John Simon & the Critical Maw

[David]

"I had always been interested in words, in language. My father taught me the alphabet a couple of years before I started elementary school in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Reading immediately became my favorite activity & writing followed apace. By the time I was going to elementary school, I was fluent in three languages: Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, & German. It may be that this had a lasting effect on my attitude toward language: that I became playful with words, rattling them around in my pockets in triplicate, pulling out now one, now another version of the same thing. It may be that having three different ways of saying 'cloud' or 'horse' made each term more interesting."

Language has been John Simon's overriding love throughout his life. He might even agree with that. I think that love is what makes him the 20th century's most important, interesting & thorough commentator on other critics; there certainly isn't another film critic who has written as extensively about other critics as Simon has. Moreover, when he's writing about the critical perceptions of good critics & bad critics, movie critics & literary critics, drama critics & culture critics, high critics & low critics--Macdonald, Kael, Kauffmann, Sarris, Molly Haskell, Charles T. Samuels, Edmund Wilson, Rex Reed, Vidal, Wayne O'Neil, Clive Barnes, Andrew Sinclair, Trilling, Barzun,
John Gregory Dunne, Mailer, Didion, Sontag, Updike, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Dr. Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Shaw, Steegmuller, Borges, Nabokov, Brodsky, Agee, Warshow & on & on--he strikes me as most committed & passionate.



I doubt anyone else has ever written as extensively & devotedly about other critics. Simon is the Critic Commentator par excellence of 20th-century literary life. I can't help thinking that this attention to criticism qua criticism is another expression of his love of language.