Ready for take-off

In 1969 John Gross wrote a justly praised book, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. The phrase seemed slightly archaic then, and is more so now. I was going to suggest that Gross is the last Man of Letters, but I find that Stephen Bayley describes me as that in the current issue of GQ magazine — and I’m that bit younger than Gross.

As editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Gross took the brave decision to end back-biting anonymity and give his reviewers by-lines: that was revolutionary, not old-fashioned. If you said he was the best-read man in Britain, I doubt there would be many challengers. Eddie Mirzoeff, who produced the television classic Metro-land with John Betjeman, later made another film with the laureate. The camera whizzed over Britain in a helicopter, and Betjeman approved verse by different poets to accompany each vista. Before the film was screened, Mirzoeff took it along to Gross at the TLS and played it to him. ‘John was able to identify almost all the poets’, he recalls.

I’ve had a similar experience of Gross’s omniscience. For an essay I was writing, I needed examples of the ‘disputed succession’ in literature. I thought of Hamlet and Little Lord Fauntleroy. A learned don, whom I quizzed, could only add King Lear. Then I put Gross to the test. On the telephone, without recourse to any reference book, he came up with Wilkie Collins’s The Dead Secret (1861); Ibsen’s play The Pretenders (1864); and Trollope’s Is He Popenjoy? (1878). Beat that!

So you can be sure that if you ask Gross to marshal an anthology, he will know the field and garner the best. He has already edited several anthologies for the Oxford University Press; and this collection of parodies does not disappoint. I wondered: has he got G.