Too many literary hatchet jobs

In 2016, the RA Magazine published a debate on the question: “Should art critics ever savage the work of artists?” Yes, wrote Jonathan Jones. “Tough reviews keep everyone edgy and creative.” No, wrote Simon Wilson. “The purpose of newspaper art criticism should be to describe, analyse and inform.” This debate seems especially topical at the moment. I have never seen so many nasty hatchet jobs as the past year or two.

In February 2018, Thomas Meaney reviewed George Steiner’s last book, A Long Saturday, a book-length interview with Laure Adler. The opening sentence set the tone: “[T]he work of George Steiner has a curiously otherworldly quality: his concerns can appear so remote, his writing so opaque, that you might as well have stumbled on a volume of Sainte-Beuve.” Really? Steiner wrote passionately about the Holocaust, Stalinism, exile and displacement, theology and philosophy as well as great literary classics from Antigone and Dante to Kafka. Are these preoccupations “so remote”? Do they not speak to younger readers, like Meaney? Admittedly, it wasn’t Steiner’s best book. Not even in the top dozen. But Meaney doesn’t mention that Steiner was 88 when it was published. Let’s see how Meaney shapes up when he’s approaching ninety.

A year later, the American critic Elaine Showalter wrote a piece about Harold Bloom, who had just died. She attacks his “combination of the melodramatic and ridiculous”. Her entire piece was an all-out assault on Bloom’s failure to understand feminism and new forms of literary theory. Not one word of praise, no sense of his achievements as a literary scholar over sixty years, writing on — among many other subjects — Romanticism, the Jewish Bible and American poetry.

A week later the distinguished historian Richard J. Evans reviewed the new biography of Lewis Namier. Hugh Trevor-Roper called Namier, “the best living English historian.” EH Carr called him “the greatest British historian” of the twentieth century. Evans was less impressed. He starts with several paragraphs of personal abuse: “Namier was clearly far more unpleasant than most”, “he had no interest in undergraduates”, “He was a bully who mercilessly exploited his junior colleagues”, “a terrible snob”. Then Evans moves onto Namier’s reputation as a historian. Namier’s best-known work is “outdated”, left behind by the rise of social and cultural history. His books on European 19^th and 20^th century history were “too prejudiced, and too superficially researched.” Evans attacks his casual “racism”.

Curiously, for one of Britain’s best-known historians, Evans doesn’t put Namier in historical context. The evidence for Namier’s “racism” comes from quotations from 1915 and the 1930s. Of course, they look disturbing a hundred years on, but Namier was born in 1888. Evans thinks Namier’s books on 18^th century England are “outdated”, ninety years on. How many British historians could anyone even name today? Does Evans think anyone will be reading his work a hundred years from now? This is a serious question which Evans might himself have reflected on. How many 20^th century historians can he name whose work will endure for even fifty years, let alone a century?

Last week, Nikhil Krishnan reviewed three recent books about Isaiah Berlin. Apparently, “sniping” colleagues considered Berlin a “charlatan”. None are named. Berlin, Krishnan writes, was “a marginal member of the British establishment”. This is news to me. Berlin was a professor at Oxford, the master of an Oxford college, the president of the British Academy, he was knighted and awarded the Order of Merit. “Marginal”? Really? Berlin’s “essays and lectures” were “in their original form, notoriously slapdash in their presentation” but were transformed by his formidable literary editor, Henry Hardy, “into pieces of impeccable scholarship.” I defer to no one in my admiration for Hardy’s impact on the way we think about Berlin’s work. But was Berlin’s famous lecture, Two Concepts of Liberty, delivered almost twenty years before he met Hardy, “notoriously slapdash”?

The targets for all these reviews are dead white males from a generation which has now passed. Their heyday was in the mid- and late-20^th century. This does not make them immune to criticism. But they deserve to be read with care, acknowledging their achievements as well as their shortcomings, and not to be misrepresented or taken out of context. Sadly, these reviews are not isolated instances. They are symptomatic of a deeply disturbing trend.