Closer to Rude than Snide

Closer to Rude than Snide

An Interview with Leo Robson

Pauline Kael attends an awards ceremony at Sardi’s in New York City on January 30, 1977. © Abner Symons/WWD/Getty

Leonard Benardo

June 25, 2026 | The Ideas Letter 67

Criticism is not a secondary form of creation but a distinct craft, Leo Robson argues in this conversation with Leonard Benardo. Tracing its flourishing after World War II through a generation of charismatic public intellectuals who made criticism both glamorous and culturally consequential, Robson rejects nostalgia for a lost age of critical authority. One of Britain’s most distinctive literary critics, Robson is assistant editor at Literary Review and writes regularly for the New York Times, New Left Review, The New Statesman, and other publications. He is also the author of the novel The Boys (2025).

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Leonard Benardo: Does anyone grow up fantasizing about being a critic?

Leo Robson: Your question alludes to the idea that criticism is not enticing, or that critics have often failed at something else, or would have done if they had tried. The film critic Pauline Kael countered that when she asked listeners to a radio broadcast: “if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.” I think it’s an interesting point. In reality, all these things are difficult in different ways and to different degrees for the people who try them. They can be done both well and badly. There’s certainly a phenomenon of the novelist as failed critic. Just open a newspaper.

But I wouldn’t go as far as Kael. With reviewing, there is less sense of uncertainty, less risk. John Updike, who wrote fiction, poetry, a play, and hundreds of reviews, said that writing criticism was to creative efforts as “hugging the shore” is to sailing in the open sea. Using similar language, Kenneth Tynan, a critic who was also involved in a lot of theatrical productions, said that when he was the literary manager of the National Theatre, under the direction of Laurence Olivier, he played the role of “tugboat nudging an ocean greyhound into harbour”—Olivier being the greyhound.

But to return to the question—whatever the limitations of criticism or the critical personality, I do think people fantasize about being critics, nowadays at least. François Truffaut, who started as a movie reviewer, once said that no child dreams of becoming a movie reviewer. I don’t know where he said it—it’s the epigraph to a book by the Cuban writer G. Cabrera Infante, who was celebrated as a film critic and novelist. But this would have been after Truffaut became a director, in 1959. So while the sentiment may have been true for him as a kid, I don’t think it was true by the time he was talking. . . I’ll try to explain why.

There is this idea that the high point of criticism, in English at least, roughly traces the career of T. S. Eliot. It started just after the First World War, and it ended—but also sort of peaked—in the late 1940s, when many of Eliot’s admirers brought out their best-known books. This was the period in which academic literary studies developed, very much under Eliot’s influence, based around techniques of “close reading” of poems and, to some degree, novels, and around a certain kind of literary history. The key centers included Cambridge, England, and Kenyon College, Louisiana State, Columbia, Vanderbilt, Chicago, Harvard, Yale. The concepts that originated in that time include Eliot’s “dissociation of sensibility” and “objective correlative,” Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “intentional fallacy,” Brooks’s “well-wrought urn,” Leavis’s “great tradition” in the English novel, and Empson’s seven types of ambiguity. It was also when Edmund Wilson was writing the essays for American magazines that he collected in books such as Axel’s Castle, The Triple Thinkers, and The Wound and the Bow, and in Britain, when Orwell was writing. He died in 1949, in fact.

An extraordinary time, but an even greater explosion came after that, some of it reacting against what came before. There was the storied work of French and Belgian theorists, some of whom, such as Roland Barthes, wrote criticism, and of certain Marxists new and rediscovered. North American academia produced incomparable figures like Leo Bersani and Elaine Showalter and Edward Said and Linda Nochlin and Gilbert and Gubar. And there was the resurgent interest displayed by, among others, Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom in Romanticism—which Eliot and his followers hadn’t much cared for.

Above all, there was writing in magazines, of the mass-market and “little” kinds. To some degree this critical journalism was responding to extraordinary work in the arts, a sort of domestication or popularization of avant-garde and high-modernist techniques with...