(Stephen Burt, Vivian Gornick, James Wood, Clare Cavanagh, Parul Sehgal) What does it take to change discussion—or start discussion—around a novel, a poem, a play, a career? How to combine instruction with delight? Four leading literary and cultural critics, winners or finalists for the National Book Critic Circle’s awards, discuss the art of writing about books. These winners and finalists differ in background and experience; all represent criticism as a lively, challenging activity, one that can and must find something new to say.

Published Date: May 8, 2013

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This event was recorded at the 2013 AWP Conference in Boston. The recording features Stephen Burt, Vivian Gornick, James Wood, Clare Cavanagh, and Parul Sehgal. You will now hear Stephen Burt provide introductions.

Stephen Burt:

Thank you so much. What a privilege it is to be here at AWP by doing this officially co-sponsored panel, called What is Criticism? With the National Book Critics Circle, on whose board I have been proud to serve. And I think there are some other NBCC board members in the room, if I'm not mistaken.

The National Book Critics Circle is the organization that represents book critics and book reviewers in the United States and to some extent, even abroad. Anyone who writes book reviews is welcome and encouraged to join. You can do that at bookcritics.org and it will take you to the membership signup page. If you do not yet write book reviews, or simply want to support the national and international conversation about how to read and what to read and why, you can become an associate member. Doing either of those things will get you a certain number of discounts on events and literary and cultural journals that will more than pay for your annual membership.

If you are a student, whether an undergraduate or an MFA student or something else, you can become a student member of which costs very, very little and brings with it all the other National Book Critics Circle membership benefits. And we do a number of things, we do events in cities throughout the country that promote reading and promote criticism, and we give an annual set of awards. Which have been given, or almost given in a sense, they were on the short list, to all four of our distinguished panelists today, whom I will introduce as rapidly as I can without loss of focus, so that we can have as much of a conversation as possible.

Toward the end, we will open it up to questions and answers from our audience. Anybody have a wristwatch? Can we put your wristwatch ... okay. Vivian Gornick. Vivian Gornick not only has a wristwatch, that's a watch-

Vivian Gornick:

[inaudible 00:02:21].

Stephen Burt:

It's so that I don't speak for too long. All of you will be great, it's my question that will get too long. Vivian Gornick, in addition to owning a wristwatch, is the author of many, many distinguished, and at this point, I would say quite often, not only admired, but imitated books of literary criticism, cultural and political criticism and memoir. Including The Men in My Life and The End of the Novel of Love, both of which were shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

Other books include a number of biographies, also a very recent book about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, is that right? And another one about Emma Goldman, right?

Vivian Gornick:

Yeah.

Stephen Burt:

Yeah. One doesn't have to imagine, one can read about it. And essays in feminism and since the 1970s, many of us have looked to her as an exemplary maker of sentences as well as an example in how to combine cultural criticism, cultural analysis, and real literary reading for a more than academic audience. I remember my first encounter with The End of the Novel of Love, and I hope that book has continued to affect me. And she also [inaudible 00:03:30], among many other figures.

Parul Sehgal became three years ago, the youngest ever winner of the National Book Critics Circle's Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing after some time at National Public Radio and the Publisher Weekly. She is currently on the staff of the New York Times Book Review and you can continue to read her own reviews at her own website, which is parulsehgal.com. Including a terrific long piece on Zadie Smtih that I was talking up yesterday, so I won't talk it up again. But read her work and read the work that she edits at the New York Times Book Review. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

James Wood, whose books many of you may also know, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for The Irresponsible Self in 2004. His many other books of literary criticism and fiction include The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, The Book Against God, How Fiction Works, which many of you I think have not only read, but memorized parts of it in the subject of so many debates recently which I'd be glad to hear or be part of. And most recently The Fun Stuff.

 And finally, Clare Cavanagh, one of the English-speaking world's most distinguished scholars and critics of poetry and Slavic languages. In addition to a terrific critic of Yates and other poets who write in English, is the Translator of Devil Prize winner. I'm going to pronounce her name wrong, I'm going to pronounce her first name wrong, help.

Speaker X:

Wislawa?

Stephen Burt:

Wislawa. Thank you. Szymborska did I get the last name right?

Speaker X:

[inaudible 00:05:11].

Stephen Burt:

I'm making progress. And the biographer of another terrific poet who writes in Polish and another novelist, [inaudible 00:05:20], did I get that semi right? Okay, okay. I'm sensitive about my lack of Polish. She's also the author of Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland and the West, one of the really ethical books, not only of scholarship but of literary criticism and a thought about literature and culture for me over the last several years. I'm very glad that it is also a book that won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Clare Cavanagh also teaches at Northwestern University. I forgot to get institutional affiliations and James Wood is my colleague at Harvard and Vivian, are you teaching somewhere right now?

Vivian Gornick:

No.

Stephen Burt:

You are not? Okay, and Parul is at the New York Times Book Review. I've given you distinctions and credentials and reasons to read the work of all of the people who are to either side of me as well as institutional connections. And I am going to get out of the way and ask the vaguest and largest of the questions I will be asking our panelists today, what is criticism for? Vivian.

Vivian Gornick:

Oh.

Stephen Burt:

We do have other questions if you reject this one.

Vivian Gornick:

I don't reject, I just dread. What is criticism for? So, okay, Steve Bird and I share a great love of Randall Jarrell. And for me, Randall Jarrell is the model. So how do I look upon Jarrell? He is a man who is passionate about reading. To Jarrell, it's all one; reading, writing imaginatively, writing critically, it's all in the service of love of reading, which for Jarrell is what makes life worth living. In fact, he said, "Intellectual life is the only thing that separates us from the animals, it's the only thing that makes life worth living." I think I more or less agree with that.

