John Simon (critic)
John Simon (born Ivan Simon on May 12, 1925, in Subotica, Serbia, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) is a Serbian-American author and literary, theater, and film critic. He was educated at Harvard (B.A., M.A., and Ph.D.), and has been a regular contributor to a number of magazines, including The New Leader, The New Criterion, and National Review. Although not a native English speaker, he is known for his incisive criticism of the (mis)use of the language in American writing, notably in his book Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline, and was one of the guests on the PBS special Do You Speak American?
Simon was a teenager during World War II, and must have been privy to many horrific things. The city of Subotica lost 7,000 citizens between 1941 and 1944 (including 4,000 Jewish deportees) to the Nazis and Fascists, and more recently became home to Serb refugees from the 1991-1995 breakup of Yugoslavia. Possibly, Simon's acerbic, even vicious, prose can be traced to those times from which many never fully recovered.
Simon was theater critic at New York magazine for more than 36 years, from October 1968 until he was fired in May 2005. [1] Since June 2005 Simon has reviewed theater for BloombergNews.com [2]. He also contributes a monthly essay to The Weekly Standard.
Controversy
Simon is noted for his erudition and also for his acid tongue and his penchant for critiquing the physical appearance of actors. (Describing Liza Minnelli, he said, "I always thought Miss Minnelli's face deserving—of first prize in the beagle category. It is a face going off in three directions simultaneously: the nose always en route to becoming a trunk, blubber lips unable to resist the pull of gravity, and a chin trying its damnedest to withdraw into the neck.") He was terminated from New York's PBS television station in 1967 because they considered his reviews misanthropic. In 1969, the New York Drama Critics Circle voted to refuse him membership, but allowed him to join in 1970. Reactions from those he critiqued ranged from Joseph Papp's remarks that Simon suffered from the effects of a "benevolent mother who undoubtedly fussed all over her precocious offspring", to Edward Albee's statement that "Mr. Simon's disapproval of my plays has been a source of comfort to me over the years and his dislike of A Delicate Balance gives me courage to go on." Harvey Sabinson, of the League of New York Theatres and Producers, once likened him to "a sadistic guard in a Nazi camp." In his essay on "Literary Gangsters," Gore Vidal, an occasional target of Simon's spleen, wrote, "There is nothing he cannot find to hate. Yet in his way, Simon is pure; a compulsive rogue criminal, more sadistic Gilles de Rais than neighborhood thug." Famously, actress Sylvia Miles dumped a plate of spaghetti over Simon's head at The Ginger Man restaurant on October 7, 1973. Time magazine's December 26, 1977 piece on Simon was titled "Count Dracula of Shubert Alley." In 1980, an ad appeared in Variety, signed by 300 people, protesting his reviews as vicious and racist.
Simon has attracted a great deal of unpopular attention in the Broadway community for his habit of speaking aloud from the audience during performances. On one occasion, when an actress made her first entrance, Simon remarked in a voice loud enough to be heard through the entire theater: "My God, she's got ghastly legs!" Other comments which aroused considerable controversy were his assertion that 1970's Show Me Where the Good Times Are was "a faggotty, Jewish, collegiate musical", and his declaration that "...Barbra Streisand [is] the sort of thing that starts pogroms." His 1985 review of the play The Octette Bridge Club dismissed it as "faggot nonsense". (The play's cast consisted of eight matronly ladies and one young man.) New York magazine briefly suspended Simon after a rumor asserted that he was overheard remarking in a Broadway theater lobby during intermission: "Gays in the theater! My God, I can't wait until AIDS kills them all!" Simon at first denied making the remark, then later acknowledged it and apologized.
Later, after the AIDS-related death of Michael Bennett, a major Broadway choreographer/director, Simon wrote a long tribute to Bennett that was entirely favorable and apparently sincere. Simon took care to fill this tribute with favorable quotes from his previous reviews of Bennett's works (along with the dates they had originally appeared, so that readers could verify them). However sincere Simon may have been in his appreciation of Bennett, this tribute appeared to be intended at least partially as Simon's attempt to distance himself from his previous AIDS controversy.
A Contrarian View
Remarking on Simon's dismissal from ''New York'' magazine, the critic Richard Hornby wrote in the Autumn 2005 issue of The Hudson Review:
- His removal seems to have been political, with a new editor-in-chief acceding to the usual pressure from theatrical producers to replace him with someone more positive. ...In fact, Simon was no more negative than most critics, but his lively writing style meant that his gibes were more memorable than those of the others. His enthusiasms were expressed with the same vigor-after heaping praise on the writing, acting, directing, and even the set designs of Doubt, for example, he described it as "a theatrical experience it would be sinful to miss." But positive reviews tend to be taken for granted, while negative ones are seen as personal insults. (I regularly get angry letters and e- mails of complaint from actors and theatre companies, but no one has ever thanked me for a favorable notice.) Theatrical producers in particular become enraged when reviews do not sound like one of their press releases. They finally seemed to have prevailed. [3]
- Lynn Redgrave and John Clark were particularly happy with his review of Shakespeare For My Father, about to begin a struggling debut on Broadway, and said so. [4]
Simon's Oeuvre
His works have been collected in several volumes, including Uneasy Stages. In 2005, he published three extremely large collections of his work, titled John Simon on Theater, John Simon on Music, and John Simon on Film.
Simon has written several books on poetry and film, including Private Screenings (1967), Movies Into Film: Film Criticism, 1967-1970 (1971), Reverse Angle: A Decade of American Films (1982), and Dreamers of Dreams: Essays on Poets and Poetry (2001).
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