Like a Rock

James Panero reads “Like a Rock,” his Letter from Plymouth in the November 2020 issue of The New Criterion.

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2020

Like a rock

On the four-hundredth anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock.

There is nothing particularly impressive about Plymouth Rock. As far as famous rocks go, the seaside boulder on which the Pilgrims may have first set foot in the New World is notably underwhelming. It has not helped that this ten-ton glacial errant, an Ice Age deposit of granite on the morainal coastline of Cape Cod Bay, has been moved and abused, venerated and desecrated many times since the storied passengers of Mayflower set down roots here four hundred years ago, in December 1620. And yet it is precisely the Rock’s humble appearance that can still evoke the greatest awe. The pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth proved to be the moonshot of the seventeenth century—odds-breaking, death-defying, and ultimately world-shattering. The Rock remains the manifestation of the first step of these spiritual wanderers, not just from ship to shore but also heaven to earth. For the nation’s celestial origins, Plymouth Rock is our moonstone.

It took over a century for the Rock to be recognized for its historical relevance, after a Plymouth elder recalled a folktale of the landing. Its importance then grew alongside a burgeoning sense of the central role of the Pilgrims in our national story. In the War of Independence, the stone came to symbolize the endurance of the Pilgrims’ separatist faith crystallized in the cause of national liberty. In 1775, the people of Plymouth joined Colonel Theophilus Cotton to “consecrate the rock . . . to the shrine of liberty.” In attempting to move the stone from the shoreline, however, the townspeople split it in two, a portent of the coming Revolutionary break. Leaving one half behind in the sand, they relocated the other to “liberty pole square” by the Plymouth meetinghouse. On July 4, 1834, that part of the rock was moved again, this time to the front of Plymouth Hall. Other pieces went farther astray. Two chunks came to reside in Brooklyn, one at the abolitionist Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims and the other at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Smaller fragments went the way of the souvenir hunters. Meanwhile the original seaside stone came to be buried in sand and port development.

Hammat Billings’s baldachin, which housed Plymouth Rock from 1867–1920.

In 1867, an elegant Beaux-Arts baldachin designed by Hammatt Billings resurrected the beach half, which was soon rejoined by the other Plymouth rock of Plymouth Rock as “1620” was etched in the stone. Finally, in 1920, for the tercentenary of the Pilgrims’ landing, McKim, Mead & White designed the portico that stands over Plymouth Rock today. The understated design, built into an esplanade and replacing the Billings monument, invites viewers to look down onto the Rock, now again on the sandy beach. At spring tide, through iron grilles in the pavilion’s open foundation, the waters of the cold Atlantic can once again lap over the worn stone.

The present portico over Plymouth Rock, built by McKim, Mead & White in 1920.

The treatment of Plymouth Rock has reflected the ebbs and flows of our own national conscience. In 1820, at the bicentennial of the Pilgrim landing, Daniel Webster proclaimed, “We have come to this Rock to record here our homage for our Pilgrim Fathers; our sympathy in their sufferings; our gratitude for their labors; our admiration of their virtues; our veneration for their piety; and our attachment to those principles of civil and religious liberty.” Pledging “upon the Rock of Plymouth,” he also called on Americans to “extirpate and destroy” the slave trade.

By 1835, Tocqueville came to observe how “this Rock has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. Does not this sufficiently show that all human power and greatness is in the soul of man? Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation, its very dust is shared as a relic.”

The pilgrims John Alden and Mary Chilton landing at Plymouth.

This year’s quadricentenary of the Pilgrim landing has not been so felicitous for Plymouth or its Rock. The pandemic has destroyed the town’s tourist trade and canceled many festivities on what should have been its most eventful year. A million visitors a year usually come to Plymouth Rock. This year that number may be less than half. Chinese, British, and German tourists, all precluded from international travel, are otherwise particularly drawn to the attraction. As I am told, the Chinese come for the American history, the British for the English, and the Germans for the indigenous. In other years, faith-based visitors are also regulars here, making their own pilgrimage to a site of America’s Christian origins. This year, even at the height of tourist season, the glasses at the Pillory Pub are half empty, the John Alden curio shop is in want of the curious, and the on-street parking is abundant.

