AfterWord edited by Dale Salwak

‘Conjuring the Literary Dead’ is the sub-title of this outlandish, sometimes beguiling book. Its editor, Dale Salwak, coaxed 19 writers — of the status of Margaret Drabble, Francis King, Jay Parini and Alan Sillitoe — to write essays in which they imagine speaking to dead authors who intrigue them. The resulting chapters are often inquisitive, macabre and teasing, but occasionally flat or laborious. ‘Perhaps all writing is motivated, deep down,’ Margaret Attwood suggests in an introductory survey, ‘by a fear of and fascination with mortality — by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.’ Francis King more modestly proposes that it is a common daydream ‘to hold converse with the mighty dead’.

This is a hodge-podge of a book with diverse contributors, subjects and locations. Jeffrey Meyers calls on Samuel Johnson in his lodgings. Cynthia Ozick visits Henry James at Lamb House, where her questions are so tart that she is ejected. Alan Sillitoe drinks whisky with a pugnacious Joseph Conrad on a Thames barge. The Department of Homeland Security initially blocks William Chace’s application to time-travel to 1927 to interview Ezra Pound at Rapallo. Brian Aldiss strolling in the Wessex countryside finds Thomas Hardy sitting on a stool sketching a village church, and recovering from dinner with the Duchess of Devonshire. Margaret Drabble’s contribution is her own critical rumination rather than an act of ventriloquism in which Arnold Bennett’s voice is imitated. Catherine Aird quotes powerfully from Kipling’s writings, but never pretends to have met him. A man who staged Beckett’s plays muses on his hero’s habits and powers.