All anthologies are failures. How can a garden be represented by a bunch of flowers (the original meaning of anthology) or a big subject by a collection of extracts? Most anthologies of literature, like compilations of music or albums of paintings, are positive obstacles to the appreciation of original work. The least unsuccessful are either very personal or very authoritative. The former depend on the individual flair of the editor; the latter depend on the collective force of editor and publisher, the combination of great expertise and great expense; and are better when the subject is narrow or the book is large. The most useful literary anthologies in English consist of several volumes-the Norton Anthologies of English and American literature or the Oxford and Penguin Books of this or that period of poetry. One-volume collections of English verse are disappointing, from Palgrave and Quiller-Couch onwards.
How much more is this true of prose. Prose is what we speak all the time and what we write most of the time, so there is simply too much of it; an anthology of it seems as pointless as a bunch of wild flowers in the countryside. In 1925 Quiller-Couch opened the original Oxford Book of English Prose by asking "if it be possible to make a prose anthology at all." He failed to give an answer; in the event, he attempted a personal rather than an authoritative book. Today John Gross avoids the query in the New Oxford Book of English Prose, but he dares to boldly go where few men had gone before and has attempted an authoritative rather than a personal book. He is well-qualified, combining ability, knowledge and experience with the confidence to ignore the canons to right and left of him and the theories before and behind; and the publishers have backed him by producing a nice fat volume with 500,000 words from nearly 500 authors over five centuries. Much hard work has gone into it, and anyone who enjoys English literature will get much real joy out of it. Yet it is a failure.
The general failure is that it is far too literary. Gross decided not to include more non-literary material because this would be "too arbitrary, too personal," and not what is expected of an Oxford book. But most prose-including much of the best prose-is not literary. The book would have benefited from the addition of more letters and diaries, sermons and speeches, tracts and manifestos, interviews and debates, reports and advertisements, science fiction and scientific papers, legal arguments and leading articles, philosophy, pornography and mandarin journalism. At the publishers' request, there are no extracts from plays (apart from Shakespeare), which also excludes a great deal of excellent material.
Gross claims that the contents are "representative" or "interesting" or that he finds them "moving, enlightening or entertaining." Many bright jewels of English prose are indeed present, but others are absent, and there is an awful lot of tawdry paste. Too many fine writers are excluded, or represented by passages below their own standards, and too many poor writers are included. Item after item is prosy or pretentious or just plain bad. This is particularly true of material written since the second world war by the 100 authors in the last 200 pages of the book, and it gets worse as it goes. Anthologists tend to stumble in the home stretch; Gross's treatment of his contemporaries will eventually seem as peculiar and even perverse as most of his predecessors. The extent of modern mediocrity is especially obvious in English writers, by contrast with the non-English writers included, as well as others not included. In fact the book unintentionally documents the way the well of English has been defiled in its native land.
This takes us from the end to the beginning. Gross starts with Malory in the 1460s, although there is plenty of quite understandable earlier prose going back a century or more, and even earlier, less understandable, prose is important in showing where we come from. He has modernised the spelling and punctuation, which makes the first quarter of the book more readable but less rewarding; it would be excessive to retain the long S or black-letter type, but old prose, like old poetry, is best read in old orthography.
Another failure is the lack of comparisons and contrasts-between various translations of the same passages of the Bible from Wycliffe to the New English Bible, say; or between rulers, from kings and queens to presidents and prime ministers; between catholics and protestants, liberals and conservatives, radicals and reactionaries, patricians and plebeians, men and women. The pudding has no theme.
Anthologies always tempt reviewers to re-edit them; I must say that I would choose many different passages from Gross's authors and also many different authors from the present century. But the result would only be another failure. All an anthologist can do is fail better; I must say that this is a much better failure than most.
The new oxford book of English prose
Edited by John Gross
Oxford University Press 1998, ?25
