Volume 21, Number 12 · July 18, 1974
Real Class
By Gore Vidal
A Writer's Capital
by Louis Auchincloss
Minnesota University Press, 160 pp., $7.95
The Partners
by Louis Auchincloss
Houghton Mifflin, 254 pp., $6.95
'What a dull and dreary trade is that of critic,' wrote Diderot. 'It is so difficult to create a thing, even a mediocre thing; it is so easy to detect mediocrity.' Either the great philosophe was deliberately exaggerating or else Americans have always lived in an entirely different continuum from Europe. For us the making of mediocre things is the rule while the ability to detect mediocrity or anything else is rare. A century ago, E. L. Godkin wrote in The Nation: 'The great mischief has always been that whenever our reviewers deviate from the usual and popular course of panegyric, they start from and end in personality, so that the public mind is almost sure to connect unfavorable criticism with personal animosity.
Review, 4920 words
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