Whither the Hatchet Job?

JUNE 1, 2013, 2:33 PM

Whither the Hatchet Job?

By CLIVE JAMES, New York Times

Watching “High Noon” again the other day, I wondered how postwar 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 marvelous, I was left looking for cultural things that the Americans couldn’t do. The only one I can think of is hostile literary criticism.

America does polite literary criticism well enough. And how: there is a new Lionel Trilling on every campus. But America can’t do the bitchery of British book reviewing and literary commentary.

In Britain, the realm of book reviewing is still known as Grub Street though the actual Grub Street vanished long ago. But its occasionally vicious spirit lives on; one of the marks of Grub Street is that the spleen gets a voice. Ripping somebody’s reputation is recognized blood sport. Shredding a new book is a kind of fox hunting that is still legal today.

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 considered 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 very rare example of a critical review in an American publication.

Immediately, as if a switch had been thrown, the review became more famous than the book. Onlookers hailed the review as a sure candidate for Hatchet Job of the Year, a prize that actually exists, out there in the boiling blogosphere.

In my reading of Ms. Heller’s review, she didn’t seem to question Mr. 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. She might have added that you can also be excused for collecting lifetime female partners the way Jay Leno collects sports cars. But on the whole Ms. 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 Ms. Heller is actually a British import: like the late Christopher Hitchens, she voiced her British acerbity in a polite context, and found, as he did, that the locals were wonderfully easy to stir up. (The British expression is “wind up”: rather more cruel, when you think about it, because it treats people as tin toys.)

At one stage in my life, I was asked to review a prominent book that I thought needed putting down, and found myself in a position similar to Ms. Heller’s. It was in the late ’70s when John le Carré was in the full power of his later phase of production and The New York Review of Books asked me to write a review of his latest book. I was scarcely a chapter into it before I felt the glue closing over my head.

I wrote that Mr. 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. He wants to hear, at the very least, that his greatness has acquired an extra layer of subtlety, even if it looks like incompetence.

IN my role as Mr. le Carré’s nemesis, I had already experienced what it felt like to be stomped on in print. Years before, John Carey, one of the cleverest of the Oxbridge dons moonlighting in Grub Street, brought all his wit and knowledge to the task of shriveling my first collection of essays, “The Metropolitan Critic.” I slept badly for months.

Then, several years later, he extolled my book “Unreliable Memoirs,” and I felt all the better for having once felt miserable. It was part of the give and take of the British literary world.

Mr. le Carré, however, 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 Mr. le Carré 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. Mr. 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. In that fact lay the insult and the injury.

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 Ms. Heller or, dare I say it, myself. American culture is a polite culture and probably the better for it.

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 bit of 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, which must confine itself to the facts; and that a complex, nuanced statement sounds not enough like a fact, and hence must be confined to the blogs, where nobody has any manners anyway.

When I read the brilliant young Alice Gregory, in Slate, struggling to express how she simultaneously approves and disapproves of the journalism of Janet Malcolm, I want to lean through her study window (Alice Gregory’s, not Janet Malcolm’s) and explain that the whole secret of literary journalism is to express both sides of a question at once, and that only in America could that imperative seem abnormal. Alice, you can’t eliminate the negative. It accentuates the positive.

Clive James is an Australian poet and critic whose most recent book is a verse translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”