A reader wrote to ask if I’d consider posting a list of books and other works of art that had served as “turning points” in my life as a critic. I’ve never drawn up such a list, though I once wrote an essay for the New York Times Book Review called “I’ve Got a Crush on You” (it’s in A Terry Teachout Reader) in which I talked about several authors whose styles I’d emulated at different times in my life. But what gave me the idea to become a critic–and what inspired me to become the kind of critic I became?
That’s easier asked than answered, but I do know that two books I read for the first time in high school, Edmund Wilson’s Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (1950) and The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965 (1966), were largely responsible for shaping my original understanding of what a critic does. Wilson isn’t as widely read as he once was, and I’m not even sure he’s all that well remembered. Back in the early Seventies, though, he still cast a long shadow across American literary life. I can’t remember how I first heard about him–I’m sure nobody in Smalltown, U.S.A., knew who he was, then or now–but somehow or other I ran across his name and headed straight for the library, where I found two chunky little volumes of the essays he wrote for The New Yorker during his tenure as that magazine’s chief book reviewer. I read them over and over again, to the point where I probably could have copied out their tables of contents from memory.
That was the first time I’d studied the work of a major critic at all closely, and the experience left a deep and lasting imprint on my own writing. Wilson’s brusquely direct style was journalistic in the best sense of the word: he didn’t write down to the middlebrow readers of The New Yorker, but he had a knack for talking about whatever interested him in a way that was both lively and intelligible. Just as important, what interested Wilson almost always turned out to interest me as well. It was in his essays that I first read about Kingsley Amis, W.H. Auden, Max Beerbohm, Raymond Chandler, Cyril Connolly, Edward Gorey, Justice Holmes, Samuel Johnson, Vladimir Nabokov, Anthony Powell, Dawn Powell, Evelyn Waugh, Edith Wharton, and Angus Wilson. That’s quite a list.
Wilson, I soon discovered, was a kind of freelance intellectual, a critic without portfolio who chose to make his living as a working journalist rather than by teaching. He had modeled his career after that of H.L. Mencken, and I in turn modeled my career after his, deciding early on that I would try to find a way to make my living by writing for an educated audience of non-specialists about whatever interested me. Even then, I had an inkling that the academy was no place for the cultural dilettante I was in the process of becoming, and I also knew by some fortunate instinct that I didn’t want to be a staff writer beholden to a single omnipotent employer. Wilson and Mencken taught me that it was possible to be a full-time freelance critic, and even though I held several “day jobs” before striking out on my own, I knew from the beginning where I wanted to end up.
As I grew older, I found Wilson’s style and approach (as well as his taste) somewhat constricting, and I became interested in other critics who would ultimately do far more to shape the sound of my writing. It’s been a number of years since I last read either Classics and Commercials or The Bit Between My Teeth. But I still own the copies of both books that I purchased thirty-odd years ago, and whenever my eye happens to fall on either one, I make a point of paying silent homage to the writer who did more than any other to set me on the path I follow to this day.