Michael Dirda was speaking at Vassar this evening. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic. When he started working at the Post, Dirda had various literary heroes but he didn’t want to meet them, fearing that if he became friends with a writer he couldn’t be fair in his reviewing. (He had a colleague get his books signed by the writers he liked–Hunter Thompson inscribed a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with the words “For Mike Dirda. Thanks for getting me crack cocaine in Boston–Your friend Hunter Thompson.”) Dirda said that he has long held that “there wasn’t any point in reviewing books I didn’t like.” He had no interest in writing “hard-hitting critical pieces.” He just wants people to read good books, and he performs the task of recommending them. I understood him when he said that he believes, like Auden, that writing nasty pieces was bad for your character, but I thought he was pitching rather low when he said “the real essence of reviewing is description.” Surely you serve your readers better when you present readings that go beyond description, that startle you into a different consciousness of the work–and the world?

And then, as if to challenge what he had been saying, Dirda said that he had of course written some negative pieces. When he reviewed Judith Krantz’s “terrible book” Dazzle, Dirda recalled writing: “I read most of ‘Dazzle’ in one sitting. I had to. I wasn’t sure I could face picking it up again.” He had ended the review with the words: “Enough. Sometimes reviewers lament that good trees have been felled to produce a book. In this case, I even feel bad about the ink and glue.”

Go here for more of such pronouncements as well as generous praise.

P.S. For a splendid story that puts its finger on the 7000-volt wire that connects the writer and the critic, go here to listen to T.C. Boyle reading Toby Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain.” The story, only a few hundred words long, is a masterpiece, with a very clever structure. What it recovers is the critic’s love of language that brought him to literature. It is very fine, and only after a while, also within the fold of memory, that the reader realizes that it is also a way of earning the critic’s surrender.

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