Beyond just the closures, the Pilgrims’ progress, like the American project itself, has been cast in doubt. For most of our history, the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving meal of 1621 has represented the Providence of America and the amity of its native peoples—after Samoset, Tisquantum (Squanto), and Massasoit’s tribe of Wampanoag saved the new arrivals from starvation. In giving thanks for their salvation, George Washington codified the Pilgrims’ holiday into civic religion.

Until recently, the story of this first Thanksgiving was central to our civic education, from elementary-school assemblies to Peanuts television specials. Now, a “National Day of Mourning,” a protest march against Thanksgiving first organized by Native American activists, can draw crowds larger than the Mayflower Society’s own Pilgrim Progress procession held in town the same day. The Plymouth Rock monument has also been the site of attacks and desecrations. So far this year, the Rock has been splattered and sprayed with paint on two separate occasions. Meanwhile, the Pilgrims have been castigated along with Christopher Columbus for the usurpation of native lands and the murder of native peoples. If children are now taught anything about the Pilgrims, the settlers are more than likely to be denounced as a colonizing force—one that never really originated Thanksgiving, never conveyed the spirit of liberty as represented in their “Mayflower Compact,” and never even landed at Plymouth Rock.

The evidence at Plymouth suggests a more nuanced understanding. In Europe, the Pilgrims had drifted around as the backwash of the Reformation. Since taxation also meant supporting the ministers to a false faith, the Pilgrims’ separatist beliefs put them at odds with the monarch and the inseparable church of England. “The king is a mortal man, and not God,” declared the Puritan Thomas Helwys in his challenge to King James I, and “therefore hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects.” Like others, Helwys was imprisoned and died for his beliefs. From England to Amsterdam, and then to Leiden, the Pilgrims attempted to resettle. In Holland, they found the labors unforgiving and the temptations undermining. Here was a faith that knew more what it stood against than for. A group of Pilgrims struck a deal with the London Company to resettle their families around what became New York. They eventually hired Mayflower, a reconfigured merchant ship, for the late fall passage. Their decision to leave the land of Rembrandt—who was then a student just a block from their Leiden church—for lands unknown was propelled by a desperation for religious liberty. “England hath seen her best days,” Thomas Hooker, the Puritan founder of Connecticut, later preached, “and now evil days are befalling us: God is packing up his gospel.”

Plimoth Plantation today.

“Founding a colony was just about the most foolish thing a congregation or any other group of Europeans could do.” So writes John G. Turner in They Knew They Were Pilgrims, his new history of Plymouth.1 What powered these early settlers, especially through the misery of their first winter, was their separatist conviction. “They knew they were pilgrims . . . and quieted their spirits,” explained Plymouth’s Governor William Bradford. Blown off course, and after exploring the area of what became Provincetown (where there is now another Pilgrim monument), the settlers arrived in the protected natural harbor of Plymouth Bay. Regardless of where they took their first actual steps, the Pilgrims “walked into a disaster,” Turner writes. “The poor nutrition during the crossing left their health fragile, and they lacked sufficient food for the months ahead. Exposure to bitter-cold weather and wading in water did not help matters.” Barely half of Mayflower’s passengers survived the crossing and the first winter. “The living were scarce able to bury the dead,” Bradford wrote the next fall.

Just down the road from Plymouth Rock, Plimoth Plantation recreates some of these privations. In the 1940s, the museum’s founder, a gentleman archaeologist named Henry (Harry) Hornblower II, announced that “we had by-passed the era of putting a fence and canopy above a rock or some artifacts in a glass case . . . my idea was to create a living museum.” He tore down his family’s estate and converted it into a life-size diorama of the Pilgrims’ first village. Later on, the staff in period costume began to take on period roles. Now as soon as you set foot out of the reconstructed fort and walk down the village road, the Plantation offers its visitors an immersive experience. This year as you come upon Governor Bradford reading English law in his home with Mistress Winslow, the face masks are the only concessions to our present moment.

Yet even this quaint settlement does not fully convey the true extremis of the Pilgrims’ first year, as husbands lost wives and mothers lost children. The Plantation’s research and reconstruction of historic Patuxet, an equally fascinating section of the living museum, goes further in explaining how these privations were overcome. Then as now, a disease had reduced the population passing through Plymouth. An “extraordinary plague,” Samoset informed the new arrivals, had recently killed the people who had lived there. The Pilgrims arrived in the land of the Wampanoag just as the weakened tribe faced off against the neighboring and untouched Narragansetts. By the 1620s, Europeans were no strangers to American Indians. Traders had been sailing the New England waters for a century. What was new was the arrival of European families. In the early years, the Pilgrim and native populations gave thanks together for their mutual support. Twice as many Wampanoags as Pilgrims joined the first Thanksgiving dinner. Recent excavations have also suggested that the two peoples chose to live and trade next to each other.

