Foreword
There I was, years ago, a lecturer in American literature at Manchester University, and a novelist. For some reason those activities seemed to be regarded as contradictory. The only comment my head of department ever made about my writing career was to say one day, ‘You’re published by Chatto and Windus, aren’t you?’ No, I told him, Faber. He gave me a suspicious look, as if he thought I might be daft enough not to know who my publishers were. ‘I thought it was Chatto,’ he said, and the matter was closed between us for ever.
So for a long time the two parts of my professional life were entirely separate. It was as though writing novels was a slightly dodgy personal habit that could just about be tolerated but never condoned. A colleague in the German department used to ask me from time to time whether I was working on a new detective story. I didn’t write detective stories, as it happened (though I’ve always loved them), but I got the message: it was OK to write fiction that didn’t take itself too seriously because then it could be regarded as a hobby, like gardening or sailing, something that didn’t set itself up in competition with the real business of writing criticism.
In some ways things went from bad to worse. Along came the 1980s and the dominance of literary theory, which so problematised writing it was hard to imagine anyone doing it at all, a fact that was recognised in the concept of the death of the author.
But authors are alive and kicking, after all – look at the ones in this anthology. Not only that; they can be nurtured in a university. There is, it turns out, nothing incompatible in thinking about literary matters and producing poetry and fiction and drama of one’s own.
My generation was the victim of two false assumptions, it seems to me. One involved the separation of reading from writing, criticism from creation. The other, related one was a post- romantic belief in the private and mystical nature of the writing impulse. At its most extreme this morphed into the notion that only the great dead were capable of lifting a pen (or quill). Even now you can still read the odd éminence grise in the broadsheet press harrumphing about these new-fangled Creative 369 Writing departments and proclaiming that literary talent can’t be taught (in much the same tone as aged judges asking, ‘And just who are these Beatles?’).