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 Biographywith equal ease and gusto. Those reviewed include Jean Stafford, Aldous
