INTRODUCING his book Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola, Gary Dexter juxtaposes two quotations by George Bernard Shaw about Shakespeare.
In the first, Shaw says: “I pity the man who cannot enjoy Shakespeare. He has outlasted thousands of abler thinkers, and will outlast a thousand more.” In the second, he lambasts the Bard’s “intellectual sterility” and declares: “The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch that it would positively be a relief to dig him up and throw stones . . .” There is, as Dexter suggests, no contest as to which of these is more entertaining. Insult beats eulogy every time. But lest we feel bad for enjoying it, he also argues that, in this field at least: “what is negative is [. . .] generally sincere”.
By contrast, writers’ public praise of rivals is often just “flattery or log-rolling”.
Thus, in this well-chosen collection of literary libels, Shaw himself is dug up for stoning by, among others, John Osborne: “. . . He writes like a Pakistani who has learned English when he was 12 [. . .] in order to become a chartered accountant.” And by Roger Scruton: “Concerning no subject would [GBS] be deterred by the minor accident of complete ignorance from penning a definitive opinion.” Those were both posthumous verdicts. But of course Shaw lived a long life and not everyone could wait for him to die. For HG Wells, writing in 1914, the prospect of a protracted world war was less a cause for depression than Shaw’s constant anti-war polemics: “He is at present [. . .] an almost unendurable nuisance”.
Another defence of Dexter's collection, according to himself, is that casual readers who fail to appreciate the alleged genius of certain writers, and are therefore caused to feel stupid, will occasionally find reassurance in high places. Here, for example, is Evelyn Waugh on the masterpiece In Search of Lost Time: "I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective. I remember how small I used to feel when people talked about him didn't dare admit I couldn't get through him [but] the chap was plain barmy. He never tells you the age of his hero and one page he is being taken to the WC in the Champs Élysées by his nurse [while] the next page he is going to a brothel. Such a lot of nonsense."
But you don't need an excuse to enjoy hearing Bertrand Russell's swipe at Aldous Huxley's apparent dependence on the Encyclopedia Britannica: "It was the only book that ever influenced [him]. You always could tell by his conversation which volume he'd been reading. One day it would be the Alps, Andes, and Appennines, and the next it would be the Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath."
Similarly Cyril Connolly’s verdict on George Orwell: “He would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the hankerchief industry.” Even friendly words among writers can be amusingly barbed.
Here's Ezra Pound writing to James Joyce to confirm receipt of, and a failed preliminary attempt to read, Finnegans Wake: "All I can do is wish you every possible success. I will have another go at it, but [. . .] nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization."
Mark Twain was surely exaggerating when, reviewing James Fenimore Cooper, he claimed that on a single page, the author “scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.” But Twain was particularly irritated by one aspect of Cooper’s forest-based adventures: the frequency with which breaking twigs featured as a plot device.
“Every time a Cooper person is in peril and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on, but that wouldn’t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig, and if he can’t do it, borrow one.”
The missiles fly here even across millenniums. Thus Thomas Babington Macaulay on Socrates: “The more I read about him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him.” Occasionally, spouses are hit in the crossfire, as in Samuel Butler’s comment on Thomas Carlyle and his wife: “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four . . .” But one of the reassuring
things about the book is
that the hostilities are often mutual.
A point recognised by Philip Larkin, when insulting Kingsley Amis: “The only reason I hope I predecease him is that I’d find it next to impossible to say anything nice about him at his memorial service. What a nasty thing to say, but you know what I mean. He probably thinks the same about me.”
fmcnally@irishtimes.com