Author bashing
Okay, I’ve been on antibiotics for over twenty-four hours. Where’s my miraculous recovery?
Fortunately Maren sent me these lovely links to ‘The 50 best author to author put downs of all time’: http://www.examiner.com/x-562-Book-Examiner~y2010m4d16-The-50-best-author-vs-author-putdowns-of-all-time Part One
It’s nice to know that Evil Cowishness has a long and honourable history. Well, maybe not honourable exactly.
Of course I can’t resist excerpting a few for interpolations. I’ve got Pollyanna locked in a closet. Those muffled yells you hear. . . .
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. . . Yes, hell hath no fury like one author gleefully savaging another author’s work
. . . writes Michelle Kerns in her introduction to her (excellent) 50. * Well . . . not exactly. Some of the following may be ill-spirited but I will bet you most, if not absolutely all of them, are merely honest. There are certainly writers who get up my nose because it makes me crazy they are either lauded or popular or both when I think they write bad (as opposed to good) garbage and/or pretentious drivel . . . but mostly I don’t like writing I think is bad garbage or pretentious drivel because I don’t like bad garbage or pretentious drivel. If you’re a writer you can’t help but be sensitive to other writing. It goes with the territory. Some of us, of course, are more opinionated about it than others.
1. Ernest Hemingway, according to Vladimir Nabokov (1972)
As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.
Yep. Pretty much got him in one, although I thought a few of the short stories as examples of he-man-ishness or he-man-ishness gone wrong are pretty excellent, in a don’t-want-him-over-for-dinner way.
7. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)
Bulwer nauseates me; he is the very pimple of the age’s humbug. There is no hope of the public, so long as he retains an admirer, a reader, or a publisher.
Yes, old Mr It Was a Dark and Stormy Night himself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_was_a_dark_and_stormy_night
Which, just by the way, as an example of what the phrase (and the contest) has come to mean, isn’t all that heinous. I’ve read worse. Bulwer-Lytton wrote worse, but somehow this is the line he’s famous for. And I like Bulwer-Lytton like I liked The Beetle by Richard Marsh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Marsh_(author)
Which very long time readers of this blog will remember my reporting on. It’s very silly, it’s a particular sort of silly thing, if you don’t like it I perfectly understand and that’s your privilege, and therefore your point would be? I think, although I could be wrong, that Bulwer-Lytton himself knew when he was writing pot boilers. And I think some of his ghost/creepy/supernatural stories are really good—but then I like florid Victorian ghost stories.
But if you’re going to take him seriously . . . Hawthorne, who seems to have been pretty well sense-of-humour-free, has a point. I like Hawthorne too, but not for his sense of humour.
8. Charles Dickens, according to Arnold Bennett (1898)
About a year ago, from idle curiosity, I picked up ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, and of all the rotten vulgar un-literary writing…! Worse than George Eliot’s. If a novelist can’t write where is the beggar.
Yowzah. Speaking of the pot calling the kettle black: Bennett was notorious for writing for the money. And I am perhaps a member of my English-lit-major generation, which undervalued Bennett, but as writing for money goes, I’ll take Dickens every time. And George Eliot. Middlemarch rules.
16. George Bernard Shaw, according to Roger Scruton (1990)
Concerning no subject would he be deterred by the minor accident of complete ignorance from penning a definitive opinion.
Hee hee hee hee. I like Shaw . . . although I have a lot of trouble with his view of women . . . but he does find the sound of his own coruscating wit irresistible.
19. John Steinbeck, according to James Gould Cozzens (1957)
I can’t read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up. I couldn’t read the proletariat crap that came out in the ’30s.
How I hated The Grapes of Wrath! That frelling turtle crossing the frelling road! GAAAAH! And then later I discovered The Winter of Our Discontent and Travels with Charlie and fell in love. I admit I’ve never had the nerve to reread Grapes and find out if it might have transformed. There’s still that damned turtle.
20. Herman Melville, according to D.H. Lawrence (1923)
Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like ‘Moby Dick’….One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!
SNORK. Barring ‘the great book’ part I would say exactly this about Lawrence, whom I loathe. Moby Dick is a great book. It’s a mess, but it’s a great mess.
24. J.D.Salinger, according to Mary McCarthy (1962)
I don’t like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn’t a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don’t like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it’s so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can’t stand it.
Yes. The Catcher in the Rye—please. And I like ‘metropolitan sentimentality’. You’re not supposed to notice the sentimentality because everything keeps ending badly. Which is supposed to make it okay or something. Feh.
26. Marcel Proust, according to Evelyn Waugh (1948)
I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.
Hee hee hee hee hee. I’m not sure it’s very comforting to find oneself on the same side as Evelyn Waugh about anything, and people who appear to be mostly sane and intelligent tell me how necessary and addictive Proust is but . . . I keep trying it, screaming, AAAAAAUGH, and running out of the room. Okay, I haven’t tried it recently. In like the last twenty years, maybe. (I also can’t read French, so I’m reading it in translation.)
28. E.M. Forster’s Howards End, according to Katherine Mansfield (1915)
Putting my weakest books to the wall last night I came across a copy of ‘Howard’s End’ and had a look into it. Not good enough. E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.
And I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella.
Definitely the umbrella. I loved Forster in college—although Maurice and its technicolour sunset pushed me pretty hard—and then reread Howard’s End after the film came out and thought WHAAAT?
30. Charles Dickens, according to George Meredith
Not much of Dickens will live, because it has so little correspondence to life…If his novels are read at all in the future, people will wonder what we saw in them, save some possible element of fun meaningless to them.
This fascinates me because I love both of them. Meredith’s The Egoist is one of the best novels ever. And it wouldn’t surprise me if Dickens had no use for Meredith, but I’m surprised Meredith didn’t get Dickens.
31. Jane Austen, according to Mark Twain (1898)
I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
I like Austen, but I don’t myself get why she’s so frelling revered. I particularly don’t like it that she writes these dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin social comedies and is often the only woman on the ‘great writers [in English] of all time’ lists. (If you’re lucky you get a Bronte or two and George Eliot.) But . . . why does he keep reading Pride and Prejudice? Hysterical dislike is bad for the blood pressure. Ask me how I know this. (No, wait, you read this blog, you don’t have to ask me.)
41. Jane Austen, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1861)
I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world.
Not exactly, but yes to the ‘imprisoned in their . . . conventions of English society’. I know that her genius is supposed to be that she reveals all humanity in those conventions but . . . I don’t think so.
47. James Fenimore Cooper, according to Mark Twain (1895)
Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record
And this is the famous one. All bashing of other authors really begins here and chronology be damned. (Okay, Samuel Johnson got off some good ones. But I’ll take Twain over—say—G B Shaw any day. New World wins in Nastiness Stakes! Film at Eleven!)
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* Even if I automatically have a problem with the ‘best of all times’ headline. I think there are probably one or two she missed. But chances are this is some copy writer’s fault, and nothing to do with her.
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