How to Read Reviews

by Benjamin DeMott

Is the literary world corrupt? Should readers of reviews worry about being had?

Twenty-five years ago, in the Widener stacks at Harvard, during a period billed at home (by me) as The Agony of Preparing for Doctoral Orals, I wrote my first short story and mailed it to a magazine. Two weeks later a note arrived from the editors saying that the journal— Partisan Review—was interested, and the decision would be made shortly and, whatever it was, would I keep in touch. Soon after came a letter of acceptance with information about the issue for which the story was scheduled, then a check (payment in advance), then an invitation to submit the unpublished piece to the editors of the current New Directions annual of new writing, then a second letter of acceptance. Between that time and this I’ve been exposed intermittently to literary politics, learning that unredeemed men and women can find work in publishing (as in schools, colleges, sugar and oil combines, and governments), and occasionally nursing a resentment. But at no point have I been the perfect audience for conspiracy theories about the publishing/ reviewing scene, or for jeremiads against the Literary Mob. Stepping up in youth to a then prestigious literary door, I knocked without hesitation or introduction, and was extremely generously received. Not the sort of experience that seeds mistrust.

Not proof either, though, that every complaint about collusion and rigging is groundless, or that sound consumer guidance hasn’t a place in this field. Currents of suspicion of the literary trade have always flowed freely, and if they’ve lately gained force, part of the blame falls, regrettably, on the trade itself. Contemporary writers in positions of power seem increasingly evasive when discussing nonliterary processes and influences affecting their work. “People often ask who chooses the books to be reviewed,” says Anatole Broyard in a preface to Aroused by Books (Random House, $8.95), a collection of his New York Times reviews. A decent answer to this question would appear to require at least a glance at the complex socio-economics of publishing and reviewing. But nothing of the sort is forthcoming; Mr. Broyard lays it down that, in this arena, character and sensibility are all:

People often ask who chooses the books to be reviewed. My colleague, Christopher LehmannHaupt. and I choose them. Because we have different personalities and try to accommodate those differences, we are each able, more often than not, to write about those books that are closest to our feelings. Our employers generally encourage us—with only an occasional resort to irony—in our efforts.

Another incitement to suspicion among general readers is the overeagerness of certain contemporary writers to pass themselves off as figures of easy virtue, people disinclined to police each other’s consciences. In tones either teasing or truculent or world-weary, readers are told about logrolling or intrigue, and simultaneously assured that both are inconsequential—nobody smart would think of making heavy weather about them. “What do you do when a friend writes a book?” asks John Leonard, editor of the Sunday Times Book Review, in the introduction to This Pen For Hire (Doubleday, $7.95), a recent collection of his critical pieces. The answer is cheeky devil-may-care: “Try to give it a favorable review. If you don’t like the way his mind works, why is he your friend?” Outsiders may wonder whether everything one’s friend writes will be of equal merit; they may also question the assumption that the way a mind works in conversation reveals much about aptitude for authorship—or the assumption that generalized “frankness” about conflicts of interest banishes the need for disclosure in individual cases. But tremors of concern among outsiders rouse—among insiders—more mockery than dismay. In a vaguely uneasy preface to The Morning After, Wilfrid Sheed, columnist for the Sunday Times Book Review, and a judge for the Book-of-theMonth Club, defended lit’ry logrolling on the ground that only stupid people are gulled:

As for log-rolling proper, the heavy work must be left to amateurs and one-shot hustlers who don’t have to cruise this particular bar again. One regular will usually do it for another (bite or stroke, it’s all we know): but otherwise, the soupiest encomiums are siphoned into harmless blurb quotes. And anyone who believes those deserves (reviewer’s malediction) to pay for his own books.

In the same piece the problem of editorial dishonesty was raised—only to be winked off in slippery comparatives and puns:

The Times Book Review I have found to be more honest than people suppose—at least, once the book has been assigned: assignation is a separate branch of diplomacy, which I won’t go into here.

Diffidence, a sense of humor, realism about human weakness— these are attractive human qualities, not invariably masks for guilt. But they don’t do a lot to stimulate confidence and trust; people whose casual opinions can kill a book’s chances overnight could be excused for dealing soberly with questions about the dice and decks they use.

