Red Ruby; Ann Gardiner, The Minister’s Wife; H. E. Bates, Now Sleeps the Crimson; The Esquire Reader; Ronald Firbank, The Complete Ronald Firbank)

‘Artless Chronicle of the Days of Youth’, Yorkshire Post, 18 May 1961, p. 4 (review of Godfrey Smith, The Business of Loving; Pierre Sichel, The Sapbucket Genius; Louis de Wohl, Lay Siege to Heaven; Robert Shaw, The Sun Doctor)

‘Welfare State Satire’, Yorkshire Post, 1 June 1961, p. 4 (review of Jack Lindsay, All on the Never-Never; Frederic Raphael, A Wild Surmise; Daphne Fielding, The Adonis Garden; Edita Morris, Echo in Asia; Susan Sherman, Give Me Myself; Richard Bissell, Goodbye Ava; Stan Barstow, The Desperadoes and Other Stories)

‘Iris Murdoch’s Latest’, Yorkshire Post, 15 June 1961, p. 4 (review of Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head; Alan Paton, Debbie Go Home; Elizabeth Mavor, The Temple of Flora; James Barlow, Term of Trial; Peter de Vries, Through the Fields of Clover)

‘Gerald Kersh at His Peak’, Yorkshire Post, 29 June 1961, p. 4 (review of Gerald Kersh, The Implacable Hunter; John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent; Muriel Spark, Voices at Play; Robert Lait, The Africans)

‘Celts in Conflict’, Yorkshire Post, 13 July 1961, p. 4 (review of Bryher, Ruan; Jean Rikhoff, Dear Ones All; Herbert Lobsenz, Vanguel Griffin; Henry Treece, Jason)

‘Talking of Michelangelo’, Yorkshire Post, 27 July 1961, p. 4 (review of Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy; Maurice Edelman, The Minister; Mitchell Wilson, Meeting at a Far Meridian; Ernest Raymond, Mr Olim; Richard Pape, And So Ends the World)

‘The Madhouse and the Couch’, Yorkshire Post, 10 August 1961, p. 4 (review of Teo Savory, The Single Secret; Rosalie Packard, The Plastic Smile; Elio Vittorini, Women on the Road; John Cheever, Some People, Places and Things …; Alexander Fedoroff, The Side of the Angels)

‘From Angels to Angelique’, Yorkshire Post, 24 August 1961, p. 4 (review of Richard Condon, Some Angry Angel; Laura Del-Rivo, The Furnished Room; Junichiro Tanizaki, The Key; Benjamin Siegel, A Kind of Justice; Sergeanne Golon, Angelique and the Sultan)

‘Wars and Wedded Love’, Yorkshire Post, 7 September 1961, p. 4 (review of Jean Larteguy, The Centurions; Vernon Scannell, The Face of the Enemy; David Hughes, The Horsehair Sofa; Christine Brooke-Rose, The Middlemen; Colin Wilson, Adrift in Soho)

‘Those Voices Again’, Yorkshire Post, 21 September 1961, p. 4 (review of Ivy Compton-Burnett, The Mighty and Their Fall; John Updike, Rabbit, Run; James Aldridge, The Last Exile; Nevil Shute, Steven Morris; Giovanni Arpino, The Novice; Ferreira de Castro, The Mission)

‘Angus Wilson’s Best’, Yorkshire Post, 5 October 1961, p. 4 (review of Angus Wilson, The Old Men at the Zoo; Richard Hughes, The Fox in the Attic; John O’Hara, Sermons and Soda Water; V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas; Nicholas Monsarrat, The White Rajah; Julian Green, Each in His Darkness)

‘Spring’s Fruits in Autumn’, Yorkshire Post, 19 October 1961, p. 4 (review of John Dos Passos, Midcentury; Anita Loos, No Mother to Guide Her; Alan Sillitoe, The Key to the Door; V. S. Pritchett, When My Girl Comes Home; John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor; Louis Aragon, Holy Week; A. J. Cronin, The Judas Tree)

