On Writing Well - William Zinsser 2001

18 Writing About the Arts
Part III Forms

Critics and Columnists

The arts are all around us, a daily enrichment of our lives, whether we perform them ourselves—acting, dancing, painting, writing poetry, playing an instrument—or seek them out in concert halls and theaters and museums and galleries. We also want to read about the arts: to be kept in touch with the cultural currents of the day, wherever art is being made.

Some of the writing that accomplishes that job is journalistic—the interview with the new symphony orchestra conductor, the tour of the new museum with its architect or its curator—and it calls for the same methods as the other forms discussed in this book. Writing about how the new museum got designed and financed and built is no different in principle from explaining how the Iraqis almost built an atomic bomb.

But to write about the arts from the inside—to appraise a new work, to evaluate a performance, to recognize what’s good and what’s bad—calls for a special set of skills and a special body of knowledge. It’s necessary, in short, to be a critic—which, at some point in his or her career, almost every writer wants to be. Small-town reporters dream of the moment when their editor will summon them to cover the pianist or the ballet troupe or the repertory company that has been booked into the local auditorium. They will trot out the hard-won words of their college education—“intuit” and “sensibility” and “Kafkaesque”—and show the whole county that they know a glissando from an entrechat. They will discern more symbolism in Ibsen than Ibsen thought of.

This is part of the urge. Criticism is the stage on which journalists do their fanciest strutting. It’s also where reputations for wit are bom. The American vernacular is rich in epigrams (“She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B”) minted by people like Dorothy Parker and George S. Kaufman, who became famous partly by minting them, and the temptation to make a name at the expense of some talentless ham is too strong for all but the most saintly. I particularly like Kaufman’s hint that Raymond Massey in Abe Lincoln in Illinois was overplaying the title role: “Massey won’t be satisfied until he’s assassinated.”

True wit, however, is rare, and a thousand barbed arrows fall at the feet of the archer for every one that flies. It’s also too facile an approach if you want to write serious criticism, for, by no accident, the only epigrams that have survived are cruel ones. It’s far easier to bury Caesar than to praise him—and that goes for Cleopatra, too. But to say why you think a play is good, in words that don’t sound banal, is one of the hardest chores in the business.

So don’t be deluded that criticism is an easy route to glory. Nor does the job carry as much power as is widely supposed. Probably only the daily drama critic of the New York Times can make or break the product. Music critics have almost no power, writing about a cluster of sounds that have vanished into the air and will never be heard in the same way again, and literary critics haven’t kept the best-seller list from becoming a nesting ground for authors like Danielle Steel, whose sensibility they don’t intuit.

A distinction should therefore be made between a “critic” and a “reviewer.” Reviewers write for a newspaper or a popular magazine, and what they cover is primarily an industry—the output of, for instance, the television industry, the motion-picture industry and, increasingly, the publishing industry in its flood of cookbooks, health books, how-to books, “as told to” books, “gift books” and other such items of merchandise. As a reviewer your job is more to report than to make an aesthetic judgment. You are the deputy for the average man or woman who wants to know: “What is the new TV series about?” “Is the movie too dirty for the kids?” ’Will the book really improve my sex life or tell me how to make a chocolate mousse?” Think what you would want to know if you had to spend the money for the movie, the baby-sitter and the long-promised dinner at a good restaurant. Obviously you will make your review plainer and less sophisticated than if you were judging a new production of Chekhov.

Yet I suggest several conditions that apply to both good reviewing and good criticism.

One is that critics should like—or, better still, love—the medium they are reviewing. If you think movies are dumb, don’t write about them. The reader deserves a movie buff who will bring along a reservoir of knowledge, passion and prejudice. It’s not necessary for the critic to like every film; criticism is only one person’s opinion. But he should go to every movie wanting to like it. If he is more often disappointed than pleased, it’s because the film has failed to live up to its best possibilities. This

is far different from the critic who prides himself on hating everything. He becomes tiresome faster than you can say “Kafkaesque.”

