Withering praise

One of the reasons I am glad to be retired from the high-stakes academic and artistic world is that my heart wearied of sharp-tongued, devastating criticism masked as praise. I read this morning, in the London Review of Books, an article by Terry Eagleton (whom I very much admire), excoriating Sebastian Barry while seeming to praise him. If Barry, on reading what Eagleton said about his work, did not have to be hospitalized for suicidal ideation, I'd have to wonder why not.

"Barry can produce prose of great splendour, but there is a soft-bellied sensibility lurking beneath it, breathless, cloying and rhapsodic." Eagleton names a couple of Barry's novels and concludes that their "unstaunchable eloquence and imaginative fertility (never far in Barry from excessive facility) mark them as among the most powerful works of fiction in English of the past decade."

Breathless, cloying and rhapsodic. Never far from excessive facility. What writer of any intelligence does not live in terror that someone they respect might assess their life's work and toss these words at it? Terrifying. I do want to see a work of art in its political context, as Eagleton helps us to do; and I think I share his politics, so that's not a problem. But the fear that my writing might be breathless, cloying and rhapsodic, or might suffer from excessive facility, is enough to freeze me up, shut my mouth, and turn my typing fingers to blocks of wood; to wither my creative impulses to brown curls in a gutter.