Karl Popper, who was, by all accounts, a man of autocratic temper, was nevertheless a vigorous enemy of dictatorship. His The Open Society and Its Enemies advocated a democracy of dialogue and competition, in which no assertion was valid ex cathedra and no single party could claim to sail on the flagship of History. To minimise delusions of disinterestedness, Popper advocated that critics, of policies and persons, should frankly admit their parti pris. In view of the difficulty of approaching a social or critical problem disembarrassed of preconception, a critic should make a habit of self-scrutiny before offering an "objective" judgement. Such declarations of bias in one's mental baggage are consistent with Popper's "scientific" view that honesty requires actually assisting others to find flaws or faults in one's theories.
So? I am not sure that Antonia Byatt's defence of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (April's Prospect) honoured Popper's principle. I do not contest her right to differ from me in her estimation of the book, but I do suggest that her assessment pretended to be dispassionate. Might it not have been better if she had confronted my objections to the novel (she ignored them entirely) rather than merely declaring its genius? I say this not because I wish to engage in polemic with a fellow writer whose merits I was, as it happens, one of the first to applaud (when I reviewed fiction for The Sunday Times). Antonia is a civilised woman of manifest intelligence. I do not doubt her honesty or her "sincere" admiration for The Reader. What I do doubt is that she wrote her eulogy only because she liked it so much. The heading on her piece stated that she was "incensed" by what I had written about the same novel. It did not say also that she was incensed at my attack on the BBC panel which compiled the list of the "100 most seminal works of the 20th century," of which she was a member. To hint at that indignation would have been less high-minded.
It can be said, and often is, that it does not matter why a critic argues a case; her arguments are valid or they are not. In any event, I have small right to resent any indignation which I may have provoked. It would be disingenuous to pretend that what I am writing here is intended only for her eyes, but I do, nevertheless, want to make a personal (if public) plea to Antonia to reconsider her opinion, as if there was no personal issue between us. I happen to think that, in order to do this, she (and I) must first frankly admit that there is. What I am asking Antonia to do is to consider the possibility that she may wilfully have read virtues into Schlink; without my earlier impertinences, would she have praised him so fervently?
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it would be impractical for literary polemicists to preface their articles with a r?sum? of their relations with the subject of a review, but it might bring furtive animosities to the surface and disclose the partiality behind apparently impartial opinions. In the days when reviews in the TLS were still anonymous, one of my oldest friends was convinced that an article disparaging his book on Roman poetry had been composed by another classicist of our generation. For years, the two men conducted a grim war of assault, reprisal and mutual vilification. It was not until the X-files of the TLS were opened that the party of the first part realised that his long rage was unjustified. The actual original reviewer had remained a warmly regarded colleague of my friend, with whom he had often exchanged malicious anecdotes about the innocent third party. The further comedy was, of course, that the prolonged exchanges of artillery were not always lacking in accuracy; the "enemies" had not been reckless in their allegations against each other, nor had they been wholly wrong in detecting each other's weaknesses. It just so happened that the (publicly unacknowledged) animus which had led them to sap each other's careers, and bad-mouth each other's learning, was entirely misconceived.
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so, again: i want, above all, to unpick a quarrel here. If I twitted Antonia about her empanelment by the BBC in an offensive way, I am sorry; just as I was wrong to have alleged Malcolm Bradbury's involvement on that occasion. As for The Reader, I happen to think that Ms Byatt's defence of Schlink may have been more spirited and, in particular, more unquestioning because of a parti pris which she did not acknowledge and hence lacked the vigilance to discount. Might she not-might you not, Antonia-have been, as they say, getting her own back?
Let me pick out just one of Byatt's points: "He [the hero] realises that her [the heroine's] life has been dictated by the need to conceal her illiteracy-that she became a guard to avoid being promoted at Siemens..."
If she had not been "incensed" by what I had said, would an intelligent woman have alleged that the "need" to conceal illiteracy "dictated" that Hanna, the heroine, should become not just "a guard" but a member of the SS at Auschwitz and an accomplice to mass murder? I have no wish to reopen wounds, but I should hate to think that my casual effrontery had led an important writer to deceive herself, and others, into believing that she was defending a masterpiece rather than avenging a very slight slight.
