Lately I've gone back to Martin Amis's The War against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000, which I bought used on a whim, without knowing a thing about it. The book includes plenty of flippancy, as one might expect from a man who seems to have been forced to spend a large slice of his writing life as a hack reviewer; but Amis does have moments of care and penetration, particularly when he's speaking of grammar. This may seem odd, but in fact to me it's a sign that he's writing as an artist, not as a critic. He understands a sentence as a cohesion of words, as an artifact under construction, or, conversely, as an accident. I don't always agree with his stylistic pronouncements, but I do admire his concentration on the materials of his art.

But he also has other interesting things to say:

As in his stories, [V. S. Pritchett] has the curious ability to let art shine through him, helplessly. Pritchett is a mirror, not a lamp. He goes at criticism the old way, creeping up on a writer through the life, the letters, the creative temperament on offer. When he interrupts a biographical account to put forward his own view . . . , he is not presenting a rival piece of evidence but merely exerting his artistic confidence. The New Critics tend to look at classic texts as if they were contemporary and anonymous; with Pritchett, criticism is always busily attentive to history, character, and random human traffic.

By the time Amis quotes Pritchett's thoughts on Flannery O'Connor--her "fidelity to the inner riot that may possess the lonely man or woman at some unwary moment in the hours of their day"--I have been entirely convinced that now is the time to reread both short-story writers.

In a review of novelist Angus Wilson's work, Amis notes:

One of the few things I would rather run a mile than do is have an Angus Wilson character over for the evening. His fictional world . . . is a nasty world, but this doesn't stop him [from] being a considerable novelist. No writer can determine what may appeal to his imagination and it is simply philistine to arraign him for the things he happens to write about best.

I think this is an important thing to remember--not just about other people's work but about my own. Presently I believe I am the most boring writer on the planet: forever trampling down the weedy grasses of my own dull quotidian duties, excitements, and anxieties. But it's my stuff. What else do I have? Amis's comment is not exactly a comfort, but it does help me keep lurching on.