In Conversation with Colin Burrow

By Madeleine Jacob

Are there two Colin Burrows? The All-Souls scholar of sixteenth-century literature also regularly appears in the pages of the London Review of Books. He has written for the paper since 1998, and contributes book reviews to the Guardian and the Evening Standard. I was hooked, as a teenager, by the title of his article on William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral, ‘The Terrifying Vroom.’ Maybe it’s fair to say that Burrow’s reviewing is also exhilaratingly — and, sometimes dangerously — adjectival. On the other hand, his scholarship is diligently sober (if it retains some of his comic timing).

Burrow’s reviews range across literary genre. Recently, he’s been tepid about Zadie Smith’s historical novel The Fraud, riffed on Lorraine Daston’s cultural history of rules (in a typically LRB-ish bait and switch) and navigated Henry James’ labyrinthine Prefaces with in a piece with an exasperated title: ‘Just say it, Henry.’ Burrow’s recent academic work also takes pleasure in the act of writing: Imitating Authors (2019) begins with Aristophanes’s frog impression and finishes with Christian Bök’s ongoing project encoding Virgil’s Georgics into the DNA of a radiation-resistant bacterium.

Last year, Burrow and cultural critic Claire Bucknell (also a fellow of All Souls) recorded a series for the LRB’s Close Readings podcast, ‘On Satire’. The series had a flavour of The Rest Is… format, where the hosts’ repartee seem to be able to animate any material they touch on. But Burrow and Bucknell weren’t talking on any old material, and their conversations were too carefully researched to feel blaggy.

In Burrow’s book-lined study, we spoke about the work of reviewing, the responsibility which comes with description, the late fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones — Burrow’s mother — and whether it’s okay to be an entertaining literary critic.

ORB How do you manage tone across the different genres you write in?

CB When I'm doing academic work, I often feel as though I'm slightly suppressing my more sportive side. For that reason, and for many other reasons, writing for the LRB is joy. When I'm reviewing, I try to make the subject of the books that I'm reviewing interesting, even if I don't particularly like the book. The academic work I do, well, people sometimes have suggested that I'm unduly frivolous in that as well, but I generally keep it more in check. There are a couple of jokes in my edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems, one of which someone did notice. So that's good, but mostly it's very solemn. One of the jokes, not a particularly funny joke, was a gloss on the word wormholes: these are the first wormholes to enter the OED. Not side splitting.

ORB You get your review copy. How do you get to your draft?

CB With difficulty. If you really want to know: I always have a sheet of paper that I fold over so it fits inside the book. And I have a little propelling pencil. As I'm reading, I write very small pencil notes on my piece of paper. I write down facts that I'm likely to forget, and I write down quotations that I think I might have something to say about. I also sketch out a bit of an idea about it. Once I've done that, I usually let the book stew for a bit, and I sit there thinking, what am I going to say? And I have few days of misery, and then there's a sort of solid moment where I go: yeah, I'm going to write this. In a morning, I might do 2000 words, and that would be the core. Then I go back to my painstaking, invisible notes, and put in the facts that I've forgotten. Then I reread it and get rid of as much self-indulgence as I can, although not all of the self-indulgence, because that would be no fun at all. And if the subject is even remotely sensitive, I get my wife to read it, who is a very good advisor on moments of excess, and I curb those, according to her advice, and then I send it off. Every piece I've done for them that I've liked has happened like that.

I have a pattern and a rhythm to it, including accepting that there's always a period after you finish reading the book where you think: how am I going to do that? And you’ve just got to go: okay, go and dig in the garden or walk the dogs or whatever, and let it happen. With any kind of writing, you have to have faith in yourself that the moments where you can't do it are just temporary and that it is going to come. But that's quite a hard thing to learn.

Even my mum, who was an amazing, productive writer. She'd sit there spellbound writing long hand without deviation. She had periods where she thought — I can't do it anymore. And we'd always say: course you can. And of course she could. So writing is always partly about negotiating the blocks or the points where it doesn't come.

I don't really have on the whole hard deadlines for the LRB, so I can let the blocks happen. In the course of the however many hundred years I've been doing it, the period of blockage and delay has got greater as I've got more willing to indulge myself. It's not a refined machine, but I have a pattern that I am familiar with.

ORB Who are your literary critical influences?

CB The literary critics who I most admire are ones who give you a sense of the stuff being important, and that goes along with being willing to describe texts with the belief that the act of description isn't just neutral. It is a sort of act of making.

If you take Shakespeare critics, Anne Barton is great in that way. She just describes things that are going on in the plays and makes you notice things as a result. And it's that — criticism as an act of animation — that I aspire to. The risk of it is it does become potentially too much about me and not enough about it. And that's a risk in criticism, and it's a risk in long form reviewing too, but it's a pleasurable risk to take.

ORB Do you take the view that there is too much literary appreciation — rather than criticism — in long form reviewing?

