Critics

Thanks "London Bobby" for your remarks on Max Miller (see comment in Blog below on Miller). I agree with all you say, yet I still have a little soft spot for critics since I was once one myself. I would attend the theatre for a play or musical - or even opera - with the wish that I would enjoy it; but so many times I'd come away disappointed. Sometimes it was the performance, sometimes the play itself. No doubt, as "London Bobby" suggests, there were times when I wrote that the play was rubbish when it was evident that the audience enjoyed it. The thing is that criticism is a personal appreciation. Charles Spencer, in The Telegraph this week, gave a rave review for the new production of "Hair" but said that his wife could not be dragged along to see it because she hated pop music. It would be no good making her a pop music critic and, the trouble is, when you are a theatre critic, there is a lot of stuff out there that is just simply not to your taste.
I have read many reviews of theatre by both Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph and Benedict Nightingale of The Times and often they are at loggerheads: one may give a play five stars while the other gives the same show one or two stars. Criticism is not founded on scientific principles; it's more of a "taste thing". I hardly ever agreed with Bernard Levin but I could'nt resist reading his articles. And this is a thing you can say about reviews: it doesn't matter so much how many stars that have been given but how the critic has analysed the play and, more than anything, how well he has written about it: the review can be looked at as an essay, interesting to read though not sacrosanct.
I think I must be one of about three people in the country who does not find "Noises Off" funny. I know, I know, it's brilliant. It is brilliant in its construction and one cannot but admire it for that. But funny? No. Yet Benedict Nightingale wrote today that when he saw it first he and his wife creased themselves laughing.
You see, it's all a matter of taste. Probably he has good taste and I have bad. Yet I find Max Miller funny which surely means I have good taste!

Phillip Toynbee

Phillip Toynbee's name cropped up a few days ago; it was mentioned in a list of writers who were considered to be second rate. This I could not understand: 30 or 40 years ago he had a distinguished reputation as a critic and poet. I remember him only as a critic but my father admired his other writings.
Two things I remember about him: Joseph Heller, an American, had written his first novel, "Catch 22" and it hadn't gone down very well in the States. It was not until Phillip Toynbee gave it a rave review that it took off, not just here but over in the USA as well. That tells something of his reputation. Yet, one feels, surely the novel would by its own steam, as it were, have been recognised for what it was, a marvellous satire on war, a modern work of literature the like of which, it's safe to say, had never been known before.
The other thing I recall is that Phillip Toynbee gave consummate praise to a book that, later, he seemed to regret having been so enthusiastic about, Colin Wilson's "The Outsider". Whether or not it was Toynbee's admiration for the book that gave it such momentum in sales I don't know but Colin Wilson's book was so drastically reviewed by others equally as distinguished as Toynbee that it became sort of infra dig to say you liked it.
I read it and enjoyed it greatly though I have to say Wilson's later work didn't speak to me at all: he became a kind of guru of mystical and magical phenomena, an expert of Jack the Ripper (how many of those are there?) and so on.
There were, if memory doesn't fail me, two excellent literary critics writing for The Observer at that time: Phillip Toybee and Cyril Connolly ("in every fat man there's a thin man trying to get out"). They both tried their hands at novels but, like many another critic, they didn't have much success.
I have known two people who, after attending university and studying literature, found it almost impossible to engage in creative work - I mean fiction writing. Maybe it's because they are too critical of what they themselves are writing to be unstilted in their style.
Someone once said of a relation of Toltoy's that "he's too good a writer to be a novelist".