For myself, I can always say, when I started to write like everybody else of my generation, when you thought you wanted to write, you immediately thought you were going to write a novel. As I matured, I realized that my bend was essayistic, it wasn't imaginative in that other sense. Then I worked my way through understanding what essayistic means, which means that the writer, there's no surrogate for the narrator, right? The narrator is the writer. But what does that mean? It means that you use yourself, your naked un-surrrogated self to explore the world.

So you are the instrument of illumination, you are not the subject, you are what will illuminate whatever it is you're looking at. The goodness of it all depends upon your perceptions, nothing else. It doesn't depend on technical apparatus. It doesn't depend on many other ways of seeing, it doesn't depend on aesthetics, it doesn't depend on moralizing, it depends on the quality of your perceptions. For me, when I began to write about books and writing, it was just an extension for me of writing essays or writing memoirs. The agenda was different and therefore the focus was different, the point of view was different.

But essentially it came to the same thing, I write about how life feels to me. In the end I think every great critic has said this. Of course, trying to prepare a little bit for this, I found myself reading about criticism and in the course of it came across some great quotes from people like I.A. Richards, from Baudelaire, and they were all saying the same thing. In the end, you have only yourself and only your own perceptions and if those perceptions, as Gerald said, make you love reading more, then you've won the game.

I feel when I'm writing at my best, I'm writing to say something. I certainly am not writing aesthetically, I have none of that apparatus at my fingertips, or any other part of me. Maybe I belong among the moralists, I don't know. All I do know is, I don't feel I have the right to write unless I really have something to say, which will illuminate the way in which life feels to the writer and the way that in turn felt to me. When I'm writing badly, when I was much younger, I used to do this a great deal. I used to write in order to announce my judgment of something, "This is good, this is bad." Mostly I loved saying, "This was bad." And learned to do it quite well, quite cruelly.

In fact, I wrote so cruelly once that a writer called the New York Times and threatened to sue. And Abe Rosenthal, who was then the head of the Times, called me up to say, "Kid, when she sues, don't worry, I'll be right behind you," and behind me is what he meant. So the whole thing was a shock, because I thought ... I didn't think, and it took me many, many years to realize that was not criticism. I'll let it go with that.

Parul Sehgal:

I think I'm going to cheat slightly. So many years ago I interviewed Steve and asked him the same question and I'm going to tell him what you said.[inaudible 00:10:47]. It was a long time ago, it was a different life. And actually you answered it really well. You were like criticism, poetry can be an art, like a chair it has uses and like voting, it's an individual way to participate in a necessary collective enterprise. Criticism, you said this. Is that smart? About criticism? Yeah, and I just thought that for years. I just think that's one of the better definitions of what criticism can do. And what it's for and what it feels like to write criticism when you're trying to do so many different things at one time. And I think for me, what criticism is for, the way I've read it, the way I try to write it, it's about much of what Vivian was saying, it's a way of clarifying perceptions.

It's a way, I think so many of us have such a thirst for reading sometimes we want to read about reading, we want to understand the way our mind works when we're reading something. So we read somebody else and it becomes this fantastic way when you're trying to write criticism, you learn about your own, at least I'm always coming up against my own myopia and my shortsightedness and my smugness and my self-loathing apparently.

But I don't know, actually I love that you brought up Jarrell too because I was reading him this morning actually and trying to think of intelligent things to say, and after he died, Robert Lowell wrote this beautiful tribute for him. And I just wanted to say one thing because I just think that it just answers it better. It goes, "One could never say this admiration. Oh, I know you would like that. His progress was not youthful. Critic's progress from callous severity to life's benevolence. With wrinkled brow and cool fresh eye he was forever musing, discerning and chipping away at his own misperceptions." Yeah, so I think for me, criticism is at least a huge process of just even self intellectual reinvigoration.

Stephen Burt:

I'm resisting the temptation to quote you Robert Lowell sonnets about Jarrell to continue those matters. But I have to thank you for quoting him and me before moving on to James while promising you, that I will get to what Parul has written about James, but not yet.

James Woods:

I am not going to detain you because I can't really improve on those two beautiful answers, except, well maybe to say that I'm exaggerating a bit here, but you understand why. That we don't need to think necessarily of criticism as being for anything any more than we think of art as being for, it exists. It exists because it's a branch of being alive and we're all critics and a great deal of art is criticism too in one form or another. So it is and magnificently it is.

Vivian Gornick:

Oh my gosh.

James Woods:

I'm exaggerating a bit.

Clare:

Well, I have a really different trajectory into criticism I think, than anybody else in the table, which is why I put my quotes here. This is like a critical autobiography in reverse in a way, I guess. I was trained in Slavic and people say, "Is that a country, do you speak Slavic?" But I was trained across the river, wherever it is at Harvard in high structuralist mode with Roman Jacobson, the famous structuralist and polymath as a preside ... he couldn't even speak anymore, but they would wheel him into the lectures and his wife would say, "If he could talk, this is what he would say."

And so I got late Jakobson out of my mind because it was really a combination of old-fashioned German philology and Jakobson, Jakobson, Jakobson. And I had to do it, and I guess I'm not sorry, but I hated it and one reason I hated it is because it is the most profound structuralism generally I think, and Jakobson in specific is treating in how not to be a critic. It's treating the little quote you have down at the bottom, I could have picked so many of them. To my mind, it's exactly what not to do. It's creating an academic language that's only a dialect of an academic language that only speaks to other practitioners of that dialect and that makes you feel insecure if you're not in with the crowd.

And I think that's the story of academia in literary studies of academia in recent decades. I hate those languages, I really hate them, and I don't understand why anybody wants to say things like he's superimposed on contiguity and his equivalence is promoted to the constituent device in the sequence. He started out talking about Yates in this thing. He has another famous thing he did with Claude Levi-Strauss on Baudelaire, and it always seemed to me, if how the computer from 2001 could do scholarship, that's what that piece would be. They're unreadable and they're intentionally unreadable.

