The Take-Down Artist

In a lively dual review of Craig Raine’s More Dynamite and James Wolcott’s Critical Mass, Leo Robson compares the critics’ wit:

If Raine is high table (notwithstanding a taste for London canapes), Wolcott is round table (his memoir Lucking Out recalled Diet Coke-fuelled late nights at the Algonquin), a university dropout who learned his trade writing about punk and television for the Village Voice in the early 1970s, around the time Raine, a life-long on-off Oxford don, started publishing reviews and poems in the TLS. Raine claims descent from Matthew Arnold and TS Eliot, a tradition that Wolcott calls “worthy, committed, subtly troubled”, preferring a virtually opposite cause, “a certain type of informal criticism”: spry, sardonic, gum-chewing, yawn-prone, streetwise, even street-fighting, and either dashing and debonair (Kenneth Tynan, Gore Vidal, Wilfrid Sheed) or exacting in its slangy scrappiness (Clive James, the Amises, Pauline Kael). For Raine, the worst thing you can be is vague; for Wolcott, lugubrious. (A Guardian editorial, “In praise of … the hatchet job”, offered as Rule No 3: “Puncture pretension with wit” – that’s the Wolcott way.)

Despite their conflicting sensibilities, Raine and Wolcott share various enthusiasms (Evelyn Waugh, Samuel Johnson, [Philip] Larkin), though the only writer given extensive treatment in both these books is [John] Updike. Wolcott praises the “deft, polite scalpeling” Updike performs on Saul Bellow (he peels away the “rugged prettinesses” to locate an “agitated sluggishness”), and his capacity to “dig beneath the hype and confetti of a book’s reception” (in this case, Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). But he also notes a “lack of heat and force”, exactly the qualities Wolcott himself aims for and attains, and calls for more “plainspokenness, even a whiff of woodsmoke from the old slash-and-burn”, just as Raine, writing about Updike’s essay on Andrew Wyeth, complains that at a certain point “he caves in”, and dismisses as “ludicrously indulgent” Updike’s comparison of Fairfield Porter to Matisse and Piero della Francesca. Updike stands as an object of worship to both Raine and Wolcott, a model of what can be done, except on those occasions when magnanimity limits honesty – cardinal virtue of any critic.