What We Learn from the Lives of Critics

In the annals of literary revenge, critics come in for as much bludgeoning as you might assume, and, somehow, still less than we might deserve. John Updike, notably, had his fictional alter ego, the writer Henry Bech, bring all his imagination to bear as he serially dispatched his harshest critics (“satanic legions deserving only annihilation”). In a blunter mode, the romance novelist Jilly Cooper once named an incontinent goat for a reviewer who had savaged her work.

But, to see the job done properly, call in a critic. In the novel “Max Jamison” (1970), which was lauded in its time and is now cruelly out of print, the critic Wilfrid Sheed paints a merciless picture of his profession. Max, a film and theatre reviewer, tramps up and down Broadway excreting opinion, as contractually obliged, and hating himself for it. He is honorable, in his way. He refuses to pander, to flatter the powerful, to build a brand. He chokes on his own stock phrases. He cannot stop reviewing himself or his surroundings. His wife begs him not to grade their lovemaking. No inventive punishments prove necessary for Max—not when he is condemned to cart around his own curdled consciousness day after day. His punishment is being Max Jamison; his punishment is life itself.

“Life Itself” is the title of the 2011 memoir by an actual film critic, Roger Ebert, and though it’s a supernaturally sunny account of the gig, Ebert allows that there is something “unnatural” about spending his days the way he does. “Man has rehearsed for hundreds of thousands of years to learn a certain sense of time,” he writes. “He gets up in the morning and the hours wheel in their ancient order across the sky until it grows dark again and he goes to sleep. A movie critic gets up in the morning and in two hours it is dark again, and the passage of time is fractured by editing and dissolves and flashbacks and jump cuts. ‘Get a life,’ they say.”

But what is that life in the dark? Out of what soil spring these beings who absorb art and photosynthesize it into pronouncements, or, worse, into principles. (Max Jamison: “Upholding standards like a minor customs official, while genius slips quietly by. Vulgar, sleazy old genius, that knows no standards.”) “Ruderal,” from the Latin for “rubble,” is what botanists call the plants that crop up in disturbed areas, in-between places, cracks and fissures. A genre builds; we can trace the life cycles of these in-between organisms. There are recent memoirs by the critics Margo Jefferson, Darryl Pinckney, and Janet Malcolm, along with accounts by the wives and children of critics, biographies of Elizabeth Hardwick, Gene Siskel, and Roger Ebert, remembrances of George Steiner. A cottage industry of books collates the lives, loves, and slights of Susan Sontag.

Such stories are spun out of deskbound lives, lives spent immured in one’s mind, one’s room. The critic vanishes into a book, and then steals furtive glances out the window, testing one reality against another. From my own window, I can see the ginkgo trees crisping, going gold. Winter is coming for criticism, too, we’re regularly told, with warnings about its eclipse trailed by hectoring about the role of the critic (by the critic), about the need for her wisdom and authority. The warnings aren’t new. Here’s Mary McCarthy, commissioned by The Nation to take on the critical establishment in “Our Critics, Right or Wrong,” a 1935 series. Here’s Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1959 essay for Harper’s on the decline of book reviewing. There have been others; there will be more.

Let’s sidestep such impulses as we do the noisome ginkgo berries that litter the sidewalks. Let’s poke around in these ruderal lives. What primes someone for this work? What comes of being in such close contact with one’s own consciousness—one’s own taste, limitations, deprivations? Not just a life of the mind but a life in the mind, perpetually observing one’s own responses. Margo Jefferson, in her memoir “Constructing a Nervous System,” calls this observing self Monster, and makes it a character. Monster mocks, Monster annotates, Monster will not be appeased.

In this particular mind, my mind, there’s the furry feeling of encroaching fever. I haul off to bed, taking with me eighty-three books. All the lives of critics I can ransack from my shelves—memoirs, manifestos, letters, biographies—and whatever new volumes I’ve cadged from publishers. I take with me food critics, theatre critics, candid widows, disabused daughters, and the masthead of Partisan Review. I take the baby, also feverish, who naps, cheek squashed upon a fat and splendid collection of Kenneth Tynan’s theatre reviews, 1951-59. A colleague, a film reviewer, learns that I mean to write about the lives of critics, and e-mails: “It will be good to find out about critics who have lives.”

Who was the real Max Jamison? Speculation abounded. Was it Pauline Kael? Was it Richard Gilman—who is the subject of a recent account, “The Critic’s Daughter,” by his eldest child, the writer Priscilla Gilman? Was it Anatole Broyard, a longtime Times book reviewer, a friend of Gilman’s, and himself the subject of a book by his daughter Bliss, “One Drop”? No, Sheed insisted, it wasn’t even himself. Max was meant to be the very essence of a critic.

My bedroom window overlooks the neighbor’s garden and, across it, a stretch of row houses. Now, in the early evening, lights flick on in various rooms, and I imagine them inhabited by the writers whose books lie scattered on my bed. V. S. Pritchett, in the aerie, is writing on a plank of wood on his lap. Sontag, one floor below, is flying on Dexedrine; her son is—as she once described—lighting and feeding her cigarette after cigarette so she never needs to lift her hands from the typewriter. In another frenzy, in another study, Pauline Kael is filling up her legal pads, wearing a rubber thimble, as she did, on the tip of her thumb. Lucy Sante and Darryl Pinckney, in the living room, riffle through vinyl records; Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy sit down for tea, his spiked with gin. Vivian Gornick laces up her walking shoes. Randall Jarrell calls to his wife—in a detail from Mary von Schrader Jarrell’s memoir of their marriage—that he needs her now, he has something she simply must see. “You’ll be glad you came,” he promises. It is a lettuce leaf, no bigger than a canary feather. “I knew you’d want to see it.” He pops it into his mouth: “It was much too good for this world.” It’s a febrile, sentimental fantasy, this house of critics—interrupted mercifully by the critics themselves, rapping at the glass.