‘Crouchback Concluded’, Yorkshire Post, 26 October 1961, p. 4 (review of Evelyn Waugh, Unconditional Surrender)

‘The Muse Steps In’, Yorkshire Post, 2 November 1961, p. 4 (review of Philip Toynbee, Pantaloon, or The Valediction; Eric Linklater, Roll of Honour; William Sansom, The Last Hours of Sandra Lee; Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie)

‘Lively World of the Dead’, Yorkshire Post, 16 November 1961, p. 4 (review of Jerzy Peterkiewicz, The Quick and the Dead; Flann O’Brien, The Hard Life; Marcel Rouff, The Passionate Epicure; Wilder Penfield, The Torch; Richard Gordon, Doctor on Toast; Roger Falla, The Sisters of Emergency Ward 10)

‘The Novelist’s Agony’, Yorkshire Post, 23 November 1961, p. 7 (review of Graham Greene, In Search of a Character; Thomas Mann, The Genesis of a Novel)

‘La Noia – And Jealousy’, Yorkshire Post, 30 November 1961, p. 6 (review of Alberto Moravia, The Empty Canvas; John Bratby, Breakfast and Elevenses; Herbert Russcol and Margalit Banai, Villa Vardi; Angela Thirkell and C. A. Lejeune, Three Score and Ten; Bertolt Brecht, Tales from the Calendar)

‘Various Handfuls’, Yorkshire Post, 14 December 1961, p. 4 (review of Peter de Polnay, No Empty Hands; Helen Foley, A Handful of Time; Françoise Sagan, Wonderful Clouds; H. E. Bates, The Day of the Tortoise)

‘Best of the Spate: Looking Back at the Year’s Fiction’, Yorkshire Post, 28 December 1961, p. 3

‘New Year Signposts’, Yorkshire Post, 11 January 1962, p. 4 (review of Adrian Mitchell, If You See Me Comin’; Errol Braithwaite, An Affair of Men; Allan Campbell McLean, The Islander)

‘Essence and Appearance’, Yorkshire Post, 25 January 1962, p. 4 (review of Storm Jameson, The Road from the Monument; Thomas Hinde, A Place Like Home; Robert Holles, The Siege of Battersea; Nigel Balchin, Seen Dimly Before Dawn; Arthur Roth, The Shame of Our Wounds)

‘Characters in Orbit’, Yorkshire Post, 8 February 1962, p. 4 (review of Nathalie Sarraute, The Planetarium; Rayner Heppenstall, The Connecting Door; R. C. Sherriff, The Wells of St Mary’s; Janet Frame, Faces in the Water; Claude Faux, The Young Dogs; Carlo Cassola, Bebo’s Girl)

‘Some Adventures in Hell’, Yorkshire Post, 22 February 1962, p. 4 (review of Elias Canetti, Auto-Da-Fé; Ruth Rehmann, Saturday to Monday; Angus Heriot, Four-Part Fugue; John and Esther Wagner, The Gift of Rome; Kathrin Perutz, The Garden; John Williams, On the Way Out)

‘Character Called Isherwood’, Yorkshire Post, 8 March 1962, p. 4 (review of Christopher Isherwood, Down There on a Visit; W. J. White, The Devil You Know; Camilla Carison, You Are Mine; John Harris, The Spring of Malice; Richard Matheson, The Beardless Warriors, Rachel Grieve, ed., Best Doctor Stories)

‘After the Minotaur’, Yorkshire Post, 22 March 1962, p. 4 (review of Mary Renault, The Bull from the Sea; John Wain, Strike the Father Dead; Clara Winston, The Hours Together; Norman R. Ford, The Black, the Grey and the Gold; Sheila Howarth, Bogeyman’s Plaything)

‘Brave and New’, Yorkshire Post, 29 March 1962, p. 4 (review of Aldous Huxley, Island)

‘Rain in Springtime’, Yorkshire Post, 5 April 1962, p. 4 (review of Brian Glanville, Diamond; Merle Miller, A Gay and Melancholy Sound; David Chagall, The Century God Slept; Cothburn O’Neal, The Gods of Our Time; Bernard Malamud, A New Life; Mikhail Zoshchenko, Scenes from the Bath-House; Sean O’Faolain, I Remember! I Remember!; Arthur Quiller-Couch and Daphne du Maurier, Castle Dor)

