Stanley Crouch gets physical

[Christiern]

He is a terrible writer and an even worse human being. I just hope that he is sued this time around.

Here's the story: The latest Crouch punch.

[Jim Alfredson]

[RainyDay]

Must not have hit him hard. I don't see any bruises. Any reason why no one besides this guy's roommate is reporting this?

[Michael Fitzgerald]

http://www.newsday.com/features/booksmags/...nment-headlines

[RainyDay]

He isn't going to press charges unless Crouch threatens him again? Obviously there's a story here. Somebody walks up and "smacks" me in the face in public is going to jail. What's a "smack"? Did Crouch hit him or plant a big wet juicy one on the guy?

[paul secor]

Who cares about pressing criminal charges? He should sue the sucker and get his hands on some of that McCarthur "genius" money. Crouch never deserved it, anyway.

[Christiern]

Rainy, it sounds as if you are trying to defend Crouch. This is a first-rank opportunist whose bullish gutter behavior and blatant hypocrisy is indefensible--that would be the case, IMO, even if he were a good writer, even if he had extraordinary insight.

When you write pap, you have to expect it to be recognized as such.

[Larry Kart]

Crouch versus Peck, genuine cockroach versus wannabe scorpion. On the other hand, aside from that rough "Which circle of Hell are you in, mister?" equivalence, it probably says something about Stanley's egomania that a good many years after Peck's smack at "Don't Look the Moon Look Lonesome" appeared, Stanley should feel the need not only to physically confront its author but also to issue that weird Wild West threat. Again, Peck isn't even a real scorpion, but if we had a world in which the ultimate response to criticism (even of Peck's sort) were violence, I'm hoping that Chuck Norris doesn't write a book.

[Christiern]

Larry, I had never heard of Peck before reading this. Are you saying that he also lacks integrity? Surely, no pan of Stanley's "Don't the Moon Look Lonesome" should come as a surprise to anyone who has given it even a cursory look. Stanley's knuckles should be down to bare bone by now if this is how he routinely handles bad reviews.

[Larry Kart]

Chris -- As it happens, the timing is good: See John Leonard's review of Peck's collected book reviews, "Hatchet Jobs," in todays' NY Times Book Review. Peck's review of Stanley's novel actually was one of his (i.e. Peck's) better pieces of work -- a man with a need to proclaim that we're being fed nothing but dung finds himself feasting on a veritable mountain of it. Peck's problem is that his protests IMO are not genuine (however much one might be tickled by a particular Peck assault) but part of a self-serving stance, as in "I'm the best and/or only brave stable cleaner the Republic has to offer." I think we agree on what Stanley's problems are.

[Christiern]

Thanks for pointing to this article, Larry. John Leonard is someone whom I have admired since we both were doing night shows on Pacifica station (he at KPFA, I at WBAI). He was known then as the "cabbage of the night," among other things--very inventive, very inspiring. This NY Times piece is interesting and Leonard's observations are solid, IMO.

July 18, 2004

'Hatchet Jobs':
Smash-Mouth Criticism
By JOHN LEONARD


Dale Peck: the critic as no more Mr. Nice Guy.

HATCHET JOBS
Writings on Contemporary Fiction.
By Dale Peck.
228 pp. The New Press. $23.95.


ALTHOUGH Robert Southey was the poet laureate of England from 1813 until his death in 1843, and a Lake District buddy of Coleridge and Wordsworth, he is hardly read at all today. A wisecrack by Richard Porson may have done some serious damage. About Southey's epic poems, Porson said, ''They will be read when Homer and Virgil are forgotten, but -- not till then.''

You will notice that I mosey. Some of us, when we are about to be unpleasant, are bothered by the feeling that it's almost as hard to write a bad book as a good one and lots easier to write a slash-and-burn review. So we walk around the block to suck up Randall Jarrell and perspective. Others, like Dale Peck, fall down out of the sky on the head of the pedestrian author like a piano or a safe. Peck is his own blunt instrument.

Which is why, in ''Hatchet Jobs,'' his Newgate Calendar of maledictions, he leans on words with primary colors, like terrible, bloated, boring and gratuitous; hate, resent, stale and slather; maudlin, dreck, drivel and insipid; muddled, pretentious, derivative and bathetic -- not to mention scatologies that can't be reprinted here but brought no blush to the bum of The New Republic, where most of Peck's fatwas first appeared and where most of American literature is generally considered a waste of the editors' warped space and deep time.

