Critiquing critics: Who's Life is it Anyway? by Rascal

Look out, there's a Critic At Large in The Washington Post Magazine, June 14, 1998. Mr Richard Cohen joins everybody else in trashing writer Lillian Ross's motives for publishing her memoirs "Here but Not Here: A Love Story", but in an especially old fart kind of way. Really, I should know better than to read any of those guys who write for the Post Mag by now, but it was the only thing on the toilet tank at the time.

In Plundered Secrets Cohen uses his first paragraph to eulogize the author's long-time married lover, New Yorker Editor William Shawn. Only in paragraph two does he mention that Ross published her memoirs about her life with Shawn, before interrupting himself to empathize with Shawn's widow and grown children, what with their family secret of adultery being public domain and all. And the great dead Shawn himself? When he was alive there was some stirring evidence to show that he was a private sort of a man, and he also probably wouldn't have approved, we are left to conclude. So let's see, including Mr Cohen that makes one, two, three, and more, alive and dead, who may not approve of this book being written. Cohen suggests that because Ross is now "an old woman, an old writer" she is running roughshod over these objectors' sensitivities, hoping for some shreds of attention and income. Ultimately, Cohen decides, Lillian Ross may be a wonderful writer, but she "seems to be a lousy human being." And for Mr Cohen, I'm betting that's what really counts when you're judging old women writers.

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