Critic, poet, and critic's critic TS Eliot on Love Beach, New Providence Island in 1957. Photo by Slim Aarons/Getty Images.
The question of whether artists and critics should or could be friends is troublesome in any art form, but in the literary world it's a nightmare that recurs, in a slightly different form, in every genre. My own background was in theatre reviewing, where you might share a drink with a director at the interval but you'd always scuttle out afterwards without catching their eye.
I was horrified when I moved to literary editing to find that this preciously guarded independence had so little place on the books pages. For a while, I blundered around in pursuit of the perfect unbiased review, but again and again it eluded me. I remember ranting to a rather startled publisher about how corrupt the literary world was and how every offer to review had to be traced, with forensic doggedness, back to its motive.
It took me a while to understand how complex and far-reaching the reasons for this are, and how embedded it is in our history, our culture and even our economic set-up. The primary and unavoidable problem is that writers are always reviewed by writers (at least in newspapers and periodicals - broadcast reviewing is slightly different). There is none of the separation of crafts and industries that exists between, say, writer and actor or dancer. As Zadie Smith elegantly put it in the Guardian Review last week, writing is "the craft that defies craftsmanship". Much as all sides might scorn the connection, critics and journalists are first cousins to novelists and poets, so in one fundamental sense incest is unavoidable.
Connected to this is the fact that there is no tradition in the UK of giving jobs to literary critics, as there is for other art forms. It takes far longer to read a book than to watch even the longest Shakespeare play, which makes it pretty much impossible to earn a living through book reviewing alone. So most reviewers have "day jobs" - usually their own writing, or some sort of teaching, both of which bring with them dependencies and compromises. A reviewer might not know a writer personally, but share an agent or publisher with them. An academic might be asked to review a book by a rival in the same discipline. But you wouldn't want to entrust the thoughts of Stephen Hawking to a reviewer who knew nothing about physics. For the reviewer, the decision as to when to turn down such a commission on ethical grounds is very delicate.
There are stories of purist reviewers, who never venture outside their own homes (one New York critic is said not even to have met her commissioning editor), but they are rare. The most independent (for which read opinionated) critics often blaze through the skies in a shower of flames, only to sputter out in a book contract a few years later.
This is not to say that book reviewers lack intelligence and integrity. The tradition of literary criticism, in which most critics are grounded, gives the good ones a sense of the separateness of text and author (you tend not to get the ad hominem attacks that are directed, say, at a bad actor). Equally importantly, critics with careers linked to their reviewing know they have to guard their reputations - expertise and discrimination mean more than personal likeability.
My antennae still twitch when a writer volunteers a review - I'm still always looking out for the motive. But now when someone mouths off to me about the corruption of book critics, I just smile sweetly and ask for specific examples. Often it comes down to a difference of opinion, which brings us to the one thing all art forms have in common: everybody loves to hate critics.
