'An Uncommon Reader' portrays Edward Garnett, a champion of new writers

For your bookish friend this holiday season, especially if that friend's an Anglophile, I heartily recommend Helen Smith's new biography "An Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett, Mentor and Editor of Literary Genius."

Smith's book reminds me, in the best ways, of my favorite bookish book, A. Scott Berg's "Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius." Both books began their lives as doctoral dissertations. Both profile men who found their destiny helping others succeed as writers.  

Perkins, the great Scribner editor, nurtured Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and many others as they birthed major works into being; the more pugnacious Garnett served as sounding board and goad to Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, John Galsworthy, T.E. Lawrence and Liam O'Flaherty. Several dedicated books to him. 

Judging by Berg's biography, Perkins was happy being a literary midwife. Garnett, however, had ambitions for his own writing that went unfulfilled, his novels making little impact. This adds a piquant note to Smith's account of his life. 

Garnett (1868-1937), the son of a prominent British Museum librarian and editor, left school at 17 but gradually earned a strong reputation as a literary tastemaker, critic and essayist. He supported himself, sometimes precariously, as an editor and reader for various London publishers, sometimes reading and offering comments on hundreds of manuscripts per year.

"The discovery of a writer was always the greatest pleasure of Edward's professional life," Smith writes. 

Her biography makes clear that Garnett saw his first loyalty as to literature and its writers, not the publishers who paid him. He didn't hesitate to recommend a writer take a book to a different house. 

"Edward took a dim view of the tastes of the British reading public, frequently bemoaning its insularity and the consistent demand that literature should 'entertain' and trumpet the attainment of moral growth and worldly success," Smith writes.

For example, Garnett loved the understated writing of American fiction writer Sarah Orne Jewett while doubting it would be well received in England. 

Garnett concluded "Decline with thanks" when a publisher had him read James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," though this seems as much on commercial grounds as aesthetic ones. "It is too unconventional for our British public. And in War Time it has less chance than at any other," he wrote in 1915.

Like Maxwell Perkins, Garnett had a gift for nudging writers in more ambitious directions. Smith compliments "Edward's ability to 'talk' a book into being, a skill he employed to some effect throughout his career, adapting his approach to the temperament of the protege, reassuring the timid, cajoling the reluctant and bellowing at the bloody-minded."

At 21, Garnett married Constance Black, seven years older. As Constance Garnett, she became a prominent translator of Russian literature, delivering English versions of Tolstoy's "War and Peace," Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and dozens of other books, often working with a Russian-speaking collaborator. Edward also promoted the warm-blooded superiority of Russian literature, to the point of annoying Joseph Conrad by emphasizing what he saw as the "Slav" element of Conrad's writing. As a Polish expatriate, Conrad hated Russia. 

The Garnetts had an unconventional marriage. Their sexual intimacy seems to have disappeared after the birth of their only child, David. Constance may have had an affair with a Russian collaborator. Edward had a long intimate relationship with artist Nellie Heath, which Constance seems to have approved of, and at least one affair with a younger woman while he was living with Heath. But Edward and Constance, though living apart, remained closely connected through their intellectual affinity and their mutual love of David.