Pandora’s Handbag: Adventures In The Book World
Elizabeth Young
(Serpents Tail; £14)
Categorisations can crush, sometimes. The small print on the back of Pandora’s Handbag invites retailers and readers alike to classify it as ‘cultural studies/literary criticism.’ The heart sinks at the very thought, innit?
This collection of the writings of the recently deceased, and much-missed, Elizabeth Young does indeed contain much literary criticism, as well as literary journalism (which is by no means always the same thing), and very fine it is, too. A pioneering aficionado of the Scottish literary renaissance, she was pretty much the first critic onto Irvine Welsh, whom she both reviews and interviews; and just about the only one — with the exception of Will Self, who contributes an elegiac and insightful introduction — to ‘get’ Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. (In other words: to read the book properly.) She also set her face firmly against the moral panic engendered by A.M. Homes’s The End Of Alice and, when pilloried by the forces of institutionalised philistinism in Private Eye’s ‘Literary Review’ column, demolished her attacker with a devastatingly unanswerable letter, redolent with her signature combination of diffidence, resolve, clarity and wit. (The entire exchange is included herein.) Without Lizzy’s imprimatur, I might never have made the literary acquaintance of Mary Gaitskill, Alice Munro or the aforementioned A.M. Homes.
Yet so much else lurks in the capacious depths of Pandora’s Handbag. Is ‘cultural studies’ an appropriate term for a memoir of her dead cat? Or for her extraordinarily moving meditation on the experience of being a Great Beauty (which she was), and then ceasing to be one (though many would argue that she never did)? Or for the three astonishingly powerful pieces of medical journalism — two on the social consequences and medical idiocies of our drug laws and one on Hepatitis C, the biological timebomb which eventually killed her — all of which are as meticulously researched, rigorously reasoned and muscularly argued as any crusading journalism of recent times? Under which umbrella can we place her consumers’ guide to conspiracy theories, her reminiscence of losing her virginity (a doggy-shag story if ever there was one), her disturbing analysis of the widespread phenomenon of child-minder infanticide, her account of seeing the robed figure of Death stalking the pavements of Ladbroke Grove?
Young always claimed to know nothing about music: a statement easily belied here by her erudite musings on punk in general and The Clash and The Sex Pistols in particular; her verbal snapshot of Diamanda Galas in performance and her reviews of books by rockcrit grandmasters Greil Marcus and Nick Kent.
Young was by no means a second-rate interviewer, yet the reader comes to resent the interviews in this book — with Poppy Z. Brite, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Pamela Des Barres, Herbert Hunke, Irvine Welsh and others — simply because they replace Young’s voice with those of her interrogatees, and it is her voice which we want to hear. Most of these pieces are prefaced with new writing, explaining the background to the articles and expanding on their ideas, and in at least one case — that of the Des Barres interview — the preface is far more interesting than the article which it introduces.
In her interview with Boyle, he makes one point which must have been delivered with considerable emphasis, because in her transcript Young renders it in caps, like so: “GOOD WRITING IS FOR EVERYONE WHO CAN READ.” Pandora’s Handbag is stuffed to the clasps with good writing, and is therefore unreservedly recommended, regardless of arbitrary and constrictive categorisation to everyone who can read. Or, to be more precise, everyone who enjoys reading.
If criticism means anything, it is a creative response to the artefact and artist under discussion, and to the world in which that artefact and artist exist. Elizabeth Young consistently rose to that challenge. Young’s premature death was tragic because, as this book plainly demonstrates, she was about to come into her own as the most innovative critic of her generation. Our only consolation is that this volume represents only half of the manuscript she delivered to her publisher and that, somewhere in development hell, is Pandora’s Other Handbag. Its publication is an event which must be keenly anticipated as an opportunity to hear more from a compassionate, eccentric, elegant and consistently surprising voice from which we never heard nearly enough.
Independent, 2001