The most obvious prod to suspicion is the continuing appearance of works alleging the existence of conspiracies—witness Richard Kostelanetz’s The End of Intelligent Writing (Sheed and Ward, $12.95)—or probing literary politics in a manner suggesting that scandals and skeletons need sniffing out—witness Philip Nobile’s Intellectual Skywriting¹ (Charterhouse, $7.95). As should be said at once, neither of these books qualifies as a distinguished effort of mind. Intellectual Skywriting focuses on The New York Review of Books, providing a history of that periodical from its founding through its emergence as an effective voice on the political left and an exceptionally influential organ of critical opinion; this essentially undramatic matter is enlivened by interviews with the journal’s backers, contributors, editors, hangers-on, and enemies. One section of the work, an account of the “Intelligentsia at War,” is useful and absorbing—sixty pages of afterthought and amplification by a number of antiwar spokesmen whose commentaries on Vietnam and other issues of the period added to the journal’s excitement in the late sixties. But Mr. Nobile sets up not alone as investigative reporter, but as critic, and he fits the latter role poorly. His classifying labels are coarse, he’s long on malapropism, and he’s overaddicted to the rhetoric of innuendo. What is worse, he seems dim about differences in human and intellectual weisht. Hannah Arendt isn’t quite like LOVABLE, GOODLOOKING, BRIGHT, and the other characters whose phone numbers and sexual kinks decorate the classifieds of The New York Review; Mr. Nobile’s chummily leveling manner with Ms. Arendt (he calls her a “Jewish Mother”) makes them out to be the same, thus deepening doubt about his judgment.

The problem of sensitivity to relative values is even severer in Mr. Kostelanetz’s treatise. Detailing the membership of the Cambridge branch of the “Northeastern WASP establishment”—a group of “similarly superficial Harvard-educated critics and reviewers”—the book names as soul brothers F. O. Matthiessen and George Plimpton, Van Wyck Brooks and John Mason Brown. Henry James steps onstage in these pages as “a classic goy” who, because of a Jewish literary conspiracy, “would have gone hopelessly unknown” if he “had written in the [nineteen] fifties and sixties. . . The samples offered of poetry and prose by “gifted” writers who, because of the Jewish or other conspiracies, haven’t been properly published or praised, range from the inexplicable to the execrable, viz this stanza by a Neglected Living Bard:

Regularly, in his chapters on “pseudo-culture,” alternative book publishers, and new periodicals, Mr. Kostelanetz invokes the names of his betters—most frequently F. R. and Q. D. Leavis—as fellow warriors in the struggle for standards against pop and tripe; his enlistment could be fatal to their cause.

Yet, damning as all this is, Messrs, Kostelanetz and Nobile aren’t just firing blanks. Snapping up unconsidered trifles of gossip, Mr. Nobile produces discouraging evidence of cronyism at The New York Review—favored contributors, for example, being invited to choose the reviewers of their books. (A tale of his own legal harassment by the Review that Mr. Nobile recently published in New Times strengthens the impression of a journal behaving as though it had fearful secrets to hide.) Mr. Kostelanetz, for his part, documents his claim that not only have contributors to the same journal been told to rewrite their reviews to fit the editors’ line on this or that subject, but the orders have been obeyed. Beyond this he presents a battery of statistics supporting his charge that the choice of books to be noticed reflects the closeness of relationship between the Review editors and Random House. In a word, wisps of smoke, if not of literary illumination, float up from both these books; taken together with relevant snippets elsewhere, they tend to confirm that for the interested, nonprofessional reader of book reviews, a measure of wariness is in order.