Another rule is: don’t give away too much of the plot. Tell readers just enough to let them decide whether it’s the kind of story they tend to enjoy, but not so much that you’ll kill their enjoyment. One sentence will often do the trick. “This is a picture about a whimsical Irish priest who enlists the help of three orphan boys dressed as leprechauns to haunt a village where a mean widow has hidden a crock of gold.” I couldn’t be flailed into seeing that movie—I’ve had my fill of “the little people” on stage and screen. But there are legions who don’t share that crotchet of mine and would flock to the film. Don’t spoil their pleasure by revealing every twist of the narrative, especially the funny part about the troll under the bridge.

A third principle is to use specific detail. This avoids dealing in generalities, which, being generalities, mean nothing. “The play is always fascinating” is a typical critic’s sentence. But how is it fascinating? Your idea of fascinating is different from someone else’s. Cite a few examples and let your readers weigh them on their own fascination scale. Here are excerpts from two reviews of a film directed by Joseph Losey. (1) “In its attempts to be civilized and restrained it denies its possibilities for vulgarity and mistakes bloodlessness for taste.” The sentence is vague, giving us a whiff of the movie’s mood but no image we can visualize. (2) “Losey pursues a style that finds portents in lampshades and meanings in table settings.” The sentence is precise—we know just what kind of arty filmmaking this is. We can almost see the camera fingering with studied sluggishness over the family crystal.

In book reviewing this means allowing the author’s words to do their own documentation. Don’t say that Tom Wolfe’s style is gaudy and unusual. Quote a few of his gaudy and unusual sentences and let the reader see how quirky they are. In reviewing a play, don’t just tell us that the set is “striking.” Describe its various levels, or how it is ingeniously lit, or how it helps the actors to make their entrances and exits as a conventional set would not. Put your readers in your theater seat. Help them to see what you saw.

A final caution is to avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic’s quiver—words like “enthralling” and “luminous.” Good criticism needs a lean and vivid style to express what you observed and what you think. Florid adjectives smack of the panting prose with which Vogue likes to disclose its latest chichi discovery: “We’ve just heard about the most utterly enchanting little beach at Cozumel!”

So much for reviewing and the simpler rules of the game. What is criticism?

Criticism is a serious intellectual act. It tries to evaluate serious works of art and to place them in the context of what has been done before in that medium or by that artist. This doesn’t mean that critics must limit themselves to work that aims high; they may select some commercial product like LA. Law to make a point about American society and values. But on the whole they don’t want to waste their time on peddlers. They see themselves as scholars, and what interests them is the play of ideas in their field.

Therefore if you want to be a critic, steep yourself in the literature of the medium you hope to make your specialty. If you want to be a theater critic, see every possible play—the good and the bad, the old and the new. Catch up on the past by reading the classics or seeing them in revival. Know your Shakespeare and Shaw, your Chekhov and Moliere, your Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and know how they broke new ground. Learn about the great actors and directors and how their methods differed. Know the history of the American musical: the particular contribution of Jerome Kern and the Gershwin brothers and Cole Porter, of Rodgers and Hart and Hammerstein, of

Frank Loesser and Stephen Sondheim, of Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins. Only then can you place every new play or musical within an older tradition and tell the pioneer from the imitator.

I could make the same kind of list for every art. A film critic who reviews a new Robert Altman picture without having seen Altman’s earlier films isn’t much help to the serious moviegoer. A music critic should know not only his Bach and Palestrina, his Mozart and Beethoven, but his Schoenberg and Ives and Philip Glass—the theoreticians and mavericks and experimenters.

Obviously I’m now assuming a more urbane body of readers. As a critic you can presuppose certain shared areas of knowledge with the men and women you are writing for. You don’t have to tell them that William Faulkner was a Southern novelist. What you do have to do, if you are assessing the first novel of a Southern author and weighing Faulkner’s influence, is to generate a provocative idea and throw it onto the page, where your readers can savor it. They may disagree with your point—that’s part of their intellectual fun. But they have enjoyed the turn of your mind and the journey that took you to your conclusion. We like good critics as much for their personality as for their opinions.

