Areté: A Retrospective

by Craig Raine

Over thirteen years, Aret has published six Nobel Prize T S Eliot, William Golding, Boris Pasternak, Orhan Pamuk, Harold Pinter, and Rudyard Kipling. The distinguished roster of contributors includes Milan Kundera, John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Evelyn Waugh, Tom Stoppard, David Hare, Patrick Marber, Christopher Hampton, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, William Boyd, David Lodge, Julian Barnes, Christopher Logue, Vladimir Nabokov, Alan Bennett, Rose Tremain, Rosemary Hill, Candia McWilliam, Wendy Cope, Frances Stonor Saunders, Nicholson Baker and Rachel Polonsky. Aret began in the winter of 1999. Not long after, Robert McCrum, then Literary Editor of the Observer, advised his readers to buy issues of the magazine as collectors items. Because, he assured them, the magazine would shortly close down. We have reached Issue 40. This Retrospective is 500 pages of survivor guilt.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Poet and critic Craig Raine was born on 3 December 1944 in Bishop Auckland, England, and read English at Exeter College, Oxford.

He lectured at Exeter College (1971-2), Lincoln College, Oxford, (1974-5), and Christ Church, Oxford, (1976-9), and was books editor for New Review (1977-8), editor of Quarto (1979-80), and poetry editor at the New Statesman (1981). Reviews and articles from this period are collected in Haydn and the Valve Trumpet (1990). He became poetry editor at the London publishers Faber and Faber in 1981, and became a fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1991. He gained a Cholmondeley Award in 1983 and the Sunday Times Writer of the Year Award in 1998. He is founder and editor of the literary magazine Areté.

His poetry collections include the acclaimed The Onion, Memory (1978), A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), A Free Translation (1981), Rich (1984) and History: The Home Movie (1994), an epic poem that celebrates the history of his own family and that of his wife. His libretto The Electrification of the Soviet Union (1986) is based on The Last Summer, a novella by Boris Pasternak. Collected Poems 1978-1999 was published in 1999. A new long poem A la recherche du temps perdu, an elegy to a former lover, and a collection of his reviews and essays, entitled In Defence of T. S. Eliot, were both published in 2000. Another collection of essays, More Dynamite, appeared in 2013.

Craig Raine lives in Oxford. His latest books are How Snow Falls (2010), a new poetry collection; and two novels, Heartbreak (2010), and The Divine Comedy (2012).

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A retrospective of the late literary magazine Areté, both edited by Craig Raine. It prided itself on being a new Criterion. In its lifetime it was known almost affectionately as ‘that magazine where they change your prose and don’t pay you.’ Others called it the Raine Sunday dinner in print - it largely published only Raine, his family, and friends. The painfully few new writers it printed are either protégés (Adam Thirlwell) or Raine clones (Hannah Sullivan).

This is a 502 page book that doesn’t need its first 99 pages, its middle 200 pages, or its last 12. The veteran authors are the most disappointing. William Boyd takes a promising subject - the film world - and renders it as fascinating as a barcode. Martin Amis updates an old piece on John Updike and piles on layers of overwriting like dirty crockery. A writing exercise - write a brief piece using only sentences starting ‘I remember’ - is used six times by various authors, with the first and dullest example by Julian Barnes. Raine manages to keep his own stuff largely out of it, but books himself as the last act on the card with a hatchet-job on Raymond Carver. (He gushes about the ‘genius’ of Gordon Lish at nauseating length and somehow avoids using the word ‘ethics’ even once.)

The reviewing offers more consistent quality. Jeremy Noel-Tod weighs up Les Murray’s mixed achievement, and doesn’t allow the shrill political pieces to mar his outstanding work on the Australian landscape. Duncan Wu calls Alice Munro to account for her one-dimensional male characters, and Alexander Nurnberg cooly dissects Philip Roth (‘This is hardly even prose. These are minutes’). I enjoyed all the reportage immensely and Nicholas Hytner’s piece on directing Alan Bennett. But the stand-out piece in the whole book is on professional film reviewing, written by an author I normally detest - Adam Mars-Jones.

I am docking a star for the magazine’s shabby behaviour while it ran. One contributor received two years’ worth of submissions back in one parcel, without comment, and had to pay the extra postage due to price increases. Thankfully in the interim he published some of his work in The London Magazine.

For shame.