Well, part of my trajectory then was backwards because what I discovered was that Jakobson of the the teens and the twenties was absolutely one of my favorite critics on the planet, and that defined for me what criticism was. I gave a long quote here, mainly because I wish I could quote the whole essay. It's a beautiful essay from 1931 that Jakobson wrote after the death of his dear friend, the great poet Vladamir Mayakovsky. And what he's trying to do is write to so many audiences in this beautiful piece. He's already in exile in Prague, formalism has been officially forbidden in the Soviet Union, can no longer be practiced.

And the other thing that got killed with formalism, people talk about the Soviet Union killing poets, or killing poetry, which is true. Poetry as the living, fighting, aggressive antagonistic life force vanished, what you had was individual poets writing in isolation. But one of the other things these poets were missing, this only struck me much later, I wrote a whole chapter in my book on Anna Akhmatova's, great, never finished work, The Poem Without a Hero. And I spent years, and years, and years thinking about this poem. She started it in 1940 and had about four variants, more perhaps, by the time she died in 1966, she wouldn't finish it. But a lot of what did was include critical responses to it.

Well, a lot of them were made up. She missed critics, she wanted critics. What the Soviets had were fixed interpretations that would be propagated by the state. The interpretation was the job of the state, so that if you read a Soviet critic, there's some that managed to sneak ideas through the cracks. She missed this live interaction that Jakobson precisely provides here, that the audience, readers, and poets and critics were all woven in together into what [inaudible 00:18:08] calls one long family argument. They're arguing with each other, and against each other, and writing prose about each other, writing poetry about each other, and then having affairs with each other, which makes it even more fun.

Tsetaeva has a wonderful essay about how she told [inaudible 00:18:24] he would find a nice girl someday. But that intense engagement where they're working back and forth across each other, contradicting one another, growing as they read one another, finding all sorts of segues and intersections, Akhmatova never got over it. And a big part of the poem without a hero, I only realized it afterwards, if she's modeling herself partly on Byron, and Byron has all these wonderful footnotes attacking the critics. She had to invent critical responses to respond to, and then she had to build it into the poem. I'll stop here, yeah.

Stephen Burt:

No, this will continue.

Clare:

Okay.

Stephen Burt:

But it will have other questions within.

Clare:

Yes, yes. Sorry, sorry.

Stephen Burt:

I wish I had ... It's not okay to write on the walls of the convention center, is it?

Clare:

Sure.

Stephen Burt:

No. I think it would get us in trouble. I want to be writing down a reading list and instead of names, we'll have reading lists for you afterwards. We're starting to speak about criticism as if it were one thing because it has been such a continuous important enterprise for so many critics. And as we get examples of breaking it down and seeing how it's affected by its occasion, by whether it is also biographical or also a book review with a judgment incorporated by length, by audience, by whether you will go to prison if you write the wrong thing, or whether you will not. Whether you will get paid, or whether no one is paying you, or whether you're being paid indirectly.

So I was hoping that you could talk and we could do it [inaudible 00:19:51] starting with Clare and moving back to Vivian. Could speak about important kinds, or genres of criticism and how those occasions or genres of criticism, change what you can write or make possible what you can write. And talk about yourselves as critics too. The book review, the biographical essay, the book length study, the memoir of one's own reading, the academic address, the genres of criticism if you think it has genres.

Clare:

Oh my gosh. This schtick I had already in my head, that schtick I didn't even know about. Some genres of criticism I don't practice, because I'm a translator/academic/critic. I always wanted to be a critic, so now I feel totally vindicated because I'm actually here. But to me, I can't do the thing like memoirs of my own reading and stuff. I suppose it's one reason why I'm a translator too, is I'm much more comfortable talking about other people in my writing. So there are whole genres that I just don't do. I hate, I don't mind talking about myself, but not too much, but I hate writing about myself. Book reviews I feel really comfortable with, especially because I do so many on Slavic poets and I feel like I have this weird double perspective that's incredibly helpful.

I write book reviews for Polish journals too because they have no sense of how writers perceive their poets stateside, and they also completely miss things like with Mi?osz. This is for genres of criticism, Susie Linfield, who was a finalist the year that I got the prize for who wrote a wonderful book said criticism for her begins in irritation, and that's true for me. All of the genres start in irritation. She says, "How could such and such not get this? How could somebody think this is a great book?" It's really fun sometimes too. "This is a good poet, or this is decent criticism." And finding different ways to get pissed off nicely and actually turn it into a learning experience, I feel like that's part of the mode for me.

And when in Poland, they don't realize that Mi?osz spent 40 years in California where I happened to have grown up. They said, "But isn't America just the air-conditioned nightmare for Mi?osz?" They missed his whole engagement with American poetry. So that's trying to find the ways to counteract misreading? I don't know. It's not really a genre. Whatever.

Stephen Burt:

[inaudible 00:22:46] purpose. James?

James Woods:

I really like the idea of getting nicely pissed off and pissed off nicely, that seems great. It is hard to talk about genres of criticism, isn't it? And I suppose one ends up talking a little bit about what one does. Personally, I like writing and have the privilege of being able to write generally longish book reviews that I hope in some way speak through a work of art and not just about it. That's something that's important to me and that I feel I got when I was a teenager reading people like Virginia Wolf. I could see, or indeed as a teenager when I discovered criticism and really loved reading essays, I'd read essays in bed and so on.

I think instinctively what I was coming upon was the fact that there is exactly as Clare has been saying, of course a long critical tradition which makes academic study very much a Johnny come lately. English studies as a discipline, comes about around 1910, 1920. Before that you went to university and you studied classical literature, not modern literature. And criticism of course has existed for centuries before the academics got to it because it was written by writers. [Inaudible 00:24:19] Goldridge and Haslett and Virginia Wolf and so on.

And I think instinctively when I was a teenager, that's what I was latching onto, that there was this writing about writing that was written in the same language, often by the same people, by creative artists. And so certainly my own reviews, I try, I know it sounds silly, but I try to speak an artistic language and write any language if I can, as much as possible. I completely understand what Clare is saying about missing critics, wanting a critic.

