Closer to Rude than Snide

An Interview with Leo Robson Pauline Kael attends an awards ceremony at Sardi’s in New York City on January 30, 1977. © Abner Symons/WWD/Getty Criticism is not a secondary form of creation but a distinct craft, Leo Robson argues in this conversation with Leonard Benardo. Tracing its flourishing after World War II through a generation of charismatic public intellectuals who made criticism both glamorous and culturally consequential, Robson rejects nostalgia for a lost age of critical authority. One of Britain’s most distinctive literary critics, Robson is assistant editor at Literary Review and writes regularly for the New York Times, New Left Review, The New Statesman, and other publications. He is also the author of the novel The Boys (2025). Listen to this essay Leonard Benardo: Does anyone grow up fantasizing about being a critic? Leo Robson: Your question alludes to the idea that criticism is not enticing, or that critics have often failed at something else, or would have done if they had tried. The film critic Pauline Kael countered that when she asked listeners to a radio broadcast: “if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.” I think it’s an interesting point. In reality, all these things are difficult in different ways and to different degrees for the people who try them. They can be done both well and badly. There’s certainly a phenomenon of the novelist as failed critic. Just open a newspaper. But I wouldn’t go as far as Kael. With reviewing, there is less sense of uncertainty, less risk. John Updike, who wrote fiction, poetry, a play, and hundreds of reviews, said that writing criticism was to creative efforts as “hugging the shore” is to sailing in the open sea. Using similar language, Kenneth Tynan, a critic who was also involved in a lot of theatrical productions, said that when he was the literary manager of the National Theatre, under the direction of Laurence Olivier, he played the role of “tugboat nudging an ocean greyhound into harbour”—Olivier being the greyhound.

But to return to the question—whatever the limitations of criticism or the critical personality, I do think people fantasize about being critics, nowadays at least. François Truffaut, who started as a movie reviewer, once said that no child dreams of becoming a movie reviewer. I don’t know where he said it—it’s the epigraph to a book by the Cuban writer G. Cabrera Infante, who was celebrated as a film critic and novelist. But this would have been after Truffaut became a director, in 1959. So while the sentiment may have been true for him as a kid, I don’t think it was true by the time he was talking. . . I’ll try to explain why. There is this idea that the high point of criticism, in English at least, roughly traces the career of T. S. Eliot. It started just after the First World War, and it ended—but also sort of peaked—in the late 1940s, when many of Eliot’s admirers brought out their best-known books. This was the period in which academic literary studies developed, very much under Eliot’s influence, based around techniques of “close reading” of poems and, to some degree, novels, and around a certain kind of literary history. The key centers included Cambridge, England, and Kenyon College, Louisiana State, Columbia, Vanderbilt, Chicago, Harvard, Yale. The concepts that originated in that time include Eliot’s “dissociation of sensibility” and “objective correlative,” Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “intentional fallacy,” Brooks’s “well-wrought urn,” Leavis’s “great tradition” in the English novel, and Empson’s seven types of ambiguity. It was also when Edmund Wilson was writing the essays for American magazines that he collected in books such as Axel’s Castle, The Triple Thinkers, and The Wound and the Bow, and in Britain, when Orwell was writing. He died in 1949, in fact. An extraordinary time, but an even greater explosion came after that, some of it reacting against what came before. There was the storied work of French and Belgian theorists, some of whom, such as Roland Barthes, wrote criticism, and of certain Marxists new and rediscovered.

North American academia produced incomparable figures like Leo Bersani and Elaine Showalter and Edward Said and Linda Nochlin and Gilbert and Gubar. And there was the resurgent interest displayed by, among others, Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom in Romanticism—which Eliot and his followers hadn’t much cared for. Above all, there was writing in magazines, of the mass-market and “little” kinds. To some degree this critical journalism was responding to extraordinary work in the arts, a sort of domestication or popularization of avant-garde and high-modernist techniques with heroic figures like Godard, Warhol, Beckett, Miles Davis, John Cage. This criticism had little to do with academia, though its practitioners had usually gone to university. It was closer to a pre-academic tradition of belles lettres and the “occasional” essay associated with periodicals based in London and Edinburgh starting in the eighteenth century. So from the early 1950s there was a new tone or attitude, bullish and iconoclastic, honest, idiosyncratic in expression. That was when Cahiers du Cinéma was formed, where Truffaut and his friends wrote, and when the twenty-three-year-old Kenneth Tynan—a figure who was to exert a tremendous impact on both specialized and general audiences—published He That Plays the King. It’s a book written, as he later put it, in an “ornate” style, and it had an introduction he forced out of Orson Welles, who was then a stranger to him. Though the subject of the book is heroic acting, it actually begins with a chapter on the state of dramatic criticism—a sort of manifesto. He talks about the necessity of “communicating excitement or scorn,” and calls for “flexibility of reaction” and “great flair and cocksureness.” The 1950s was when many of these figures emerged, either belatedly, like Pauline Kael, or precociously, in the case of the Australian art critic Robert Hughes, who recalled in his memoir Things I Didn’t Know that he read Tynan “incessantly.” Another person unavoidable to mention, Susan Sontag, began writing in the Columbia Daily Spectator in 1960, and within barely five years, had written the much-discussed essays on movies, Happenings, criticism, and“camp” she put together in Against Interpretation.

