I have a confession to make. For years, I earned a living—or a sort of living—writing negative book reviews. Panning a book wasn’t all I did, and it wasn’t even most of what I did, but the pans were what got the attention. Yet when I think of the prospect of sharpening my knife and setting to work on another negative review, distaste for the enterprise makes me listless. The truth is that I intend never to write a negative book review again.

I didn’t realize how strong my revulsion against negative reviewing had become until some months ago I read, in the New York Times, an essay by the critic Clive James titled “Whither the Hatchet Job?” James laments the inability of American critics to lay into their scrivening colleagues with the exuberance practiced by their British counterparts. “America,” James wrote, “does polite literary criticism well enough. And how: there is a new Lionel Trilling on every campus.” In contrast to the soporific American scene James sets the thriving vitality of book reviewing in Britain, where “ripping somebody’s reputation is recognized blood sport.”

James is on to something significant about the current critical landscape, but the mild tone in American book reviewing today is not a permanent feature of the American character. From Dwight Macdonald to Pauline Kael, John Simon, Seymour Krim, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Renata Adler, and Dale Peck, American critics have been as sanguinary as the Brits in their estimations of that lamb gambolling toward the slaughterhouse known as the “new book.” Even the “polite” Trilling was lethal in his sardonic condescension toward “The Kinsey Report.”

In fact, the New York Review of Books recently printed, on the happy occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, a glorious facsimile edition of the first issue, in which the majority of the reviews are mixed to negative. The negative judgments yield nothing to the Brits in critical spleen. Here is Mary McCarthy on William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch”: “disgusting and sometimes tiresome, often in the same places.” Norman Mailer on a memoir of nineteen-twenties Paris: “a modest bad dull book.” Jonathan Miller on John Updike’s “The Centaur”: “a poor novel irritatingly marred by good features.” Nicola Chiaromonte on Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”: “pretty near unbearable.”

Fifty years ago, the savage tone of book reviewing thrived in intellectual journals like the New York Review, Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent. Contentiousness was not just an intellectual style; it was a social habit, practiced at cocktail gatherings, parties, dinner parties, meals, and while strolling in the park. The tone of the essays in the first issue of the New York Review is casual, brisk, conversational, almost intimate, as if the written text were the spillover from a hectic conversation of the previous night.

Criticism was socializing by other means. And since socializing in those narrow literary and intellectual precincts consisted of egos battling for position, status, friendship, and love, it was inevitable that the criticism embody and sometimes exemplify what Delmore Schwartz—no mean takedown artist himself—once called “the scrimmage of appetite.” Pulverizing reviews were not taboo because the victims could always make their retort at the next social gathering, or on the pillow, or in one of the journals that served as kitchen tables for the extended family of writers who published there.

In the popular imagination, the intellectuals—especially the so-called New York intellectuals—were hugely influential, but this is a distortion. Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock,” published in Commentary in 1959, caused few ripples outside her own circle, even though Arendt’s argument that the United States was wrong to pursue integration at that moment was incendiary. By contrast, her article “Eichmann in Jerusalem” caught on in the larger culture because she published it in The New Yorker, one of the dreaded “middlebrow” magazines that was then in the process of making intellectuals like James Baldwin, Dwight Macdonald, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, and Harold Rosenberg prominent national figures.

But during much of the fifties and sixties, literary and intellectual life was far removed from the mainstream. Miller’s dismissal of Updike’s novel had zero effect on Updike’s career. The same, one imagines, went for Albee’s play, and for a volume of Arthur Schlesinger’s essays, most of which were panned by Dwight Macdonald in that first New York Review issue. The intellectuals’ inability to affect the social currents and political trends they obsessed over was a driving force behind their negative reviewing.

Elizabeth Hardwick refers, with worldly bluntness, to this sharp sense of limitation in an essay in the inaugural New York Review: “Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference—with words.” A few years earlier, Harold Rosenberg had described the downtown bohemian atmosphere as “a kind of metaphysical retirement.” Saul Bellow, in his 1968 story “Mosby’s Memoirs,” contrasted the character of Hymen Lustgarten, a bumbling, ineffectual former left-wing writer, with Willis Mosby, a smooth WASP aristocrat who, by virtue of his position in society, has become a member of the political elite. For many of these writers, the imbalance between the power of their minds and their actual power was almost vertiginous.

* * * The insular, hothouse atmosphere of postwar intellectual combat is where, about twenty years after it disappeared, I schooled myself in the dark art of the takedown. I can now see the irony of my situation—or, as those bygone critics would have said, my “position.” My awareness of my own ineffectuality in the world also led me to seek out the power conferred by words. But the world had changed. I was not practicing a shared style. I was cultivating an idiosyncrasy: I was one of the few critics who carried a hatchet.

What had once been nicely divided into highbrow and middlebrow culture—even at the time a crude formulation of a complex reality—had become a wildly eclectic place where “high” and “low” and everything in between existed side by side. A critic I admired as I was starting out was Robert Hughes, who reviewed art for Time, ruminated more deeply on culture in the New York Review and in the back of the New Republic, published serious books on serious subjects, and introduced people to art in television series on PBS. His style was gripping, elegant, and, above all, popular. Though I didn’t share his fierce aversion to much contemporary art, I thought that the way his career blurred the distinctions between “high” and “low” was exemplary.

The general condition that reigned was the gravitational force of commerce. Writers—including serious ones—began to be financially rewarded for their previously marginal ideas; in the process, they expressed them with less bitter ardor. We are used to wringing our hands over commercialization, but the assimilation of sharp critical intellects into the mainstream sprang them from their downtown ghettos. Rosenberg, Macdonald et al. at The New Yorker, Daniel Bell at Fortune, and Irving Howe at Time (before returning to world of the small intellectual journal with Dissent) all enjoyed the greater effect their new venues allowed them to have on the world around them, even as it nudged many of them into tempering their tone. They didn’t “sell out.”’ Rather, the “middlebrow” publications that hired them were evolving and acquiring a new type of candor and complexity. It was as gratifying a surprise to come across Hughes’s high literary excursions in Time, or Janet Malcolm’s clairvoyant profiles in The New Yorker, as it was to find James Wood’s unforgettable briefs for a more ontologically vivid fiction in The New Republic.