We begin the new year with a look at some remarkable examples of joint literary endeavour and intertwined literary lives. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s third book of poems, published in 1934, was a collaboration with Valentine Ackland – a brave attempt by the widely acclaimed Townsend Warner to bring her little-known lover’s work to the fore. The volume was poorly received (Robert Frost, to whom it was dedicated, dissociated himself from it and from its authors, “that couplet in England”). Ali Smith, reviewing new editions of both women’s poetry, finds that the well-meaning experiment was doomed from the start by their very unequal talents. Esther Schor discusses the friendship of another “odd couple”, Emily Dickinson and John Wentworth Higginson, and a “loosely gathered array” of American lives whose connections, glancing or intimate, issued in the posthumous publication of Dickinson’s poems. Daniel Hack exhumes a (very) early Gothic tale by Wilkie Collins, who went on to great fame – and to a mostly happy collaboration with Charles Dickens.

Relations between Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill were stormier, as revealed in a new book reviewed by Wm. Roger Louis. David Martin examines a “very intelligent, subtle and learned guide” to hypocrisy as a political tool by the TLS contributor David Runciman, who shows “why it is important to cultivate a seamless habit of virtue, even if you have to fake it”. Moving from the masks to the masques of power, Alex Danchev reviews recent studies of tragedy on the theatrical and the world stage, including an account of a “harrowing” Waiting for Godot produced by Susan Sontag in Sarajevo. In a week that saw, among much else, a great loss to the English dramatic and literary scene with the death of Harold Pinter, it seems too much to hope that The Birthday Party or Mountain Language will one day be appreciated in Gaza and Galilee.

Alan Jenkins

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