And it made me think about George Steiner wrote that thing about 20 years ago in which he said, slightly Jarrell like actually, he said, there's far too much criticism, there's endless commentary. If we put all the books of commentary he always likes doing this, in a line from here to stretch all the way to the moon, blah, blah, blah. We need to get back to a world in which artists suggest commenting on each other through their art.

And Jeff Dyer wrote a wonderful thing in The Guardian where he said, "Professor Steiner has described the world of jazz, right? No commentary, very little commentary between the jazz musicians, and the commentary is intramural." And so that seems an ideal to me, even as it's preposterous, it's an ideal, but you're breaking the ideal every time because you are actually producing commentary. You are actually adding to the great line of books that goes all the way to the moon. But so be it, we're all producing commentary the whole time.

Stephen Burt:

Yeah, I think you actually have to say National Book Critic Circle Award winner, Jeff Dyer. Parul, how does the kind and occasion of the piece you are writing, including word count and audience affect what you are able to say as a critic?

Parul Sehgal:

I tend to write book reviews, I tend to work in that narrow little plot, and I really like being in that narrow little plot. And the more you do it and it starts feeling like when I was learning piano, like any tool, you keep practicing the variations. You get strong on different aspects of it, but I think the brevity of it, and I think the fact that you are writing, generally if you're writing for example, for a book review, you are thinking about the reader. You are commenting on a book in a newsy kind of way, you want it to feel relevant.

You're not necessarily talking about critical standards. You're really talking about what's in the book, what is the book saying it's going to do, is it doing it? I think for me it is everything. I think as a critic, you're always thinking of who's reading this, who's consuming this? But other than that, I don't know if the challenges are different for any other kind of probes, any other kind of writing. I don't even think in terms of genre, it really changes what it feels like to produce it. I think we're all stuck in that Anne Carson mode of one can never know enough, one can never work enough. One can never use the infinitives and participles, oddly enough whatever your length, whoever you're writing to.

Stephen Burt:

I'm trying to think of what it would be like to be stuck in an Anne Carson mode? [inaudible 00:27:45] books.

Vivian Gornick:

First I want to say that what Clare said about [inaudible 00:27:52] missing the critics is deeply moving. And it's the world in which she lived, in which people like her, they all gathered together in a tight little world against a larger world that was telling them they couldn't live, but they were not wanted and therefore they came to appreciate each other with an intensity that only that world threat really produces. Living in the world that we live in, the most privileged in history probably, we deal with a huge amount of separateness. We don't appreciate each other, and I feel like I work in isolation, I really do. I don't have a job, I don't have a particular audience to write for, and I guess I never have.

So I worked for the Village Voice, that's how I became a writer. I've always considered myself something of an outsider in the formal world of letters and of newspapers. So I'll tell you a little bit, I'll tell you about a piece I just wrote not too long ago, which really just about summarizes the way I work. 30 years ago, a little bit more, about 30 odd years ago, I went to Israel. I was sent by a publisher and I was going to write a book about it. But I found myself with no affection for the country, and I came back and my mother begged me not to write this book. And I didn't write the book because I knew that to write without any affection was death, would be literary suicide. You could criticize all you want if you had some affection, but I didn't.

So I put it all away, I had 100 pages of notes and I met marvelous people. There were marvelous circumstances, marvelous landscape, marvelous this and that, but I didn't feel it was 100 pages of yes, but. And last year I went to Israel for a week in the summer for the first time in all these years and was surprised, shocked enough by what I actually experienced there, to go back to those notes and see the way I experienced the country full strength 35 years ago, which was all negative as they say. And at that time, I wrote in my notes, I had read the early stories of A.B. Yehoshua and I'd been surprised by those stories as against what I was seeing on the ground, and what did I mean by that?

I went back to the notes, I went back to Yehoshua's stories, I reread them all, and then I put together a piece, which if this is not immodest, it will be in the nation at the end of this month.

Stephen Burt:

No. Please, please pitch that forthcoming work. Please read that forthcoming work.

Vivian Gornick:

Anyway, the thing is this. I disliked the culture that I found on the ground. When I read Yehoshua, I saw another culture, I saw another set of feelings, I saw what I could never have seen in that rough bullying public culture of Israel, I saw existential loneliness as I could not see there. What I did in this piece was to put the two together and then bring it up to date. This is how it felt then, this is what I read, this is what I read now, this is what I saw now.

That for me is the best way of criticizing and I wrote a huge amount about Yehoshua's stories in this piece, to bring back to life what he himself cannot feel anymore, by the way. What he writes now is at such a distance from what he wrote then, which is the luminous work of a man in his forties who felt profoundly what a writer like David Grossman has now taken up that gauntlet. It's David Grossman, who now gives you the sense and he's nowhere near as good as Yehoshua, who was really profound and those stories were just marvelous.

Now, by the same token, the two books that I was nominated for, the National book Critic Circle Award for, one was called The End of the Novel of Love and the other, The Men in My Life. They're both collections of stories, of pieces of criticism that are organized in exactly the same way. The End of the Novel of Love is a book that arose out of the realization that I had over many, many years of reading that you couldn't write a great novel anymore with romantic love at the center, you just couldn't do it. We had too much experience and there was no way.

Now, I wrote this in many ways without knowing what I was writing until an editor put them together and then made me write the lead piece, the title piece, The End of the Novel of Love, which pulled it all together, and it's the same with the men in my life. So that's how I know. Yeah.