There’s no medium like the movies to give us the pleasure of traveling with a good critic. The shared territory is so vast. Movies are intertwined with our daily fives and attitudes, our memories and myths—four different lines from Casablanca have made it into Bartletts Familiar Quotations—and we count on the critic to make those connections for us. A typical service that the critic provides is to freeze briefly for our inspection the stars who shoot across the screen in film after film, sometimes arriving from a galaxy previously unknown to stargazers. Molly Haskell, reviewing A Cry in the Dark, in which Meryl Streep plays an Australian woman convicted of killing her baby on a camping trip, ponders Streep’s “delight in disguise—in bizarre wigs, unorthodox getups and foreign accents—and in playing women who are outside the normal range of audience sympathy.” Putting this in a historical context, as good critics should, she writes:

The aura of the old stars radiated out of a sense of self, a core identity projected into every role. However varied the performances of Bette Davis, or Katharine Hepburn, or Margaret Sullavan, we always felt we were in the presence of something knowable, familiar, constant. They had recognizable voices, ways of reading a line, even certain expressions that remained constant from film to film. Comics could do imitations of them, and you either responded to them, unam- bivalently, or you didn’t. Streep, chameleon-like, undercuts this response by never staying in one place long enough for you to get a fix on her.

Bette Davis, stretching the bounds of type, went in for costume (The Virgin Queen) and period (The Old Maid), but she was always Bette Davis, and no one would have thought to want it otherwise. Like Streep, she even dared to play unlikable, morally ambiguous heroines, her greatest being the wife of the plantation owner in The Letter who murders her treacherous lover in cold blood, then refuses to repent. The difference is that Davis fused with the role, poured her own passion and intensity into it. Her heroine is as icily proud and implacable as Medea—which may be why members of the Academy denied her the Oscar she deserved in favor of sweeter and tamer Ginger Rogers for Kitty Foyle—but Davis makes us respond to the fire within. It’s hard to imagine an actress like Streep, who remains at a safe distance from her roles, rising to such heights... or falling to such depths.

The passage deftly connects Hollywood past and Hollywood present, leaving us to fathom the postmodern cool of Meryl Streep but also telling us everything we need to know about Bette Davis. By extension it tells us about a whole generation of grand dragons who reigned with Davis in the golden age of the star system—the likes of Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck—and who didn’t mind being hated on the screen as long as they were loved at the box office.

Turning to another medium, here’s an excerpt from LivingRoom War, by Michael J. Arlen, a collection of columns of television criticism that Arlen wrote in the mid-1960s.

Vietnam is often referred to as “television’s war,” in the sense that this is the first war that has been brought to the people preponderantly by television. People indeed look at television. They really look at it. They look at Dick Van Dyke and become his friend. They look at thoughtful Chet Huntley and find him thoughtful, and at witty David Brinkley and find him witty. They look at Vietnam. They look at Vietnam, it seems, as a child kneeling in the corridor, his eye to the keyhole, looks at two grownups arguing in a locked room— the aperture of the keyhole small; the figures shadowy, mostly out of sight; the voices indistinct, isolated threats without meaning; isolated glimpses, part of an elbow, a man’s jacket (who is the man?), part of a face, a woman’s face. Ah, she is crying. One sees the tears. (The voices continue indistinctly.) One counts the tears. Two tears. Three tears. Two bombing raids. Four seek-and-destroy missions. Six administration pronouncements. Such a fine-looking woman. One searches in vain for the other grownup, but, ah, the keyhole is so small, he is somehow never in the line of sight. Look! There is General Ky. Look! There are some planes returning safely to the Ticonderoga. I wonder (sometimes) what it is that the people who run television think about the war, because they have given us this keyhole view; we have given them the airwaves, and now, at this crucial time, they have given back to us this keyhole view—and I wonder if they truly think that those isolated glimpses of elbow, face, a swirl of dress (who is that other person anyway?) are all that we children can stand to see of what is going on inside the room.

