Ron Peters's Reviews > On Writers and Writing

What an arrogant, mean-hearted, hurtful S.O.B. he was as a critic! He is cruelly judgmental, so certain that no one except himself can possibly be an arbiter of taste in both fiction and morals. (Except that, for him it’s not a matter of taste, he is simply right.) He accuses the writers he attacks of all the things he does himself. And blithely spouts arrant nonsense: “Walt Disney is now universally recognized as the greatest artist the world has ever known, except for, possibly, Apollonius of Rhodes.” (p. 89)

Here he is describing why he likes John Cheever (and one suspects, himself), because he had: “what Tolstoy called, without apology, the artist’s correct moral relation to his material. I will not spell out in detail what all that means, especially the unspoken premise here that some opinions on life are plain right and some plain wrong, nor will I waste space explaining why nearly all the rest of our respected novelists seem to me either mediocre or fake.” (p. 134) I’m so happy I never met the man.