BOOKS
ISS
JOHN SIMON
ACID TEST.
By
John Simon. Stein end
Day.
$5.95.
This is a fine, an admirable book. It is a collection of reviews
of a wide variety of experiences Mr. Simon has had, at the movies, at
the theater, at the picture galleries, and reading novels, poems, books
about pictures, works of literary criticism. The voice we hear talking
in the book-and one of its virtues is that it so distinctly
has
a voice-is
of the sort that Shaw describes, "the living, breathing, erring, human,
nameable and addressable individual who writes criticism," whose effort is
always to get "away from the abstraction 'criticism' to the reality from
which it is abstracted." It is a voice which is sometimes irritating, some–
times wastefully oblivious or defiant of good taste, sometimes delighted
with itself at moments when self-delight seems unjustified, flamboyant
at moments when flamboyance seems unhelpful or distracting.. But it is
fully alive and remarkably varied, and it expresses an intelligence
that always seems to have available the knowledge relevant to the
task at hand, all the equipment necessary to
be
the sort of critic that
he is. T?e title and the book jacket lead us to expect something quite
different from what we .get: "Few critics have had as many enemies
at an early age as John Simon has at 38"; "In New York, John Simon
keeps a moat of troubled waters between those who would silence him
and his eminent domain"; "You will disagree with him at least as
often as his publishers do, but you will pay attention to
Acid Test
and
to the books that follow, unless he is first assassinated." It all sounds
quite
ex~iting
and fearful, but what we actually get is something far
more honorable and interesting than what is promised. It is a mind
which is capable of rendering with considerable exactitude its experience
of actually attending a performance, reading a book or poem, looking
at a picture, so that, even when one
h~s
occasion to disagree, one is dis–
agreeinK not with the blankness of an abstraction or a theoretical position
but with the expressed concrete opinion of a voice that is alive.
He is capable, to
be
sure, of the tone his publisher is so pleased
with: "Robert Creeley's poems have two main characteristics: (1) they
are short; (2) they are not short enough"; "Ask a foolish question, and
you will, if you are George Steiner, get up a hookful of foolish answers";
"And what of George Voskovec's tour de force? You'd never think that
those dozen parts were all played by
one
actor. I didn't even think they
were played by
an
actor." But he is also capable of things which give one
