It is harder to review a collection of critical essays than other kinds of nonfiction. A little easier, to be sure, if you take issue with the critic; but what if you are full of admiring approbation? You end up reduced to quoting enthusiastically more and more passages, till the review becomes an anthology of quotations, a miniature commonplace book. I am not sure I can escape this predicament in reviewing Ian Hamilton’s Walking Possession: Essays and Reviews, 1968–1993, a book I relished when I agreed with it, and respected when I didn’t.

Hamilton, who is also a poet and a biographer, is probably best known for his Robert Lowell, an excellent critical biography, and In Search of J. D. Salinger, a stimulating account of what happens when a rebarbative biographee bombards the biographer with monkey wrenches. Some will also recall Hamilton’s work as an editor on the Times Literary Supplement, and, better yet, as the editor of the short-lived but valuable The New Review, issues of which I am loath to part with despite dearth of space on my groaning book shelves. But anyone, familiar or not with Hamilton, will have a rattling good time with this collection whose mood is pleasantly varied, judgment consistently sound, and style incisive, lapidary, and, whenever possible, urbanely witty.

Hamilton addresses fiction, biography, poetry, various kinds of nonfiction, and the Dictionary of National Biography with equal ease and gusto. Those reviewed include Jean Stafford, Aldous Huxley, Stephen Spender, Sylvia Plath, George Orwell, two Amises, (K. and M.), and two Waughs (A. and E.). Also Frost, Graves, Roy Fuller, Alun Lewis, Wilbur, Merrill, Stevens, Heaney, and Damon Runyon. There are three pieces on Larkin (poems, letters, biography), and more specific examinations of single novels by Updike, Mailer, Roth, Terry Southern, and Julian Barnes. There are also solid pieces on a biographer’s misgivings, literary hoaxes, a literary conference in Australia (a bit of a hoax, too), New York literary celebrities and their sycophants, television personalities, the life of a notorious madam, and Cyril Connolly and Tambimuttu as editors, respectively, of Horizon and Poetry London.

There is also, I am less happy to report, a final section on various sports and sports figures, which I find hard to comprehend, not only because the references and even the argot is fiercely British, but also because I can’t take sports that seriously. Raised largely on Continental literature, I am used to certain kinds of idiosyncrasies—Colette on cats, Calvino on imaginary cities, Karl Kraus on the inferiority of everyone else— but not sports. Well, yes: Musil, a physical-exercise fanatic, who condignly died while exercising; and Montherlant about bullfighting, which may not be so much a sport as a perversion. And, sure, I know about Pindar, but those were other times.

England, however, is different. There the poet Edmund Blunden will write a book about cricket, and Sir Leslie Stephen will write you one on mountaineering. There are also the fox-hunting novels of Surtees, and a book-length epic poem Cricket, by one James Love. But never mind, I’ll grant Hamilton his interest in sports if only he would keep it out of a book of literary criticism. It is quite a shock to encounter a piece entitled “Irving Scholar’s Spurs,” and expect to read about how some astute academic earned his spurs by unearthing new data on Washington Irving, only to find out it concerns Irving Scholar, the chairman of the Tottenham Hotspurs football club.

But back to literary matters and, to begin with, the book’s title. This, as the author explains in a liminal note, refers to what happens in bankruptcy cases under English law. The bailiffs, before they can foreclose, take walking possession, i.e., only half-own your goods for a fortnight, during which you may come up with the monies owed and regain ownership. Hamilton writes: “Reviewers are sometimes thought of as the bailiffs of literature: they take walking possession of their subjects; they talk as if they owned them, but they don’t.” Moreover, he adds, “many of the reviews reprinted here were written in less than fourteen days and one or two of them were done on a typewriter half-owned by the courts.”

This is splendid but excessive modesty. Hamilton writes with such assurance and persuasiveness that he makes his subjects thoroughly his own. But “own” in the sense of someone who, say, knows every nook and cranny of Central Park, and writes about it with a sense of involvement bordering on possessiveness, but still without denying others their rights to the park. As for the speed with which the pieces were written, what matter, if the writing has nothing shoddy or provisional about it; and who would now contest Hamilton’s claim to that productive typewriter?