This is criticism at its best: stylish, allusive, disturbing. It disturbs us—as criticism often should—because it jogs a set of beliefs and forces us to reexamine them. What holds our attention is the metaphor of the keyhole, so exact and yet so mysterious. But what remains is a fundamental question about how the country’s most powerful medium told the people about the war they were fighting—and escalating. The column ran in 1966, when most Americans still supported the Vietnam war. Would they have turned against it sooner if TV had widened the keyhole, had shown us not only the “swirl of dress” but the severed head and the burning child? It’s too late now to know. But at least one critic was keeping watch. Critics should be among the first to notify us when the truths we hold to be self-evident cease to be true.

Some arts are harder to catch in print than others. One is dance, which consists of movement. How can a writer freeze all the graceful leaps and pirouettes? Another is music. It’s an art that we receive through our ears, yet writers are stuck with describing it in words that we will see. At best they can only partly succeed, and many a music critic has built a long career by hiding behind a hedge of Italian technical terms. He will find just a shade too much rubato in a pianist, a tinge of shrillness in a soprano’s tessitura.

But even in this world of evanescent notes a good critic can make sense of what happened by writing good English. Virgil Thomson, the music critic of the New York Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1954, was an elegant practitioner. A composer himself, an erudite and cultivated man, he never forgot that his readers were real people, and he wrote with a zest that swept them along, his style alive with pleasant surprises. He was also fearless; during his tenure no sacred cow could safely graze. He never forgot that musicians are real people, and he didn’t hesitate to shrink the giants to human scale:

It is extraordinary how little musicians discuss among themselves Toscanini’s rightness or wrongness about matters of speed and rhythm and the tonal amenities. Like other musicians, he is frequently apt about these and as frequently in error. What seems to be more important is his unvarying ability to put over a piece. He quite shamelessly whips up the tempo and sacrifices clarity and ignores a basic rhythm, just making the music, like his baton, go round and round, if he finds his audiences attention tending to waver. No piece has to mean anything specific; every piece has to provoke from its hearers a spontaneous vote of acceptance. This is what I call the “wow technique.”

No rubatos or tessituras there, and no blind hero worship. Yet the paragraph catches the essence of what made Toscanini great: an extra helping of show biz. If his fans are offended to think that the essence contained so coarse an ingredient, they can continue to admire the Maestro for his “lyrical colorations” or “orchestral tuttis” I’ll go along with Thomson’s diagnosis, and so, I suspect, would the Maestro.

One lubricant in criticism is humor. It allows the critic to come at a work obliquely and to write a piece that is itself an entertainment. But the column should be an organic piece of writing, not just a few rabbit punches of wit. James Michener’s books have long defied reviewers to say anything bad about them; by their earnestness they are unassailable. Reviewing The Covenant, however, John Leonard ambushed Michener by the roundabout route of metaphor:

What must be said for James A. Michener is that he wears you down. He numbs you into acquiescence. Page after page of pedestrian prose marches, like a defeated army, across the optic tract. It is a Great Trek from platitude to piety. The mind, between the ears, might as well be the South African veld after one of the devastations of Mzilikazi or the “scorched earth” policy of the British during the Boer War. No bird sings and the antelope die of thirst.

And yet Mr. Michener is as sincere as shoes. In The Covenant, as in Hawaii and Centennial and Chesapeake, he takes the long view He begins 15,000 years ago and he stops at the end of 1979. He is going to make us understand South Africa whether we want to or not. Like the Dutchmen whose point of view he often presents with a grim sense of fair play, he is stubborn; he endures his own bad weather; he drives the cattle of his facts until they drop.

After 300 pages or so the reader—this reader anyway— submits with a sigh. Of course, if we are going to spend a week with a book, the book should be written by Proust or Dostoyevsky, not stapled together from file cards by Mr. Michener. But there is no turning back. This is less fiction than it is drudgery; we are lashed on by the pedagogue who rides our shoulders. Maybe learning will be good for us.

Learn we do. Mr. Michener doesn’t cheat. His personal covenant is not with God, but with the encyclopedia. If, 15,000 years ago in the African bush, the San used poison arrows, he will describe those arrows and name the source of the poison.

How should a good piece of criticism start? You must make an immediate effort to orient your readers to the special world they are about to enter. Even if they are broadly educated men and women they need to be told or reminded of certain facts. You can’t just throw them in the water and expect them to swim easily. The water needs to be warmed up.

