Have We Lost Our Taste for Literary Criticism?

Literary and drama critic Richard Gilman, who taught at Yale’s School of Drama, was a provocative voice among the glory days of New York City’s intellectuals. He challenged linguistics in his historical analysis, “Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet” and hailed the innovation of Russian theater in “Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity.” The ex-husband of Lynn Nesbitt — the powerhouse agent of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Anne Rice and later Joan Didion — his post-divorce memoir, “Faith, Sex, Mystery” was a shocking document of male anguish and eroticism. Now, his daughter, Priscilla Gilman, has released her own second memoir, “The Critic’s Daughter,” reexamining the life of her late father. She’ll be speaking at The Cornwall Library in Cornwall, Conn., on March 25.

Alexander Wilburn: In 1970, your father wrote in The New York Times, “I don’t think of myself as a critic.” Did you have any hesitation when it came to the title of your book, “The Critic’s Daughter?

Priscilla Gilman: I had been considering writing a book about my father, and I didn’t have a hook, But I woke up one night and thought “The Critic’s Daughter, that’s it.” I never questioned it, but then when I started reading my father’s work and came across that quotation I thought, oh — this may be a problem. But I think the title plays with the idea that we do have worldly roles that we inhabit, we have labels, but we exceed them.

AW: Many could say they are the child of a critic — in the other sense of the word.

PG: My father was an exceptionally unusual person in many ways, he was very idiosyncratic. I absolutely see this as a universal story of what it’s like to be a daughter. My first book, “The Anti-Romantic Child,” was about being a parent, this book is about being a daughter. You hear your parents’ voices in your head, and you may direct your career choices, your romantic choices — not because my father was critical of me, in the sense of being mean or eviscerating me. But he certainly had standards and tastes and ideas of what was right for my life, as did my mother. My story is about valuing those voices, but also coming into my own voice.

AW: What was the point after his death when you knew you wanted to write this?

PG: It was in the spring of 2015. My father died in 2006 and I don’t think I could have written this book when my children were younger. There’s a lot of adult content in this book, and it was an emotionally grueling experience for me to go back and revisit it, process it and write about it. I think I needed my kids to be older and sturdier and more independent in the world before I could tackle it. In 2015 I felt an urgency to get this story down. Initially I conceived it not just as a complicated elegy for my father, but a complicated elegy for a vanishing New York City, a vanishing intellectual culture, a vanishing world and art and creative ferment. I found that disappearing from New York and from our country. Originally I was going to write more about his cohorts, like Stanley Kauffmann and other theater and literary critics, and then it really did evolve into more a personal story, and in a way, a more universal story. Every child has to come to terms at some point with their parents’ flaws, an idealized figure in your life that falls on the pedestal. In my case it was when I was 10 and all these secrets came out about my father, and I saw him in all his vulnerability when he was very unstable.

AW: You really capture this lost literary New York. Between both your parent’s careers do you feel like you had this front row seat to something that doesn’t exist anymore?

PG: I one hundred percent do. We were at 333 Central Park West on 93rd Street, my bedroom fronted Central Park West, it was crazy. My parents were paying $140 dollars a month. Maybe the paint was peeling, but we didn’t care. I went to Brearley for maybe $2,000 a year.

AW: What is it, $70,000 now?

PG: I think it’s $60,000. But back then middle class people could send their kids to private school and live in large apartments, and everyone in the building, if they weren’t an intellectual, they were a therapist, they were a teacher.

AW: You write that as a child you knew your father being published by Random House meant he was the center of culture. That feels like it’s from such a far away time. Do you think we've culturally slid so far down that literary criticism has no place in the mainstream?

PG: I sort of do, and his last book was published by Yale University Press, and that trajectory in itself shows something. In his prime he got advances for books, he was on The Dick Cavett Show. I do see some signs of hope, I do see academics being able to publish — but my father’s book being written about on the front page of The New York Times Book Review… His obituary written by Ben Brantley was announced on the front page. I cannot imagine a newspaper today announcing a theater critic’s death on the front page.

AW: It’s also hard to imagine a critic on late night. We don’t have Gore Vidal types appearing on Seth Meyers.

PG: And Dick Cavett was the Seth Meyers of his day!

AW: What do you think your father would have made of Twitter?

PG: I actually think he might have liked Twitter. I think he might have spent some time crafting some evisceration or comically amusing tweets. He was very much about precision and being concise and delivery just the right line. There is something about the form that probably would have appealed to him.

Gilman will discuss “The Critic’s Daughter” at The Cornwall Library on Saturday, March 25 on 4 p.m. in-person and over Zoom. To register for the talk go to www.cornwalllibrary.org