Stephen Burt:

The Israeli Hebrew language writer whose stories Vivian is saying, we should all go read. I want to be sure his name's spelled correctly because it's counterintuitive. A.B. Y-E-H-O-S-H-U-A is the way it's normally transliterated from Hebrew into English, the stories you're recommending, is that right? Okay. We'll spell out [inaudible 00:33:09] Tsvetaeva for you after we get to the end, we can ask when we're all done. Great transition into a question I wanted to ask all of you, which is about the reception of criticism and the place of the critic in other countries. In Britain, in Ireland, in South Asia, in Poland, and Poland's neighbors as well as in Israel. All of you know something about the place of critics and criticism in some countries that are not the United States. Would any of you like to speak about it? Okay.

Parul Sehgal:

It is interesting to see, first of all, if you don't ... I was just thinking, you were talking about critics together and then the work that ... you must be familiar with the critic [inaudible 00:33:59], who got his start when he discovered in this tiny town, this little village that he lived in the work of V.S. Pritchett, and that was his great ingress into Western nurture. So we don't really know who our reader ever is and what we're doing. In terms of just realizing how important criticism is for literary culture, I look at India right now, which has so many readers, so many writers. And trying in the nascent stages of, it's both incredibly active and it's both very, very decentralized. So you see a lot of really, really interesting criticism and important criticism happening in blogs, happening in places that you don't really ... odd little corners of the internet.

[inaudible 00:34:47] is a fabulous Indian critic, she does a lot of stuff, but one realizes the infrastructure of magazines, newspapers, book sections in a country that doesn't have that and has so many readers and especially Indian readers who love to argue, love to fight, love to rank. We have all kinds of caste systems and we want to apply them. And it's just hard, we can't find ways to do it, but it is always a heartening thing whenever I go online, or go back and see the work that's being done and see the energy. And actually in the absence of that, how voraciously they read the work, how voraciously they read New Yorker, they're always up on the new James Wood before I am.

Stephen Burt:

James.

James Woods:

Obviously I know the British context fairly well. I started out there just after university freelancing and then worked for a while actually on the pages of the Guardian newspapers, books pages until I was about 30. And I keep up with that world a bit, and many of you will know it too, but it's fairly pugilistic, which I quite like. There are still lots of newspapers, although the space for reviewing in Britain has contracted. The strength that American reviewing has at the moment is in long form magazine journalism, which also has a spillover I think, onto blogs what you get now, LA review of books and this sort of thing, long essays.

That's still a real lack, I think, in British journalism, which tends to be short and scrappy, 800 words, 900 words, Spectator, Guardian, that kind of thing. And even the TLS, it's not long pieces. The one exception is the London Review of Books and I'm sure many of you, like me, read that journal with great pleasure and enjoy the long pieces in that journal. But I do think that we're fortunate in America still to have this tradition of small magazines like The Nation and the New Republic, the Atlantic, though for how much longer, Harper's again, for how much longer? Three or four years ago, I'd perhaps been a bit more optimistic, and now there's the smell of contraction and menace in the air.

Stephen Burt:

Place of criticism in other countries that you write about?

Clare:

Well with Russia, as far as I can tell, and I hope I'm wrong, it never completely recuperated from Stalin's really elimination of the whole concept of criticism. There was this, either you could be quasi empirical, which is what Jakobson is doing here, is count syllables or do exact biographical data, or there was a genre, there's a great Russian word I love, I don't have a good translation for it. [foreign language 00:38:01] which I think of as self-involved blather, and nothing in between and it handicapped my whole field. I've always gone to the Anglo-American tradition to find models for scholar critics and for poet critics who were publishing their work and so forth. That's what I've always used.

So Russia I think was really handicapped by that. It's another reason why I just value criticism so much, I know what it looks like when it's not there. In Poland, it's a different matter, they had a very brief stone in this mode and the criticism never got killed out. And the idea of lively engagement, and factions, and different modes, and constant argument is still very much alive there and they're much more vicious than we are. Michael Hoffman wrote a review of a new translation of speaking [inaudible 00:38:59] a few years back.

And I remember Polish friends saying, "Oh my God, it's like you wrote it in Poland." It's when you really do that kind of job and people take it incredibly personally. Somebody did a negative translation of somebody's translations of James Merrill, and they're no longer on speaking terms. So it is very likely and engaged, but there's also the undercurrent of animosity, I'm always very glad that I can back off of it and get out of there. And also that I don't have a Polish last name I get exempted from [inaudible 00:39:35].

Stephen Burt:

I think I remember that Michael Hoffman piece.

Clare:

Oh, yeah.

Stephen Burt:

Yeah. And the translator he was trying to run out of town, was someone whose own poetry I liked, I was shocked.

Clare:

It was appalling.

Stephen Burt:

Yeah.

Clare:

Yeah, it was appalling.

Stephen Burt:

He had strong feelings. Parul, when you reviewed James' latest collection, you indicated that in your view, he was moving away from criticism with particular arguments about literary realism, which James has worked for so long towards more impressionistic or appreciative models for what he was doing as a critic. Is that true, and if not, what should we believe [inaudible 00:40:27] about where your work has gone?

Parul Sehgal:

My punishment will be what?

Stephen Burt:

There is no punishment. You'll be reviewed by Michael Hoffman.

James Woods:

Steve you have to tell me, who are you asking? Is it true that ... no, I'm teasing. I very much like what Parul wrote, and I think she was onto something and I've been enjoying in the last few years writing not just book reviews, but different pieces, more personal pieces. I don't think they rise to the level or the title of cultural criticism exactly, but I guess they just reach that level that it's annoying, rather faith thing that the New Yorker does where it goes, the writing life, or the personal life that really hates us, but I guess that's where they belong. But it's a start.

Stephen Burt:

James, you've written about, actually, you've all written about this in different ways. What writers whose view of the world do you find unsympathetic? Writers where you read the book and you say, I don't want to meet that person ever. They're wrong about something big. How hard is it to do the writing justice when there's something else about the writing you want to say?

