cover image CRITICAL TIMES: The History of the Times Literary Supplement

CRITICAL TIMES: The History of the Times Literary Supplement

Derwent May, . . HarperCollins UK, $35 (606pp) ISBN 978-0-00-711449-8

Entering its centennial year, the Times Literary Supplement, that British bastion of highbrow book culture, has a circulation of just 35,000. So it should not surprise anyone if a 600-page, painstakingly thorough history of the supplement generates sales somewhat more meager than that. This is something of a shame, for despite its wrist-cracking bulk and geological pace, this volume is stylishly written, affectionate and more entertaining than it has any right to be. May, a TLS contributor and longtime Times man, closely chronicles the supplement's tenuous start (it was originally issued to cover book reviews squeezed out of the regular Times by parliamentary reports) and frequent financial crises the TLS would inevitably be rescued in the nick of time by one high-minded millionaire or another. May faithfully traces the rise of such famous contributors as Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, freed by anonymity (there were no bylines in those days) to write searingly vivid critiques. (Of one unlucky title Woolf wrote, "You draw from it that sense of instruction in unimportant matters which you get by looking from the train window at a flat stretch of countryside.") May is equally good following the uncertain early fate of works destined for immortality, like The Waste Land and Ulysses. The correspondence of hawk-eyed TLS subscribers, pouncing on errors in translations of Catullus, will delight those with a taste for the absurd. It is hard to imagine any but the most stout-hearted TLS reader undertaking this long journey from cover to cover, but American literary scholars will likely treasure this heroic record of a periodical that took the life of the mind more seriously than most. Illus. (Mar.)