Prefacing

And forewords to history

First Folio: A Little Book of Folio Forewords

Forewords are pretty hard to write. That must be the conclusion of anyone who has read even a few, since they are so often terrible. I’ve read forewords to collected editions of comic books written by other comics authors. They’re sometimes very funny but mostly quite awful. I’ve read back-slapping forewords by friends of the author, or tedious, mannered forewords to things like government or think tank reports. (And I’ve ghosted a few of them, too, just in case you think I’m exempting myself from this shower.)

Forewords ought to be easy to write; I’m sure many of us think we could have a decent go at writing them. Though it is not always so easy.

Most publishers fail, it seems, really to get the goods.

But some people truly believe they do things properly. The Folio Society is meant to know its onions and to get good and worthy people to write its prefaces. As this volume indicates, that belief is not unfounded. Some of the forewords here are excellent.

Tim Parks on Machiavelli does not say anything very interesting – he merely claims that Machiavelli occupies his place in culture not only because he talked of ends and means and not morals, which every era and every society needs to hear periodically, but also because he does still shock us, boring moralists as we are. Anyone who once was depicted as demonic, as the most evil possible philosopher ever produced, must yet generate some interest. No doubt it’s true.

When Richard Holmes offers a real survey of Robert Louis Stevenson’s travel writing, he begins with the most ridiculous purple passage: the idea of going travelling oneself, at a tender, precocious age, and getting sunburnt and made unhappy, and then gulping down great draughts of ice-cold water and of Stevenson’s travel writing in alternating fashion. This image is absurd. It’s all pose, no point. But then, we read on; and the preface gets better and better. Holmes really quite excellently sums up Stevenson’s various travel-writing endeavours, weaves them neatly into his biography, gives hints but never unnecessary digressions into the processes of writing and publication.

By its conclusion, I thought that this approached an ideal foreword.

Philip Pullman on Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is perhaps proof that a subject and an author can go together too well. Pullman clearly adores the book, can offer forth innumerable little examples from it, wants to go on and on in its favour. But the reader might not like something so effusive. Might not want to get so bathed in admiration before beginning to approach the literary K2 of Burton’s immense work. May just want more of the facts, ma’am.

But each to their own.

Iain Sinclair on The War of the Worlds is a misstep. Bad, tedious zip, zap, boom type writing does not necessarily become describing (or even introducing, heaven forfend) something that’s actually good. This one is just too much effort, too much vain grasping at style when substance really would have done. Had Sinclair been capable.

As it turned out, he was not.

But Colm Tóibín on Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, meanwhile, is just the ticket. Tóibín writes so elegantly and with such analytic strength that one cannot but want to read the book in question (which I intend to read this year, along with as much of the rest of James’s work that time will allow). This is the ideal introduction: serious enough, amusing enough, thoroughly effective in whetting appetite and building anticipation. Solid propaganda. I’ve read very little better.

William Trevor’s preface to A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, meanwhile, serves to produce from that immense roman-fleuve a few of the little bits and pieces that dull aficionados can endlessly pull out of their rucksacks – a little like salt flecks groomed from an ape’s fur by its friend.

But I’m by no means above that practice, so here’s my favourite of the passages Trevor quotes: ‘”What an indescribably sordid incident,” said Stringham. “However, let’s hear full details.”’

Simply delightful.

Frances Wilson on a selection of Casanova’s memoirs paints him as a wannabe Tristram Shandy-esque picaresque hero, but in reality a somewhat tragic figure. An exile from his beloved Venice. A victim of the Inquisition (notorious spoilsports). Someone seduced by rather than seducing of women, powerless in their presence or when unwitting part of their schemes (a reality with which some of us can sympathise).

A man more sinned against than sinning. Who’d have believed it?

John Sutherland’s introduction to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is really profoundly inadequate in ways that are quite surprising. That Sutherland only alludes to Vonnegut’s total and unrepentant acceptance of the neo-Nazi and holocaust revisionist position on the Dresden bombing (something also made fetish of by the authorities and secret police of the GDR), makes the whole piece absurd.

Less literary criticism than shoe-shining. Unworthy.

Jonathan Coe’s very short effort to sum up Tom Jones is mostly spent defending Fielding from being a man’s man and in doing so somewhat fails to explain why the book is quite so wonderful as the preface-writer says it surely is.

And to round off the collection we have Julian Barnes on the paradoxes and deceits of Ford Madox Ford, a man whose own chaotic life and the chaos of The Good Soldier might just give readers a false impression. Barnes is a fan, but he’s not a dogmatic fan. And his essay is fun, funny, enticing.

As a foreword really ought to try to be.