This is particularly true of literary criticism. So much has gone before—all writers are part of a long stream, whether they decide to swim with the current or to hurl themselves against it. No poet of this century was more innovative and influential than T. S. Eliot. Yet his 100th birthday in 1988 passed with surprisingly little public attention, as Cynthia Ozick noted at the start of a critical essay in The New Yorker, pointing out that todays college students have almost no knowledge of the poet s “mammoth prophetic presence” for her generation: “[To us], in a literary period that resembled eternity, T. S. Eliot. . . seemed pure zenith, a colossus, nothing less than a permanent luminary, fixed in the firmament like the sun and the moon.”

How adroitly Ozick warms up the waters, beckoning us to return to the literary landscape of her own college years and thereby understand her amazement at the tale of near oblivion she is about to unfold.

The doors to Eliots poetry were not easily opened. His lines and themes were not readily understood. But the young flung themselves through those portals, lured by unfamiliar enchantments and bound by pleasurable ribbons of ennui. “April is the cruellest month”—Eliots voice, with its sepulchral cadences, came spiraling out of student phonographs— “breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire.” That tony British accent—flat, precise, steady, unemotive, surprisingly high-pitched, bleakly passive—coiled through awed English Departments and worshipful dormitories, rooms where the walls had pinup Picassos, and where Pound and Eliot and Ulysses and Proust jostled one another higgledy-piggledy in the rapt late adolescent breast. The voice was, like the poet himself, nearly sacerdotal; it was impersonal, winding and winding across the country’s campuses like a spool of blank robotic woe. “Shantih shantih shantih,” “not with a bang but a whimper,” “an old man in a dry month,” “I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”: these were the devout chants of the literarily passionate in the forties and fifties, who in their own first verses piously copied Eliot’s tone—its restraint, gravity, mystery, its invasive remoteness and immobilized, disjointed despair.

The paragraph is brilliant in its remembered detail, its scholarly fastidiousness, its conjuring back of Ehot himself as a huge physical presence on campuses across America. As readers we are transported back to the high priests highest moment—a perfect launch for the descent that lies ahead. Many scholars didn’t like Ozick’s essay; they thought she had exaggerated the poet’s fall from renown. But for me that merely validated her piece. Literary criticism that doesn’t stir a few combative juices is hardly worth writing, and there are few spectator sports as enjoyable as a good academic brawl.

Today, criticism has many first cousins in journalism: the newspaper or magazine column, the personal essay, the editorial, and the essay-review, in which a critic digresses from a book or a cultural phenomenon into a larger point. (Gore Vidal has brought a high impudence and humor to the form.) Many of the same principles that govern good criticism go into these columns. A political columnist, for example, must love politics and its ancient, tangled threads.

But what is common to all the forms is that they consist of personal opinion. Even the editorial that uses “we” was obviously written by an “I.” What is crucial for you as the writer is to express your opinion firmly. Don’t cancel its strength with last-minute evasions and escapes. The most boring sentence in the daily newspaper is the last sentence of the editorial, which says “It is too early to tell whether the new policy will work” or “The effectiveness of the decision remains to be seen.” If it’s too early to tell, don’t bother us with it, and as for what remains to be seen, everything remains to be seen. Take your stand with conviction.

Many years ago, when I was writing editorials for the New York Herald Tribune, the editor of the page was a huge and choleric man from Texas named L. L. Engelldng. I respected him because he had no pretense and hated undue circling around a subject. Every morning we would all meet to discuss what editorials we would like to write for the next day and what position we would take. Frequently we weren’t quite sure, especially the writer who was an expert on Latin America.

“What about that coup in Uruguay?” the editor would ask.

“It could represent progress for the economy,” the writer would reply, “or then again it might destabilize the whole political situation. I suppose I could mention the possible benefits and then—”

“Well,” the man from Texas would break in, “let’s not go peeing down both legs.”

It was a plea he made often, and it was the most inelegant advice I ever received. But over a long career of writing reviews and columns and trying to make a point I felt strongly about, it was also probably the best.