And good BAD reviews

This month, the Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA) foundation launched with the mandate to analyze and ultimately redress the gender imbalance in book reviewing in Canada. The organization, founded by Gillian Jerome, analyzed the book reviews published last year by literary journals, general-interest magazines and newspapers, and tallied both the gender of the authors under review and the gender of the reviewers. As a country, we fared better than our American counterparts (as scored by VIDA, the U.S. equivalent to CWILA), but not by much. I’d recommend every reader of this column go to the website, take in the analysis, read the interviews and essays, and think the issue over, because it’s an important one, and the work that was put into the study is as impressive as the results are humbling.

One of the many threads in the broader discussion is a call for women to do more reviewing. I second it, and I imagine that CWILA will inspire women who hadn’t reviewed before now to start. And yet on the eve of what many hope is a new era of criticism in Canada, I was surprised to find that one of the three essays framing the CWILA discussion is one by Jan Zwicky entitled “The Ethics of the Negative Review,” which we can charitably call spooky and meretricious, but is probably deserving of a much less friendly repudiation. The essay justifies her baffling policy of not publishing negative reviews during her tenure in the 1990s as review editor of The Fiddlehead, a major Canadian literary journal. “I made a point,” she writes, “of requesting that a review be written only if the reviewer was genuinely enthusiastic about the book.” Why? Because to be an artist, “one must be tuned to the play of emotion and perception” and therefore reviewers should have “respect for the thin skin that is essential to creativity.”

Cue the violins, folks. The essay, woozy with Romantic anemia, begins by paraphrasing Byron’s idiotic diagnosis that “the critics killed Keats” (Keats died of an infection of the tubercle baccilus, TB), and along its way manages to summon every blackberet cliché about the poetic temperament, so that by its conclusion we can all but smell Chatterton’s extinguished candle. And beneath those black berets are the empty heads of red herrings and straw men. The idea that a poet’s power is in any way related to his predisposition to take offense is stupid beyond stupid; if it were true, Shakespeare, the most linguistically and emotionally perceptive poet in the language, would have folded up tent in 1592, well before he reached the height of his powers, when Richard Greene published his scathing review of “the upstart Crowe” who “supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best.” How, Jan, did he ever go on?

I feel a little bashful pointing out to a professional philosopher that she’s constructing a false syllogism, but Zwicky does just that when she proposes that only a positive appraisal is “engaged with its subject matter.” Anyone who has read a scathing review by Randall Jarrell or Helen Vendler or William Logan can tell you that critic and subject matter are not just engaged, but betrothed. They’re flat-out honeymooning. “I’ve seen too many beginning poets discover Donne,” she contends, to believe that criticism needs to jolt our preconceptions, because a classic’s greatness “lies precisely in its ongoing ability to move, provoke and inspire an audience.” But if it weren’t for T.S. Eliot’s punchy essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” Donne, who every fledgling poet now considers indispensible, would still be as neglected as he was for centuries, when everyone knew he was beyond derivative. And am I the only one who finds Zwicky’s assertion hilarious that “historically, Virginia Woolf provides us with some excellent models” of cheerful, uncontroversial criticism? The author of A Room of One’s

Own, no slouch in either the artistic or critical (not to mention feminist) departments, wrote: “my real delight in reviewing is to say nasty things.”

So what’s Zwicky’s advice to the women who, inspired by CWILA to change the critical landscape, find themselves in the not-uncommon position of being assigned a book to review which they dislike? “I am suggesting simply that, in public, we keep our mouths shut.” What a miserable, low thing to tell another woman, another writer, another human. No, it’s more than that: It’s unethical. I’m sorry, but we’ve tried it Zwicky’s way: flat, uninspired review prose that reads like it was composed by publicists playing duelling games of mad lib and broken telephone; swollen reputations left to inflate and float away; living under the general paranoia that simply speaking your mind is enough to ruin your future prospects. Enough of this bulls--t. Look: love is Janus-faced. Being turned by a work of art reorients your whole perspective, the part that loves and the part that hates, and there’s nothing wrong with admitting that certain word-orders now move you more than others. Call me old-fashioned, but I think the truth sounds beautiful, and there’s an intrinsic value in discovering what writers think of each other’s work. The purpose of a review, good or bad, is to begin a conversation, not to end it. And when we write a negative review, we’re writing it about an adult, a professional, who of her own volition chose to publish poems, to share them with other human beings who have that pesky, intractable habit of thinking for themselves. No one is forcing these people, we who are too many, to publish; if you’re squeamish, put your poems in a goddamn drawer. And if you can’t stomach the occasional reader disclosing that she doesn’t like your poems, well: There’s always law school.