The Sheep from the Goats: Selected Literary Essays.

The Sheep from the Goats: Selected Literary Essays, by John Simon (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 453 pp., $24.95)

GREAT BOOK REVIEWERS have always been rare, but never so rare as in the present age. In the heroic age of reviewing (the nineteenth century), learned men belabored incompetent authors with a vigor that is almost unknown today, when readers of the New York Times must make do with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who day after day displays the most amazing range of ignorance. Over at The New York Review of Books, Robert Towers is better-read, but he has the power to make any novel sound duller than it could possibly be. Still, Towers does know his job. He knows how to puff a book for Random House or Viking, while at the same time showing his contempt: he's like a mosquito that can sting and drool at the same time. Then there is John Simon.

Mr. Simon may be best known as a critic of films and theater, but it is as a literary essayist and reviewer that he displays his best qualities: a high level of erudition that has been enriched by tastes that are, if not Catholic, at least Episcopalian in breadth; a correct and grammatical style that can be sober but never academic, witty but almost never cute; and finally an original and penetrating intelligence that has steered a path between the Scylla and Charybdis of literary criticism: professional theory and popular cant.

Simon comes down hard on the theorists-particularly the deconstructionists-whose object is "the substitution of hermetics for hermeneutics." While theorists such as Harold Bloom set out to obscure literary texts, Simon insists that the "sacred duty of literary criticism is to elucidate and explicate," and compares the critic to Heinrich Schliemann digging his way through layer after layer of false Troys until he reaches the city of Priam and Helen. More practically, he spells out his own method in the introduction to The Sheep from the Goats: "To look at the work and author steadily (as Arnold put it) and try to see it and him or her whole. And to make the examination and evaluation straightforward, informative, and, I hope, entertaining." The essays collected here are all that, and more.

Mr. Simon has divided his volume conveniently into sections corresponding to the various national literatures to which he has devoted his attention: American, English, French, German and Austrian, Slavic, Italian, and Spanish. Few critics would risk making fools of themselves in so many different tongues, but Mr. Simon is the rarest of rare birds-a comparative-literature PhD who took the trouble to learn the languages. He is sound in all the areas he has chosen to study, but he is especially valuable on the writers of Central Europe: Brecht, Musil, Kafka, Hasek, and Kundera.

For all of Simon's reputation for spleen, what emerges most clearly from these essays is a certain fairness. While cheerfully pointing out the odious character of Bertolt Brecht, he never loses sight of Brecht's literary gifts. He is equally fair to Tennessee Williams, Franz Kafka, and Gore Vidal, even though Vidal once called him "a compulsive rogue criminal" and "an Illyrian gangster." At the same time, little patience is wasted on poseurs like Norman Mailer: "Mailer needs neither sex nor food to be nauseating; he can do it with mere hyperbole."

At his best, a man of letters is always at least a bit of a pedant, and Simon is no exception, His greatest delight is to discover a misplaced accent, and his most cutting adjective is "ungrammatical." Literary biographers who have devoted years to their subject wake up one morning to find themselves pummeled and pilloried for their historical errors and grammatical mistakes. A reviewer must therefore experience a certain Schadenfreude in discovering that Mr. Simon is not perfect. For example, it was not actually Ovid "who first formulated the dilemma of the modern artist . . . 'I see the better and approve of it, but follow the worse.'" The Roman poet was, in fact, only imitating Euripides' Phaedra, who makes a similar pronouncement, probably in answer to Socrates' dangerous fallacy that doing right follows automatically from knowing right.

Given a second or two to reflect on this, Simon could probably recite the passage. One of the high points in the history of television was a Dick Cavett show in which John Simon took classicist Erich Segal apart in a discussion of Euripides and his audience. Simon ended up lecturing the Yale professor (and author of Love Story) on the process by which Athenians selected the winners at dramatic festivals. To complete poor Mr. Segal's discomfiture, "Little Richard" leaned over to reassure him: "That's right, don't listen to the critics. They've always been against me."

No one, not even a European polymath, can know everything, and Mr. Simon is stronger in the literatures of the Continent than he is on AngloAmerican themes. He does write very well on Robert Lowell's hopelessly botched translations: "A poet runs out of poetry of his own, so he makes it out of someone else's, rather like the fly that lays its eggs in the living body of a caterpillar for the larvae to feed on." On the other hand, his insistence that Lowell's free adaptations are essentially medieval in approach is simply wrong. Renaissance humanists did develop high standards in scholarship, but the loose imitation of ancient works was never abandoned as a literary form. French and English writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had worked out elaborate distinctions between the various degrees of freedom in translation, and some of the best verse of the period -Johnson's "The Vanity of Human Wishes," Rochester's "Satire against Mankind," and Pope's imitations of Horace-are, if anything, freer adaptations than Lowell's.

If eighteenth-century English verse is fairly unfamiliar ground for Simon, American history is for him something of an exotic subject. He apparently accepts Vidal's bizarre rewriting of history in Burr, and seems content to take Vidal's word for it that Jefferson was "a liar, coward, selfish schemer, inconsistent wordmonger, paltry tinkerer, and consummate hypocrite." Why? The explanation probably does not lie in any hostility toward Simon's adopted country, but it is hard for many educated Europeans to take us as seriously as we should like.

Simon's greatest successes are his essays on intentionally serious literature, even seriously bad literature. But, at its best, American literature is rarely like Flaubert or Borges or even Kundera, and it is hard to imagine what he would do with Bret Harte or Booth Tarkington. The closest he comes to typical Americana are Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams. In "Brothers under the Skin," Simon makes a good case for an affinity between the two. But the relationship may not be as fraternal as he suggests. O'Neill is a sort of father to most of the American playwrights who followed him, and, as much as one ought to bow to Simon's judgment in matters of the theater, O'Neill created a large aeuvre that Williams could only think of rivaling in one or two of his best plays. Perhaps this is only a matter of taste.

Indeed, a reviewer's greatest virtue is neither theory nor even judgment but that indefinable quality known as taste. While anyone is free to disagree with Simon's taste, he manages to be consistent without being entirely predictable. One might not have predicted his affection for Stevie Smith, for example. In fact, Simon displays rather good taste in poetry-likes Jarrell, despises all but a few good patches in Lowell. It is precisely because he has such taste in English-so rare among those who grew up speaking other languages-that he might better have omitted his analyses of poetic technique. In Miss Smith's terse but (intentionally?) clumsy lines, Simon discovers "childlike, tripping movement" and notices a beautiful "suspension" in the line "But only for a day as we." As someone who has been assiduously studying verification for 25 years, I have to say I don't see much more than a conventional enjambment that might have been handied with greater skill by any experienced poet since Marlowe. Poetry may not be the mug's game Eliot thought it was, but searching for sound-and-sense parallels is a parlor game that is best left to theorists and professors.

Book reviews are among the ephemeral arts, like newspaper editorials and popular commercials. They make a sensation for a time, and when they are gone we remember what we felt about them better than we remember the actual works. With most of Mr. Simon's reviews, such is not the case. His pans are as satisfying as a public execution, and as long as readers are interested in Kafka, Borges, Brecht, and Camus, they should be able to take profit and pleasure from these observations of a critic who is "as tall a man as any's in Illyria"-or in the United States.