Who Loves a Critic?

MAX JAMISON by Wilfrid Sheed. 260 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.50.

People have been known to ask a drama critic what qualifies him for his post. The charitable popular assumption seems to be that this chap once tacked up scenery in summer stock, or directed a college play, or was summarily reassigned from the sports section of his publication during an acute journalistic drought. The less charitable view is that the fellow is a failed playwright who plumps into his opening-night seat on the aisle palsied with envy and gurgling with bile. Percy Hammond, a formidable drama critic of vinegary wit, once gave a simpler answer: "Because I get paid for it."

It is among the innumerable merits of Max Jamison that Novelist Wilfrid Sheed provides a serious, pertinent answer to this old question. His hero, Max Jamison, is a drama critic by function but a critic by an act of nature: "He preferred a good mechanic to a bad poet from the first." Max is a critic in the way that the 747 flies, the tiger stalks, and water boils at 212DEG Fahrenheit. He could get irate at a three-minute egg for being a four-minute egg. Before he is even married to her, one of his wives looks at him after making love and remarks: "I'd hate to think you were assigning me a grade."

Max, in short, is never off duty. That is his pride and his eventual torment. He is a compulsively strict constructionist of culture. A somewhat prickly man, the reader will guess. Well, George Jean Nathan anticipated that objection: "The critic is no gentleman, and the gentleman is no critic."

Cold Showers. Max works for Now, a new weekly magazine. Even though he knows that he knows better, he tends to think of Now as a Babylonian garden where critical purity is corrupted. He suspects that his employers pay him more for his jokes than his judgments. To ease his qualms, he holds on to a movie-reviewing job at Rearview, one of those little magazines where a pittance of salary permits a critic to take bracing cold showers of integrity. Sheed has been a triple-threat critic himself, in theater (for Commonweal), in films (for Esquire), and in books for several publications. He has put a lot of what he knows, and something of what he is, into this novel. Some novels purporting to be spiny character portrayals are merely leaning towers of print, but Max Jamison is the mocking, funny, sad, irascible, loving, raging, hurting, touch-proof profile of a man.

Max has botched his first marriage long ago. He is separated from his second wife, Helen, one of those eager Midwestern emigrees who dote on Eastern intellectuals. He honed her critical intelligence to a straight-razor edge, and then his Galatea cut him up. Sheed scarcely needs to imply that two first-rate critics in one house is a brief description of hell.

On Saturdays, Max has visiting rights with his two sons. Their meetings are among the most affecting scenes in the novel--the father-son relationship reduced to a sequence of trips to movies, museums and zoos, the bribe of sweets and presents for affection, the heart-sickening estrangement gap as "the separated father becomes an uncle." For surcease from tension and sorrow, Max does some casual fornicating on the lecture circuit, and starts a wary love affair with a new disciple and apple polisher of the arts called Eve. Sheed's handling of sex is admirable for what it spares one. There are no moist orgasmic fantasies or topographical check lists of the human anatomy. He understands the erotic power of speech and the intriguing musk of intellectuality. Sex comes easily to Max, but he suffers from an unaccommodated heart. Eventually, when he has reconciled with Helen, left Now and seems to be living in a kind of lobotomized euphoria back at Rearview, one realizes that his larger suffering has been "agenbite of inwit," Joyce's term for remorse of conscience, a troubled unremitting scrutiny of the shortcomings of his own character.

Scratch a critic and find a moralist. Scratch a drama critic and find the latest priest of aesthetics in an apostolic succession from Aristotle. Sheed's high achievement is that he dramatizes every facet of the critical mentality and temperament. His style is terse, elliptic, introspective. It mirrors a high-speed mind, the precise way in which Max thinks, which is in internal dialogue, a constant contrapuntal debate waged between his thoughts and his words.

The critic may "sneer from strength," and Max does, while remaining painfully aware that many of his colleagues are show-shop hacks with minds and values no larger than ticket stubs. As Sheed knows and shows, the superior critic --a rare specimen--finds his job to be ego-depleting as well as ego-demanding. There is a cost to maintaining scrupulous standards in a society that feels intent should be applauded as roundly as execution. There is the fear, after a number of years, of saying the same thing over again. Is he an educator among the stubbornly uneducable, the critic wonders? Has he perfected a guillotine to lop off heads of straw? Has he, in fact, changed anything?

But the next night the gloom lifts. He is back in the theater, rushing up the aisle through the lobby, and out under the marquee for the ritual of the intermission cigarette--Max Jamison, Page 1, Scene 1. It is a pity this book came out in May. When December rolls around, some book reviewer may forget to put it on his list of the ten best novels of 1970. He will be wrong.

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