Volume 28, Number 21 & 22 · January 21, 1982
More Kicks than Pricks
By James Wolcott
Nobody Here But Us Chickens
by Marvin Mudrick
Ticknor & Fields,, 299 pp., $16.95
Writers stung by criticism are seldom shy about retaliating. Hardly a month slips by without some disgruntled author coughing into his fist on 'The Dick Cavett Show' and denouncing critics as whores, leeches, or—that old wheeze—eunuchs (invariably: 'They like to watch because they themselves can't Do It'). Other epithets are always in fashion. To some, critics are a scurvy band of cutthroats swarming upon unprotected vessels; to others, they're—we're?—careless surgeons, splitting open the tender skin of prose with scalpels rusty and blunt. But perhaps the most popular hostile image of the critic now is that of the thug—the hit man. A decade ago in Commentary, Gore Vidal did an entertaining burlesque in which he depicted a number of critics as black-gloved gangsters, 'edgy hoods hanging around the playgrounds of the West Side.'
Review, 2214 words
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