{"id":736,"date":"2011-01-13T17:24:25","date_gmt":"2011-01-13T17:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp\/2011\/01\/the_critics_critic_a_tribute_t.html"},"modified":"2011-01-13T17:24:25","modified_gmt":"2011-01-13T17:24:25","slug":"the_critics_critic_a_tribute_t","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2011\/01\/the_critics_critic_a_tribute_t.html","title":{"rendered":"The Critics’ Critic: A Tribute to John Gross"},"content":{"rendered":"

There have been many obituaries<\/a> of John Gross, who died on 10 January. He was the critics’ critic, witty, erudite, and polymathic, a graceful writer and a lightning-quick thinker. His series of Oxford anthologies, his books on Shylock, Joyce and Kipling and his 2001 memoir about growing up in the Jewish East End of London, A Double Thread<\/i>, will all last; and one of his books, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800 <\/i>(1969), is a classic.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n


\n<\/p>\n

       <\/span><\/p>\n

  <\/span>He
\nmade a permanent mark on English literature as editor of the Times Literary Supplement<\/i> when he took
\nover from Arthur Crook in 1974, simply by ending the practice of anonymity. At
\na stroke he banished “Mr Puff and Mr Sneer” from his pages, and made the paper
\nlively, which it has been ever since, but never was before. Though he knew his
\nown mind, John’s manner was diffident, and he would never have claimed or
\nappealed to the higher morality for his policy; but, in fact, he brought
\nfairness to an institution that had provided a cordial, even sometimes welcoming
\nhome to the vendetta and the literary assassin.<\/p>\n

         <\/span>By
\nthe summer of 1978 I had completed writing and (with a genius called Venetia
\nPollock) the long, painful process of editing my book on G.E. Moore and the
\nCambridge Apostles, which had long been contracted to Weidenfeld &
\nNicolson, a publishing house with which John had a long-time, mostly informal
\nassociation. I can’t remember where John and I met (though most probably it was
\nvia his then-wife, the stunningly beautiful, wonderfully clever, Miriam, Terry
\nKilmartin’s deputy literary editor on The
\nObserver<\/i>, for whom I’d been reviewing since 1974). Our social circles overlapped
\neven more after he and Miriam separated, and even now I smile at remembering
\nthe bevy of well-born, nicely brought-up young beauties who seemed to surround
\nJohn at parties. He beamed with pleasure at their company.<\/span><\/p>\n

I knew a secret.
\nJohn was an Apostle. He’d been elected during his time as a Fellow of King’s
\nCollege, Cambridge, from 1962-65. This is further testimony to his intellectual
\nsplendour, for it was unusual for the Apostles to elect men who were fellows,
\nor as old as John (who was born in 1935). 
\n<\/span>The Apostles of his day met, I believe, in Morgan Forster’s set of rooms
\nat King’s. (Somewhere I have a membership list of the Apostles that stretches
\nwell into John’s time at King’s, but in the chaos of my office I can find the
\nlist only up to 1914.) <\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>The
\nreason I mentioned the summer of 1978 above is that it was the occasion when
\nJohn commissioned my first piece for the TLS<\/i>.
\nThis commission showed the breadth both of his imagination and of his reading.
\nIt was to review a volume called The
\nPoems of John Dewey<\/i>, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Though I had read some
\nDewey when I was reading philosophy as an undergraduate, I had no special
\nqualification for reviewing this book – or so I thought, until I began to do
\nsome research.<\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>Though
\nI wrote that: “The book itself, except for the seventy-odd pages that contain
\nthe text of the verse, has been subjected to [the] academic kiss of death and
\nis virtually unreadable,” I continued:<\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>“Yet
\nDr Boydston’s work is redeemed by her discovery (related largely in her
\nfootnotes and in the blurb on the dust-jacket) that Dewey had ‘a brief
\nemotional involvement…in the 1917-18 period’ with the Jewish Polish-American
\nwriter, Anzia Yezierska, who is the subject of much of his love poetry. Nothing
\ncould do more to rehabilitate John Dewey than this revelation that he was,
\nafter all, human; that in spite of the volumes of lifeless, unlovely prose
\npublished in his lifetime and after, the bloodless philosophical writing that
\nis intelligible now only to his few remaining disciples, Dewey was capable of
\ngreat passion.”<\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>The
\nfirst point is how remarkable it was that John knew of Yezierska; he even directed
\nme to a photograph of her in Irving Howe’s World
\nof our Fathers<\/i>. The second that he sent me to the London Library, where he
\nknew the then-Librarian could help me find out more about her. Third: if only
\nany editor would allow me to write a paragraph as complicated as that, or the TLS<\/i> would allow me now to write at the
\nlength of my first-ever piece for that paper. For all his diffidence, John knew
\nexactly what he was doing. He’d matched this crazy volume of verse by a dusty
\nphilosopher with an ex-philosopher whose real qualification was that, once he’d
\ndiscovered it, he would understand the immigrant background of Dewey’s
\nunexpected mistress and its significance for both of them. And (despite, or
\nmaybe because of, my own PhD in English) I think he probably expected me to be
\nrepulsed by the pseudo-scholarship of the book.<\/span><\/p>\n

      <\/span>When John was on
\nthe TLS<\/i> he showed, too, the
\ncatholicity of his interests.  <\/span>I
\nonce got a call from him asking if I knew the owner of a gallery well enough
\nfor him to ask to reproduce an image from a current show. I told John
\n(accurately, it turned out) that both the gallery and the artist would be
\nthrilled to be asked. He came to stay with us in the country once or twice. I
\nwasn’t terribly surprised to learn that he knew our nearest neighbours very
\nwell – he knew everybody.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the 90s we
\nmet frequently, sometimes more than once a week, as he was the theatre critic
\nfor The Sunday Telegraph<\/i> and I was
\nmade to add the theatre to my critical portfolio on The Wall Street Journal<\/i>. John was as brilliant a theatre critic as
\nhe was a book reviewer, with a huge memory bank of performances – and texts – to
\ndraw on. <\/span><\/p>\n

I only wish we’d
\nseen more of one another since he retired. John enriched the lives of a lot of
\npeople. We were lucky to have known him, and I’ll miss him.<\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There have been many obituaries of John Gross, who died on 10 January. He was the critics’ critic, witty, erudite, and polymathic, a graceful writer and a lightning-quick thinker. His series of Oxford anthologies, his books on Shylock, Joyce and Kipling and his 2001 memoir about growing up in the Jewish East End of London, A Double Thread, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-736","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-bS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}