Work
Celebrated for his erudition and longevity as a critic, Simon is equally well known for his aggressive style.
Reporting for Playbill, Robert Simonson wrote that his "stinging reviews—particularly his sometimes vicious appraisals of performers' physical appearances—have periodically raised calls in the theatre community for his removal." On Simon's dismissal from New York magazine, critic Richard Hornby wrote in the The Hudson Review:
His removal seems to have been political, with a new editor-in-chief acceding to the usual pressure from theatrical producers to replace him with someone more positive....In fact, Simon was no more negative than most critics, but his lively writing style meant that his gibes were more memorable than those of the others. His enthusiasms were expressed with the same vigor—after heaping praise on the writing, acting, directing, and even the set designs of Doubt, for example, he described it as "a theatrical experience it would be sinful to miss." But positive reviews tend to be taken for granted, while negative ones are seen as personal insults. (I regularly get angry letters and e-mails of complaint from actors and theatre companies, but no one has ever thanked me for a favorable notice.) Theatrical producers in particular become enraged when reviews do not sound like one of their press releases. They finally seemed to have prevailed.
While some people loved Simon's reviews in New York magazine and others hated them, many were quick to change positions, depending on what he thought of their latest work. Interviewed for The Paris Review, Simon described a photo taken with producer Joseph Papp who had "his arm around me after I've given him a good review, and for the picture back the next month because of a bad review." Lynn Redgrave and John Clark were particularly happy with his review of Shakespeare for My Father, about to begin a struggling debut on Broadway. Others have suggested, however, that his negative criticism is mean-spirited rather than constructive. For example, he is known for dwelling on the unattractiveness of actors he does not like: Wallace Shawn is "unsightly" and Barbra Streisand's nose "cleaves the giant screen from east to west, bisects it from north to south. It zigzags across our horizon like a bolt of fleshy lightning." In his memoir Life Itself, Roger Ebert wrote, "I feel repugnance for the critic John Simon, who made it a specialty to attack the way actors look. They can't help how they look, any more than John Simon can help looking like a rat." In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker criticised Simon for reviews that obsessively focus on an actor's physical appearance to the detriment of critical acumen. Carol Burnett wrote a letter to Time Magazine responding to an attack on Liza Minnelli and she closed with "Could Mr. Simon be suffering from a simple case of heart envy?"
Although not a native English speaker, he also is known for his criticism of the (mis)use of language in American writing, and edited the 1981 collection, Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline. He was one of the guests on the PBS special Do You Speak American? In addition, Bryan Garner referred to Simon as a language "maven" and credited him with improving the quality of American criticism.
Read more about this topic: John Simon (critic)
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are constantly being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To lift, to fetch, to drive, to shed, to pen,
Are acts I recognize, with all they mean
Of shepherding the unruly, for a kind of
Controlled woolgathering is my work too.”
—Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972)
“I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.”
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)