Vivian Gornick:

That's a sore point right this minute. I just did something that I swore I wouldn't do again, which is to write about a book that I didn't like, exactly what you've just described. And it was a review, and I promised myself I'd never do this again, but I did do it, it's about James Salter's new book. And the thing actually that I had to say was that Salter at 87 is writing as he did at 42. It was a long life, it's a very respectable life. It's a life in which he's been praised to the skies for 40 years for his style, for the lushness of his style. I don't know how many of you know his work, but he's been praised by the famous and the infamous and the obscure forever.

And I never really read much of him and now this new book of his has come out and I was asked to review it, and I agreed to do it before I actually read it, and then I read it and I thought, "You should back out of this." And then I didn't back out of it. And then I had the hardest time in the world, but I thought it was worth saying that it was not worthy of a writer who is as good as he is, to not have pushed himself harder. Every writer has only one story.

Flannery O'Connor said, "You can write about anything you want, but there's only one thing you can really make come alive." And I believe that, I think it's true. We write pretty much out of the same understandings, which don't change that much, but should enlarge, they should develop, they should change, they should surprise, they should do something otherwise it's repetition. And so I comforted myself by saying, it's worth calling to the reader's attention that it is the writers obligation to grow with the work, to change, to not tell the same story over and over and over again in the same way, but to tell it different ways. So that was ...

Stephen Burt:

[inaudible 00:44:00].

Parul Sehgal:

What can I say? I don't know how to follow that. That was great. No, I think for me, it is very difficult. That's the work, especially, I don't know if I'm somebody who trusts my instincts generally. So when I don't like something, I have to ask myself carefully. Again, is it because it's new, is it because it's challenging within my cherished premises, is it because I don't understand it, is it making me feel stupid, is it making me feel small? And I think that back and forth becomes really, really interesting. And then once you're ready, once my full mental, spiritual audit is over, then when you're writing the piece, then it becomes very interesting.

It's like Auden, right? Auden says that books come to us and they appeal to us when above us, the way people do. So how do you talk shit about a person, how do you criticize a book, how do you criticize a friend to another friend carefully, how do you build your case? And you proceed by quotation as [inaudible 00:45:08] says, "You Marshall the evidence, you go and you try to be careful." But yeah, I think that everything leading up to that moment when I'm sure, and then I start to build the case is very scary and important, I think.

Stephen Burt:

Yeah. Yeah. Coming back to the British reviewing context and the history of British reviewing brings us back to pugilistic or Marshall metaphors, which I think I was ... I was just standing up to notice that, I shouldn't have done that. I'm going to sit down and ask James and clearly answer the same question.

James Woods:

Well, I was thinking about Vivian's piece about James Salter, and maybe thinking that I quite understand the anxiety, but maybe that you should be less anxious than you are. Well, there's a particular question of his age, which I think is difficult, all books might be the last book he writes. This might be one of the last reviews he ever reads. Sorry, sorry, I'm just playing, I'm just playing. But as you described it, it's a perfectly bright thing to do, particularly as I'm sure you weren't unkind.

Vivian Gornick:

I was.

James Woods:

Well, maybe you think you are more unkind than others will. Maybe you think you're unkind and he'll think you're unkind, and nobody else will. Remember, you're writing for readers, and they may well agree with you. They may well think, my God, I've been waiting 20 years for someone to say that James Salter just repeats himself and actually it's a rather limited body of work that people have made an enormous amount of fuss about, and finally someone said it. That's not a small thing, and I don't mean to be, and I'm not picking on James at all, but you negated the name of an ideal. Again, you said about Belinsky, there is an ideal and that seems to me an admirable one.

But I totally understand what you and Parul are saying about the slightly inhuman quality of it, which there's an honesty you can have on the page and take it from me, I spent my teens being a huge liar because I grew up in a highly Christian environment, and including fiction, fiction was the realm of freedom, it was a place where I could get away and realize that I could think my own thoughts. So I grew up knowing when I could tell the truth and when I had to lie, specifically to my parents. Writing, I still find confrontation and precisely that kind of, meeting someone and telling them what you think of them. Is it very hard but writing is a zone of honesty, it is a little different from meeting someone at a party, or there's something inhuman about it as well as entirely human.

Clare:

Well, I am thinking about a couple things here. One is that it seems to me that both of you are so thoughtful and cautious about how you approach criticizing someone, that seems like the ideal to me in a way. But the other thing is that I think it's important, I'm thinking back to the twenties and the teens again, in Russia. The review isn't a final word, it's setting up a conversation or an argument. And I wrote a review of the Michael Hoffman thing, and then he wrote back a little snide thing after that. And of course I was right but that's part of keeping the argument going. When [inaudible 00:48:54] says that, "Literary tradition is nothing but a prolonged family argument," That what you were doing, if somebody else wants to come, someone may be relieved and another person may be irritated and come back and say, you're wrong, this is what's happened new here. He's revisiting old territory but not repeating it, something like that. But you've set something in motion and it's keeping the work alive.

Vivian Gornick:

Well, but Steve's original question was, how do you deal with writing about something you don't like? Something-

Clare:

Something you don't like.

Vivian Gornick:

And speaking of Auden, which Parul was, Auden said famously and rightly, Auden said, "Never write about bad art, not only is it not worth it, it's bad for your soul and the stuff goes away anyway. It doesn't last." Yeah. It's true, and he said that. And I tried to take that to heart because I believe it's true. So that was what bothered me, on the other hand, there was a point buried in my dislike of the book that I felt was worth it. It's very complicated, it really is it's very complicated because there are people at the ends of all of these books.

And who was it I just read recently? Somebody who likes dealing with something because it can't hurt their feelings. I don't know, I'm losing it. It was about inanimate objects instead of writing about books or people attached to it, it can't [inaudible 00:50:16]. Anyway well, I'm glad to hear that it doesn't sound so bad. But I do think in general, it's not worth writing about stuff you don't like, or stuff that you think is bad. Because it's hard to extract from that. Going back to Jarrell who's our favorite here, Jarrell was passionately stern when he didn't like something right. And Auden, he trashed Auden in some early book and some early collection of his poems, trashed him left, right and center. And Auden said, "Oh, Randall was in love with me." That's right, that's right.

