READING & WRITING : Whither the hatchet job?

READING & WRITING : Whither the hatchet job?

KATHMANDU, JUN 14 - Clive James is an Australian poet and critic. The Observer hired him as a TV reviewer in 1972, and for 10 years his weekly column was one of the most famous regular features in Fleet Street journalism. During this period, he became a prominent TV performer himself, and over the next two decades wrote and presented countless studio series and specials, as well as pioneering the postcard format of travel programmes. In 1979, his first autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, was an enormous publishing success, and was followed by four other volumes of autobiography. Collections of his essays on literary and other topics include The Metropolitan Critic (1974), and The Revolt of the Pendulum (2009), but the critical book that drew most attention was his study of culture and politics in the 20th century, Cultural Amnesia (2007). The bestselling Brilliant Creatures, the first of many novels, was published in 1983, and his most recent book is a verse translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In 2008 he was awarded the George Orwell Special Prize for lifetime achievement in journalism and broadcasting.


I’ve often wondered how post-war British culture ever found the strength to continue breathing. America’s global economic clout can be belittled only if you believe that no American cultural product is any good. Since it is undeniable that the occasional American cultural product is marvellous, I was left looking for cultural things that the Ameri-cans couldn’t do. The only one I can think of is hostile literary criticism.
America does polite literary criticism well enough. But America can’t do the bitchery of British book reviewing and literary commentary.
In Britain, the realm of book reviewing is still known by its occasionally vicious spirit. Ripping somebody’s reputation is recognised blood sport. Shredding a new book is a kind of fox hunting.
Such critical violence is far less frequent in America. Any even remotely derogatory article in an American journal is called ‘negative,’ and hardly any American publication wants to be negative.
In America, consensus is normal and controversy is confusing. Zoë Heller’s recent attempt, in The New York Review of Books, to prove that Salman Rushdie’s book Joseph Anton: A Memoir was less than magnificent is a rare example of a critical review in an American publication.
In Heller’s review, she didn’t seem to question Rushdie’s importance but rather seemed merely to find piquancy in the fact that he never questioned it either. She carefully conceded that if hundreds of thousands of people are offered a reward for your head, then you can be excused for regarding yourself as the natural subject of current historical conversation. But on the whole Heller said nothing that might not have shown up, in Britain, in a feature on the same subject carried by almost any serious literary publication.
In The New York Review of Books, however, the piece was remarkable, generating many an argument at highbrow dinner parties. Its alien quality was underlined, perhaps, by the fact that Heller is actually a British import.
At one stage in my life, I myself was asked to review a prominent book that I thought needed putting down. It was in the late ‘70s and The New York Review of Books asked me to write a review of John le Carré’s latest book.
I wrote that le Carré’s style had become verbose and implausible by his own standard, which had been set by his early books, especially by The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which I called a masterpiece. But no writer wants to hear that he has lapsed from greatness.
Le Carré had never had a really bad review in his life until I ambushed him in America. He just wasn’t used to it. My review was undoubtedly a hatchet job and he was right to be annoyed. For one thing, a ‘negative’ review in such an influential publication could hardly be good for the book’s chances in America, although in fact it became a best seller anyway. Le Carré, nonetheless, let it be known that he thought I had set out to damage him.
I hadn’t. But I can see how it might have seemed like that to him. Having far too much fun as I picked out the book’s absurdities and pomposities, I had written a British-style killer book review but I had published it in an American context.
British writers know that they are in a cockpit at home but when their books come out in America they expect to be safe. Usually they are; and anyone deputed to take them down usually has to be brought in from outside, like Heller or myself.
Sometimes I wonder, though. There was a time when the American literary world grew its own hatchet persons, and could rejoice in the thoroughness with which Mary McCarthy dismembered the reputation of Lillian Hellman.
But among young writers, there seems a shortage of critics unhampered by excessive good manners. Why this should be so is a mystery. It could be that the typical established publication has become too impressed with its own self-imposed status as a journal of record; a complex, nuanced statement sounds not enough like a fact, and hence must be confined to blogs.
But the whole secret of literary journalism is to express both sides of a question at once, and only in America could that imperative seem abnormal. You can’t eliminate the negative. It accentuates the positive.