John Simon, critic with a cutting pen, dies at age 94

John Simon, one of the nation’s most erudite, vitriolic and vilified culture critics, who illuminated and savaged a remarkable range of plays, films, literary and art works and their creators for more than a half-century, died on Sunday in Valhalla, New York. He was 94.

His death, at Westchester Medical Center, was confirmed by his wife, Patricia Hoag-Simon.

In an era of vast cultural changes, Simon marshaled wide learning, insights and acid wit for largely negative reviews and essays that appeared in New York magazine for nearly 37 years until his dismissal in 2005, and in The Hudson Review, The New York Times, Esquire, National Review, The New Leader and other publications.

In a style that danced with literary allusions and arch rhetoric, he composed with pen and ink (he hated computers) and produced thousands of critiques and a dozen books, mostly anthologies of his own work. While English was not his native language, he also wrote incisive essays on American usage, notably in the 1980 book “Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline.”

Born in Yugoslavia and educated at Harvard, he was an imperious arbiter who, unlike daily press critics, foraged widely over fields of culture and entertainment at will, devouring the Lilliputians with relish. He regarded television as trash and most Hollywood films as superficial. His formula for an ultimate triumph on Broadway: “A loud, vulgar musical about Jewish Negroes.”

“My greatest obligation is to what, correctly or incorrectly, I perceive as the truth,” he told The Paris Review in 1997.

Many readers delighted in what they considered his lofty and uncompromising tastes, and especially in his wicked judgments, which fell like hard rain on icons of culture: popular authors, Hollywood stars, rock and rap musicians, abstract artists and their defenders in critics’ circles, for whom he expressed contempt.

But Simon was himself scorned by many writers, performers and artists, who called his judgments biased, unfair or downright cruel, and by readers and rival critics with whom he occasionally feuded in print. They characterized some of his pronouncements as racist, misogynist, homophobic or grossly insensitive.

He denied being any of those things, and argued that no person or group was above criticism, especially those who, in his view, lacked talent and covered themselves in mantles of race, ethnicity, gender or sexual identity and used them to claim preferential treatment in the marketplaces of culture.

“I do not like uniforms,” Simon told the author Bert Cardullo in 2008. “I do not like people who are a professional this, that or the other. Professional writers, actors and singers are OK, but I don’t like professional Jews, professional homosexuals, professional blacks, professional feminists, professional patriots. I don’t like people abdicating their identity to become part of some group, and then becoming obsessed with this and making capital of it.”

Simon liked the plays of August Wilson, John Patrick Shanley and Beth Henley. “From time to time a play comes along that restores one’s faith in our theater,” he wrote of Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart,” which won a 1981 Pulitzer Prize. He said Shanley’s “Doubt” (2004), about Catholic school scandals, “would be sinful to miss.”

He invited readers to see the world through the literary works of Heinrich Böll, Jane Bowles, Alfred Chester, Stig Dagerman, Bruce Jay Friedman, J.M.G. Le Clézio, Bernard Malamud, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O’Connor, Ferenc Sánta and B. Traven, and through the films of Antonioni, Bergman, Fellini or Kurosawa — but only “at their best.”

But such praise was a rarity. In his “Reverse Angle: A Decade of American Films” (1982), he recommended only 15 of the 245 films he discussed.

His attacks on actors were often meanspirited. He likened Liza Minnelli’s face to a beagle’s and said Barbra Streisand’s nose “cleaves the giant screen from east to west, bisects it from north to south.” William F. Buckley Jr., the publisher of National Review, once said Simon “reviewed movies in the same sense that pigeons review statues.”

He generally admired impressionist painters, but castigated abstract art. “Why should I consider something art if I, a non-artist, could do it just as well? Or if a small child or chimpanzee could do it too?” he demanded on his blog, “Uncensored Simon,” in 2014.

Simon welcomed comparisons of himself to H.L. Mencken, the iconoclast who denounced political phonies, organized religion and chiropractic medicine. “Now the point is not whether Mencken is right or wrong, but that we have here a person perfectly willing to offend,” he wrote in “Acid Test” (1963), his first collection of essays. “Not wanting to offend, mind you, just willing.”

Rival critics were frequent targets, even posthumously. After film critic Roger Ebert died in 2013, Simon scoffed at A.O. Scott’s positive evaluation in The Times. He took particular issue with what he called “the whole thumbs up, thumbs down critique Ebert practiced,” adding, “Except from the palsied or mentally defective, it takes no dexterity whatsoever, let alone art.”

On “Charlie Rose” in 2001, Simon accused The Times’ drama critic Ben Brantley of favoring plays by homosexuals because he was gay, a motivation Brantley rejected. “To my misfortune,” Simon said, “I’m not homosexual, and therefore I’m a kind of odd man out in the theatrical world.”

Some critics responded. “There are merrymakers at every party who can do John Simon imitations, and with a few drinks I can do the Count Dracula of critics myself,” Andrew Sarris, the longtime film critic for The Village Voice, wrote in The Times in 1971. “If the careers of the late Joe McCarthy and Dr. Goebbels have taught us anything, it is that the Big Lie only thrives on the proud silence of its victims.”

Simon was barred from some film screenings. An advertisement signed by 300 people in Variety in 1980 called his reviews racist and vicious.

John Simon was born Ivan Simmon on May 12, 1925, in Subotica, Yugoslavia, to Joseph and Margaret Reves Simmon. By 5, he was fluent in three languages, learning German and Hungarian at home and Serbo-Croatian in the streets of Belgrade. He later learned French and English, and studied for a year at The Leys, a British private school at Cambridge.

In 1941, the family moved to the United States. Simon Americanized his name and attended Horace Mann School in New York and Harvard, where he wrote plays, fiction and poetry. After service in the Army Air Forces in 1944 and 1945, he returned to Harvard and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1946 and a master’s in 1948. He taught literature and the humanities in the 1950s at Harvard, Washington University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Bard College, and finished his doctorate at Harvard in 1959.