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By Root 924 0

seventies, and there was more room for it in print, but even in a rude decade it wasn’t going to win you any popularity contests. One of the minor revelations I got after clocking a few years in journalism was how many writers wanted to be in the popularity pool, wanted to be invited for weekends at the Vineyard. Although I should have known better, being aware that one of the bedsores of Norman Mailer’s resentment toward Norman Podhoretz was Podhoretz’s inviting of Mailer’s then-archrival William Styron to a party for Jacqueline Kennedy and not him, I couldn’t understand how not being asked to certain parties or panel discussions or petition drives could plunge a can opener into a writer’s pride and morale. I was naive enough to believe that such pouting ended once you graduated from high school, when it was replaced by a jolly new set of pouting opportunities and grudge breeders. It took me a while to learn that warm grievances fresh from the bakery do come along in life but they’re simply piled atop the old, cold ones, a sedimentation akin to Philip Larkin’s accounting of how Mum and Dad muck you up in “This Be the Verse” (“They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you”).

Going into writing for the social-climbing glory was never the goal, and not just because I didn’t have any long-range goals, never picturing myself in the white mink palace of penthouse nooky and celebrities with all-cap names that gave the critic Seymour Krim such gnashed teeth. I was making my name almost solely as a critic, where restrictions apply. Being a critic isn’t anyone’s childhood dream, an occupation that schools set out a booth for on Career Day, a religious calling that glimmers in the goldenrod. It’s impossible to imagine George Sanders’s Addison DeWitt from All About Eve as anything other than a fully formed adult, issued from a printing press. To those literary cubs who fancied having a cigarette dangling from their mouths like Albert Camus or Jack Kerouac, or sharing a club table with Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and Tama Janowitz to anteater a line of coke from here to the Vegas strip, or getting a Chinatown tattoo alongside Mary Gaitskill, or watching Jonathan Franzen adjust his eyewear (and who today would be happy just to get through breakfast without feeling as if everything’s turned to gravel), to them, critics are the snipers in the trees that the director Sam Peckinpah heard whenever the palm leaves rustled. To creatives, the Critic is the undermining inner voice maliciously put on the intercom to tell the whole world (or at least the tiny portion of it that still cares), You’re no good, you were never any good; your mother and I tried to warn you this novel was a mistake, but, no, you wouldn’t listen, Mister-Insists-He-Has-Something-to-Say. Failed artists consider critics failed artists like themselves, but worse, because unlike them they took the easy way out by not even trying to succeed, critics not having the guts to climb into that Teddy Roosevelt arena that everyone likes to invoke as the crucible of character, or risk the snows of Kilimanjaro. Even prestige authors who flex their fingers at performing criticism as if filling in at the piano on Monday nights feign disdain of it as a secondary activity, siphoning off the creative juices necessary to keep genius fertile and gurgling. For some reason, the elegant retort “If doing criticism didn’t cost Henry James, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and John Updike any candlepower, what makes you think you’re too good for it, buster?” never seems to stick.

Journalistic critics such as myself were, are, and forever will be routinely disparaged as parasites, sore losers, serial slashers, Texas tower snipers, and eunuchs at the orgy (what orgy? where is this orgy we seem to have missed?), which would hurt our feelings, if we brutes had any. The journeyman critics who are both perceptive and funny—genuinely funny, not jokey, their wit flipping off their wrists like a sneaky curveball—can escape the accusations of jealousy hurled across the notions