The Metropolitan Critic
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My first book, The Metropolitan Critic was published in 1974 by Faber & Faber. There was only ever a hardback. A second edition, with a new Foreword and postscripts to the essays, was published by Jonathan Cape in hardback in 1994, and was followed up in 1995 by a Picador paperback. Julian Barnes used to make jokes about how the original edition had two photographs of me on the jacket. The second edition had four of them.
A postscript about postscripts: Though it attracted some kind reviews, the first edition of The Metropolitan Critic eventually seemed embarrassingly exuberant even to the man who had written it. When I reissued the book twenty years later, I attached postscripts to some of the pieces, rather than try to cheat time by toning down their style and updating their conclusions. In this, the ultimate stage of retrieval, these postscripts are retained, but so, once again, are all the original excesses. For someone who so clearly fancied himself in the book's title role, I certainly didn't set much store by a sober demeanour. Too late, and too dishonest, to try fixing that now. |
Extracts
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Contents
Foreword
Part One: TWO EXTRAMURAL MINDS
1. The Metropolitan Critic
2. Big Medicine
Part Two: SOME OF THE POETS
3. When theGloves are Off
4. Everything's Rainbow
5. Settling for Dust
6. Two Essays on John Berryman
7. Two Essays on Theodore Roethke
8. An Instrument to measure Spring With
9. Keyes and Douglas
10. Sniper-Style
11. A Reason for Translation
12. Augustan Wattle
13. Seamus Heaney
14. The Wheeze Incarnadined
Part Three: CARRY THAT WEIGHT
15. Roy Fuler's Magisterial Thumb
16. Love, Help and the Performing Self
17. F. R. Leavis in America
Part Four: PAST MASTERS
18. D. H. Lawrence in transit
19. The Perpetual Promise of James Agee
20. A Dinosaur at Sunset
21. The Last Amateur
Part Five: CLERICAL TREASON
22. Cuter than a Cub Koala: Ricard Neville's Play Power
23. After the Oz Trial
24 Another Dreamer
25. The Green American
26. Getting Married Later
27. An Absolute Lady
28. Aquarius, Prisoner of Sex
29. Speed Writes: Tom Wolfe's The Mid-Atlantic Man
30. A Whole Gang of Noise
31. Rough Beast
32. He Didn't Stifle
33. The New Lost
34. The Fascist Intellectuals
Part Six: FROM THE LARGEST ISLAND
35. Tell England: or, In the Penal Colony
36. A Poor Report on Violence
37. Supplementary Viewpoints
Part One: TWO EXTRAMURAL MINDS
1. The Metropolitan Critic
2. Big Medicine
Part Two: SOME OF THE POETS
3. When theGloves are Off
4. Everything's Rainbow
5. Settling for Dust
6. Two Essays on John Berryman
7. Two Essays on Theodore Roethke
8. An Instrument to measure Spring With
9. Keyes and Douglas
10. Sniper-Style
11. A Reason for Translation
12. Augustan Wattle
13. Seamus Heaney
14. The Wheeze Incarnadined
Part Three: CARRY THAT WEIGHT
15. Roy Fuler's Magisterial Thumb
16. Love, Help and the Performing Self
17. F. R. Leavis in America
Part Four: PAST MASTERS
18. D. H. Lawrence in transit
19. The Perpetual Promise of James Agee
20. A Dinosaur at Sunset
21. The Last Amateur
Part Five: CLERICAL TREASON
22. Cuter than a Cub Koala: Ricard Neville's Play Power
23. After the Oz Trial
24 Another Dreamer
25. The Green American
26. Getting Married Later
27. An Absolute Lady
28. Aquarius, Prisoner of Sex
29. Speed Writes: Tom Wolfe's The Mid-Atlantic Man
30. A Whole Gang of Noise
31. Rough Beast
32. He Didn't Stifle
33. The New Lost
34. The Fascist Intellectuals
Part Six: FROM THE LARGEST ISLAND
35. Tell England: or, In the Penal Colony
36. A Poor Report on Violence
37. Supplementary Viewpoints