Reflections on 'PNR'

Abstract

This is a good time for me to talk about PN Review, because I have lately agreed to have my name, along with C. H. Sisson's, removed from the masthead of the magazine. There remain, as 'contributing editors', Nicholas Tredell,John Pilling, and Dick Davis all these, like heretofore Sisson and me, subordinate to the Managing Editor, Michael Schmidt. This change permits of the polite fiction that I can write impartially; it means in any case what we all agree on: that the pioneering phase of the magazine is over, and so can be looked back upon to some purpose. I will say frankly that the latest issues (numbers 37 and 38 are the latest to hand as I write) represent an assurance and an accomplishment such as Schmidt and Sisson and I always yearned towards, but mostly felt we had fallen short of. In PNR 37 Schmidt, explaining Sisson's and my withdrawal, said: 'Neither was ever entirely happy with PNReview. It has not lived up to their hopes, though it is perhaps better than they expected.' This is a just estimate of my sentiments, and I dare say of Sisson's; but with the important qualification that our hopes may well have been misplaced, the aspirations of an out-distanced generation. Tredell and Pilling and Davis represent a generation neither less stringent than ours, nor with different stringencies, but with a surer sense of priorities among them. What is threatened is the free exercise of the literary intelligence; on that we all agree. But the threats to that freedom don't always come from those quarters where Sisson and I tend to look for them. Perhaps the greatest achievement of PNR (which is to say, in this context, of Michael Schmidt) has been the discovering and identifying of responsible intellectuals like Tredell and Pilling and Davis, to whom must certainly be added certain others like Stephen Romer and Michael Hulse. These younger men are as vigilant as Sisson and I tried to be, but with a better sense of where vigilance is called for. Probably, from a selfish point of view, the chief profit of my several years association with the magazine has been my getting to know C. H. Sisson, whom I take to be one of the most remarkable Englishmen of our time. This is not to say that Sisson has won me over to his view of English history. Rather, in the course of making me take account of his views, Charles Sisson has enlarged my notions of what Englishness consists in. It is not easy to say how far this enlarged awareness, of what is meant by the central letter in our acronym ('N' for 'Nation'), was communicated to our juniors. Much of the time (I speak for myself, but I suspect for Sisson also) there was a besetting