CB There have been a lot of changes in the past 30 years in the way in which reviewing works. There’s a lot less of it in newspapers. And academic book reviewing has become ultra-cautious and ultra-descriptive. Academic book reviews now are often shortcuts to reading the book, with very little barb or bite to them. That certainly was not the case when my academic career started, when the hatchet job was a recognized genre, and everybody did it to everybody else. The fact that there was blood flowing everywhere didn't really matter. Everybody chuckled as the heads rolled. It isn't like that anymore, but I don't I think there's loss or gain in that.

There is a descriptive timidity in some reviewing now. There's a reluctance to say this is wrong, or this is bland, or this is wrongheaded. And criticism is partly about making judgments, and making judgments involves criticizing. That is potentially something being lost.

In the academic world, it's partly because everybody knows that people's jobs depend upon not having nasty reviews, and promotion depends upon having been reviewed in reputable journals by reputable people in broadly positive ways. And I think the precariousness of academic life has had an effect on the culture of reviewing. One of the good cultural changes in the past 30 years is that people generally are much more conscious of the dangers of giving offense, and that is a good thing, because it's hard to be critical without also being sneering or superior or aggressive.

ORB Do you feel guilty or anxious when you review the work of living authors?

CB It’s partly being reviewed yourself and realizing how hard it is to write a book of any sort. I’ve become more aware of the risks of cruelty as I've got older. I think, well, I would hope, that I would only really let someone have it if they if I thought they really deserved it. The cruelest review that I've ever done was a review of Stephen Greenblatt's very bad biography of Shakespeare. He was paid a huge amount of money to sell his soul and produced a pretty terrible book. He is of an eminence where letting him have it isn't going to do him any harm. I'm quite happy to punch upwards. I hope I would not punch downwards.

I found it quite hard reviewing Zadie Smith's The Fraud. I really admire her, but I felt that she was sort of pushing herself in a direction that suppressed a lot of what made her fun. It took a long time to write, and obviously there are particular delicacies: an old white bloke talking about work by a black woman about the relationship between transatlantic slavery and the English aristocracy. With that sort of case, you’re aware both of the mines that you've got to tread on and the person that you're writing about, and also the audience that you're writing for. And it's quite a hard process of tiptoeing through. But with that one, I think I did okay.

ORB In your mother’s writing, description often has magical power. Do you feel a power, or responsibility, when you describe a literary work in your criticism?

There are lots of ways in which critics generally just matter quite a lot less than they did. The public intellectual critic, appearing on Newsnight back in the day, has vanished. And that's something, whether or not it's power. I don't really like power, but I know what you mean, that describing a thing in a particular way, whether it's a book or an author, is making it look that way to your readers. I suppose that is my kind of power.

I think what I do is so infinitely inferior to what my mother did, that I can't quite see them on the same poles. She genuinely had a magical view of reality. If you said things, they happened. She was one of half a million people on the M25 when a lorry stalled in lane three. For the other how many hundred thousand people it was a lorry stalled on the M25 but for her it was a manifestation of her travel jinx, and she genuinely believed that that was how the world functioned. It was crazy and egotistical, partly, but it was also a manifestation of how deep her imaginative view of the world was.

When Miyazaki was negotiating over doing a film of Howl’s Moving Castle, which was a big event for her, she had to sign over all the rights in all the characters. She said, ‘but it's like signing them into slavery’. Ultimately, she was happy to do it because she and Miyazaki were very much in sympathy about her view of the world. But she genuinely thought that she was making things, not just stories but worlds. I don't do that — I don't make worlds. I just write reviews of books to make people laugh, maybe read them and maybe spare them the pain of reading them, in some cases. I don't think that is either power or lack of power.

ORB When passages of text are read out on the [Close Readings] podcast it’s often in a very dramatic way. How do you feel about being an entertaining as a literary critic?

CB To step back from the question, I think academics studying English Literature are often quite defensive about what they do, and I have personal experience of being not regarded as doing serious subject. That all you do is read Shelley in a punt or whatever. That perception of the subject as being easy pushes some critics towards being bit too po-faced about the material that they're dealing with, and too reluctant to make it entertaining. Most of the stuff that we solemnly discuss as literary critics was written to give people thrills of one kind or another, to excite them or make them laugh or make them think.

Any really good literary text is going to have a voice, a sort of human voice inside it talking directly to an audience. And I think one of the good things about podcasts as a medium is that you can really let the voice out, and you can make a text into something that's speaking. If that involves putting on silly voices, I'm quite happy to do that because I have no dignity and no pride. It makes me happy to do the voices. But I also think at a profound level all really good literature is, at root, dramatic, and that you can bring out a voice inside it if you perform it right.

Doing the podcast was enjoyable particularly because it enabled me to think about how literature is a form of performance art, which weird for me to say, given that I've spent most of my academic career working on the non-dramatic works of people who are famous as dramatists. But there we go. We're all allowed contradictions.

MADELEINE JACOB is currently reading English at Hertford College, Oxford. Her writing has appeared in ArtReview, Architecture Today and The Isis Magazine. She is the lead editor of Starch, a literary pamphlet based in Oxford.

Art by Cordelia Wilson