Reviewing Reviewing
BY ELAINE DUNDY THE American newspaper strike had one fascinating result. Apparently New York was able to do without news but not without book reviews. In fact the enthusiastic reception which greeted the first issue of the New York Review of Books published in the midst of the strike was such that only recently was I able to get a copy. `But I only read things by people I've met,' I had once said (and was never allowed to forget) as"—my friend's eyes hardening from astonish- ment to contempt—he withdrew his copy of eater's Renaissance from under my nose. But now, battling with this first issue of the New York Revi eh' of Books as I have been for the last three weeks, I can only groan 'Do I have to?' Because I've met most of the people writing for it-1 might as well confess I know some of them quite well; I even went to school with one of them (actually he was in my younger sister's class)--and they are on the whole jolly people given to stumbling over their dogs and children and their cocktail conversation sounds far more like: `Did the son-of-a-bitch say that about me? I'll kill him,' or 'I have only one rule in life, ask myself would X [contemporary; rival] con- sider it beneath him and if he would, I do it like know, real writer talk—than 'I think you'll his latest. The symbolism is sublimely dis- associated . . . but still autonomous . . .' that Occasionally gets murmured in your ear. The New York Review of Books . . . does not seek merely to fill the gap created by the Printers' strike in New York City but to take toe which the strike has presented Publish the sort of literary journal which the editors and contributors feel is needed in aMerica,' the editors state firmly at the begin- tlg, adding as a throwaway, 'Neither time trior space have been spent on books which are sal in their intentions or venal in their effects ti'eePt occasionally to reduce a temporarily in- atea reputation or call attention to a fraud.' °Except occasionally to reduce a temp—! lit_ nestlY, it's slap, punch scratch, tweak, tease the whole time. The collective image one Pert 18 of a grown man sore at the world, yet tectly pleased with himself (odd stance for a brown`uP) and, to lift a prase nestling amidst these pages, infuriatingly certaihn. tarkilrst Page: F. W. Dupee attacks James ni for—I think for not writing like a real thggter. 'Baldwin's point of view is not merely °f generic Negro. It is that of a highly bVsed Negro,' sort of thing. But in fact the aor pc Manner is so mysteriously labyrinthine 1)w1111131Y giving-with-onhand-while-snatching- W,:-with-the-other that it is hard to tell exactly renadthe's getting at old Jimbo for. When I Nex as I ran that much of Baldwin's The Fire read .` ime IS unexceptionably first-rate,' I mis- to n,it as unexceptionally first-rate (it seemed enou, aiPPes. n with the tone) until it bothered me that Longo back and check. I hate it when "in to b°nald the next page where Dwight Mac- in the gives Arthur Schlesinger jr. a sharp kick Preaehshi": 'The intonations of the fashionable Man e.r blend into those of the ideological con with ' I wish [he] had never gotten involved everyboltb, Politics.' And after that it's almost PoPular s game. Edward Albee is 'headed for success because of the same uncon- hrst etcetera etcetera that characterised his Plcys:
-laiinger writes 'as if for three hundred Many Russians of the old school go through a conflict they cannot express.
Incidentally, guess who wins the Most Mentioned Stakes? At first 1 thought it was going to be Jimmy Baldwin but by page 12 that sturdy Irish thoroughbred Jimmy Joyce flatted his ears and romped home by a mile.
Is it only me who finds the Auden type don't- forget-who's-the-teacher-around-here review in- tolerable? 'Perhaps it may help the reader to approach what is, frankly, a very difficult poem, if he will imagine, as he reads it, that he is sitting in a Roman Catholic church while Mass is being celebrated. . . Oh God. Does anyone else tremble with boredom confronted with page 8: Four Studies in Soviet Economic De- velopment? 'Moreover, much as we recognise the charm of a mytho-poetic (Physiocratic) image of the origins of savings '
Let me quickly leap over the net and shake hands with Philip Rahv and John Hollander who happened to like the books they were reviewing (1 won't say 'had the good fortune to' because I understand each person chose the book he wanted to review) and wrote about them with grace and feeling. I am also grateful to Mary McCarthy for so precisely telling me exactly what is in The Naked Lunch and what it's about and although she too cannot resist every now and then leaping on to the referential swing and merrily pumping away ('It is as though Finnegans Wake were cut loose from history and adapted for a cinerama circus titled "One World" ') she mostly keeps her nose in the book and reports. So 1 don't have to read it myself.
It was the hope of the editors to discover whether there was not only a need for such a review but the demand for one. Well there is,
there is, there is! One hundred thousand copies of issue two of this Times Lit Suppish review hit the_ stands in America last week with the
announcement that come September it will be published twice a month. Meanwhile, if anyone would like my copy of this one he is welcome to it. I can't seem to throw it away.
years the literature of Western culture has not conducted a campaign to demonstrate that the middle-class family is about as close as we have come to achieving hell on earth.' Auden 'does not sound like a professional critic and perhaps is not one.' Genet, in his new play, seems to be saying 'but in bad forced lyricism which is not song at all: Sing your crap.' The reviewer's answer: 'It can't be done.' John Updike's The Centaur is 'a poor novel irritatingly marred by good features.' John Hersey's technique is a famous one: 'The journalist collects an immense amount of data, and then uses most of it.'
Now don't get me wrong. I like heady in- vective as well as the next one but it must be carefully set—or offset—to shine like a jewel or
a raindrop on a leaf instead of pouring down ffl on you with the steady beat-beat of a three-
day rain if it's not to have the same depressing effect on your spirits.
Another trouble with this Mag is that they 01 can't seem to make up their minds whether they're writing reviews or essays, having been given too much space for the one and too little for the other with the result that they fill in by becoming either heavily referential ('Such a system might suit Marcus Aurelius but it hardly seems congenial to the author of The Naked Lunch . . .,"as the corrupt Alcibiades followed Socrates . . .,"like Kleist's, like
Kierkegaard's . . .') or merely repetitious. Alfred Kazin's piece about a White Russian's visit to the Soviet is a splendid example of this.
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