This summer, after completing a three-year rebuilding at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport, Mayflower II, a faithful 1956 replica of the Pilgrims’ faith-conveying ship, returned to Plymouth under her own sail power. Plimoth Plantation is once again scheduling tours of the ship, tied up within sight of Plymouth Rock. Four hundred years after the original landing, the craft speaks to the hardships, endurance, and desperation of the settlers who have defined America in myth and memory. Entering the open hold of this tiny replica vessel, where 102 passengers would have endured the Atlantic passage together, reveals much about the death and disease they encountered that first winter in Cape Cod Bay.

The Monument to the Forefathers in Plymouth, completed in 1889.

Just up the hill from Plymouth Rock, now buried among the trees and residential development, the Monument to the Forefathers offers a final statement on the combination of forces that came to the Pilgrims’ salvation. Hammatt Billings began designing this eight-story-tall granite carving in the 1850s. His brother, Joseph, working with local carvers, completed it in 1889. The monumental site, which now also includes scalloped fragments from Billings’s original Plymouth Rock pavilion, might appear grandiloquent did it not commemorate such an extraordinary event. In addition to relief images from Pilgrim history, the monument is buttressed by the personifications of Morality, Law, Education, and Liberty. Rising above them, facing England to the east, is the colossus of Faith. “Erected by a grateful people,” reads the front inscription, “in remembrance of their labors, sacrifices and sufferings for the cause of civil and religious liberty.” Stone by stone, the monument recalls the Providence of Plymouth Rock. Through sacrifices and sufferings, its blessings continue to land on the country the Pilgrims helped define.

1They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty, by John G. Turner; Yale University Press, 464 pages, $30.

The Woman Who Saw the Future

James Panero, the Executive Editor of The New Criterion, reconsiders the Gilded Age author Anna Bowman Dodd and her uncanny predictions about the future.

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2020

The Woman Who Saw the Future

On Anna Bowman Dodd and The Republic of the Future.

John Singer Sargent could trace out subjects who were larger than life and as illustrious as his brush. He drew the brilliance of the brilliant. “John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal,” the exhibition that was on view last fall at New York’s Morgan Library, reviewed in these pages in December by Mario Naves, was a Who’s Who of Sargent’s bright new century. As the artist turned from paint to pencil, a glittering gallery of famous figures looked out across the threshold of the twentieth century in the light of renewed confidence. Ethel Barrymore, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Henry James, Lady Diana Cooper, and William Butler Yeats were among those illuminated by Sargent’s dashing strokes.

Even a century on, many of his subjects remain household names—or, in our amnestic age, at least they remain names known by certain households. Yet, even by these standards, there were a few faces here that called out for rediscovery. You can be sure that those subjects who have slipped from our collective memory have done so through our failings rather than any fault of their own. Sargent was a far better talent scout than our culture would permit today.

One figure who dared us to look back was Anna Bowman Dodd (1855/8–1929). Her appearance was anything but flamboyant, especially compared to many of Sargent’s more theatrical bright young things. But get close to her portrait completed around 1900, most likely drawn at a time when both the artist and the sitter were living in Paris, and this middle-aged doyenne with eyebrow raised and lips curled seems to suggest she knows something we do not. Just what she knows is the question: we have to be led into her secret. The answer, as it turns out, is that she could see the future.

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Anna Bowman Dodd, ca. 1900, Charcoal on paper, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York.

I am certain there are some readers out there who know of Dodd and perhaps even know her well. She might just have an underground following. But if Dodd is as new to you as she is to me, I would not be surprised. Although a prolific writer with over a dozen books to her name and an extensive career writing dispatches for journals and magazines, Dodd has so far eluded retrospective attention. Today there are no books in print about her, just as there are no books in print by her, or at least from what I could find. This fact may be all the more surprising given our supposed interest in “marginalized” voices. As a lady writer in a gilded man’s world, Dodd would seem to be a ready subject for revival. Given what she wrote, I imagine she just landed on the wrong side of history.

