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On the Horizon:
Irwin Shaw: Adultery, the Last Politics
- Abstract
But this is a remark, of course, precisely out of the pigeon hole—not the expression of an independent opinion at all, but a cliché about critics not quite redeemed by the rancor behind it. To be sure, the bad temper of writers who hate critics is no more significant than the bad temper of critics who hate writers who hate critics; it is the particular names they call each other that matter. What, then, are Shaw’s charges against the critics? First, that they are pettish, smug, and self-satisfied, and second, that they will not let the poor, dedicated author show in his fictions the defeat of a “decent man.” The first part of the indictment is merely a banality compounded of the same sleazy part-truths as Shaw’s observation that in America all writers are regarded as eggheads and subversives, or his trite observation that “writing can still be original, but talking or writing about writing can’t.” “Holy man,” he cries to his questioners with the masculine contempt for chatter of which he seems so proud, “I want to play some tennis.”
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