Annals of Book Reviewing

Students of literary pathos may recall that John Keats is the only writer who claimed to have been slain by book reviews. The intimation is there on his tombstone in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, in words that may have been written by his fellow romantic Shelley: Here was interred "all that was mortal of a young English poet who . . . in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies directed these words to be engraved. . . . Here lies one whose name was writ on water."

In hundreds of book reviews, over more than half a century, for at least a score of publications, this writer has never knowingly committed literary murder—much as some books and writers deserved it. On the principle that dogs do not eat dogs, book reviewers tend to refrain from lethality because they too have felt the sting of unfavorable notices. That was my own experience a few years back when a West Coast academic of advanced views scolded me for ignoring the alleged anti-Semitism of Henry James, which her sensitive antennae alone seem to have detected. She was reviewing my novel, Lions at Lamb House, in which James plays one of two key roles, the other played by Sigmund Freud on an imaginary visit to James's country residence. Her review appeared in an influential book supplement and very possibly prejudiced potential readers against my book. But, even apart from her utter misunderstanding of Henry James, hers was the great sin of book reviewing: ignoring the work at hand and condemning the writer for not writing to confirm her prejudices.

I might mention two instances in which I have been accused of mayhem, if not murder. Two of my great-grandfathers wore Confederate gray, both colonels. One, Georgian, fought with Lee through much of the War for Southern Independence, and he was killed in the siege of Petersburg in August 1864 and rests in Hollywood cemetery in Richmond. The other, a schoolmaster, local historian, and sometime colonel of militia, died in his bed after a long life. But, on his gravestone in Grace Lutheran cemetery, near Hickory, North Carolina, he caused to be chiseled, with pride: George M. Yoder, Colonel, csa.

This ancestral history is, however, mere prologue. When I was assigned by the Washington Post to review the memoir of the late historian Stephen Ambrose, I was dismayed by his unqualified assertion that the South had "fought to keep fellow human beings in bondage." This is a familiar assertion these days, as we observe the sesquicentennial of the war; but it is polemic, not history, and in plainer words it is demonstrably false—at least as a comprehensive explanation of Confederate tenacity. I felt obliged by the ancestral shades to write a few corrective sentences—citing, among other facts, that my Georgia ancestor said that, like his great commander, he fought "to resist an unconstitutional invasion of my homeland." I was set upon by many Post readers who claimed I had spoiled their breakfast and/or caused them to spill their morning coffee. It was short of lethality, but seems to have constituted a kind of virtual killing—of a myth.

And another: not long after he left the presidency, Jimmy Carter published what may stand among the drier examples of that anodyne form the presidential memoir. It was called Keeping Faith, and again I was assigned to review it by the editors of the Washington Post's now deceased book supplement. Amid some more laudatory passages I wrote:

Unfortunately, the personality reflected in these pages is a bit blurred. It will disappoint those who assume that every public man floats, like an iceberg, on a hidden substructure of self-contradiction. The Jimmy Carter appearing here is the same sober, energetic, earnest Carter who stood before us for four years— friendly to a point, but with the icy eyes and the grin not quite congruent; not exactly humorless but not witty either; unschooled in . . . Washington's accustomed rituals; a president who assumes . . . that others take public duties as seriously as he does.

And:

With the exception of the...