Mine Own Worst Enemy
ON the back of the jacket there are tributes from some of my favourite people—Groucho Marx, S. J. Perelman, Charles Addams—which describe it as uproarious, just great, sheer ecstasy. Well, it isn't. It is the autobiography (there is no index, which is practically a definition of some of these gossipy, wisecracking, inaccurate American auto- biographies) of a man who has led a certain type of bizarre and noisy New York life, gone rather Algonquin at the edges. Mr. King, as a matter of fact, has got more claim on the right to produce an interesting book than most of them; there is nothing inherently surprising about an editor of Life becoming a drug-addict, but the remin- iscences of such a man (which Mr. King is) would surely be worth reading, if only he didn't consider it his duty to keep the reader in fits throughout. Anecdote succeeds anecdote; and every now and again he pulls himself together with a visible effort and tells us about Life (as opposed to Life)— ]. might as well tell you something really un- pleasant. The basic ingredient of art is talent. And I'm going to top it off with a still greater heresy. When I say talent, I don't mean a talent for making money! So there it is.
Writer, journalist, commercial artist, uncommer- cial artist, junkie, jailbird—you would think, even without the great names who support him on the back cover, that Mr. King should have something interesting to tell us. Alas, funny though the anecdotes, or some of them, are, this is the emptiest book to appear for many a year, and even if it were not written almost entirely in the same breathless, sweaty prose, it would still be a waste.
BERNARD LEVIN
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