To Kill a critic

They do things differently over there. Imagine the autobiography of a literary critic sitting on the best-seller lists for a year or more in this country. And then imagine a novel detailing the murder of that critic - or somebody very much like him - selling 75,000 copies on its first day of publication and getting banned from review by a leading newspaper on grounds of alleged racism and personal malice. But you pays your money and you takes your choice. In Germany they regard literature more seriously than we do, which is a good thing; and are less forgiving about its politics and personalities, which maybe isn't.

Martin Walser's Tod Eines Kritikers, or "Death of a Critic", was published in Germany three months ago, so if you don't have the German, you are not yet able to decide for yourself the extent of its personal or indeed racial vindictiveness; but The Author of Himself by Marcel Reich-Ranicki - the critic in question - is available in English and is worth anybody's attention on several accounts, not all of them sensational. As for whether you would want to do away with him in a novel if you were (as Walser was) one of the writers he has savaged, pointedly ignored, or damned with faint praise in the course of 40 years as the most influential voice in German literature, I suspect the answer is yes, but once again the national differences are what is striking. If you did away with him imaginatively in this country, no one would notice.

Though it is sold as "an unforgettable piece of Holocaust literature" on the front cover, and Reich-Ranicki does have a remarkable and harrowing story of survival to tell, the book is not first and foremost important on this score. Perhaps as a matter of literary taste, and perhaps because evocation of horrors is not what his genius is suited to, his descriptions of life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto are only as vivid as they need to be. I commend this restraint. Others have been here, and, besides, The Author of Himself is what its title proclaims: the autobiography of a man as shaped by his reading, the adventure of a devotion to literature, especially to German literature. The ironies of that devotion are the book's driving force, just as his sustainment of it, despite every provocation to do otherwise, is its redemption.

Criticism of the sort for which Reich-Ranicki became famous, in his newspaper columns, in his books, and latterly on his television programmes, is hard to find in Britain. We have grown wary, for one thing, of expressing love of a national literature. I haven't done the word count, but I'd be surprised if the word "English" cropped up in literature courses in this country as frequently as "colonial", say, let alone "post-colonial". Nor has Reich-Ranicki been a friend to theory or the obscurities - the sense one has of initiates talking to initiates - which theory has spawned.

Resonating throughout the book is the advice of Mephisto in Goethe's Faust: "My friend, all theory is grey, and green/The golden tree of life." And while Mephisto might not be the best person to listen to on every occasion, Reich-Ranicki proves the virtues of accessibility by example, not by rejoicing to concur with the common reader exactly (he is too opinionated for that), but by forever taking the common reader into his confidence, by never forgetting that literature is for everybody and that criticism itself is a communal activity. Little by little, not through analysis or hermeneutics, but simply by means of an allusion here and a stray quotation there, the reason-why of Goethe and Lessing and Heine is brought home to us, companions of the author's mind, so many fruits on the golden tree of his life. It is not always possible to like Reich-Ranicki, even as he depicts himself. He is a cold fish. He views the personal weaknesses of writers with too grand a disdain, as though he is not a creature in the same mould himself. Time after time he notes their touchiness and inordinate thirst for praise, forgetting his own thin skin in the matter of criticism, and his own longing for the justice of immortality.

TIME after time, too, he reflects with sadness on his failure to tell a disappointed writer how much his or her work meant to him. "And I regret to this day..." goes the refrain. But the lesson seems never to have been learnt: the final soothing word of admiration goes on being withheld.

So, let the offended novelist kill off the critic as often as he chooses to. If it's war, it's war (Walser, by the way, is 75 years old and one of the most prolific German novelists, translated into 33 languages; so the war goes back a long way).

But for us, who are not interested parties, the example of such an absorption as Reich-Ranicki's in the literatures of past and present is exhilarating. What is more, for us who live in a culture which would like to do without literature altogether now, the example is shaming. Where is our English equivalent? What critic speaking in the language of men is a household name to us? And where is the English television channel which would give our Reich-Ranicki, if we had one, 75 minutes a week to talk literature - actually to talk it - without author interviews, readings, dramatic re-enactments and all those other sops to ratings?

"In addition to readers or aficionados of literature," Reich-Ranicki writes of his show, "our audience also included people who did not wish to know anything about it." In other words, the strays, the passers-by, the fools who came to scoff and remained to pray. Without such belief in the accidentality of art's appeal, and everybody's permeability to it, you have no culture to speak of. No, we don't kill off our critics in works of the imagination. But that's only because their death, like their life, is unimportant to us.