The majority of Dodd’s published works, and her best, were travelogues. Born in upper-class Brooklyn as Anna Bowman Blake—whether in 1855 or 1858 is disputed—Dodd traveled extensively from a young age. Her marriage to Edward Williams Dodd, of Boston, only advanced her worldly peregrinations. Along the way she developed an ear for language and an eye for color that still enliven her travel writing today.

Since Dodd’s body of writing is out of copyright, in the age of the Internet several of her books now make reappearances as online scans, complete with markings from the Harvard, Stanford, and New York Public Libraries, from where these books were photocopied. I located ten of them online with little effort.

The antique typesetting and illustrations give these books an extra transporting power. Cathedral Days, of 1888, tours the hamlets of southern England. In and Out of Three Normandy Inns, of 1892, takes us through her stays in Villerville, Dives, and Mont-Saint-Michel. On the Broads, of 1896, follows the yachting season “between the sea-beaches of Yarmouth and Lowestoft, the grain-fields of Wroxham, and the crowded river-wharves of Norwich.” Falaise: The Town of the Conqueror, of 1900, places us in one of those “minor towns” that “have been centres of great movements,” where “feudalism and chivalry, English and French arms, Catholicism and Protestantism each in turn struggled for that supremacy which was to make or mar human progress.” In the Palaces of the Sultan, of 1903, was occasioned by the diplomatic reception of General Horace Porter, the United States ambassador to France, by the Ottoman court of Abdul Hamid II.

These many accomplishments are made all the more remarkable by the early book that both framed Dodd’s career and sealed her reputation. In one sense, The Republic of the Future, or, Socialism a Reality, of 1887, published when Dodd was around thirty years old, is another travelogue. The short fictional work, set in epistolary form, draws on Dodd’s same powers of observation. There is also little action here, as the brief narrative is driven by the traveler’s descriptive force rather than any twists of plot. And yet, this book’s dystopian vision of “New York Socialistic City” in the year 2050, which returns this travel writer to her hometown after anarchists have leveled the old city to the ground, conveys one of the more prescient understandings of how the theories of the nineteenth century would manifest themselves in the years to follow.

The title page of The Republic of the Future (1887) by Anna Bowman Dodd.

The Republic of the Future contains the letters of Wolfgang, a “Swedish Nobleman,” writing to Hannevig, his “Friend in Christiania,” as he travels to New York over the course of a future December. Journeying beneath the Atlantic by pneumatic tube—in a passage that reveals Dodd’s descriptive abilities—this tourist first encounters the “armies of fishes, beautiful to behold in such masses, shimmering in their opalescent armor as they rose above, or sank out of sight into the depths below.” Still, all is not right in this kingdom of the deep, due to the

wholesale cannibalism going on among the finny tribes, a cannibalism which still exists, in spite of the persistent and unwearying exertions of the numerous Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty among Cetacea and Crustacea. We passed any number of small boats darting in and out among the porpoises, dolphins and smaller fish, delivering supplies (of proper Christian food) and punishing offenders. A sub-marine missionary, who chanced to sit next to me, told me that of all vertebrate or invertebrate animals, the fish is the least amenable to reformatory discipline; fishes appear to have been born, he went on to say, without the most rudimentary form of the moral instinct, and, curiously enough, only nourish in proportion as they are allowed to act out their original degenerate nature.

The absurd notion of regulating the deep foreshadows the regulation of the heights as Wolfgang arrives in New York Socialistic City. Journeying by balloon to his hotel, he observes that the future city’s skyline is perfectly flat, with not even the occasional spire or chimney to offer variation: “It is as flat as your hand and as monotonous as a twice-told tale. Never was there such monotony or such dullness.” Anticipating the ideological conformity behind our brutalistic housing projects to come, “each house is precisely like its neighbor. Each house has so many rooms, so many windows, so many square feet of garden, which latter no one cultivates.” The reason is that “no man can have any finer house or better interior, or finer clothes than his neighbor. The abolition of poverty, and the raising of all classes to a common level of comfort and security, has resulted in the most deadening uniformity.”

The forced elimination of sex differences and gendered labor has been another priority of the revolutionaries. The future home no longer has a kitchen. Food is now delivered by culinary conduits, from centralized plants in Chicago, in bottles or in pellets. “The State scientists,” we learn, “now regulate all such matters.” The thought is, “If kitchens and cooking and long dinners hadn’t been abolished, the final emancipation of women could never have been accomplished. The perfecting of the woman movement was retarded for hundreds of years . . . by the slavish desire of women to please their husbands by dressing and cooking to suit them.”