Peck is so hard on his elders that you suspect him of symbolic patricide, except that he is just as hard on his peers. Famously, of course, Rick Moody: ''the worst writer of his generation.'' But Colson Whitehead gets it for his ''stiff, schematic'' first novel, ''The Intuitionist,'' and a second, ''John Henry Days,'' with ''the doughy center of a half-baked cake.'' David Foster Wallace's ''Infinite Jest'' so much fails to amuse him that he wishes on Wallace an anal assault. Richard Powers, Dave Eggers and the Jonathans, Franzen and Lethem, are rudely dismissed for lack of ''a true empathetic undercurrent'' and what he elsewhere disdains as ''pomo shenanigans.'' Nor is he impressed by the Dirty Realists (trailer homes), the Brat Packers (nightclubs) or the New Narrativists (sexual transgression).

But the wise old heads are also on his chopping block. So Nabokov, between ''Lolita'' and ''Pale Fire,'' sold out to ''sterile inventions.'' At the bottom of its bowl of ''watery oatmeal,'' the subtext of ''American Pastoral'' is Philip Roth's misogyny. Thomas Pynchon in ''a 30-year writing career hasn't produced a single memorable or even recognizably human character.'' Julian Barnes ''crawls under your skin and itches like scabies.'' Stanley Crouch's ''Don't the Moon Look Lonesome'' is such ''a terrible novel, badly conceived, badly executed and put forward in bad faith,'' that it's amazing the guy shows up on Charlie Rose. The ''ridiculous dithering'' of John Barth, John Hawkes and William Gaddis isn't even worth discussing, but they belong to ''a bankrupt tradition'' going back to James Joyce and ''the diarrheic flow of words that is 'Ulysses,' '' which tradition has now broken down ''like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid -- just plain stupid -- tomes of Don DeLillo.''

This isn't criticism. It isn't even performance art. It's thuggee. However entertaining in small doses -- we are none of us immune to malice, envy, schadenfreude, a prurient snuffle and a sucker punch -- as a steady diet it's worse for readers, writers and reviewers than self-abuse; it causes the kind of tone-deaf, colorblind, nerve-damaged and gum-sore literary journalism that screams ''Look at me!'' The rain comes down -- and the worms come out -- and just what the culture doesn't need is one more hall monitor, bounty hunter or East German border guard.

Not that Peck hates everyone. There's Homer, E. M. Forster, Thomas Bernhard, Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut. But except for Vonnegut, all they get in his fleet passing are adjectives that glow like gumdrops in the dark. He would much rather seethe and twitch: ''If you aren't a novelist,'' he hair-shirts, ''I'm not sure you can imagine what it feels like to write such heresy. Though I normally write in the morning, I am writing this in the middle of the night like a fugitive; my hands are literally shaking as I type.''

Is he really that afraid of Heidi Julavits? The hit man is projecting. So Western literary culture went off the tracks with J. Joyce, smashed up entirely with D. DeLillo and deserves wholesale junk-heaping, from the modernists who merely twinkle-toed in the theater of war, one blood war after another, to the post-toasties who can't even tell anymore if they're being ironic. In place of the word games, Peck would bring back ''something ineffable, alchemical, mystical: the potent cocktail of writer and reader and language, of intention and interpretation, conscious and unconscious, text, subtext and context, narrative, character, metaphor'' -- novels ''illustrating the tension between society and the self,'' written by the old-fashioned sort of Author-God who ''feels guilty about causing his characters to suffer so much and offers them apologies in the form of epiphanies or the satisfaction of inhabiting a meaningful narrative.''

Scratch a commissar and you get a philistine. But I haven't mentioned Sven Birkerts, have I? Never mind DeLillo, who is smarter than all of us (except maybe Powers). Or Pynchon, whose Mason and Dixon are certainly more memorable than Peck's Martin and John. Or Whitehead, whose ''Intuitionist'' is a levitating marvel. Or Barnes, whose ''Flaubert's Parrot'' has been cunningly ignored. Never even mind Stanley Crouch, who dumped on Toni Morrison and so deserves finding out exactly what it feels like. But Peck devotes more than 30 contemptuous pages to Sven Birkerts, for the street crime and mortal sin of generosity in literary criticism.

