Editor's note: This article was originally published as "View From the Reviewing Stand" in the August 13, 1960, edition of America.
Ten years ago I climbed to the eminence from which (it has sometimes been said nastily) I condemn books. Like all persons with literary pretensions, I tend to parse my life into periods, and these ten years, upon which I would reminisce now, compose the period of the restive reviewer. Let me explain.
In 1948 I was full of brand-new apostolic ardor. I was newly made a Catholic, and I put my strong feelings of gratitude into an article and sent it off to the only Catholic publication I had ever read, America. From this beginning I began to review books, first for America, and then for a variety of Catholic publications. For one of these I was a full-time reviewer, writing an average of 15 reviews a month for two and a half years. Others sent me books on occasion, and in three years I had become fixed into the period of the modern American and British novel. How this came about is still a mystery to me. To each of these publications I had replied, when queried about my area of competency, that my forte was medieval literature with emphasis upon the 14th century and Geoffrey Chaucer. Perhaps it was inevitable and natural that I should therefore be called upon to write authoritatively on modern fiction.
In ten years I have reviewed 302 books. This week, at great cost to my ego and pride, I have reread all the reviews of these books. I find that 1) in most cases, when I reviewed a mediocre book favorably, I erred seriously on the side of charity; 2) in some cases, when I used most of the space for “summing up the plot,” I accomplished nothing except an inadequate précis and an unbalanced evaluation; and 3) in the very few cases where I had the courage to stick blindly to my principles and dissent rigorously, I wrote the best criticism and the most readable review. I find myself firmly in these few reviews. The others are a vast collection of borrowed catch phrases and critical clichés—polite letters of commendation which sound dangerously like direct quotation from the book jackets. “The interest of the mind of the individual reviewer is everything,” says Elizabeth Hartwick in a recent obituary on the art of reviewing (Harper’s, October, 1959), and I wonder if this attitude of the reviewer is not what is missing when we substitute the easy platitude and the benevolent “good notice” for vigorous, difficult, unpleasant criticism.
I do not claim that, on this evidence of mine, one can draw up a substantial list of critical tenets. But I find myself in agreement with Miss Hartwick’s general points. More often than not the colorless, faint, bland praise (“democratic euphoria”) of the usual review, or the ineffectual listing of contents, or, worst of all, the lack of informed technical criticism make most modern criticism useless, effectless activity. The New York Times and Herald Tribune Book Review sections on Sunday are prime examples of the listless state of reviewing today. Promptly every Sunday one book is installed as “definitive” or “superb,” a dozen are hailed as “first-rate,” twenty others are given “sweet, bland commendation,” and are “born into a puddle of treacle” (I am using Miss Hartwick’s phrases). Just as promptly the great majority disappear into everlasting oblivion.
This state of affairs is, sadly enough, equally true of the general Catholic press. Christian humility is a great virtue but not, it seems to me, when it becomes the habitual attitude of the book reviewer that the printed word is sacrosanct. “The brine of hostile criticism” (Miss Hartwick serves me again) would be greater charity to the writer, if it were accompanied by documented evidence of specific failures, if it dealt with concrete examples of stylistic weakness, character defects, plot incoherence, etc. And what is more, the reader would be accurately guided away from the second-rate, the transitory and the pretentious. He would be able to choose the best books with confidence, knowing from the clarity of the critical words that the books are worth his time and money.
We in the Catholic press are often guilty of a deeper failure. We tend to treat works by Catholic writers with an added meed of kindness: a poor novel by Waugh has a critical edge over a parallel novel by a non-Catholic writer, and a fourth-rate piece of prose by C. B. Stern takes most of us in, as we fall willingly into that special slough of praise reserved for articulate converts. We approach all pietistic and spiritual writing with the same suspension of judgment that the writers themselves bring to their subjects, and rarely do we deal with written words on spiritual subjects as if they were prose constructions as well as right-minded thoughts. As a result, in Catholic reviewing there is rarely the impress of an individual mind dealing distinctively and memorably with a book at hand. We have almost no critics, we have only an amiable and indistinguishable group of adequate plot-summarizers liberally equipped with useful terms like “intensely interesting work” and “fills a need” and “authentic,” “gripping,” and on and on.
Recently in Harper’s (March, 1960) Stark Young discussed the art of theatre criticism and concluded that on the whole it was valueless to the theatre professional: “It seldom affords any suggestion of anything technical, anything that implies taking the stage as an art or craft in the same sense as we take music or painting.” This is equally true of reviewing, and until the professional reviewer learns to approach his task with a scorn for the cliché and the easy dismissal, and to acquire a concern for exact, documentary analysis and conclusion, his writing will be as valueless as most of the books he is given to evaluate.
A Mind in Action
As often as one states the necessities for critics, one is constantly pulled back to the initial point, that good criticism has always been the result of an interesting, well-stocked, trained and often eccentric and original mind dealing in disciplined prose with the book assigned to it. Amid the welter of colorless, gentlemanly reviews in the Sunday Times this year only one impressed me enough to clip. It was a review by Aubrey Menen of John Berry’s Krishna Fluting. Despite Mr. Menen’s wonderfully blunt treatment, the book went on to win a National Book Award. A part of Menen’s summary is this:
The principal character is a young mari who is half Pennsylvania Quaker and half Hindu. He is a poet. He is writing an epic. He has, says Mr. Berry, “virile hair on his toes.” He is—naturally—very amorous and early on in the story he makes advances to a local woman “by sitting on her legs and leaning back on her as if she were a mat.” He is not always so delicate. A little farther on we find that “from head to foot he pounded her with a sandal, weeping at the violence he was doing to them both.” (That is, the lady and himself, not I believe, the lady and the sandal, though it might be, since Mr. Berry is fond of symbolic passages.) He is a man of strong but complex emotions. Looking at himself in a mirror, he “poured whiskey and drank it neat, shuddering; then half a tumbler, not shuddering.” “The fact is,” writes Mr. Berry, “that he found himself infinitely attractive.”
There is a good deal more of this nonsense, all carefully collated by the reviewer. (I took the trouble to read the book so that I would feel free to quote the review I so much admired.) The result is that, prizes or not, after reading Mr. Menen’s review, one would find it hard to take seriously this pretentious novel.
What Reviewers Need
I do not wish to imply that all good reviews are derogatory, although so much of what comes into print is so obviously worthless that it is logical to expect more uncomplimentary reviews than there are now. Nor do I feel, as I look back on my own yellowing pile of clippings, that reviews ought to be literary productions entirely on their own, fine prose without reference to the purpose of the review. The answer must lie somewhere in between. The review needs to stand alone (rather than to lean upon the book jacket) as a distinct and literate judgment. The reviewer needs to overcome his instinctive awe of the work at hand and his humility toward it merely because it is in print, and reject his sense of inferiority about his own role in literature even if it has been bred in him by centuries of writer’s scorn. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Lectures on Milton and Shakespeare, wrote: “Reviewers are usually people who have tried their talents at one or another [type of writing] and have failed; therefore they turn critics.” Joseph Addison wrote that it is ridiculous for a reviewer “to criticize the works of another if he has not distinguished himself by his own performances.” The reviewer needs to cultivate an obliviousness to this view; to regard his profession as creative and necessary. If learning, as Aristotle has pointed out, is painful, so is good criticism.
At the same time the reviewer needs a large measure of Emerson’s self-reliance. His reliance upon his private view, informed, educated and tested as it should be, must be almost egotistical. Without this attitude his reviews become what we have been deploring: “the mush of concession” (this is Emerson’s phrase) and the primrose path to the perdition of pale praise.