As the socialist revolution took aim at the family, motherhood also came to be seen as the “chief cause of the degradation of women” and was “finally abolished by act of legislature.” Children are now raised and educated “under state direction.” Automation and the elimination of work and family have left a society where “both men and women are muscled like athletes, from their continual exercises and perpetual bathing”—one of the few ways they “murder time which appears to be slowly killing them.”

The end result of the elimination of nature’s inequities has not been liberation but rather a “profound melancholy which appears to have taken possession of this people.” Women “dress so exactly like the men in this country that it is somewhat difficult to tell the sexes apart.” There has been a “gradual decay of the erotic sentiment . . . due to the peculiar relations brought about by the emancipation of woman.” A man’s house has “ceased to be his home. There are no children there to greet him, his wife, who is his comrade, a man, a citizen like himself, is as rarely at home as he.” Woman, meanwhile, has “gained her independence at the expense of her strongest appeal to man, her power as mistress, wife and mother.” Beauty is shunned, just as the “aristocracy of intellect” has been eliminated by the exile of “scholars, authors, artists and scientists” and by “forbidding mental or artistic development being carried beyond a certain fixed standard, a standard attainable by all.”

In the pages to follow, some of it humorous, much of it grim, Wolfgang tours this future city. He talks with its citizens. He visits its “Ethical Temples” dedicated to the “nihilists, early anarchists, and socialists” whose portrait busts surround the statue of their saint, the utopian theorist Henry George. Wolfgang leaves New York Socialistic City unconvinced.

In attempting to make the people happy by insuring equality of goods and equal division of property, you have found it necessary to stultify ambition and to kill aspiration. Therefore a healthy, vigorous morale has ceased to exist. In making leisure a law you have robbed it of its sweetness.

“We are still chaotic, and unformed, and unredeemed, and unregenerate,” Wolfgang writes in comparison to Hannevig, “but we are tremendously alive.”

Published in an era of utopian literature and idealistic thinking, The Republic of theFuture established Dodd as one of the few voices of dissent over the doctrines of socialism, feminism, Georgism, and the many -isms to come. What unites these ideologies, as expressed in Dodd’s book, is the leveling and deadening effects of equality, enforced to perfection through ever greater degrees of coercion and unnatural control.

At the time of its publication, the smart set roundly rejected it. “The author is either ignorant of the writings of the best socialists, or has deliberately chosen the views of inferior men in order the more easily to ridicule them,” wrote Henry C. Adams in the magazine Science of August 19, 1887. “It is bright, in good style, and full of pleasing imagination; but for an argument it is too full of imagination.”

If only Dodd’s fictionalized imagination had not become fact through the brutalities of our real socialist states. Even in the free world, the militant impulse of equalizing “rights” through the elimination of liberties continues to define progressive thought and determine progressive policy. The Republic of the Future carried this impulse to its illogical, satirical, and devastating conclusions.

“If some of the ineradicable, indestructible principles in human nature could be changed as easily as laws are made and unmade,” writes Dodd, “the chances for an ideal realization of the happiness of mankind would be the more easily attained. But the Socialists committed the grave error of omitting to count some of these determining human laws into the sum of their calculations.” As a travel writer who deserves rediscovery, Dodd saw the world, including our own.

John Simon, 1925-2019

THE NEW CRITERION, January 2020

John Simon, 1925-2019

Remembering the cultural critic and longtime New Criterion contributor.

James Panero on the legacy of John Simon (1925–2019), the inimitable critic and longtime contributor to The New Criterion.

Early in my magazine apprenticeship, I received a memorable telephone call from one of my writers. Hello? “Whom do I have to f— to get a callback around here?” replied the raspy, Mitteleuropean voice on the other end of the line. It was John Simon, our legendary critic who died in November at the age of ninety-four.

Only John, I imagine, would have used “whom” rather than “who” in his salacious salutation. He was not about to make an error of grammar at his own demotic expense, even for a joke. After all, “there are those to whom ‘whom’ is sacred, and those who have forgotten that they ever heard it, if indeed they did,” he wrote in Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline, his 1980 book on the falling standards of English. For John, which interrogative pronoun to use was never a question.

