Well, so what? Many people collect their literary criticism: in recent years, for instance, John Updike and Claire Tomalin. But Rosemary Dinnage is no Updike or Tomalin. She is capable of a memorable line — about Clemmie Churchill’s famous destruction of Graham Sutherland’s portrait of her husband, ‘Perhaps she needed, too, to have one great, tremendous battering and slashing.’ But she is also capable of a pretentious or banal one (‘And who, really, was Nadia?’; ‘the youngsters you see on the London Underground draped with chains … are probably sweet kids really.’)
These reviews are not good enough to be collected for themselves, and Dinnage’s instinct to suggest that they add up to more than the sum of their parts is a sound one. But it is not true: they add up to less. The biographies she reviewed very often showed that the roots of their subjects’ torments and achievements lay in their unhappy childhoods — cold mothers (Mansfield, Marie Stopes), deserting fathers (Stevie Smith, Enid Blyton), early bereavements (Gwen John, Bertrand Russell, Mme Blavatsky.) But the interest and value of this lie in the individual detail; boiled down and repeated it becomes reductive. In fact I’ve always disliked most biography reviews, which simply repeat the story in this reductive way. Since the best part of Alone! Alone! turns out to be largely a collection of such reviews, I’m probably the wrong person to review it. Sorry.
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