Hatchet-Jobs indeed in the Penny Press!

Just when you thought the whole ‘negativity-in-book-reviews’ teacup-tempest had finally blown itself out, no less an unlikely Lady Bracknell than Clive James stirs it back up again. Himself a critic of legendary and delightful omni-competence, James has recently announced that his health has gone into serious decline (he just published a poem about it – one of, one fears, many to come – that somehow managed to be both lachrymose and stoical at the same time, which is some neat trick). He’s published his long-awaited translation of The Divine Comedy, which must surely count as a major line-item on just about anybody’s To Do list, and what’s perhaps more predictable coming from a life-long memoirist, he’s begun more frequently and fondly looking to his personal good old days.

In Saturday’s update of the New York Times “Opinionator” blog, James looks back on his days in Grub Street and laments one thing in particular: that the Americans among whom he spends so much time and for whom he has such affection can do just about any cultural thing they set their minds to  – but they haven’t managed to master the art of “hostile literary criticism” the way they have in Britain, where “shredding” a new book is “a kind of fox hunting that is still legal today.”

James patronizes with the best of them, of course; he concedes that America is probably a more polite society and no doubt the better for it (my dear, he doesn’t quite say, although you can hear it just fine). But it’s forced, as all patronization must be, because what good is patronizing somebody if they can’t hear it while you’re doing it? No, America’s too polite a society for shredding – he points out that a recent negative review of Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton had to be written by a Brit, Zoe Heller, like a literary version of extraordinary rendition, with the hapless books suddenly hooded, zip-cuffed, and whisked away to a mongrel fringe-nation where critics in ski masks are willing to get their hands dirty. “Back home, you got lots of fancy rights,” they growl as the latest novel from Curtis Sittenfeld blinks away tears under the interrogation lamp, “but here, you have only Hell.”

It’s a daft conception, and James is much too well-read to believe it. In fact, his little screed actually revolves around quite a different aspect of hatchet jobs than their frightful lack of manners, and he tips readers off to this when he mentions Zoe Heller’s fellow Brit, the late Christopher Hitchens, who in his own “shredding” work found that the citizens of his adopted country were “wonderfully easy to stir up.”

Certain elements of them, anyway, and Hitchens left behind a healthy estate because he recognized the financial potential in that fact as surely and unerringly as any carnival huckster. Thousands of star-struck acolytes in dorm rooms all over the Western world can recite chapter and verse of the thunderous attacks Hitchens made upon organized religion in the last years of his life. He famously went on a rollicking bar-storming book tour through every rickets-ridden holler in the American Bible Belt, making mincemeat out of the local snake-handlers hoisted up to debate with him, urging listeners to throw off their “mind-forged manacles” and join him in his life-long quest to free the world of religion, which, as his book’s sub-title put it, “poisons everything.”

Hitchens learned his trade in that same Grub Street world James recalls so fondly, where “the spleen gets a voice” – and where hatchet-jobs are matters of ad hoc and entirely insincere hackwork of a type that served Hitchens, among many others, quite well. Long before he wrote a book saying religion poisons everything, after all, he wrote a book saying the dishonesty of President Clinton poisons everything. And before that, it was Henry Kissinger poisoning everything. And before him, Mother Teresa. If he’d struck six-figure paydirt with any of those earlier malefactors, God wouldn’t have heard a peep out of him.

The point, in other words, is opportunism. The term for this in the Internet Age (which Brits of Hitchens’ and James’ age-group seem not to believe really exists – obviously, yes, but not really, like the little man who turns off the refrigerator light when you close the door) is trolling. When Christopher Hitchens wrote that religion poisons everything (or that the Bush administration was wise to invade Iraq, or that women can’t be funny, etc.), he wasn’t writing anything he’d believe ten minutes after he cashed his check – he was just trolling for attention, because that’s the goal of British hatchet-job journalism. Likewise James, who doesn’t really believe that Americans critics are too polite to shred the books they review – but who very much believes that writing such a thing will rattle up some attention just like the kind it’s getting here at Stevereads right now.

That scrappy, punch-drunk Grub Street ethos was indeed grand fun (James might take a moment to recall that America has a rather good record of just such gleeful gutter journalism itself – indeed, some of his readers might just be old enough to have participated in it for years and gained memories they wouldn’t trade for all the National Book Critics Circle Awards in Purgatory), but even in the UK, it never made its way out of the servants’ quarters. In London’s most prestigious literary journals, the hatchet-job transforms into the take-down by adding a smidge of perspective and a dollop of professionalism – just as it’s done in goody two-shoes America.

James knows this perfectly well, since he writes those kinds of reviews better than anybody. But he can hope Monday is a slow news day just the same.