This article is taken from PN Review 271, Volume 49 Number 5, May - June 2023.
In Person
It was in late 2016, after an event to celebrate the life and work of Elizabeth Jennings, that Michael took me aside to give gentle thoughts on a batch of poems.
The sheaf was neatly annotated, with buoyant ticks and neutral lines. He had many things to say about them that I immediately recognized as true, and hadn’t thought of myself. The best criticism includes remarks that stick with you, as a writer, because it cuts to the heart of something about your practice, and perhaps even something about your life. There was plenty of that, and it was all delivered with perfect tact and concision.
When we were done, he stood up, smiling: ‘Now, have you met Priscilla Tolkien?’ And there she was, full of benign encouragement and stories about her father, the author of my favourite books from childhood. It was a lovely sequence of experience. It wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Michael.
It hammered home something I should have known anyway, but a thing easy to forget: the remarkable literary figures (and who is more ‘remarkable’ or ‘literary’ than Michael?) can, in the best cases, be as wonderful in person as they are by reputation.
...
The sheaf was neatly annotated, with buoyant ticks and neutral lines. He had many things to say about them that I immediately recognized as true, and hadn’t thought of myself. The best criticism includes remarks that stick with you, as a writer, because it cuts to the heart of something about your practice, and perhaps even something about your life. There was plenty of that, and it was all delivered with perfect tact and concision.
When we were done, he stood up, smiling: ‘Now, have you met Priscilla Tolkien?’ And there she was, full of benign encouragement and stories about her father, the author of my favourite books from childhood. It was a lovely sequence of experience. It wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Michael.
It hammered home something I should have known anyway, but a thing easy to forget: the remarkable literary figures (and who is more ‘remarkable’ or ‘literary’ than Michael?) can, in the best cases, be as wonderful in person as they are by reputation.
...
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