It wasn’t mere provocation that made John so memorable, although he could memorably provoke. It was his way with words, and especially American words, that played out over so many decades on the written stage. Born in the former Yugoslavia in 1925, John was a late arrival to our linguistic shores. English was the fifth language he learned, after Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, German, and French. So he handled our American words and phrases like hard-earned gold in his pocket. He appreciated their luster with the turn of his fingers. He understood their richness in a way that native speakers never would or could. And he stacked them on the page again and again in a tireless doubling-down of opinion.

John made a career out of criticizing the vicissitudes of stage and screen—of books, music, movies, theater, and just about every cultural space in between. His extensive writings have been collected in some dozen books, most recently a three-volume set from Applause Books extending over two thousand pages. That his latest review appears in the very same issue as his obituary speaks to how dedicated he was to his craft. He was a critic to the end and the last of a generation.

Whenever John came by our office, he was the first to lie on the floor and crawl through our slush pile of review copies destined for the Strand Bookstore. He then had us hold onto whatever he found while he made judicious disposals from his bookshelves at home—a concession to his wife, Patricia. There on our floor was the man we knew had received one of the most famous wounds among criticism’s legionnaires. At a party for the New York Film Festival in 1973—it now bears little repeating—the actress Sylvia Miles dumped a plate of steak tartare on John’s head after he had called her a “party girl and gate crasher” in a review. The exchange soiled a jacket he had purchased on Rodeo Drive. When John sent her his dry-cleaning bill, she refused to pay. A veteran of the culture wars with a laureled suite at the Hôtel des Invalides of criticism, John died with the acid still fresh in his pen and the paper-cut scars of battles won and mostly lost.

Like many, I grew up reading John on the theater in New York magazine. It was a post he commanded for nearly thirty-seven years with unparalleled intensity. He panned much more than he praised, upsetting many. Still, the theater world never hesitated to proclaim his favorable judgments, which were not always expected. He called Cats, for example, a “delightful albeit trivial Gesamtalmostkunstwerk.” He also dared to see theater as a visual experience rather than some disembodied political statement. At times he even discussed the bodies on view. He once picked at Barbra Streisand’s prominent proboscis. When the actress Calista Flockhart took the stage, he commented that here was “Ally McBeal in the flesh,” but “be forewarned: There is very little flesh on dem bones.” Of Wicked he wrote that “Kristin Chenoweth is cute as a button, but rather makes you wish for a zipper.” He called Liza Minnelli a “performer whose chief diet is audience adulation” and whose “comeback” was “from alcoholism, [being] overweight, and an overlong absence from regular performing.”

These offenses and then some were too much for Adam Moss, New York’s new editor, who pushed John out as one of his first acts in 2005. John was too controversial. He was bigoted. He was sexist. He was old-fashioned. He made fun of Liza Minnelli’s looks. Throughout his career, the complainants lodged their grievances against such supposed nastiness. Over time, they won. Not only was John defenestrated from his high-rise column at New York, which was never again as important in theater criticism, he also lost his lofty aeries at venues ranging from Channel Thirteen and National Review to Bloomberg News and The New Leader. Some of these falls were more his doing than others, to be sure, but a critic gains honor through each venue lost, no matter the reason.

The critic John Simon in 1975. Photo: Michael Tighe/Donaldson Collection, via Getty Images

At The New Criterion, we were proud to be one of the last remaining venues to feature John regularly and at length. At the end of his life, he otherwise made do with a blog called Uncensored John Simon—underwritten by his surprise friend Yoko Ono—and appearances on local Westchester television. John wrote seventy-six pieces for The New Criterion from 1989 through, now, 2020. The essay in this issue that carries him over the decade line, a review of a new collection of writings by Vladimir Nabokov, was in edits when he died on November 24. Even at the end of his life, John wrote in a distinctive style of erudite prestidigitation and playful idiom: “obiter—or arbiter—dicta” . . . “cream of a much larger crop.” The piece bears his precise and unmistakable accent.

