“JOHN UPDIKE’S 6 RULES FOR CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM”
by Maria Popova
[Back on 17 July, my friend Kirk Woodward e-mailed me the following article from The Atlantic of 2 May 2012. He entitled his message “Useful (and brilliant)” and added that in the article, about John Updike’s book Picked-Up Pieces, the writer was providing advice “on criticizing a written piece, but with more general application.” (I strongly suspect that what Kirk was thinking about specifically was theater and perhaps film criticism and reviewing, a craft at which both he and I have turned our hands.)
[The Atlantic essayist, Maria Popova, makes the same point in her article. Therefore, I pass her remarks and Updike’s along to readers of Rick On Theater.
[John Updike (1932-2009) was a novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. In her essay, Popova invokes two other writers of note, Sir Ken Robinson and E. B. White. Popova has written short essays on these two men of letters and ideas and I’ve collected her comments on them with “John Updike’s 6 Rules” and posted all three together below.]
How to assess other people's work graciously and fairly.
As Sir Ken Robinson thoughtfully observed, we live in a kind of "opinion culture" where not having an opinion is a cultural abomination. At the same time, the barrier of entry for making one's opinions public is lower than ever. The tragedy of our time might well be that so many choose to set those opinions apart by making them as contrarian and abrasive as possible. But what E. B. White once wisely pointed to as the role and social responsibility of the writer—"to lift people up, not lower them down"—I believe to be true of the role and social responsibility of the critic as well, for thoughtful criticism is itself an art and a creative act.
We need to relearn the skills of making criticism constructive rather than destructive, and we need look no further than the introduction to John Updike's 1977 [sic] anthology of prose, Picked-Up Pieces [1976, Knopf/Random House; paperback: Fawcett, 1986], where the beloved author and critic codifies the ethics and poetics of criticism by offering the following six rules to reviewing graciously and fairly. Though they were written with literature in mind, at their heart is an ethos that applies to critique and criticism in any discipline.
My rules, drawn up inwardly when l embarked on this craft, and shaped intaglio-fashion by youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion, were and are:
1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give him enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants' revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?
To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical [sic] battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author 'in his place,' making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
[Maria Popova, a Bulgarian-born, American-based writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism, is the editor of Brain Pickings (now The Marginalian), an online publication that The Atlantic has labeled “an Atlantic partner site.” She also writes for Wired UK and GOOD, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow.
[Updike’s examples of critics who write to humble or rebuke someone may not be familiar to everyone. John Aldridge (1922-2007), a writer, literary critic, teacher, and scholar, was hostile to, as he himself wrote, “writers whose reputations seemed to me to have become inordinately enlarged and upon whom I saw it as my sacred duty to perform a deflating operation.” Some writers, such as Gore Vidal, castigated Aldridge, while others, like Norman Mailer, praised him.
[Neoconservative commentator and former editor of Commentary magazine Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930), declares himself a “‘paleo-neoconservative’ because I’ve been one for so long.” He’s a staunch believer in “Americanism”—which I take to mean American Exceptionalism, sometimes seen by conservatives as a belief that the United States may make its own rules of conduct because it’s special. As an unwavering neocon, a movement he helped launch, Podhoretz sees only one way to defeat domestic anti-Americanism: “to fight it intellectually.”
[ROT has run many articles
on theater reviews, reviewing, and criticism.
Some of them provide examples of Updike’s advice—and others describe
exemplars of approaches of which Updike would disapprove:
• “On Reviewing,” 22 March 2009
• “The Art of Writing Reviews
by Kirk Woodward,” 4, 8, 11, and 14 November 2009
• “Eric Bentley – An
Appreciation” by Kirk Woodward, 4 December 2012
• “Culture War,” 6 February 2014
• “Joan Acocella: Critic,
Historian, Or Critic-Historian. An Interview, 28 November 1988” (archival text
with New
Yorker review), 31 May 2019
• “‘Moron! Vermin! Curate!
