On Craig Raine

Reflections on the poet, critc and editor at 80

Craig Raine just turned eighty. He was first known as the author of a pair of poetry collections in the late 1970s, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home and The Onion, Memory noted for their skill in metaphor. As Clive James wrote in the twenty-two stanza ottava rima verse letter which he addressed to Raine in 1981:

You spot resemblances with a precision
Not normally conferred by human vision.

He wasn’t the only one to notice. There were those, James observed, who were ‘showing signs of going mad as hatters / At hearing you so often praised and quoted.’

He has also been poetry editor at Faber, a tutor at New College, Oxford, a regular contributor to magazine and newspapers on literature and the arts (collected in three volumes), and mentor to Martin Amis, though Amis preferred to describe him as “my mentor and protégé”.

I have admired Raine for twenty years but it’s fair to say we view things differently. At a recent event, I overheard him saying to a group of people – potential, or former potential, readers of my journalism – “I try to read his longer pieces, but then he starts quoting Fredric Jameson.” His own eccentric canon, emphasising verbal precision or essayistic fluency, includes Beckett and Bellow and Bennett, Salinger and Kundera and Pinter. (He doesn’t like Penelope Fitzgerald and David Foster Wallace.) Starting in 1999, Raine expressed these passions and antipathies in his own Oxford-based little magazine Areté, which closed in 2020 after sixty issues.

The below piece is my fourth ambivalent tribute to Craig Raine. The others concerned activities as novelist, editor-proprietor of Areté, and critic. This one, written for the just-released last-ever issue of Areté – the only one he didn’t edit – is more personal, or at least more extensively memoiristic. . .

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Writing for Craig Raine

Since I’m of the view that Craig is almost always wrong, it was perhaps inevitable that he’d give me a bumpy ride. In 2014, I wrote a pair of pieces on celebrated modern novels for consecutive issues of Areté. After we put the first to bed, Craig wrote, “Next time it will be easy-peasy.” Needless to say, this wasn’t the case.

We had been introduced at the New Statesman centenary party – or, perhaps more accurately, I was summoned to meet him. Craig wanted me to know that while he didn’t bother reading his reviews, he was nonetheless aware that I had “peed” on his novel in the pages of the TLS. The following week, my review of Areté: A Retrospective appeared in the New Statesman, and before long Craig, displaying an uncharacteristic reluctance to vary his metaphors, had complained to someone (yes, wrongly) that I’d “pissed” on his magazine.

This was in 2013, around a decade after I’d begun reading Craig’s poems and essays, first at school, then during a gap-year visit to the Strand Bookstore, where, unable to afford a second-hand hardback of Haydn and the Valve Trumpet, I sat on the ground and made my way through the pieces – brilliant, bracing, persistently daft – on any topics I knew something about. I still remember my surprise–and, with it, a sense of unknown possibilities – at coming across a quotation from Donne’s Anniversaries (“There is motion in corruption”) in a piece about thefilm of The Tin Drum. From that moment, I was a fan of Craig’s writing, and so, it turned out, were the friends I made when I moved to London after university. They’d quote things like the opening line to his piece on Paul Auster (“Even the title is a cliche”), or his assertion that Edmund White “can’t write,” and laugh or grimace with envy. I was also a fan of Areté, which I’d discovered at around the same time as Haydn and theValve Trumpet, on the kitchen sideboard in the kitchen of a woman whom Craig had hassled into subscribing at a dinner party. For a variety of reasons, Craig’s fierce independence prime among them, Areté was the only periodical in English that might run, to name an old favourite, Alexander Nurnberg’s essay on the critical values of James Wood and V S Pritchett. (Not surprisingly, it was really a covert tribute to the glory of Nabokov.) Everything in the magazine–I refuse to call it an ‘arts tri-quarterly’ – read so well, and many articles seemed to be among their author's best things (Tom Shone on Bellow, for example). With its lovely design, its dazzling cast of contributors, its encomia from Updike and Kundera, its refusal to compromise, and its endless peccadilloes, Areté was something that only Craig – or ‘Craig Raine’, as I thought of him then – would even have attempted to pull off.

And so I felt excited but nervous when Craig, leaning against the bar of the Cittie of Yorke, on Chancery Lane, a year after our first encounter, asked if I wanted to write a piece for a special issue he was planning on Márquez. He recalled by way of explanation that he’d devoured Love in the Time of Cholera on a long-ago family ski trip – a stronger seal of approval, it appeared, than the legions of imitators or the awarding of a Nobel Prize, and confirmation, as if it were needed, that the subject of Areté issues were indeed chosen at the whim of its proprietor-editor. I told Craig that I wasn’t sure I was equipped to write Areté. But then his colleague, Claire Lowdon, nudged my side, and I realised that they were short of copy.