They all understood each other. Randall was as passionate in his dislikes, again, all in the name of the Holy crusade, all in the name of upholding the joy of reading and the ligation that both reader and writer had to delivering that joy of reading. So it was interesting when he wrote negatively, if you were a good reader of his reviews, you didn't feel diminished. You didn't feel, oh, this is a piece of poison, this is getting us nowhere, this is just a writer writing bad about another writer. Not at all. Not at all. You felt the banner was being held high. There's something worth holding it high. Yeah.

Stephen Burt:

I would love to do two more hours on Jarrell's [inaudible 00:51:42]. I've done it, but not for this work. He's great, you should read everything he wrote and his sense of when and why it is worth writing a negative review? And when it is worthwhile to be funny in a negative review, really changed over the course of his life. And I think the only way I can resist the temptation to try to create a two hour discussion of Jarrell and Auden is to do what I promised to do an hour ago, which is to open the floor to questions from other people here. While we have time, let's take some audience questions. I'm just going to walk down the isle and point to people and be loud. Does this move? Yes.

Speaker 7:

I'm an art critic in St. Louis.

Stephen Burt:

Speak louder we can't hear you.

Speaker 7:

Okay. A very famous quote by Peter Schjeldahl was that, "You can't have an art critic in a city like St. Louis." And I was curious, did you comment on criticism in smaller context, what it means to represent these smaller contexts?

Stephen Burt:

Did everyone hear that? Regional venues and regional audiences. Can you have a regional criticism, for example, in St. Louis?

Clare:

No.

Stephen Burt:

No.

Clare:

No, go ahead. You started.

Vivian Gornick:

I don't know what regional means. I think you need some level of shared values of shared sophistication. There is such a thing as provincialism and the urban, I don't know what it means. What small city in America has produced some nationally valuable ... what, where?

Speaker 7:

[inaudible 00:53:43].

Vivian Gornick:

Where?

Stephen Burt:

I've heard Mississippi.

Parul Sehgal:

I don't know if I'm going to answer your question, but I just feel like, I don't know if I believe in realism, but for different reasons. Just because for me, it's that same story with [inaudible 00:54:12], right? Books and texts break that down. So break down that idea of space, geography. For me, race, ethnicity, I came to criticism because I loved [inaudible 00:54:27] just because she made ideas seem glamorous to me. And I think that, yeah, whatever you're doing, wherever you're doing it, but that's-

Speaker 7:

... doing it in St. Louis?

Parul Sehgal:

No, no, what I'm saying, but I was reading her in Delhi. And it's [inaudible 00:54:43] which is like-

Speaker 7:

[inaudible 00:54:45].

Parul Sehgal:

Yeah. But instead of [inaudible 00:54:51], look at somebody like for example, [inaudible 00:54:53] coming out of this tiny village. I don't know if I agree that certain cities produce better artists, but I definitely do believe that if great criticism is coming out of St. Louis, whatever it's about, I think it'll find an audience and it'll find grateful readers like me.

I also think that to say you can't have great regional criticism, it's like saying you can't have great regional art. The two things intersect and change places constantly. I think it's true and I think again, especially because in the world that we're living in now, regionalism is part of what I think the critic would be doing, was translating the world for the region and translating the region for the world. They give regional Tony's for theater, that's an act of engaging with the regional artistic community, it's an act of criticism.

So I don't see how you could not have that, this isn't a critic, it is a writer, but Faulkner was engaging with the entire European tradition out of a little tiny town. And if he hadn't have been in a little tiny town, his active engagement would've been entirely different. And then it took southern critics to sort of recognize that capacity in Faulkner, so.

Stephen Burt:

I want to hear from James.

James Woods:

No, I'm more interested in the ...

Vivian Gornick:

When I say no, were you talking about regional criticism or regional writing? That has very little to do with the fact that writers and that people in the arts come from everywhere, from every conceivable background, but we don't have a regional literature now in the United States. And as soon as he could, he went to London. He came out of that village, of course, we all come out of everywhere, I came out of the Bronx. It was as good as any Indian Village. I couldn't wait to get to Manhattan, what are we talking about? When I wrote about the Bronx, it wasn't people in the Bronx who appreciated it or gave me a job. It was people of the larger urban, urbane, the singleness of shared literature.

We don't have a regional ... I don't know what you mean by regional criticism? People can write in St. Louis and they send their work to publications that are read by people all over the country, or the world. And they're read by them because they all recognize each other. Then you enter another land, right? James, help me out here.

James Woods:

Yeah, no. So the debate here is where regionalism ends, right? And actually, I reckon if we had another half an hour, this side and this side and there, would probably all agree on where ... that seems to be the debate, at some point, regionalism does end and it isn't regionalism anymore. I think you implied it in a way with the Faulkner thing, right?

Vivian Gornick:

Yeah. But the Faulkner thing, as Faulkner taught so many writers internationally [inaudible 00:58:14] regional, but I also think there's a point living in that rural village of Chicago. I read Chicago critics all the time, and what I do is I see them for theater all the time. It's a great theatrical community and in a weird way, it's regional, because it is like a repertory company where you see the same actors and the same directors showing up here, there and other places. Some of them go out, but they come back. And it's specifically-

Speaker 7:

That's not the equivalent of writing and criticism.

Vivian Gornick:

Well no, it's against regional criticism. I'm reading drama criticism in a very specific area for a specific audience. It depends again on region, but it wouldn't carry outside of Chicago.

Stephen Burt:

We need one clarification, and then we're going to attend to this region, which has another hand. I won't even ask for clarification. I will simply take another person in our audience who's had his hand up for a while.

