Leonard Benardo interviews Leo Robson in The Ideas Letter:
Leonard Benardo: Does anyone grow up fantasizing about being a critic?
Leo Robson: Your question alludes to the idea that criticism is not enticing, or that critics have often failed at something else, or would have done if they had tried. The film critic Pauline Kael countered that when she asked listeners to a radio broadcast: “if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.” I think it’s an interesting point. In reality, all these things are difficult in different ways and to different degrees for the people who try them. They can be done both well and badly. There’s certainly a phenomenon of the novelist as failed critic. Just open a newspaper.
But I wouldn’t go as far as Kael. With reviewing, there is less sense of uncertainty, less risk. John Updike, who wrote fiction, poetry, a play, and hundreds of reviews, said that writing criticism was to creative efforts as “hugging the shore” is to sailing in the open sea. Using similar language, Kenneth Tynan, a critic who was also involved in a lot of theatrical productions, said that when he was the literary manager of the National Theatre, under the direction of Laurence Olivier, he played the role of “tugboat nudging an ocean greyhound into harbour”—Olivier being the greyhound.
But to return to the question—whatever the limitations of criticism or the critical personality, I do think people fantasize about being critics, nowadays at least.
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