The subject matter of Nabokov also seems right for a final act. The two shared linguistic affinities. Each delighted in their adopted, “richer” English language. Wordplay abounds for both writers, although John was quick to point out that Nabokov did not know German—unlike the reviewer of the present volume. A “special, poetic prose that depends on comparisons and metaphors” came to define Nabokov, John writes in this review. In Paradigms Lost, he made a similar observation about himself:

I suppose I must credit my coming to English relatively late with my especially analytical, exploratory, adventurous approach to it. I am always surprised when people marvel at the way some foreigners—Joseph Conrad, Karen Blixen, alias Isak Dinesen, Vladimir Nabokov—wrote English. If you have a sufficient feeling for and facility with language, coming to a specific tongue later rather than earlier can prove a distinct advantage. . . . There is a sense in which one is both an insider and an outsider in that language, and the interplay between the two becomes creative play.

As an outsider, John reveled in the new language at his fingertips. “English became eroticized for me,” he said. Beginning in Belgrade and moving on to study in Cambridge, England, he finished his high school years at New York’s Horace Mann. When he enrolled at Harvard, where he went on to earn a doctorate in comparative literature, he tested the potential of his adopted language by writing “ardent verses to a number of Radcliffe girls.” He says his “poetry ran dry before there was enough of it for a volume; by then, however, my prose had begun.” One must also wonder at his poetry’s amatory successes. He described one story as involving a “rutilant princess and a dainty redhead with a steamily rubescent epidermis.” His first love was words.

John defended the significance of words while bristling at their devaluation. He did not genuflect to identity politics. Nor did he come to our shores to carry America’s cultural baggage. The shocks of the Sixties only clarified this critical vision. He saw our cultural debasement as stemming from “some sort of populism, Marxism, bad social conscience, demagoguery, inverted snobbery, or even moral cowardice.”

Even in the 1970s, he questioned the rising Orwellian impositions of the new Left. “Should we Genderspeak?,” he asked in one essay for Esquire. “I understand and even sympathize with a woman’s desire not to be called a poetess or an authoress, because there was once a kind of female-ghetto poetry and prose that gave poetess and authoress a bad odor. But actress was never pejorative, nor, certainly, were empress, priestess, duchess, and the rest.” Contrary to the prescriptive dictates of our political ophthalmology, John was not about to start wearing rose-colored glasses.

The decline of criticism was just as much his concern as the decline of culture. “Insensitivity is the coloring of the age,” he told Mike Wallace in 1978. “The only way that you can pierce all that protective, or maybe not protective, coloring is by calling people’s attention to the fact that another opinion exists. You can’t do that by whispering. You can’t do that by a polite little rap on the knuckles. You have to make yourself felt.” Some years ago, my wife and I took John out for dinner in the theater district to be followed by a show (which he left at intermission). When she asked John’s opinion about another critic, his voluble response nearly sent the proverbial record scratching and plates crashing to the floor. I will reserve his remarks to the grave.

We “read a critic for the writing,” John says in “Critics & criticism,” his essay in these pages in November 2018. “If the critic goes beyond information and adjudication, if he or she can add wit to the review or critique, the resultant effect is at least doubled. . . . This is scarcely less important than the critic’s yea or nay.” As the explosion of the summer blockbuster paralleled the rise of pop criticism and hot takes, the thumbs-up, thumbs-down school of criticism was never for him: “Except from the palsied or mentally defective, it takes no dexterity whatsoever, let alone art.”

Nor did John have a style well suited for the proliferation of mass media. Up against the imperial forces of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, in 1983 he waged a one-man rebellion on Nightline against the dark side of Star Wars:

The raves for the early Star Wars have been so violent and so extravagant, that I feel one cannot afford to mince one’s words if one dislikes these things. I feel they’re so bad because they’re completely dehumanizing. Obviously, let’s face it, they are for children, or for childish adults. They are not for adult mentalities, which unfortunately means they are for a lot of my fellow critics, who also lack adult mentalities.

Rather than watch Return of the Jedi, John suggested that children—and Roger Ebert—read Huckleberry Finn or see Tender Mercies.

Good opinions may never be popular, but they need to be stated. Serious criticism often stands against majority rule and what one wants to hear. A year ago John joined me in my office to record a discussion about his life in review. Do you have any advice for aspiring critics?, I wondered at the end.

I mainly give them a piece of advice, which may not be helpful, or maybe it will, but is to trust themselves: to review in the way that they really feel or really think. Not in the way the audience, the readers, the editors, the public might think. But they themselves, what their true feelings, true opinions are. That is what you heed, and what you put on paper or on the internet.

John was not anything but himself. His departure leaves us without a friend to call and a culture desperately in need of his criticism.