Think of it: with a whole world of worthy targets -- Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner, Donald Trump, Conrad Black, Eli Manning, Shell Oil, Clear Channel, Conde Nast -- he mugs a man who has spent the last quarter of a century staying poor by reviewing other people's books, who has read more widely, warmly and deeply than the vampire bat fastened to his carotid, who should be commended rather than ridiculed for a willingness to take on a review of a new translation of Mandelstam's journals, and who, even though he wrote a regrettably mixed review of a book of mine in these pages, deserves far better from the community of letters, if there is one, than Peck's bumptious heehaw: ''With friends like this, literature needs an enema.''

It's the relish on this hotdog that turns the stomach. He promises never to do it again, but the very title ''Hatchet Jobs'' reeks of market niche, an underground service like fumigation or garbage recycling. His alibi for being unfair is that he's a novelist, and they lie a lot. But his reputation would have long since earned him the right at his various pillboxes and lemonade stands to review any book he chose, out of hundreds of good ones needing discovery among tens of thousands cynically published, and yet he almost always seems to pick a punching bag, or draw his own bull's-eye on the passing chump. This is lazy, churlish and even demagogic.

I was going to suggest some hard-won guidelines for responsible reviewing. For instance: First, as in Hippocrates, do no harm. Second, never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle. Third, always understand that in this symbiosis, you are the parasite. Fourth, look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book with every change of emotional weather because we are reading for our lives and that could be love gone out the window or a horseman on the roof. Fifth, use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet or a license to kill. Sixth, let a hundred Harolds Bloom. But instead I'll tell a story.

Many years ago the editor of this publication asked me to review John Cheever's last, brief novel, ''Oh What a Paradise It Seems,'' after he had already been turned down by half a dozen critics who knew that Cheever was dying but thought his new book a weak one and didn't want to compromise their supreme importance with a random act of kindness. It never occurred to me that a thank-you note to a wonderful writer, a valediction as it were, would get me kicked out of any club I wanted to belong to, so I immediately said yes. At the time, besides that review, I wanted to write a message to those preening scribblers who thought they were too good for lesser Cheever. On a card, in small caps, I would have said what I say to Peck:

GET OVER YOURSELF.

John Leonard reviews books for Harper's Magazine and The Nation, television for New York magazine and movies for ''CBS News Sunday Morning.''

Edited July 18, 2004 by Christiern

[Larry Kart]

Basically, what's happened here is that a thug (Crouch) wrote a terrible book and then got mugged in print by a mugger (Peck); then the thug acted according to type when he got a chance. Moral distinctions are hard to come by in this, I think; thug and mugger deserve each other. In fact, it would be lovely if Crouch and Peck were now linked through all eternity.

[Christiern]

[RainyDay]

Must not have hit him hard. I don't see any bruises. Any reason why no one besides this guy's roommate is reporting this?

Yes there is. No one gives a damn.

[Bill Nelson]

Sometime this week, NYC forensic police may find the limp corpse of Stanley Crouch and determine he was slapped to death.

[JSngry]

My guess would be that he'd have been uglied to death.

[sheldonm]

My guess would be that he'd have been uglied to death.

I know beauty is only skin deep but I think he's ugly to the bone

Edited July 19, 2004 by sheldonm

[PHILLYQ]

Here's a little bit about Swingin' Stanley in today's NY Post("You want accuracy, go somewhere else!"):

NOVELIST HAPPY FOR SLAPPING

THE most delicious dialogue on Sunday night's "Topic A with Tina Brown" came just as the end credits were rolling.

"Stanley," Brown said to novelist and cultural critic Stanley Crouch at the close of her CNBC chatfest, "you have something to confess this week. What did you do, you naughty man?"

"I slapped Dale Peck," Crouch replied matter-of-factly.

"You bitch-slapped Dale Peck?" Brown squealed. "That is true," Crouch replied. "He deserved it."

"I was asked a question," Crouch later told PAGE SIX's Lisa Marsh. "I had no idea the sound was going out."

The bad blood that caused Crouch to slap Peck across the face at Tartine in the West Village last week stemmed from Peck's withering review of Crouch's novel, "Don't the Moon Look Lonesome," in the New Republic way back in 2000.

Peck wrote: "Let's be blunt. 'Don't the Moon Look Lonesome' is a terrible novel, badly conceived, badly executed and put forward in bad faith; reviewing it is like shooting fish in a barrel."

Crouch said yesterday, "I've been known to write a negative review or two in my time." However, "the only hatchet job I've ever gotten was from him" — refraining from mentioning Peck by name.

Still-seething Crouch claimed Peck "is a widely hated person in the realm of literature. He publishes reviews full of lies . . . his sole purpose is to elevate himself." For good measure, Crouch said Peck deserves "a gob of spit in his face — he's deserving of that.