But what measure exactly? Should a foundation subsidize a corps of costly Kostelanetzes, gumshoes dedicated to the pursuit of bookish bad guys? It’s one thing to assert that the processes by which this or that work comes to notice ought to be more visible, but quite another to argue that inquiry should cut more deeply into this matter than, say, into the question of how the new school superintendent in your hometown or mine is chosen. The Whole Story on any professional turf is always tricky for outsiders to grasp. Yet common sense and a moment of reflection do wonders for consumers elsewhere: why should they be less than adequate here? A comic novelist, successful with his first book, spends a dozen years on his second; the book is reviewed by a successful novelist who in the same period has made a reputation and fortune in the same genre: is it surprising that the review is kind? Could Kurt Vonnegut have spoken ill of Joseph Heller in the Sunday Times Book Review without seeming mean or greedy? Were not the editors who assigned him the book aware of the situation? Is CIA aid necessary for comprehending such an “assignation”?

Surely not. By maintaining alertness to relationships between author and reviewer, and by bearing in mind a few truisms about editors, space allotments, ‘Tegular contributors” (and irregulars), and the like, any reader can protect himself satisfactorily as a consumer. But the truisms—or rules—do perhaps need spelling out from time to time. Among the most important are the following:

1. Information concerning the review editor’s opinion of the book to be reviewed is always communicated beforehand to the reviewer; decisions to change a reviewer’s copy or to ask for revisions are desperation moves, indicating a breakdown in the signaling system or an intolerable upsurge in reviewerly independence.

The editors of The New York Review, Mr. Kostelanetz reports, once obliged Professor R. W. B. Lewis of Yale to moderate his praise of Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act. The editors of the Sunday Times Book Review, Mr. Sheed reports, once changed words in Mr. Sheed’s review of a bestseller-to-be, moderating his abuse of the work. The editors of The Nation and the Saturday Review under Nicholas Charney, I can report, rejected assigned reviews outright that offended this or that in-house prejudice. But the standard-form editorial intervention precedes the actual writing of pieces. On the phone, or in a note to the reviewer, an editor may convey an explicit assessment of the work. He will almost certainly, at a minimum, stipulate a space limit, from which his opinion about significance is easily deduced. (At the Sunday Times Book Review a request for 400-800 words often means a book that just managed to qualify for a notice; a request for 1000-plus words usually means that a screening reader was impressed.) And when a reviewer ignores that opinion, the editor may employ a variety of carrot-and-stick procedures—avoiding confrontation or explicit talk of revision—designed either to cover himself or to ease the reviewer toward compromise.

One example: a year or so ago, Professor X, speaking to me in confidence, reported an unhappy experience with the Times Book Review. Having turned in, on assignment, a sharply negative, 1200-word piece about a book by an American historian, he received a call from an editor of the Review who expressed admiration for the piece, spoke of his seniors’ intention to use it as a featured, so-called “second front” article, and noted that in order to play it up front they needed an acknowledgment, high in the text, of the book’s “importance.” No need to back off from your attack, said the editor, merely an acknowledgment that, while the book has grave faults, it has to be reckoned with as a major entry, comparable in scope and ambition to standard works X, Y, & Z. Reluctant, yet mildly elated by the possibility that he himself and his opinion of the book would gain prominence if better placed in the Review, the reviewer inserted the desiderated claim of importance. When the piece at length appeared, it was buried in the back pages—but the single sentence claiming “importance" became available for quotation in advertising, and the decision about the original space allotment came off as reasonable. In general, the good reader of Sunday book sections bears in mind that reviewers, like other people, are suggestible; that space allotments tend to prestructure opinion; that a negative decision by a reputable professional with 1000-plus words is likely to be a more seriously judged and committed act than a routinely unimpressed comment by a reputable professional originally assigned 500 words; and that bad reviews must go to the back of the bus. (The matter of gassy paeans in the Sunday Times Book Review deserves separate inquiry. The last unremittingly negative notice I remember on its front page—the title reviewed was by Susan Sontag— appeared well over five years ago. But that fact counts for less than that the fatuity levels of front-page praise have ballooned crazily in recent months, as though Letters were determined to do its bit for the inflationary spiral.)

2. The least satisfactory reviews in any periodical, from The New Yorker to Playboy, are likely to be those of books produced by authors clearly identifiable as contributors, or friends of the founders, or people to whom the editors lend their apartments for parties while they’re at Caneel Bay, or as characters formerly approved but lately dropped.

