1963 The most famous writer to review his own works behind a protective mask of anonymity was Walter Scott, who gave a lengthy and favourable notice to his first series of Tales of my Landlord in the January 1817 issue of the Quarterly Review (the Tory journal that Scott himself had set up, with John Murray, in opposition to Archibald Constable’s Edinburgh Review).
Later in the century Walt Whitman shamelessly (and again anonymously) puffed his first volume, Leaves of Grass, in 1855. As late as 1876, in an anonymous article in the New Jersey Post (26 January), Whitman was still promoting Whitman to an insufficiently appreciative American readership and editors who mistreated his genius with, as Whitman believed, ‘determined denial, disgust and scorn’.
In the 20th century the most flamboyant self-reviewer was Anthony Burgess. In the early stages of his literary career Burgess picked up work as a reviewer for the Yorkshire Post – a paper that then had influential literary pages. Burgess’s first novels appeared under the pseudonym ‘Joseph Kell’.
Unaware of the relationship, the Post’s literary editor gave Burgess Kell’s Inside Mr Enderby to review. Burgess, who loved literary mischief, duly produced a sagacious review, published on 16 May 1963. Mr Kell, he blandly informed his readers (with a double meaning that only he appreciated), was ‘a quiet and cunning novelist’. Readers, however, should be warned:
Inside Mr Enderby is, in many ways, a dirty book. It is full of bowel blasts and flatulent borborygms, emetic meals … and halitosis … those of my readers with tender stomachs are advised to leave it alone.
In the context of post-Chatterley ‘liberation’ such warnings were, of course, an incitement to buy. Dirty books were in vogue.
Burgess’s editor was not amused by the jape and Burgess–Kell was sacked. In a 1992 essay, ‘Confessions of the Hack Trade’, and in late-life interviews, Burgess justified his deceit with allusions to Walter Scott, Swift’s self-lacerating ‘Verses on the Death of Dr Swift’, and the persuasive argument that the author of a novel ‘knows its faults better than any casual reader’.
It is suspected that the so-called ‘reviews’ invited on Amazon.com have revived, to epidemic proportions, the practice of self-puffery – the vast bulk of it infinitely less witty than Burgess on Kell.