Let me begin with a longer quotation taken from a review of Andrew Motion’s Larkin biography:  

We knew too that this poet’s personality, his off-color ribaldry and slang, had been shaped in the “come-off-it” postwar years and nurtured in dreary provincial towns, in seedy digs and gas-lit libraries. We had no proof but we rather suspected that Larkin collected hardish porn, had it in for blacks and queers, was careful with his money and, when it came to relationships, too morbidly obsessed with his own failings to be much of a lover or friend. Plenty of this we were able to pick up from the poems but these were usually so well judged, as dramas or confessions, that we could speak also of a Larkinesque “persona”— a self-projection that might in part be a disguise.

When Larkin died in 1985, at sixty-three, the obituaries were full of warmth; there was much talk of our “nation’s loss.” He was known to have gone a bit funny in his final years, falling in love with Mrs. Thatcher and giving out with some reactionary comment, but all this was reckoned to be amiably bufferish, a bit of a self-parody, and somehow valuably English in its concern for old-style ways. Only a few people knew that there was nothing at all funny about the way Larkin had gone funny, that his conservatism was tinged with the same vehemence that marked his ever deepening self-hatred and despair. There was also a drink problem, a port-for-breakfast kind of drink problem. Since the death of his mother in 1977, he had stopped writing poetry, or stopped expecting to write poetry, and when he did take up his pen it was either from duty or from rage—and it was not always easy to tell which was which.

Notice, first of all, how much is crammed—effectively—into two paragraphs. You immediately see the critical biographer’s interest in biography, especially as it ties in with Larkin’s writing, but also, of course, in extracting from the book under review the clues to the poet’s quintessential self. This self is then cogently viewed as partly a mask, but partly also the man himself.

Adroitly, Hamilton fills in the reader on the background by rehearsing things already known about Larkin to the cognoscenti—a good way of flattering the reader into thinking himself one of the initiates as one rehashes the basics. And always Hamilton makes Motion come out ahead, by allowing him the role of conclusive corroborator, confirming what was only vaguely known before. For what was known only to experts and intimates is, after all, news to the world. And Hamilton’s summary is conveyed with a cleverness that partakes of wit, but transcends it into illumination couched in terse, memorable phraseology: “there was nothing at all funny about the way Larkin had gone funny,” “a port-for-breakfast kind of drink problem,” “self-projection that might in part be a disguise.” There are fine distinctions, which lead Hamilton to emend “stopped writing poetry” to “stopped expecting to write poetry,” something more piteous and self-dramatizing. Also truer. Best of all, there is the suggestive insight left a trifle unexplained: poetry written “either from duty or from rage—and it was not always easy to tell which was which.” Does this mean that Larkin raged at the world to the point where it became his duty to put it in writing, or that the compulsion to write poetry made a man who would have preferred something else —something more—from life rant against his limitations? Or both? Relative uncertainty encourages us, nay compels us, to become actively involved in unriddling Philip Larkin.

To turn now to Hamilton on Seamus Heaney:

Like Dylan Thomas, like Graves, Heaney assumed the noble vestments, but he did so with an engaging awkwardness, a persuasive lack of flourish. One of the fascinations of Heaney’s work, read from the beginning until now [i.e., The Haw Lantern, 1987] is in observing how he shifts this way and that to find a genuinely comfortable fit, a non-fake, non-proud way of living in the sacred robes he knows he has the obligation and the right to wear. He can neither fling them off nor swap them for the more workaday gear which, in certain moods, he might feel more “at home in.” But there is always a touch of “Why me?” in his sometimes effortful transcending of the “me,” and this has given him a rare sturdiness of posture—rare, that is, for the “chosen” sort of poet he’s become. Indeed, it could be said that one of Heaney’s principal achievements is that he has re-dignified the bardic stance.

If my previous quotation showed off Hamilton the biographer-critic, this one displays the critic-poet. For the entire ample paragraph is taken up with one metaphor, the modern poet aware of his Irishness assuming the vestments of an ancient folk bard. The master image is gracefully pursued into various sartorial ramifications, e.g., flinging off one’s ceremonial clothes or swapping them for more comfortable workaday gear. And there is the neat, poetic-epigrammatic clincher, “he has re-dignified the bardic stance,” the kind of gnomic last line with which a lyric etches itself into the memory.

