BUT DO BLONDES PREFER GENTLEMEN?

This collection of nearly 200 short reviews and literary pieces—probably necessarily uneven in quality given the publish-in-haste nature of his book reviewing—demonstrates Burgess' broad learning and also his habitual critical highhandedness. The university don that Burgess—foiled by WW II—never became lurks close beneath the anything-for-a-buck man of letters and learned journalist of his current persona, ever ready to snap at bright objects—or dullards. Burgess includes among the dullards all feminists ("Grants from a Sexist Pig" heads the volume), most American scholars (Yankophobe Burgess finds Edmund Wilson's Anglophobia incomprehensible), and Daniel Defoe (whose Robinson Crusoe Burgess compares—outrageously—to P.C. Wren's Beau Geste). Burgess does like James Thurber, Vladimir Nabokov, and Princess Grace of Monaco—although his sketches of the first two never mention their celebrated crochetiness; but perhaps this master of the crochet never noticed a certain peevishness. If occasionally willful, these essays are also occasionally memorable in their epigrammatic succinctness. Another asset is Burgess' lack of prudery. He writes of Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings: "Give it a few years. . .it may well appear as one of the great works of contemporary mythopoesis. It certainly gives us a new look up the anus." As Burgess says himself in reviewing a volume of S.J. Perelman's short pieces, this is not the kind of book to go through in one sitting—the repetitions and tics become too obvious. (Burgess notes Perelman's repetition of the odd word "lagniappe"; he is himself addicted to the equally recondite "onomastic.") Still, since the literary turf of the educated reader—judgments about the comparative merits of contemporary writers, or the probable duration of literary reputations—is now almost ignored both by the increasingly theoretical academic journals and the increasingly illiterate schlock media, intelligent and impassioned practical critics like Burgess perform a real service. Forgive him his obtuse remarks.