Tom Stoppard’s extraordinarily ambitious trilogy, “The Coast of Utopia,” was a big winner at this year’s Tony awards, nabbing seven in all. Among the victors was Billy Crudup, who was named best featured actor for his portrayal of Vissarion Belinsky, a literary critic who was at the forefront of Russian intellectual ferment during the mid-19th century. This award was richly deserved; Crudup has shown himself to be a splendid actor in both theater and films. But it was a surprising victory because of the character he plays—a sympathetic critic. That must sound like an oxymoron. Most people imagine the critic to be about as sympathetic as a sadist carefully picking the wings off flies. This bilious view is reflected in another Tony-winning show this year: the Kander-and-Ebb musical “Curtains,” in which theater folk trying out a new play sing “What Kind of Man?” which wittily expresses their disdain for the critics stomping on their show.
This merry mockery is far more typical than Stoppard’s exaltation of the critic. One reason for the almost universal loathing toward critics must be the way in which they have been portrayed in pop culture. Consider an earlier theatrical example, one of the few instances when a critic has been at the center of a play. Indeed, Sheridan Whiteside is the title character in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s smash hit comedy from 1939, “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” But Whiteside is the protagonist, not the hero. At best he could be described as a sacred monster—a snob and tyrant who terrorizes the people who cross his path, including his beleaguered staff and the poor Midwestern family forced to pamper him when he gets injured on their doorstep.
The characterization of Whiteside (reportedly modeled on a popular pundit of the era, Alexander Woollcott) set the tone for other portrayals to follow. A direct descendant of Whiteside was Waldo Lydecker, the waspish, murderous columnist depicted by Clifton Webb in the 1944 film of “Laura.” When asked to endorse a brand of pen, Waldo replies memorably, “I don’t use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.” The venomous quill was also the favored instrument of the most famous critic ever put on film—Addison DeWitt in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s classic, “All About Eve.” George Sanders won an Oscar for his suave portrayal of this haughty character, and his wicked quips have delighted generations of gay men since the movie opened in 1950. But Addison is the moral equivalent of the treacherous Eve Harrington. In the movie’s climactic scene, Addison articulates what Eve and he have in common: “a contempt for humanity, an inability to love and be loved, insatiable ambition.”
Scathing portrayals of critics have persisted over the decades. Horror buffs relish “Theater of Blood” from 1973, in which Vincent Price played a Shakespearean actor who murders all the arrogant critics who trashed him, in a series of gruesome set pieces inspired by the Bard’s tragedies. This thespian slasher was not the only disgruntled artist to seek revenge against his enemies in the press. I was personally horrified by the latest movie to skewer a critic, M. Night Shyamalan’s “Lady in the Water.” The critic in that movie was named Mr. Farber, and one blogger speculated that the film represented a “tip of the hatchet to Movieline’s Stephen Farber” as well as to critic Manny Farber (no relation). Shyamalan insisted that he was not taking a swipe at any particular writer. But whoever inspired the director’s vitriol, the fictional Mr. Farber was a noxious character—a pompous, pontificating know-it-all who ended up gleefully gored to death by monstrous aliens. No one in the audience shed many tears for Mr. Farber. After all, he, like the scribes dismembered and disemboweled in “Theater of Blood,” met the fate that most people probably desire for critics.
The reason so many filmmakers and playwrights distrust critics is that the best critics are fiercely independent and refuse to exhibit blind loyalty toward even the artists they admire. In “Shipwreck,” the second part of “The Coast of Utopia,” Belinsky explains why he lashed out at Gogol, a writer he once praised. “I loved that man,” Belinsky says. But he felt betrayed by the author’s latest book, denouncing it as “a crime against humanity and civilization.” Artists seek unqualified adulation, and they are instinctively wary of critics, who can turn on their protégés with vituperative fury.
In light of this perennial warfare between the two professions, it’s all the more startling that Stoppard portrays Belinsky in such a glowing light. At a time when most Russian intellectuals were aristocrats, Belinsky had a more common background. One of the delicious comic moments in “Utopia” is when Belinsky bangs his head against a table because another writer gives him an article in French—and he hasn’t had the expensive education to learn French. Crudup found the humor in the character’s gaucheries. But he also honored Belinsky’s passion, a fervor that only a few of the other characters in the trilogy can equal. Passion is the last quality one would ascribe to the pinched, prissy Sheridan Whiteside or Waldo Lydecker or Addison DeWitt or “Lady in the Water”’s Mr. Farber. The high point of “Voyage,” the first part of “Utopia,” is a long exhortation by Belinsky, in which he laments the mediocrity of Russian literature and links that to the failings of Russian society under the ignorant and tyrannical Czar Nicholas I. It’s an electrifying speech—brilliantly delivered by Crudup—that inevitably drew an ovation from the audience during the play’s New York run.
Belinsky admits that he didn’t have the talent to write plays or poetry; his talent is in discovering other writers and clarifying their import to the world. “When a book seizes me, it’s not by the elbow but by the throat,” he says in “Voyage.” “I have to slap down my thoughts before I lose them, and change them sometimes while I’m having them—it all goes in, there’s no time to have a style, it’s a miracle if I have a main verb.” No one has ever caught so perfectly the rush that a critic can feel on discovering a new work of art.
Belinsky dies in the second part of “Utopia,” but not before he has another marvelous speech in which he defends his vocation. “I fell in love with literature and stayed lovesick all my life,” he exclaims. “Every writer dead or alive was writing for me personally, to transport me, insult me, make me shout for joy or tear my hair out, and I wasn’t fooled often.”
Considering the ongoing animosity between critics and artists, the creation of this character represents a remarkable act of generosity and imagination on Stoppard’s part. Belinsky is one of the most memorable figures in this grand tapestry and just possibly the noblest incarnation of a critic ever put into a work of fiction. Critics know that we’re hated by legions, and we can live with that. Still, it’s an unexpected pleasure to encounter such an eloquent salute to our profession, courtesy of a great writer and a great actor.