‘Shattered Dreams’, Yorkshire Post, 19 April 1962, p. 4 (review of Paul Scott, The Birds of Paradise; J. R. Salamanca, Lilith; Richard G. Stern, Europe; P. H. Newby, The Barbary Light; Ronald Marsh, The Quarry)

‘Heady World of Lowry’, Yorkshire Post, 3 May 1962, p. 4 (review of Malcolm Lowry, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place; Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano; Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook; John Updike, The Same Door; Bertrand Mather, Through the Mill; Richard Mason, The Fever Tree)

‘Stone Turned to Flesh and Blood’, Yorkshire Post, 17 May 1962, p. 4 (review of Olivia Manning, The Spoilt City; David Beaty, The Wind off the Sea; James Hanley, Say Nothing; Louis Battye, Cornwall Road)

‘Off the Path’, Yorkshire Post, 31 May 1962, p. 4 (review of Paul Ableman, As Near As I Can Get; Rosemary Manning, The Chinese Garden; Claude Simon, The Flanders Road; Stuart Lauder, Winger’s Landfall; Peter de Vries, The Blood of the Lamb)

‘Polish and Pin-Stripes’, Yorkshire Post, 14 June 1962, p. 4 (review of Peter Green, Habeas Corpus and Other Stories)

‘A Severed Rose-Head’, Yorkshire Post, 14 June 1962, p. 4 (review of Iris Murdoch, An Unofficial Rose; Roger Vailland, Turn of the Wheel; Peter van Greenaway, The Crucified City)

‘The Music of Time’s Finale’, Yorkshire Post, 28 June 1962, p. 4 (review of Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones; Joseph Heller, Catch-22; Vernon Scannell, The Dividing Night; Gusztav Rab, A Room in Budapest)

‘Twin Problems’, Yorkshire Post, 12 July 1962, p. 4 (review of Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding; Theodora Keogh, The Other Girl; Susan Yorke, The Agency House; Ronald Hardy, Act of Destruction; Desmond Meiring, The Man with No Shadow)

‘Light Gravity’, Yorkshire Post, 26 July 1962, p. 4 (review of Pamela Hansford Johnson, An Error of Judgement; Hortense Calisher, False Entry; Edgar Mittelholzer, The Wounded and the Worried; Roger Lloyd, The Troubling of the City)

‘Tension in Sicily’, Yorkshire Post, 9 August 1962, p. 4 (review of Federico de Roberto, The Viceroys; Carlo Castellaneta, A Journey with Father; Nantas Salvalaggio, The Moustache; Diana Raymond, The Climb)

‘The Magic of Place’, Yorkshire Post, 16 August 1962, p. 4 (review of Elspeth Huxley, The Mottled Lizard; Rupert Croft-Cooke, The Glittering Pastures; Mrs Robert Henrey, Spring in a Soho Street)

‘Bell Rings the Changes’, Yorkshire Post, 23 August 1962, p. 3 (review of Lettice Cooper, The Double Heart; Edward Upward, In the Thirties; Thomas Hinde, The Cage; Robert Lund, Daishi-San)

‘Idylls and Ideals’, Yorkshire Post, 30 August 1962, p. 4 (review of Phyllis Bottome, The Goal)

‘Tribute to a City’, Yorkshire Post, 6 September 1962, p. 4 (review of Harrison E. Salisbury, The Northern Palmyra Affair; Friedrich Darrenmatt, The Quarry; Diane Giguerre, Innocence)

‘Forger’s Faith’, Yorkshire Post, 20 September 1962, p. 4 (review of William Gaddis, The Recognitions; Ian Brook, The Black List; Frederic Raphael, The Trouble with England; Catherine Ross, The Colours of the Night)

‘The Real Holmes’, Yorkshire Post, 27 September 1962, p. 4 (review of William S. Baring-Gould, Sherlock Holmes: A Biography)