Speaker 8:

Well, bad art may go away, but certainly in the here and now, it obscures good art. So that's one reason I value you critics. My question though is, I have to believe just from hearing you that you have made enemies or lost even friends through your writing. And I would like to know if that has happened to you, if the experience has strengthened or weakened your backbone?

Parul Sehgal:

I don't think I've made any enemies, not from my writing. It's more personality. I think I owe a lot of money, but I hope that's not because I haven't taken a stand, but no, so I would say no, I can't answer that one.

Stephen Burt:

Vivian.

Vivian Gornick:

I don't know. It would probably all make enemies. I don't move in a world where I'm aware of the enemy. Every now and then I will walk into a room where somebody I have reviewed is actually there and if I please them, they're happy, and if I haven't I have had the experience of having somebody alarmingly confront me and say, "I hate everything you write and [inaudible 01:00:53]. But generally I'm not aware of this at all. And it certainly wouldn't strengthen or demoralize me one way or the other. Either way, either lots of praise, or lots of blame. It really doesn't. Most writers, I think, are fighting with themselves so much, that what's happening out there really can't compete with how much damage you can do to yourself any hour of the day or night. I really do believe that.

Stephen Burt:

Enemies James, Clare.

James Woods:

I'm certainly aware of having enemies, but I think I agree with Vivian, so what really. I find actually the crumbling of the backbone that you're talking about, and I have a terrible back at the moment, but the crumbling that you are talking about, I find it happens more acutely when I publish a book, and then as you'd understand, I'm then myself reviewed sometimes nicely, sometimes nastily. And those times I think, "My God, it's unpleasant being on the receiving end of it." And therefore it's really unpleasant to do it to other people.

Unfortunately, that's a little bit like being sick, that's to say that when you're healthy, you forget how unpleasant it was to be ill. And after a few months, readily you forget that experience and you go back to your old ways.

Clare:

Well, for those of us who teach, we get reviewed on a regular basis by our students, and they're allowed to be anonymous and it goes online, and you never forget the bad reviews ever, ever. I've had bad reviews about my outfits because they can write anything and they go online. But I really like what Vivian said about the internal critic because that's in a way, what I've used as a therapy for whenever I feel like, "Who the hell am I to be writing about next?" Who the hell am I ... If somebody else said that to me, you'd say something that I'm not going to say in public. So just externalizing my internal critic creates a nice buffer zone for the rest of them. So, yeah.

Stephen Burt:

One more question. There are two more questions. Yeah.

Speaker 9:

Yeah. The editor of the Browser, which is a British conglomerate website, they link to interesting articles. He recently said that publications or platforms no longer matter at all. Because of the internet articles live on their own, they get passed and shared on social media and that kind of thing. And I was wondering to hear what you guys thought about that, does the publication of the platform matter to you?

Vivian Gornick:

How can you tell? I don't do the internet or anything. I do email and Google information, but I don't do any of this stuff. So I'm always amazed when something is called to my attention, that something of mine appeared on the internet. Somebody will send me something and say, "Look at this." Blah, blah. Blah. And it's something of mine that was written either a long time ago, it is now being used in a way that I never meant it to be used, or that I see that it's up there. That there are all kinds of stuff that I write that is reproduced on the internet and it's so totally unreal, for me it's such an abstraction. I certainly have a generation who, I don't think it can ever be anything but an abstraction. But it is like I'm reading something from never never land that has no effect on me at all, and I can't tell what it means out in the world. Do you feel the same way?

Speaker 9:

No.

Parul Sehgal:

I think, I guess, a bit differently, but I don't know if I agree with that. If only because, if I click on a link on Twitter, it's generally because it's reached some critical mass, or people are saying enough things about it. Whereas the publications that I read regularly, LRB, Book Forum, all of these. I have relationships with these magazines, with some of the columnists, some of the regular critics. I even have an aesthetic relationship with the public and just the way it looks matters to me. So yeah, for me yeah, that.

Stephen Burt:

James does platform matter.

James Woods:

I think it obviously matters less and less. Though I agree with Parul, that there are institutions that you're familiar with, fond of and the LRB would be a good example. Book Forum, they have certain stables of writers who've been writing for a long time, and to that extent, that's an institution then. But of course, since that can be replicated online, you could almost argue the opposite of the editor of The Browser, that the institutions still matter, they're just all over the place, there are just more of them. I don't know, I come and go on this issue, but I certainly do enjoy being able to read literary criticism in lots of different places, both in print and online and think of that as a benefit of the last few years.

Clare:

I basically get it with you on this one, is I basically hate the internet because it gives me ADHD, and I can't really read, I skim so I can get off fast. But one thing I do like in terms of venue, is it's democratized criticism so much. And evaluation and responses in so many ways and you can, if you're a poetry critic, it's wonderful. Because you get so many responses and people writing out poems from memory, which is an act of criticism because they make interesting mistakes, or get that line breaks wrong where they create stances. But this is a very personal example, I was asked to write something after Wislawa Szymborska died just about a year ago, and I was asked to write something for a Polish journal. And I couldn't because I knew her really well and I really loved her, and I just couldn't.

But what I did instead, which was one of the most wonderful experiences I ever had, is I just went online to see what people wrote about her. And they were so wonderful and some of it was criticism, and some of it was extremely personal. And some of it, how I discovered her, or who gave this book to me, or one woman said, "If I'm considering someone for a friend, I give them this poem and if they don't like it, they're not my friend." In all sorts of venues. And some of them were official publications and some of them were people's private blogs and some of them were for journals that had nothing to do with literature.

And that was one time when I really loved the internet. And people would be doing responses on each other's pages and writing out whole poems. And that was one time when I really loved the internet as a form of criticism. Yeah.

Stephen Burt:

Can we take one more question, or not really?

Speaker 10:

Not really.

Stephen Burt:

Not really. Thanks so much to the National Book Critic Circle. If you look [inaudible 01:08:20]. Thanks so much.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning into the AWP podcast series. For other podcasts. Please visit our website@www.awpwriter.org.