Critics

Long ago, I used to read John Simon's movie reviews. Given his reputation, and given the movies, I must have read many savage put-downs. Yet curiously the only two reviews I remember were favorable: one of The Lacemaker, one of an Italian comedy. I did see a number of hard things said in Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline. It was something for Simon to have been thought to be the model for the obnoxious critic in Wilfrid Sheed's Max Jameson, and something to have acknowledged or boasted of the rumor, even if Sheed was in fact his own model.

(The Strand Books website places Paradigms Lost on the third of eight pages if one searches for "John Simon" as author. I can't but think that the late critic would have admired the title of a book on the first page, Filth-diseases and their Prevention, and might have supposed his endeavors to have some relation to those of the earlier John Simon.)

I started to read Clive James much too late, a few book reviews apart. I was hooked a few years ago when I opened Cultural Amnesia to the essay on Margaret Thatcher, which opens with the word "Solzhenitskin", a Thatcher coinage. I am slightly embarrassed to find that of the references in the book, I have followed up at most three: Nirad Chaudhuri, Sergei Diaghilev, and Egon Friedell. (Diaghilev, by visiting the National Gallery of Art's exhibit on the Ballets Russes a couple of years ago.) I have given copies of Cultural Amnesia and Latest Readings to friends, and have read Cultural Cohesion.

Both Simon and James died on Sunday, November 24.