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As it happens, we do have a fairly good idea of the kinds of books/critics who Tolkien was talking about in that moment. Most of the most cutting reviews of LotR (and they only became more cutting as the years went by and the book went through edition after edition, and worse, became a bestseller in America) came from the critics who wrote for the more "literary" reviews (The Times Literary Supplement for example).
These critics were, throughout the middle part of the last century, almost wholly in accord with one another that the "best" kind of novels were those of the High Moderns (Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad) and their inheritors. They valued experimentation in style (non-linear narrative, mixing genres, shifts in voice/tone/point of view) and an aesthetic that priviledges uncertainty and ambiguity. Tolkien, they felt, offered none of these things: he was writing in a style that was not only not-new, but was in fact very very old, and behind the interesting questions of his work, there was little ambiguity or uncertainty (we know not only who but what is good and evil in LotR).
It wasn't just Tolkien who came in for this kind of dismissive treatment. Evelyn Waugh (of Brideshead Revisited fame) and Graham Greene received similarly bad reviews. Interestingly, all of these writers were "openly" Catholic in their writings and dealt with issues of faith, belief and absolute notions of good and duty. You won't find much of that in the Moderns valued by the critics at the TLS in Tolkien's lifetime!
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