A fine solo performance

The sort of young person who once drifted into publishing now fiddles about with computers instead. The trade has been transformed both by its wretched economics and by the wretched spirit of the times. Solo publishing in particular, an eccentric business or a business for eccentrics, should have died out many years ago. Michael Russell didn’t. He is vague about dates but seems to have been at it for about 35 years and is still going, perhaps even going strong. He puts it perfectly: ‘In publishing terms I know I’m largely out of touch, but I seem to keep in touch all right with that part of the book-buying market which is also out of touch.’

Now he has produced an anthology of snippets from works he has published over the years. The start, a small reminiscent essay by himself, is very funny. So, to hook the audience, are the next few pieces. They are funny, that is to say, if you are keen on puns and verbal crashes like an order to the Everyman Bookshop in Salisbury for a copy of Tess of the Dormobiles.

Later comes more serious stuff, quite often involving Eton, the army, dogs, people whose fathers are earls, and subordinate bits of abroad like India, Egypt and Ireland. There is a bit about the Spanish civil war from a nurse who joined the Nationalist side because her father (a mere lord, this one) was a friend of the Spanish royals. There’s even a fascinating scrap about Hitler from a chap who enjoyed the Nuremberg rally, worked in London for Ambassador von Ribbentrop and, to be fair, later turned anti-Nazi.

I sheepishly claim the barest relationship with all this grandeur, by way of some anecdotes by John Colville about my mother’s godfather Colonel Jack Seely, a gallant officer upon whom Asquith later thrust high political office. Winston Churchill

thought Duff Cooper’s wit went too far when, accused across the dining table of being the worst Secretary of State for War in the present century, he swelled with pretended rage and replied: ‘How dare you say that in the presence of Jack Seely?’

There is fine writing as well as high-ranking bitchery. Freya Stark struts her stuff, in a letter to Paul Scott. Philip Glazebrook writes about a presidential tea-party in New Delhi: ‘Women crowded cakes onto their plates with quick looters’ fingers.’ Very few extracts seem to be there just because of the compiler’s fondness for the compilee. Even Fly Fishing by ‘J. R. Hartley’ earns its rightful place.

The temptation when reviewing anthologies is to lapse idly into sub-anthological extracts. Yet the process of selection, if not simply to show off the selector’s wide reading or fashionable friendships, may have a more interesting purpose. The best anthologies are autobiography by other means, opening windows into the compiler’s mind. Mr Russell reveals himself as an interesting fellow who either thinks his life has not been full enough to merit a long narrative, or is overmodest about his narrative gift. In a brief account of what publishers actually do he observes, wisely, that quite a lot of them can improve other people’s fictions, but very few of them can write a tolerable novel: ‘The gift is the narrative thrust, the whatever it is that keeps people turning the pages.’

Lacking by his own account that thrust, he has turned out one of his always elegant volumes, ideal for those with short attention-spans, old-fashioned tastes and a liking for high-class gossip. The people most likely to enjoy it might well be those who love The Spectator.