Goldberg: Herschel Walker may be lying about an ex-girlfriend’s abortion. Does it matter?
When The Washington Post published a photograph of Herschel Walker with a young woman in January 1968, the nation’s first African-American man of letters was already the most talked-about, most scrutinized, most admired young intellectual in the country. Even now, more than four decades after his death, Walker’s name still rings out in classrooms, coffee houses, and restaurants.
To the surprise of many reviewers, Walker had been “discovered” by a staff writer for the San Francisco Examiner, who asked the young author for an interview. Walker declined the opportunity to become a national figure. He felt he’d already achieved that status. The writer was “dumbfounded,” he once told an interviewer. “I had no idea that I had an impact like this.”
Walker, who died in 2012, did have an impact. He and his work (and his ex-girlfriends and their abortions) did more than just make you think about literature. They helped bring about a period that made literary critics, even left ones, sound like literary critics.
Literary studies, to put it charitably, have always been a pretty thin-skinned discipline. It has never been very demanding on a critic’s time, and it rarely demands anything of its contributors. The result is that for nearly a half-century literary journals—where a critic might be asked to put down a book he hasn’t even read yet and then be given the time and space to read it—had treated literary work with a level of respect that has often left a critic feeling like a kid in kindergarten. The difference between a literary journal and a literary publication used to be simply “that you couldn’t publish a book on a Friday and then leave a book not even reviewed that same Friday.” But literary publications