Ms. J. has achieved her reputation partly through her pieces in our pages; she’s written for us for years and we hope she’ll continue to do so: can we be certain that the reviewer we’re choosing won’t wound her? Mr. B. used to write for us a lot, but when the new editorial broom came in, namely ourselves, we dropped him: how can we handle his book in such a way as to avoid implying that those who once published him here were fools (of course they were), yet at the same time put seemly distance between us and him? The “second front affair” just described involved a “contributor’s book,” naturally. My own worst moment as a reviewer came in my first year, when the editor of The Hudson Review insisted on softening some stern words about Herbert Gold—a contributor, naturally. (Capitulation with honor seemed feasible because the words to which the editor objected originated not with me but with Norman Mailer; but I hated killing the quote, and have since vowed never to do the contributor’s number unless provided with firm no-tampering guarantees beforehand.)

Asperity about reviews of contributors’ books obscures one truth about them; they can be most amusing, the only first-rate comedy in book sections. It is, inevitably, formula comedy, depending upon impersonation (clowns or wild boys playing Arnold or Pater), and demanding strict observance of conventions. Most work in this line falls into two categories. Genre A: Jones Is Not As Superb As Most Shrewd, Well-Informed, Cultivated Admirers of Her Work Have Sought Against Odds to Make Us Believe. Genre B: Jones Is Not Quite As Wretched As Most Shrewd, Well-Informed, Cultivated Despisers of His Work Have Sought Without Opposition To Make Us Believe. The first formula is followed for a member in good standing; the second is for the dropped; each requires the reviewer to adopt the posture of the stern, just righter of balances, and a tone that someone once very acutely called sonorous remoteness (“I know nothing whatever about this author except what I make out from his books”). Classic work in Genre A recently appeared in The New York Review. Professor Roger Sale proved, sonorously, that the author under review—Ms. Alison Lurie, a regular contributor to the journal, frequent houseguest of its founders, intimate of its backers—was not really as good as Jane Austen, though many (as he admitted) believed otherwise; she was only marvelous.

Often there’s a piquant, invisible, personal link between reviewer and contributor that adds—if known—to the intricacy or hilarity of the reading experience. (The father of the reviewer who deprived Ms. Lurie of membership in The Great Tradition was for years her husband’s colleague in the Cornell University English department, where Ms. Lurie now teaches.) But the good reader of reviews of “contributors’ books” proceeds on the understanding that the linkups probably can’t be known; he does what he can to ascertain the present state of professional and social relationships between the editors of the organ of critical opinion and the contributor under review, but, regardless of his finding, preserves an attitude of good-natured wariness. He knows, to repeat, that pieces about contributors’ books will remain the least reliable in any journal.

3. Know your reviewer’s standards. The consumer who develops clear conceptions of reviewers and editors upon whose work he has to depend is hard to dupe; he’s able to weigh judgments in light of differences be-tween the reviewer’s standards and his own.

Arriving at clear conceptions can be difficult, to be sure. A reviewer who chooses not to collect his pieces—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the Times is such a one—makes it yet more difficult. Memory contends that Mr. Lehmann-Haupt has a weakness for Stunning New Forms or Ideas (our children have saved us; Charles Reich; novels by Rudolph Wurlitzer), that he likes complicated arguments (and is better at cogent summaries of them than most book columnists), and that he expects an author not to treat him as a cretin (he himself is admirably tactful to his own reader). But these are not conclusions based on the hard evidence of a collection.

Then there is the problem of the reviewer turned editor: a volume published before he joined the Administration tells you what he used to like, but perhaps power and office have moved him on? John Leonard as a reviewer seemed partial to books wherein the fire and ambulance sirens never sleep, wherein exacerbation is a moral value, and feelings other than suicidal are dismissed as not pertinent to the age. The following sentences on Ms. Marge Piercy bring the taste of that period into view:

The imagination of disaster, the dream of blood, the ritual exorcism, the end of property, the death-sleep of the eagle populate Miss Piercy’s teeming vision. She writes it down on bandages, and we are suddenly aware of our wounds. What a book. The novel lives.

