Tastes in critics and book reviewers, like preferences in cities or vegetables, are idiosyncratic. They depend as much on voice as on judgment or taste. Fashion and peer influence may also play a role, despite our resistance. Some, like Gabriel Josipovici, earn our trust through the rigour of their prose, even when their literary inclinations diverge from our own.
I have been travelling recently but am back in Hampshire for the autumn, with the low, weighty English skies that always seem to bring me home. While looking through old notes on Borges, I came across a short poem copied into a notebook some years ago, by the American poet Adelaide Crapsey:
‘Listen.
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.’
The other night I had a dream I can only describe as quietly arresting. I remember little of its narrative, but I was accompanied throughout by Eileen Battersby, the book reviewer. I knew almost nothing of her work, perhaps one or two reviews, glimpsed through links on Twitter. Since then I have watched an interview with her, John Banville and Enrique Vila-Matas. I cannot say our literary interests would have aligned, but something in her voice, in her presence, held my attention. A passion, or a trace of one.
Oddly, I stumbled across Crapsey relatively recently – goodness knows where – and was pretty impressed with her verse and surprised she’s not better known.
A decent minor poet, contemporary of Woolf and H.D. but who knows how her work may have developed if TB hadn’t taken her at 36 years of age.