March 1960
It is now a year since I began reviewing books here, and as I have been given the chance of making a few general remarks, there is one point which was perhaps not made clear a year ago. It has been suggested on several occasion that I am always ‘too kind’ (soft, or soppy), have nothing but ‘praise’ (indiscriminate admiration) and that, according to me, ‘all books are marvellous’ (I am a tasteless bore). While all this may be simultaneously true, the intention has been to find books that you might want to read, and not ones that you won’t. Even on this principle, the dozens or hundreds which I have had to omit haunt me. My space, like your time, is limited, and if - like the man when you ask your way - I were to describe in loving or caustic detail a turning which there is no point in your taking. I should be wasting both.
So, out of the great sea of generals, statesmen, professional men, artists, and erstwhile criminals who are pouring out their earliest memories in the form of autobiography, there may only be room to choose one poet; one of the hundreds of people who cross the Pyrenees on a bicycle, the Pacific in a coracle, the deserts by jeep, the Arctic by dog, the Lake District by gumboot, and various other gigantic distances by balloon, raft and camel, there may only be room for one travel book; out of the thousands of attempts at illuminating human relations very few novels can be selected, and however many people write works explaining the innermost motives of General Gordon, the Brontês or Burke and Hare, one book about one of them is probably all that can be managed. This is apart from the vast miscellany outside these categories - there are countless books to choose from; the point is not that there are far too many bad books so much as that there are quite enough good ones, and this is the climate required for anything better than good to emerge…