There is some evidence that in his editorship of the Sunday Times Book Review, Mr. Leonard has remained faithful to his earlier self. Desperate or drugged, mauled or maimed are the heroes and heroines of the writing welcomed as masterwork from week to week in this paper. What is more, the journal under his editorship has declared war on the merely comprehensible, making its own independent contributions to the general cultural nightmare it proclaims. (The “new broom” at the Times seems to have no thought-through positions, cultural, political, or aesthetic, only a paralyzing fear that the old charge of middlebrowism will be revived against it, and an underexamined softness for so-so writers employed by the Columbia English department.) But whether the zest for apocalypse can survive much longer, measured neatly out for weekly deadlines, is uncertain; apathy (if not cheerfulness) could break in.

There is, in truth, only one daily (actually thrice-weekly) book critic presently on the job whose full measure can conveniently be taken—namely the Times’s Mr. Broyard. As the title of his collection, Aroused by Books, attests, this critic tends to favor writing that charges him up physically. He speaks out strongly for “gut truths,” for “rhetoric that pulled my pulse,” for a novelist whose “imagination stalks the back fences and overturns the garbage cans of our emotions.” A writer on education pleases Mr. Broyard because “aphorisms and insights came at me so thick and fast . . . that I often had to put the book down after a few pages to give my intellectual appetite a chance to burp.” Reading some new poems, he discovers in delight that “Poetry today is sexy. ... It lays its hand on parts of you that no one has ever touched before—and if you can accept it, it feels wonderful.”

At the center of this critic’s value system lies a warm feeling about the human race—a real pleasure in being one of us:

My God, but my fellow creatures are fascinating! I found myself thinking. How touching, how absurd, how real they are! All at once I was delighted to be sharing their destiny.

And the counterpart of the sense of solidarity with you and me is a readiness to imagine the reader as his equal:

“How the hell can you expect me to read poetry,” you’ll say. “I can’t even understand the stuff.” Well, try to tell me that you understand Beckett, or Pinter, or Godard, or Antonioni.

Mr. Broyard goes to lengths to find language or methods that will make dead writers available to the present. He speaks of Dr. Johnson as “a giant conversational jock.” Considerate of the folks just mentioned who can’t understand the stuff, he quotes a poem by Auden as prose and terms it a “beautiful remark.” He rates James Hanley with Samuel Beckett, and puts Nabokov in his non-feelie place:

I think it would be useful to clear the air concerning Nabokov. If he doesn’t want to reach out and touch us—if this offends his fastidiousness—fine! That’s his affair. But I feel it’s time we stopped pretending we like it.

And his titles—Wash Your Feet With Poetry; That’s No Lady, That’s My Wife; Naked in His Raincoat; Woman as a Groaning Board, and scores more—underline the basic Broyardian heartiness. An age more pretentious than the present might have hooted down a writer of this quality for vulgarity, might even have denied him space. But as a compass whose true north points to grossness, he is right for the times. Of few other writers alive can it be said in perfect confidence that nothing they dislike can be all bad and that nearly everything that excites them must be in some part vile.

Are there no other rules for readers worth mention in this survey? Only one, this the most familiar commonplace of all. It is that the good reader of reviews will have at the back of his or her mind a few texts, or rather a few literary moments, that strike him as calling forth his greatest resources of understanding or fineness of response. Mrs. Bulstrode’s “Look up, Nicholas” in Middlemarch; Cordelia’s “no cause”; Gurev’s words to himself as he sits down to wait, in the Chekhov story, until his mistress’ tears are done . . . The good reader will have these moments summonable at notice, and will sometimes bring them before him as he’s reading a piece—for the purpose of discovering what the reviewer before him, judged from his tone and temper as displayed, would make of them. Would he find these texts too unbloody, too lacking in sick eagles or bandages or sirens, too fastidious, too intent on keeping their hands to themselves? A good book isn’t read, it reads the reader—“asks a certain height.” in the famous phrase. From which it follows that the whole art of reading—and the secret of not being had, of fending off conspiracy—lies in being certain about the altitude, if any, to which the critic at hand can rise.