I followed up to ask if Craig had been “serious about Autumn of the Patriarch” – the novel I’d been assigned – and if so, perhaps he might supply me some basic details. The reply said: “2-3000 words. Deadline 21 July. Payment: nugatory.” (I said that I was disappointed, having read the article he wrote for the New Statesman when he founded the journal, that he’d started paying his contributors and he wrote again to say that the cheque would be cancelled if I mentioned it to “anyone.”) As 21 July came and went, and the only thing I’d written were excuses about moving flat, Craig proved lenient and even empathetic (“I *hate* moving”). When I eventually filed, he made a number of judicious cuts and questioned the taste I exhibited –so non-Areté-friendly that I must have done it just to annoy him – for engaging with works of academic criticism: “You write so well yourself I don’t see why you adopted the strategy of working through [redacted] and the other duds. You may be nervously covering your arse re S American history, but all the same it means you have to first outline some meathead’s erroneous position and then correct it…”

I pushed back on one or two additions, including a “crack at Polytechnics” (Craig’s description of this addition), on the ground that my mother had attended one. He replaced it with a mocking reference to somebody “holed up in the Bodleian” – the sort of thing, he seemed to imply, that dons waste their time doing when they should be charging around the continent, imbibing magic realism on ski lifts, scoffing canapés in private squares, reclining on gondolas, and air-kissing at first nights. Craig was sure to check that I didn’t have any “rellies” working at Oxford but couldn’t resist a taunting follow-up: “Or are academics in general a protected species?” Once we’d hashed out our differences on this matter and others, he conceded, “the version I really prefer is my first edit.”

But when I wrote to thank Craig for the cheque, he suggested another piece. It soon became clear that Areté’s special issue on Booker Prize winners, unlike the Márquez one, had not been planned as an exercise in celebration. We haggled for a while over the topic. I turned down Schindler’s Ark – I’m not sure why – and suggested In a Free State. “I don’t think Naipaul needs defenders,” he replied. Who said anything about defending (or attacking)? It was here that for me a central area of Craig’s wrongness emerged. I wrote that criticism wasn’t just “a matter of value judgment but of understanding,” adding that if he wasn’t convinced by this to offer yet more Naipaul praise, perhaps I could do John Berger’s G.? It turned out that he wasn’t convinced, but that he also disliked the suggested alternative, informing me to say he wanted neither “a rechaufée [sic] piece on Naipaul” nor “a piece on Berger that emerges from your beautiful brain smelling piquantly of Fredric Jameson and Geoff Dyer.” He wasn’t interested in Berger’s politics. “I’m interested in how well he writes. I believe in evaluation.” At this point, of course, I’d said nothing about my intended approach. We then had a mini-debate about the “rechaufée” thing. What did he mean? My Naipaul piece sounded like “a pet project you’ve been saving up.” Then he added, “I’m probably wrong.” And he was, as people are inclined to be when drawing conclusions on no evidence. (I had never read In a Free State.) He got in touch again to say that he was “just suspicious,” adding, “Perhaps wrongly.” Well, at least he’s on the scent.

We finally settled on J G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, from 1973, Craig predictably rebuffing my idea that I wrote more widely on “post-colonial” winners. “I’d rather your piece was about Farrell’s book than about the Booker’s judges’ complicity with imperialism.” (It was unlikely to claim that: work characterised as post-colonial tends, of course, to be anti-imperial.) “I want to establish - if possible - how many of the winning novels were any good and whether the prize has any aesthetic credibility.” I accepted the brief and, perhaps to show just how on-side I’d become, got in touch to ask if he knew the book was so turgid. “I thought it might be one of the good ones,” he wrote, “but they’re all turning out to be shit.”

I filed the piece, even later than the previous time (one email just read, “Good morning. A-hem…”), and Craig sent back an edited version, with the ambiguous verdict: “Reads well now.” I had a number of quibbles, among them a request to excise the French and Latin words he’d added. Craig’s entire reply read, “Does that mean you vote UKIP?” Later in the back-and-forth, he expressed his amusement that I “think passe is French and viz is Latin. You mean like tour de force or succes d’estime and eg and etc?” Yes, just like those. I said that I might use “magnum opus” and “maybe tour de force ironically.” “Leo,” he advised, “these are now English words.”

But the piece was a hatchet job and so Craig was happy. Towards the end of the process, he wrote, “confirm that ‘mendy’ is brandied peaches” – a factual parenthesis he had added at some point. I replied, “how could you be wrong?” But of course, just as great literature may well contain evidence of clichés or big ideas, and good criticism can be systematic and theoretical and non-evaluative, and denizens of libraries harbour the occasional bright idea, and V S Naipaul merits writing about, and foreign tags can be an eyesore, so ‘mendy’ turned out to be a plant that produces henna. A celebrated journalist friend with knowledge of India provided the definition, before signing off, “It certainly isn’t a brandied peach.”

But as Craig might say: so what? In his introduction to Haydn and the Valve Trumpet – a title named after a memorable solecism – Craig confessed that a letter to the TLS had pointed out that an essay he had written notionally on the topic of Eliot’s relationship to Buddhism could as easily have been about Eliot and Hinduism. But when Craig later rewrote the essay, he managed to invoke the image of Eliot with a dhoti. And even after this mistake was pointed out to him — by the Faber editor Charles Monteith — he retained the detail for the collected version: “like a conscious act of contrition.” Well, he has a lot to be contrite about it. But more to be proud of. He’s a wonderful writer, a canny editor, a world-class mischief-maker, and an all-round source of inspiration – a heroic figure in the world of English letters for more than half a century. I shall always feel lucky to have written for him.