“It is not the critic who counts,” Theodore Roosevelt famously declared. Rather, “the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” Of course, Roosevelt never read anything by John Simon, the theatrical and literary critic who died last week in New York at the age of 94. If any critic in our time was “in the arena,” sometimes defiantly so, it was Simon.
He came to criticism comparatively late in life. Born Ivan Simmon in Belgrade, Simon grew up speaking three languages at home and learned English and French in school. His family emigrated to America in 1941, when Simon was 16. After service in the Army Air Forces during World War II, he went to Harvard, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees and, in 1959, a doctorate. He had intended to teach — he briefly did so at MIT, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of Washington — but the academic life was an awkward fit.
“None of those places wanted me,” he told the Wall Street Journal last month. “Some [students] were capable, but many I thought remarkably ignorant. I tried to exhibit some patience, but I could only make the grading so lenient.” In 1969, he became theater critic for New York magazine, and in time wrote for various publications, including National Review, the New Leader, Commonweal, Hudson Review, and the Weekly Standard.
If anyone was suited to literary journalism by birth and temperament, it was Simon. Possessed of a prodigious erudition, meticulous eye, love of the lively arts, and sharpened pen, for the next five decades, he held theater, film, and literature to the highest standards of perception and craftsmanship, teaching readers how to understand his innumerable subjects and appreciate the ways in which drama, film, and fiction succeed or fail.
Simon was also a critic in the purest sense. He judged writing by its literary merits and drama in artistic and theatrical terms. Impatient with theory and dogma and, above all, politics in the arts, he explained last year in the New Criterion that a critic “shows how a work fits into the history of its art form, and how it reflects and comments on its social context. If it is of performing art, he or she evaluates writers, directors, and actors.”
Which is why Simon’s criticism was so exacting, shrewd, exhilarating — and famous. In the incestuous world of theater and publishing, he had no interest in hedging his bets, joining coteries, or currying favor. He held the commonsense view that the bulk of poems, plays, movies, and novels are likely to contain, at any given time, a relatively small number of works of excellence. Yet he was wise enough to recognize that journalism tends to exaggerate a moment’s significance: “Looking back into the past,” he told the Journal, “makes the past look better than it actually was, and the present worse, perhaps, than it actually is.”
His enthusiasms, for the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, the Czech composer Leos Janacek, or the American playwright Beth Henley, among many others, were boundless; so were his prominent targets. More than a few emperors in the kingdom were without clothes, Simon believed, and he was prepared to say so aloud. “Gore Vidal,” he once explained, “is a slick novelist, impressive essayist, and perfect bitch.”
Inevitably, in a world of thin skins and dubious reputations, Simon became better known for maledictions than insights. He was routinely barred from previews and screenings, and, as long ago as 1980, an angry advertisement in Variety with 300 signatories accused him of writing “vicious” and “racist” reviews. In one legendary incident, an actress named Sylvia Miles, whom Simon had once described as a “party girl and gate crasher,” took her revenge in a New York restaurant by hurling a plate of steak tartare in his direction. But of course, the joke was on her: Just about the only thing anyone now remembers about Sylvia Miles is not her acting, but her culinary assault on John Simon.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