Hamilton is well aware of the limitations of the early Heaney, as in “he was a shade too youthfully delighted with the plopping, slopping, thwacking sounds of spade on soil, or milk in pail.” And this allows the reviewer to prick the bubble of donnish critics who “have always loved this onomatopoeic side of Heaney, though: maybe because it gives them the chance to exhibit their own ‘sensibilities’—‘You’ll notice how the “thwa-” of “thwack” is shyly answered by the “plu-” of “plump.”’” This is my first example of Hamilton’s superb sense of humor—that “shyly” is priceless—of which there will be much more to come.

That brings us to another of Hamilton’s specialties, call it disputational criticism, in which points are more sharply made by introducing critical errors on the subject at hand, then resoundingly setting the record straight. Thus,

Field Work, to my mind, is the book of Heaney’s which we ought to keep in mind (how can we not?) when there are grumbles about “anonymity” or “suppression of the self.” His “moi” poems are all the stronger, all the more hard won, it seems to me, not because they go against his notions of a tribal role but because—at their best—they don’t: it’s just that, in these poems, the “I” lurks behind the “we” and vice-versa. And the elegy is, of course, the perfect form for such lurking, or entwining: an intimacy meant to be made public.

It is most satisfying to follow the specifics of Heaney’s poetry to a major statement about poetry itself: the elegy as the perfect form for making an intimacy public. There is also forceful rhetoric here: the not because of such-and-such but because of its opposite, always an effective device. And then such fine points as the significant reiteration from “my mind” to “keep in mind,” from author to reader; the strengthening of “lurking” with “entwining.” Noteworthy, too, is the judicious restraint in that “at their best,” set off with dashes for greater emphasis.

Yet if Hamilton is fine when he is positive, he is no less so when he is negative. True, it may seem easier to score with witty putdowns, but not when these are so delicately calibrated from poker-faced irony to rip-roaring demolition jobs. “In the thirties, as head of the Lyrical Department of Mac Spaundey Inc. [i.e., MacNeice, Spender, Auden, and Day Lewis], Spender won high marks for being sensitively muddle-headed when all around him had made up their icy minds, and a kind of wincing bewilderment has been his trademark ever since… . All the most famous thirties photographs suggest that in a period of purposeful limb-discipline, of rallies and goose-steps and international brigades, Spender alone knew how to trip over his own fire-hose, and be loved for it.”

About Kingsley Amis’s Memoirs of 1991 we read: “The faint hope might have been that the old shag would come over as somewhat, shall we say, cuddlier than his public image makes him seem. To any such tender expectations, though, Amis offers here a close-to-gleeful ‘In a pig’s arse, friend’—i.e., you bastards will get nothing out of me, or not much, and what you do get you won’t like.” Perusing the new Dictionary of National Biography, Hamilton concludes:

Fifty year olds with blood-pressure difficulties might scan the DNB’s roll-call of eminents with divided feelings: although it is cheering to note that for most of the dictionary’s entrants, the age of fifty marks Stage Two in a nobly envisaged Five-Stage masterplan, it is depressing to be taught how long, how very long you have to live in order to rack up these near-superman C.V.s. In the forty-sixty age group, there is but a handful of entrants and these have mostly earned their place by compiling points in relatively vulgar, early burn-out professions like publishing or pop singing. And even the sixty-seventy grouping carries a faintly sleazy air: poets, comedians, psychiatrists and the like. It is only when we pass the age of seventy that the entrants look as if they’ve really earned their keep.

On James Merrill’s Book of Ephraim, we read: “Harold Bloom has said ‘I don’t know that [it], at least after some dozen readings, can be over-praised.’ A neat way of disarming reviewers who have only had time to read the work ‘some once’ or at the very best ‘some twice.’” Even worse is meted out to Charles Berger, one of Merrill’s “more prostrate fans” whose lucubrations on the dust jacket are quoted. “What can this mean?” wonders Hamilton. “We will never know, but in the meantime it is hard to warm to a text which attracts such bovine homage.”

About the quasi-autobiographical hero of Updike’s Couples, Hamilton treats us to a racy passage from the author, then comments: “Piet, we perceive, is not as simple as he thinks he is. A man who can think such beautiful thoughts, and in such silkily alliterative cadences, has more than just ass on his high mind. Like earlier Updike heroes, Piet has the church at his back, and before him, in the distance, dim intimations of sublime apotheosis. Assisting him in his quest, he has the lush music of Prose Style. If he seeks ‘ass’ it is because he doesn’t know where else he might seek God.”

