Aftermath of Waugh
Sir: In your issue dated April 28, Auberon Waugh, with the pretext of reviewing two novels, treats us to a brief homily on the subject of novelreviewing. Having myself at one time reviewed novels for The Spectator, and having recently received an unfavourable review from him in your pages, I should like to make a few comments lest younger and less experienced reviewers may be in danger of paying too much attention to his fulminations. Since he referred to me by my Christian name, I shall return him the compliment, if such it be, and call him Bron.
The Modern Movement died, as he said, a generation ago and I agree that those critics who pretend it did not are most tedious. To pinpoint its demise as 1935 seems to me sloppy dating. I
should prefer, for prose, the publication of Finnigan's Wake and, for verse, Dylan Thomas's Twenty-five Poems, both slightly later. I also agree with his castigation of 'academics' as such, not only as re
viewers of books outside their own subject — and often within it — but whenever these people dabble in fields of which they are ignorant, such as contemporary literature or politics. There are, however, exceptions. There are also other fields of major activity which seem to me to invalidate a man's claim to criticise imaginative work: one is extreme political commitment, another the sloppy and tasteless journalese of those who write regularly for such gloomy publications as Private Eye.
There is, however, another shortcoming in a reviewer of which Bron himself has given glaring and repeated examples in your columns, and this is the argumentum ad horninem. I apologise for being personal, but in reviewing a novel by myself Bron made great play of the fact that I live in Ireland, and therefore — according to him — was not fitted to write a book part of which is set in England. He also accused me of having placed various passages of my book in the United States, in order to increase American sales. He finished up by admonishing me to "Come home." Since my paternal family has been Irish for some 700 years and since for the first fifty years of my life I was an American citizen, I cannot think what on earth he was talking about. Furthermore, since he knows me slightly, has stayed long ago in my house, and is married to a distant cousin of mine, it would not be impossible for him to get his facts right. The argurnenturn ad hominern is dangerous: with incorrect facts it is fatuous.
In the following week he reviewed a novel by Kingsley Amis. Here he was on even more treacherous ground in an allegation that men of about fifty tend to show a morbid sexual interest in adolescent girls. Mr Amis, as Bron pointed out, is about fifty. Whether there is any truth in the generalisation I do not know. I suspect that it was derived from that, vastly overpraised afterbirth of the Modern Movement, Lolita, ahe work of a precieux riclicute.
The point I am trying to make by these two examples is this: a reviewer is paid to review a book, not its au
thor. Apparently Bron, in his little world, knows or thinks he knows a great many of the authors he reviews, and shows some surprise that they may be annoyed by his public intrusion into what he has learned, in these two cases incorrectly, in private.
Unlike Bron, I am reluctant to generalise about writers' reactions to reviews, since I am under the impres sion that a book is written by a single man or woman, not by a clique of which Bron is arbiter. I suspect, however, that most writers react as I do:
that a man who gives me a .good review is a good reviewer while a man who gives me a bad one is either a fool or basely motivated. My own rule of thumb is never to review a book by a friend unless I like the book, and not always then. If, like Bron, I had the good or bad fortune to know almost all the English Novelists, I should give up reviewing novels altogether — except perhaps in Private Eye.
Constantine FitzGibbon St. Ann's, Killiney Hill Road, Co Dublin.
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