Cretin! Crritic!!’: John Simon (1925-2019),” 28 November and 1, 4, and 7
December 2019
• “Reviewers” by Lily Janiak,
Jeremy Gerard, and Alice Saville, 6 July 2020
• “In Memoriam: Eric Bentley
(1916-2020)” by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and Nathaniel G. Nesmith, 2 September
2020
• “Max Beerbohm’s Theater
Reviews” by Kirk Woodward, 2 November 2020
• “Kenneth Tynan” by Kirk Woodward, 29 September 2021
[There are also copious examples of reviews and criticism on the blog and other articles about writers who have produced criticism, but which cover other aspects of their work. That list would be excessively long.]
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by Maria Popova
[The essay below was posted on The Marginalian on 17 March 2012 at https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/04/17/e-b-white-paris-review-interview/.
[The writer E. B. White (1899-1985) was the author of highly popular books for children, including Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte’s Web (1952), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970).
[He was also the co-author of the English language style guide The Elements of Style (originally written by William Strunk, Jr. [1869-1946], in 1918, and published in 1920; enlarged and revised by White in 1959). The style guide became widely known by writers and writing students simply as “Strunk and White.”]
“Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.”
Recently, heading to Columbia to take part in a symposium on the future of journalism — a subject that feels at once on some great cusp and under the weight of a myriad conflicting pressures — I found myself revisiting E.B. White’s spectacular 1969 conversation with The Paris Review’s George Plimpton and sidekick Frank H. Crowther [“The Art of the Essay,” 1969], included in the altogether superb interview, included in the altogether unputdownable The Paris Review Interviews, vol. IV [Picador, 2009].
White — who has also voiced strong opinions on the free press and, of course, the architecture of language — shares some timeless yet strikingly timely insights on the role and the responsibility of the writer:
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. I feel no obligation to deal with politics. I do feel a responsibility to society because of going into print: a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.
One important reflection is that in 1969, implicit to the very nature of print was a kind of accountability, a truth standard that engendered in White this sense of “responsibility to society.” As news and opinion have shifted online, a medium much more fluid and dynamic, this notion of baked-in accountability no longer holds true and, one might observe, has allowed journalistic laziness that would never have been acceptable in White’s heyday. What standards and expectations we adopt and instill in writers and publishers today will “inform and shape life.”
When asked how he sees the role of the writer in an era “increasingly enamored of and dependent upon science and technology” — bear in mind, this is 1969 — White answers:
The writer’s role is what it has always been: he is a custodian, a secretary. Science and technology have perhaps deepened his responsibility but not changed it. In [the 1956 essay] ‘The Ring of Time,’ I wrote: ‘As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost. But it is not easy to communicate anything of this nature.’
A writer must reflect and interpret his society, his world; he must also provide inspiration and guidance and challenge. Much writing today strikes me as deprecating, destructive, and angry. There are good reasons for anger, and I have nothing against anger. But I think some writers have lost their sense of proportion, their sense of humor, and their sense of appreciation. I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they happen to strike me. One role of the writer today is to sound the alarm. The environment is disintegrating, the hour is late, and not much is being done. Instead of carting rocks from the moon, we should be carting the feces out of Lake Erie.
I love this notion of a custodian, or secretary, or interpreter, of culture. Though the word “curator” is tragically flawed, the ideals at its heart — to shine a light on the meaningful, to frame for the reader or viewer what matters in the world and why — remain an important piece of the evolution of authorship. What White describes as the role of the writer is very much the role of the cultural custodian today, in the broadest, most platform-agnostic sense of the role possible.
But perhaps most brilliantly, in one swift sentence White captures everything that’s wrong with the sensationalism that permeates media today, from the HuffPostification of headlines to the general linkbait alarmism of language designed to squeeze out another barely-monetized pageview:
Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.
Complement with White on the future of reading, what makes a great city, why he wrote Charlotte’s Web, the two faces of discipline and his warm letter of assurance to a man who had lost faith in humanity, then plunge into this evolving library of wisdom on writing from some of humanity’s greatest writers.
[I’m somewhat of a fan of E. B. White. One of his other books is a collection of essays, The Points of My Compass (Harper & Row, 1962). It’s been in my library for 58 years (for some reason my copy is British, published the next year). I read White’s essays avidly when I was still in high school. I liked the way he wrote, easily and unaffectedly, with considerable, but understated, humor.