As you would expect, Norman Mailer brings out the best in Hamilton. So we learn about Ancient Evenings that “when Mailer locates his first bout of gay fellation in some shadowy corner of the Land of the Dead (a long-gone incumbent is spiritedly welcoming his newly-enrolled grandson) the whole effect is … well, so much more spooky and theological than if he had set it in the men’s room at the Barbizon Plaza.” And further: “Several times, during the Nile-long course of Ancient Evenings, one gets the image not of a writer writing a book but of a child contentedly playing with his toys: dressing them up, giving them funny voices, making them perform sudden, improbable acts of violence, and so on. When Mailer wishes his hero to be humiliated by a brutal Pharoah, for example, he makes his Pharoah-toy bugger the hero-toy—just like that.” And still further: “There are fun and games to be had here, of course, and it is entirely in line with almost everything else in the book that Mailer should use the telepathy device mainly to keep us up to date on who is thinking of doing ‘it’ to whom. (Nobody, it should be said, is ever not thinking of doing it to someone.)”

Animadverting on John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, Hamilton notes ironically, “This polemic against highbrows can the more easily be swallowed, indeed savored, because it is written by a highbrow. It is well known that John Carey reads Milton in the Latin and knows where to find all the dirty bits in Ovid.” Or take the subtler irony in the following: “It could be said that only he who was uninterested in exploring his own personality could have employed that personality as usefully as Orwell did, could have—as it were—sent his whole self out into the public world with such a firm sense of the moral and political reliability of his responses.”

I could go on quoting till the cows come home (which, if they knew Hamilton, they would do rather more precipitously), but will content myself with just two more samples of how well Hamilton can do with subjects not remotely connected to literature. Here he is writing on a biography of the notorious madam Cynthia Payne: “How then does Cynthia maintain this high standard of hospitality, this cheerily (and come to think of it, literally) painstaking determination to ‘fix-up’ her eccentric clientele? Her ‘biographer’ Paul Bailey clearly believes that she has the fabled ‘heart of gold’ … imaginatively caring for the wanking-wounded, the casualties of the sex war.” So formidable is Cynthia that, as Hamilton estimates, “Even those who didn’t want a beating would probably not have had the cheek to turn one down.”

Finally, here is Hamilton describing the spectators at a typical cricket match at Lord’s: “There was no one who was not under ten or over fifty. There were fathers with sons, the sons often bespectacled and with gigantic scorebooks on their knees; there were benign-looking pensioners, many of them accompanied by wives with thermos flasks and knitting; there were sad-faced scoutmaster types with binoculars, Daily Telegraphs and sandwiches that could only have been packaged by a mum no other woman had ever managed to displace.”

However, lest the rest of us in the trade should die of envy at such perfection, the gods have provided Hamilton with an Achilles heel. As you may have suspected from what I have quoted so far, his grammar, syntax, spelling, and punctuation can display astounding caducity. To adduce only some of the most painful examples, consider: “His religious impulse sent him searching for a God whom his scientific impulse insisted must be seen face to face.” Again, “One of the few ‘experts’ who really does seem to have some expertise.” Also “centred toward,” “nervously wracked,” “Postwar, it was easier,” “behaviour-wise,” “stories like this,” “like in the books,” etc., italics, of course, mine. And there is also the irritating habit of having in one sentence four dashes, or, worse yet, three.

Still, we are likely to be more indulgent with Ian Hamilton than with a lesser man. Thus we shall not take it amiss that his criticism is limited to Anglophone literature; not every critic need be a generalist, and a job well done is a job well done. What distinguishes Walking Possession is that it is truly gustatory criticism in an age of all kinds of crazy critical doctrines and theories, and of political axes to grind. Here, for a change, is criticism from the brain, the heart, and the gut. So what if, in my view, Hamilton underrates Robert Graves and Richard Wilbur—he does it for reasons he valiantly defends. So what if, to my mind, he overestimates Wallace Stevens—doesn’t everybody? Anyone whose criticism makes you think, laugh, and eagerly turn the pages deserves a raised hat, even in this bleak midwinter inimical to our pates.