The modern enemies of promise

In 1938, Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise identified domesticity, drink, journalism and politics as snares for the apprentice writer. In an age of Amazon and the creative writing course, DJ Taylor asks what those enemies are now

There never was a British literary world that didn’t believe itself to exist in a permanent state of flux. The “serious writers” of the 1890s, grimly regarding developments in popular journalism, thought they were being deluged in trash. The columnists of the 1930s lamented the decline of the “mid-list” (meritorious works with average sales) quite as feelingly as their modern day successors. An early issue of Granta, published in 1981 and titled “Beyond the Publishing Crisis” dwelt on what seemed to be the near insuperable difficulties facing anyone keen to make a living out of printing, selling, writing or criticising books. Times have always been hard, and from the travails of the impoverished hacks in George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) onward, conspectuses of literary life nearly always turn out to be jeremiads.

If, as is very often suggested in book-trade journals, our own literary world is in the middle of a revolution – the revolution of the online bargain bin and the Amazon reviewer, the falling income and the squeeze on arts journalism – then it is worth asking exactly on whose behalf this insurrection is being carried out. We all know that the gates of that old citadel of hardback novels in tiny print-runs, literary journalism and Leavisite sneering at expressions of popular taste – all the classic manifestations of “literary life” covered in John Gross’s pioneering study The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969) – are being stormed, but who stands to benefit from their overthrow?

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