"All I can say is this — I've become the people's man. I've gotten many telephone calls. I've gotten so many commendations and accolades. For the first time I've been in New York, I feel like the people's hero."

Howard Mandel, president of the Jazz Journalists Association, and the Village Voice's Harry Allen may not share that sentiment, as they've been on the receiving end of Crouch's swing in the past. "I used to be a boxer," Crouch admitted. "It has happened."

Journalists aren't the only ones in danger of getting slapped around by the cantankerous commentator. A PAGE SIX tipster reports that Crouch slapped two waitresses at the Tin Palace 25 years ago over service and tipping. "I don't recall that," he said, adding, "You can't change your past."

Peck declined comment.

[7/4]

Here's a little bit about Swingin' Stanley in today's NY Post("You want accuracy, go somewhere else!"):

Slappin' Stanley would be more like it...

[PHILLYQ]

Here's a little bit about Swingin' Stanley in today's NY Post("You want accuracy, go somewhere else!"):

Slappin' Stanley would be more like it...

[ajf67]

Crouch = Dishes it out + Can't take it = PUNK

[Nate Dorward]

Funny--just got up from reading the Leonard review in the NYTimes to find this thread. I'd come across Peck's reviews in the LRB some years ago (the Infinite Jest pan & the untypically positive piece on Vonnegut come from its pages)--can't say I'm encouraged to go check out his new book, which sounds like more of the same.

[maren]

Here's a little bit about Swingin' Stanley in today's NY Post("You want accuracy, go somewhere else!"):

Slappin' Stanley would be more like it...

Dale Peck may have been slapped, but Crouch threw punches at Howard Mandel and Harry Allen. Broke Harry Allen's jaw. Sucker punches, I might add -- out of the blue, in work settings, not presaged by mutually escalating physical intimidation.

Stanley Crouch is real big, too. And a former boxer? "Punk" does seem more accurate than "thug" -- because he seems to go off only on LITTLE guys (and gals -- as a matter of fact, I was briefly a waitress at the Tin Palace in the era mentioned above, though not one of the slapped ones -- I kept my distance).

I'm not saying that Howard Mandel can't be a jerk. Dale Peck either. Maybe Stanley felt ripped off, since the title of Peck's new collection of reviews --Hatchet Jobs -- vaguely echoes Crouch's own collected essays, Notes of a Hanging Judge. Guess they deserve each other, but IMO it doesn't mitigate the bully-ness of walking up to people in social/professional settings and punching them.

[Dr. Rat]

Never mind DeLillo, who is smarter than all of us (except maybe Powers).

Which smartness he has demonstrated to us how?

Leonard's piece is really little more than a hatchet job itself. Rather less amusing that Peck's because it falls into line with literary orthodoxy rather than defying it.

Peck's schtick gets tiresome, but, frankly it's about time someone started asking why Joyce's later writings are supposed to be so good or why DeLillo's rather commonplace (and when not commonplace, wrong) insights into pop culture make him so damn "smart."

Not to say Peck's right in his condemnations of either writer, just that it's good to see a naysayer push his points out of the margins and onto center stage.

Someone may now feel inspired to actually say some intelligent things about DeLillo and Joyce (not Leonard or Carlin Romano, so far though).

--eric

[makpjazz57]

Here's a little bit about Swingin' Stanley in today's NY Post("You want accuracy, go somewhere else!"):

Slappin' Stanley would be more like it...

Dale Peck may have been slapped, but Crouch threw punches at Howard Mandel and Harry Allen. Broke Harry Allen's jaw. Sucker punches, I might add -- out of the blue, in work settings, not presaged by mutually escalating physical intimidation.

Stanley Crouch is real big, too. And a former boxer? "Punk" does seem more accurate than "thug" -- because he seems to go off only on LITTLE guys (and gals -- as a matter of fact, I was briefly a waitress at the Tin Palace in the era mentioned above, though not one of the slapped ones -- I kept my distance).

I'm not saying that Howard Mandel can't be a jerk. Dale Peck either. Maybe Stanley felt ripped off, since the title of Peck's new collection of reviews --Hatchet Jobs -- vaguely echoes Crouch's own collected essays, Notes of a Hanging Judge. Guess they deserve each other, but IMO it doesn't mitigate the bully-ness of walking up to people in social/professional settings and punching them.

I do remember the Mandel incident, but what prompted Crouch to break Harry Allen's jaw and are we speaking of saxophonist Harry Allen?

Marla