‘Braine at the Top’, Yorkshire Post, 4 October 1962, p. 5 (review of John Braine, Life at the Top)

‘Yankee Giant’, Yorkshire Post, 18 October 1962, p. 4 (review of Hiram Haydn, The Hands of Esau, Sid Chaplain, The Watchers and the Watched; Paul Hyde Bonner, Ambassador Extraordinary; Ellen Marsh, Unarmed in Paradise)

‘Hatred Afloat’, Yorkshire Post, 1 November 1962, p. 4 (review of Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Get Ready for Battle; Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke)

‘Nabokov Masquerade’, Yorkshire Post, 15 November 1962, p. 4 (review of Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire; Paul Gallico, Coronation; Bernard Thompson, O Tell Me Pretty Maiden; Marguerite Duras, Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night; C. Dawson Butler, Negative Evidence; Alexandre Dumas, The Flight to Varennes)

‘Through a Curtain’, Yorkshire Post, 29 November 1962, p. 4 (review of Slawomir Mrozek, The Elephant; Jean Ross, The Godfathers; Rachel Trickett, A Changing Place; Naomi Jacob, Great Black Oxen)

‘Time, Space and River’, Yorkshire Post, 13 December 1962, p. 4 (review of Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet; Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time; R. H. Mottram, To Hell with Crabb Robinson)

‘New-Type Pagliaccio’, Yorkshire Post, 10 January 1963, p. 4 (review of Emyr Humphreys, The Gift; Antony Trew, Two Hours to Darkness; Jim Hunter, Sally Cray; Jennifer Dawson, Fowler’s Snare; Sybille Bedford, A Favourite of the Gods)

‘Nasty Middle Ages’, Yorkshire Post, 24 January 1963, p. 4 (review of Zoë Oldenbourg, Cities of the Flesh; Harold Robbins, The Carpetbaggers; Barnaby Conrad, Dangerfield; Mochtar Lubis, Twilight in Djakarta; Norman Thomas, Ask at the Unicorn)

‘First Citizen of Athens’, Yorkshire Post, 7 February 1963, p. 4 (review of Rex Warner, Pericles the Athenian; Alfred Grossman, Many Slippery Errors; John Updike, Pigeon Feathers; William Butler, The House at Akiya; Fausta Clalente, The Levantines; George Andrzeyevski, The Gates of Paradise)

‘Black Agony’, Yorkshire Post, 21 February 1963, p. 4 (review of James Baldwin, Another Country; George MacDonald, Phantasies and Lilith; Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey, Seven Days in May; Stefan Heym, Shadows and Lights; Jerome Weidman, My Father Sits in the Dark; Ralph Allen, Ask the Name of the Lion)

‘Cain and Abel in Algeria’, Yorkshire Post, 21 March 1963, p. 4 (review of Maurice Edelman, The Fratricides; Patrick Raymond, A City of Scarlet and Gold; Donald Jack, Three Cheers for Me; Alexander Cordell, Race of the Tiger; Ira J. Morris, A Kingdom for a Song; Angus Heriot, The Island is Full of Strange Noises)

‘I Remember Grossmama’, Yorkshire Post, 18 April 1963, p. 4 (review of Niccolò Tucci, Before My Time; Sloan Wilson, Georgie Winthrop; Glendon Swarthout, Welcome to Thebes; Jon Cleary, Forests of the Night)

‘Poetry for a Tiny Room’, Yorkshire Post, 16 May 1963, p. 4 (review of Joseph Kell, Inside Mr Enderby; Bernard Malamud, The Natural; Teo Savory, A Penny for the Guy; B. S. Johnson, Travelling People; Ralph Dulin, The Unconquered Sun; Daphne du Maurier, The Glass-Blowers; Evelyn Ames, Daughter of the House; Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow)


Andrew Biswell lectures in the English Department at King’s College, Aberdeen University, Scotland.

Please send any comments or queries to Andrew Biswell. 

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Last Updated on Sunday, 30 June 2013 19:44
 
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