Heavyweight critic and great essayist Vivian Gornick reviews Missing a Beat in the April/May issue of Bookforum, and her hardheaded take on Seymour Krim includes this assessment,
Krim developed an essay-writing persona—neurotic, ambitious, angry, and self-mocking—through which he made an identity out of his breakdowns, his hungers, his envy of those who had achieved worldly success: very much in the style of the great nineteenth-century English eccentrics (Lamb, Hazlitt, etc.), who also developed savage, ailing, self-involved voices that speak to us at vivid and voluble length.
That’s Krim, alright.
On other scores, Gornick is less forgiving of Krim than I am. But when reading the work of any writer — and this goes double for Krim — you have to decide how much junk you’re going to put up with to get the good stuff.
I always think of literary critic Robert Alter’s defense of Saul Bellow’s Augie March against charges that it is flawed. He pointed out that great novels are often “magnificent edifices with many splendid rooms piled high with junk.” You put up with the junk because you get “so much life with such extraordinary penetration.”
Now the problem here is obvious. Krim was no novelist. His canvas was infinitely smaller, and so he can’t afford a junk room. A junk drawer is about all that will fit. But he offers a slice of life in catchy jazzy New York sidewalk language and with high energy and true suffering that makes it precious.
I’m with Bellow’s Charlie Citrine when he told Renata that Humboldt was worth remembering even if his poetic output was wasn’t large or magnificent. Some of it was beautiful. “Even one is a lot, for certain things,” said Citrine.
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