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Daphne Merkin and Christopher Caldwell

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from: Daphne Merkin

Attack-Dog Reviewers and Tactful Interviewers

Posted Thursday, July 15, 1999, at 6:07 PM ET

Dear Chris,

How in God's name have you perused the Times Literary Supplement already?!! I picked it up from my mailbox last night and noted the Scruton piece and the article on Freud and cosmetic surgery, but that's all I did: noted. From your description, the attack on Scruton sounds heartless but accurate--a bit like James Wood's dissection of George Steiner some time back. I do think this type of reviewing is a young mug's (male or female) game, although you will no doubt now inform me that Eric Griffiths is a sprightly 70-year old. What I mean is that it requires a certain Eyes Wide Shut approach all its own: You can't think too much of the human consequences at the end of your rapier wit. It used to be a great way of establishing a literary reputation rather quickly, in the days when people still cared about literary reputations. That's certainly how Podhoretz did it, and I made my very own youthful, relatively unheralded first appearance in print by attacking Chaim Potok in the pages of Commentary. I've always wondered about people like Anne Tyler who refuse to do anything but positive reviews. I guess it's rather shrewd, from a certain point of view, but it's also artificial, not to mention uninteresting. Still, the British are far more inclined to spawn good attack-dog reviewers than we are over here, where there is a sort of social-welfare approach to book-reviewing--i.e., if you can't say anything good, don't say anything at all.

Thanks for the reassurances about my surname. Whatever happened to Valerie Merkin, do you think. In the whatever-happened-to category I passed Dick Cavett--looking a bit puffier than I remembered him--the other day on Park Avenue. We were both walking quickly but I wanted to stop and tell him that I miss his presence and sheepish smile on late-night television. I know he's suffered from depression, so I immediately assumed he was rushing to a shrink appointment. A case of projective identification, no doubt, since I'm the one who's always rushing to shrink appointments. I'll never forget the interview he did with the travel writer Jan Morris, after he-now-she wrote Conundrum, about his sex-change operation. I thought Cavett asked his questions with great tact and skill, without skirting around the issues that were on everyone's mind. I remember Morris kept blushing and crossing her legs, as though the only way for her to feel authentically female was to act in the most caricatured of ladylike ways.

Do people in Washington feel compelled to flee the city for the weekend the way they do in New York? Every summer I find myself at the mercy of invitations and last-minute attempts to book hotel reservations, and every summer I promise myself that I will rent a house the next summer. I can't say I'm much up for being a house guest these days, in any case: I think it's one of those age-limited things, although I know there are bon vivant types who do it forever and arrive bearing cunning house-gifts that insure their welcome.

I suddenly feel a surge of separation anxiety coming on: from you, from Slate, from my morning immersion in the Times. Hope we will get a chance to chat again. I've enjoyed it.

All the best,
Daphne

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Daphne Merkin

Attack-Dog Reviewers and Tactful Interviewers

Posted Thursday, July 15, 1999, at 6:07 PM ET
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Daphne Merkin is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes "Reckonings," a column on personal and cultural life. She is the author of Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays (click hereto buy the book). Christopher Caldwell is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.
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