[I never much considered writing at that age. In fact, writing didn’t become remotely important in my life until graduate school. But if I ever did write anything worth reading, I would have liked it to be like White’s essays. At 17, I had read Points like a novel, as if there were a plot that drew me on inexorably.
[The Elements of Style is another matter. I don’t remember when I first got a copy, probably also in high school. The copy of Strunk and White I have now dates from 1972, which puts it in my army years. I certainly never had need of it then: the army had its own, inimitable writing style. (As an intelligence agent, I did have a lot of on-the-job writing—reports of various kinds, and even one book-length staff study.)
[But along came grad school and a master’s thesis. I also took a criticism class that required regular reviews. Strunk and White got very useful all of a sudden. Believe me, it’s well-thumbed by now!]
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by Maria Popova
[Also posted on The Marginalian on 17 March 2012, the article below is available at https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/04/17/sir-ken-robinson-school-of-life/.
[Sir Ken Robinson (1950-2020) was a British author, speaker, and international advisor on education in the arts. He’s written extensively on arts education; The Arts in Schools: Principles, Practice, and Provision (Greener Books Ltd, 1982), is now a key text on arts and education internationally.
[Among his several awards and honors, in 2008, he won the Peabody Medal for contributions to the arts and culture in the United States and the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the Royal Society of Arts for contributions to cultural relations between the United Kingdom and the United States. He was knighted in 2003 for services to the arts.]
What knowing the limits of knowledge has to do with finding the frontiers of creativity.
Sir Ken Robinson has previously challenged and delighted us with his vision for changing educational paradigms to better optimize a broken system for creativity.
In this wonderful talk from The School of Life, Robinson articulates the ethos at the heart of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything [Penguin, 2009] — one of 7 essential books on education — and echoes, with his signature blend of wit and wisdom, many of the insights in this indispensable collection of advice on how to find your purpose and do what you love.
Robinson seconds Stuart Firestein’s insight on the importance of ignorance in exploration and growth:
In our culture, not to know is to be at fault socially . . . [.] People pretend to know lots of things they don’t know. Because the worst thing to do is appear to be uninformed about something, to not have an opinion. . . [.] We should know the limits of our knowledge and understand what we don’t know, and be willing to explore things we don’t know without feeling embarrassed of not knowing about them.
Among Robinson’s many astute observations is also one about our socially distorted metrics of achievement, in line with Alain de Botton’s admonition about “success”:
It’s not enough to be good at something to be in your element. . . [.] We’re being brought up with this idea that life is linear. This is an idea that’s perpetuated when you come to write your CV — that you set out your life in a series of dates and achievements, in a linear way, as if your whole existence has progressed in an ordered, structured way, to bring you to this current interview.
If you haven’t yet read The Element, do — it might just change how you relate to everything you do.
[The School of Life, an educational organization that offers guidance on a variety “life issues,” was founded by a group of intellectuals in 2008 and has its headquarters in London and branches in Amsterdam, Berlin, Istanbul, Paris, São Paulo, and Taipei. It is not without its critics and detractors.
[Stuart Firestein is a biologist and chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. Raised in Philadephia, he became active in theater in Los Angeles and San Francisco and worked in the field there and on the East Coast for 20 years. At 30, he enrolled full time in San Francisco State University and at 40, got an advanced degree.
[Firestein published Ignorance: How it Drives Science (Oxford University Press, 2012) and spoke frequently on the subject of the significance of ignorance in scientific inquiry. Science, he says, is often like searching for a black cat in a dark room, and there might not be a cat.
[Alain de Botton (b. 1969) is a Swiss-born British philosopher and author. (De Botton was one of the founders of The School of Life.) Popova doesn’t identify the “admonition about ‘success,’” but in her 27 February 2012 essay on The Marginalian, “How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love” (https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/02/27/purpose-work-love/), Popova quotes from de Botton’s 2009 TED talk “A kinder, gentler philosophy of success” (https://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_philosophy_of_success).
[(It’s somewhat ambiguous,
but Popova’s quotation at the end of her essay is from Robinson, but not from The Element; it appears to have been something he
said, perhaps in a lecture. It’s not
from anything composed by de Botton, however.)]
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