The Modern Library: the 200 best novels in English since 1950. By Carmen Callil and Colm Toibin Picador. 259pp, £12.99p in UK
The phone call came on a Monday morning. Carmen Callil, I was told, the founder of Virago Press, had retired as managing director of Chatto & Windus and had agreed to write a book called The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950. She wanted another person to work on it with her. Would I be that person? I didn't even think about it. I immediately said I would. I believed, in my foolishness, that I would be able to come up with the titles of at least 70 books there and then. Surely, Carmen would have 70 too. And, I believed, we would have no trouble finding the other 60.
At the first meeting about the book I realised certain things about Carmen Callil. One, she is usually right. Two, she usually gets her way. Three, she gets up really early in the morning. Four, she adores England. Five, she takes a dim view of America. I realised that I was in the opposite camp on all five issues. I am never right. I never get my way. I never get up early in the morning. After more than two days in England I get the creeps. I love America.
She explained at this meeting how we would do the book and I listened, stunned. We would start from scratch, she said, and do it country by country. Who was to tell, she said, that there were not forgotten masterpieces from India or New Zealand, published in the 1950s and out of print? We should contact academics and booksellers - she trusted booksellers more than academics - and ask them for lists. We should be out there finding lost and forgotten classics, she said. She had no interest in the idea that I already had a list. I went back to Dublin bemused and depressed. This could go on for years, I thought. (It did go on for years.)
The first change in my mood came when Carmen sent me a novel from New Zealand I had never heard of called Plumb by Maurice Gee, published first in 1978. It was the unpromising story of an unpromising New Zealand clergyman and my spirits sank as soon as I laid eyes on it. How many of these was I going to have to read? Why was Carmen Callil torturing me in this way?
Twenty pages into the book, I was deeply engrossed in the complex feelings and sharp, tetchy attitudes of one George Plumb, clergyman. The book took me over; I had the most wonderful day with it, and I rang Carmen to thank her for sending it. You see, she said. I agreed, as I did many other times, that she was right all along.
I was responsible for Canada. Thus I was able to argue for Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of the Lion over The English Patient. Yes, Carmen would say, but have you found anyone new? (She was responsible for India, and had found loads.) I ploughed through the entire works of Robertson Davies until I found Fifth Business, which seemed to have all his genius without any of his heavy-handedness. This was something we came across over and over: writers producing one masterpiece, but writing a dozen other novels as well. Very few writers, we learned over long days and nights, have ever thought of stopping.
I worked away at Canada, asking any Canadian I met about good fiction, until someone told me that there was a marvellous writer who had only ever written 14 short stories, but they couldn't remember his name. In the offices of the publisher McClelland and Stewart in Toronto, I asked the editor Ellen Seligman about this. She left the room and came back with two tiny books by Alistair MacLeod, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun. Reading these two books, knowing that I could tell other readers about them, was the high point of The Modern Library project for me.
The stories are gentle, sparely-written, mainly set in Cape Breton and Newfoundland; they deal with the poetics of melancholy, they dramatise the conflict between family and destiny, ties of blood and exile. Carmen Callil rang to say she was in tears at the end of the first story, as, indeed, I had been. Alistair MacLeod will be reading at this year's Cuirt festival in Galway. Reading him, and being able to write about him in the book, has been an extraordinary pleasure.
One day, I phoned Carmen to say I had another proud Canadian discovery - Margaret Laurence. Darling, she said, I published her in Virago. I didn't mention her, she went on, because I didn't think you'd like her. We both agreed that Margaret Laurence's novel A Jest of God deserved to be in the book. And we both began to learn about one another's taste.
I had a job convincing Carmen - and often she was not entirely convinced - about the merits of various loose, baggy, modernist monsters such as Iain Sinclair's Downriver or Alistair Grey's Lanark or Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. She, in turn, had trouble convincing me of the merits of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, A.S. Byatt's Possession and Anita Brookner's Family and Friends. There was a good deal of argument, and looking at it now, I must have won some of them. It just didn't feel like that at the time. Then there was the Irish Question. I gave Carmen every book by an Irish writer that I thought eligible. I told her that, since many of these people were friends of mine, she could have the final say. As soon as I said it I regretted it. And then she rang up to ask who was Eugene McCabe and why had she never read Death and Nightingales before? She adored the book. Every time we met she talked about it. And that was a real thrill for me: watching her loving a book which I had loved from the moment it came out.
With other Irish novels I was not so lucky. There are at least two novels which I wanted to include, but Carmen didn't rate. It was my own fault for letting her decide. There was one Austalian novel - Carmen was born and brought up in Melbourne - called Power Without Glory by Frank Hardy, published in 1950, which tells a story of graft and corruption in 20th-century Australia. Carmen felt it was a novel which only Australians could understand. I was glad to be able to tell her that, as a political novel, it is, by any standards, a masterpiece, and I'm glad it's on our list.
Sometimes the work was boring. I missed deadlines, which Carmen never did. I bluffed at meetings, which she certainly never did. And I often went absent without as much as outline planning permission, which drove her crazy. I have memories of the summer of 1997, sleeping and waking and eating beside piles of books, read and unread, but mainly unread. Sometimes I knew by the urgency and insistence of the ringing tone that it was Carmen on the phone waiting to know how I was getting on with William Gaddis (several long, difficult novels) or John O'Hara (many very long novels) or the entire Heinemann African Writers Series. Sometimes I must confess that I did not pick up the phone.
And then something happened which made all the difference. Carmen got to hear about a CD of hymns which had been a best-seller in Ireland. She knew all the hymns from her Irish Catholic convent school in Melbourne. I knew all the hymns from various Catholic institutions in Wexford. We had different tastes in novels and different work patterns, but we both knew the words of "Sweet Heart of Jesus". As you can imagine, we were, indeed are still, in great demand in the more fashionable parts of Blair's Britain. We started getting on together.
Carmen in Virago had been responsible for altering our view of the canon of English writing, and placing figures like Grace Paley, Emily Eden, Antonia White and Kate O'Brien back in the centre. This time she found, as I found, that the idea of the centre has changed radically over the last 50 years, that novels by women, by Indians, Australians, Africans and Irish people are part of anyone's essential reading list. The world of the novel in English is no longer the preserve of live white American and English males. The Empire, such as it was, has struck back.
The Modern Library includes, I think, 100 books which would be on anyone's list (such as The Catcher in the Rye, Go Tell It On The Mountain, Lolita, To Kill A Mocking- bird, Catch 22, The Golden Notebook, Burger's Daughter, Midnight's Children, Beloved). But the list of the second hundred is up for grabs. We searched high up and low down for forgotten masterpieces and we found many of these. But two other people might have found different books, or liked different books. It is, in the end, a matter of taste as much as judgment. We have chosen only 194 books; the last six will be chosen by other readers and will be included in the paperback list. We know that all novel-readers have five or six books they love passionately, and we look forward, with some trepidation, to hearing from them.
This book will be the subject of The Irish Times Cuirt Debate in the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, next Tuesday at 8.30 p.m. The Irish Times has 40 pairs of tickets to offer readers for this literary event. They will be given to the first 40 people (one pair of tickets per person) who contact The Irish Times on (01)6792022, ext 676 or 689, on Monday, April 19th.