To the Editor:

There were not many jokes in Richard Schickel’s poison-pen “review” of my tome, “Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W. C. Fields” (Book Review, Sept. 28). The only good one was his denunciation of me as “too young and too English.” I am in fact neither of these, being a somewhat shopworn Israeli-Scot. Of course, Schickel can only hate my book if he clings so fiercely, against all the evidence, to the belief that W. C. Fields was the same person off screen as on, a notion discredited by W. C.’s grandson Ronald Fields long before I began my own humble quest. One wonders at the Eminent Critic’s own biographical method if he is so determined to ignore the facts. He is welcome to impugn W. C. Fields’ own writings as well as my own, but the value of Fields’ old vaudeville sketches--for whose use I am indebted to the Fields family--is in the way they reveal the professional craftsman’s obsessive reworking of comic business and gags. Alas, this wipes out Schickel and his hero, Taylor’s old thesis that the Great Man performed, sui generis, out of his angst.

Unable to supply a shred of proof for his thesis, the Eminent Critic resorts to personal abuse. This is neither dignified nor attractive, and I am at a loss to comprehend it, as I have never met Schickel, let alone run over his dog. I am perfectly happy to allow the reader to judge the substance of the argument, and I extend to my enraged colleague, even in his righteous fury, a very hearty handclasp.

Simon Louvish, London

Richard Schickel replies:

I’m sorry to have mistaken Simon Louvish’s age and ethnicity, but there’s no mistaking the ineptitude of his work. He doesn’t understand my review any better than he understands the art of W. C. Fields. I didn’t argue that Fields’ comic persona was identical with his private self. I was trying to suggest that the performer drew on his fundamental nature, his life experience and the texture of his times in ways far more subtle and complex than his biographer acknowledged. Needless to say, there is nothing personal in my views. It’s just that I hate to see a great subject trivialized by a writer the banality of whose prose perfectly matches the quality of his ideas.