The work produced by all of these people for magazines ranging from Time to Partisan Review was collected in books, many of them still in print. And they were admired by artists and writers, sometimes for their informed judgment but also just as fellow talented people. You would need to have a rather narrow vision not to consider Tynan a great writer. The things he wrote about—theatre, entertainers, jazz, cinema, the relationship between politics and culture, sexual freedom—were not exactly negligible, especially when you consider that most novels are just about ordinary people getting on each other’s nerves. If people do dream of becoming critics, and have done for some time, it was because of these sorts of figures. There was another element: glamor. If you look at these people—literally look at photos or watch footage—you discover that they were either beautiful or charismatic, or both. They all appeared on television. Among fiction writers of that time, maybe Philip Roth had some of that swagger, quick wit, amused air, though he also had a professorial, sweater-wearing side. There were others—James Baldwin, Muriel Spark, Norman Mailer in a more strenuous way. Not many. Paradoxically, novelists often seem more bookish or sedentary. There’s a moment in Geoff Dyer’s book Out of Sheer Rage, which is sort of a novel about criticism, where he is walking down a fancy road in North London and finds that he is appalled at the idea that in one of those large houses Julian Barnes would be working at his desk. Dyer considers this an “intolerable waste of a life, of a writer’s life especially” and “a betrayal of the idea of the writer.” Tynan may not have been a river pirate, but he led an active, adventurous life. Both of his wives wrote books about him. He certainly wasn’t chained to a desk. All the people I have mentioned wrote about the arts. No book reviewer had quite the same glow. They were often moonlighting academics—Trilling, Kermode, Steiner—and slightly stiffer. There were practitioner-critics of phenomenal distinction like Updike and V. S. Pritchett, but neither captured the imagination the way that Sontag did.

I do think this started to change about twenty-five years ago, in part due to a trio of English writers associated with the US: Martin Amis (after his collection The War Against Cliché appeared), Christopher Hitchens, and James Wood. The side career of Zadie Smith and the posthumous vogue for Elizabeth Hardwick have also played a role. Nowadays wanting to be a book reviewer is like wanting to be an astronaut or a fireman in the old days. LB: How do you understand a critic’s job? LR: One can overcomplicate what the job involves. It’s to adjudicate in the process of explaining, or the other way around. You might be intuitive and passionate or rational and reflective, but that’s the baseline. And there are a lot of useful critics who do only that. Of course, critics might also express ideas about the direction of an art form, what’s missing, what’s gone stale, how it relates to the other arts or to wider reality. But this is a bonus. The same with being a delightful or entertaining writer. It’s too rare to qualify as an intrinsic part of the job. But of course, it’s what we want, as readers. And while we know that novels and poems are more important than critical forms, there is nevertheless something exciting about the kind of thought and perception you can encounter in a piece of argumentative prose. Wilfrid Sheed, in his introduction to Essays in Disguise, argued that the essay has brought out the best in English prose because the novel has “too many other fish to fry.” It’s not true—the writing in even the greatest reviews is not in the same stratosphere as Absalom, Absalom!, Beloved, Moby-Dick, Tender is the Night, To the Lighthouse… But you get the principle. LB: Has the perception of the critic’s job changed over your lifetime? LR: Robert Hughes, in his unfinished second memoir, questions the idea that people used to care a lot about the “authority” or cultural weight of the critic, as arbiter or guide. I don’t know how true it ever was. The influence of a critic is reflected in their public—in some cases a general audience, in others a more captive one—reading and re-reading them, discussing them, thinking about them. Edmund Wilson was a dominant figure. Everyone says so.