Granta at 100
Looks like a book: A literary magazine considers its position
The Observer, December 2007
A few minutes after lunching with Ian Jack, who departed as editor of Granta earlier this year after 12 years and 48 issues, I dropped into Quinto, the second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. Granta was about to celebrate its 100th edition, and I wanted some early copies – those classic ones with writing by Richard Ford, John Berger, Martin Amis and Angela Carter. The man at the counter wasn’t impressed. ‘What’s Granta?’
I could have given him the usual: about how it was a river in Cambridge, or the upper part of one, and its name spawned a student magazine that began in 1889 and was revived in the late 1970s. I could have said that this magazine became home to some of the best writing in the English language, and was edited for half its life by a man, Bill Buford, described to me as ‘a crazy, inspiring, absolutely absurd lunatic’. But instead I said: ‘It’s a literary magazine, but it looks like a book.’
‘Our literary magazines are in the far corner,’ the man said, pointing. He was in his mid-twenties, with a week-old beard. He made me feel uncomfortable, as if I had asked for a spanking magazine. I went to the far corner, and there were several issues in fair condition, at £2 each. One was a reprint of Issue 1 from 1979, which carried a manifesto. Granta, its two editors William Buford and Peter de Bolla wrote, was to be ‘devoted to the idea of the dialogue in prose about prose’, which was enough to get the reader hurling their new purchase through a window. Was there ever a more deathly proposal? How could a magazine possibly get to 100 issues with this as its starting point?
As it turned out, a browser in Quinto unfamiliar with the subsequent Granta pedigree would be amazed and delighted. Here is Issue 13, with stories by Milan Kundera and Doris Lessing, and here is number 17, with ruminations by Graham Greene. Here is Granta 5 from the early Eighties, with a prescient fate-of-the-earth scenario from Jonathan Schell. Next to it is Granta 12, dominated by Stanley Booth’s account of his high and terrible times with the Rolling Stones at Altamont. And then there is a more recent one, number 80, with writers looking at old photographs and remembering old friends, and Granta 65, with Hanif Kureishi and Ian Parker writing knowingly and enticingly about London.
What distinguishes these random issues from the other magazines on the shelves around them? And what sets them apart from the Paris Review, Harvard Review, the London Magazine and all the other boutique stars in the literary firmament with their fictions, poetry, woodcuts, interviews and reviews? Consistency, surprise, self-belief, originality and, thankfully, the complete absence of a dialogue about prose in prose. But beyond that: Granta is almost always an exciting and rewarding and illuminating thing to read. And beyond that: our world would be much the poorer without it.
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