Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola [Hardcover]

Gary Dexter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 22, 2009

Mark Twain once said of Jane Austen, "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone." And then there's George Bernard Shaw on the Bard: "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare." Twain and Shaw were both known for their coruscating wit, but they were far from the exception in terms of charity toward their peers. Literary one-upmanship is the subject of this hilariously evil book. Those who delight in literary malice can enjoy Cocteau's damnation of Victor Hugo, and Edith Sitwell's denunciation of D. H. Lawrence. Drawn from the popular "Writers on Writers" column in the The Guardian, Poisoned Pens captures those moments when major authors' talents are turned toward the petulant, abusive, mocking, and downright mean.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Poisoned Pens" is a delightfully malicious compilation of literary invective across the centuries, registering the less than kind views of one author for another. We always knew that the profession of writing was as cut-throat as any other. Now we can see little authorial daggers doing their malicious work.
The effects is oddly pleasurable. Feelings of envy, anger, condescension, contempt and irritation are universal, of course, but writers have a way of expressing such feelings with unusual style and, at times, with astonishing accuracy—when they are not being merely rude, petty and childish.
George Meredith, a novelist who prided himself on his prose refinement, knocked his contemporary Charles Dickens for being the "incarnation of cockneydom." Virginia Woolf felt that the poet T.S. Eliot was too religious: "He seems to me to be petrifying into a priest." Her complaint about Katherine Mansfield was less elegant. One might wish, she wrote in a letter, "that one's first impression of K.M. was not that she stinks like a—well, civet cat that had taken to street walking."
A monstrous snob, Vladimir Nabokov criticized Fyodor Dostoevsky for his "lack of taste." H. Rider Haggard, the author of "King Solomon's Mines," denounced Anthony Trollope (whom he met in South Africa) for being "obstinate as a pig" and filled with "peculiar ideas."
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Henry Miller, famous for such louche classics as "Tropic of Cancer," mocked George Orwell for his high-mindedness. Aristotle attacked Euripides (for being too modern). Ben Jonson sniped at Shakespeare (for plagiarism). Alexander Pope skewered Colley Cibber (for excruciatingly bad poetry); Cibber, for his part, called Pope a "dwarf" and ridiculed his translations of Homer. The milk of human kindness does not seem to be an innate writerly trait, and charity is scant.

One wonders what role similarity plays. Woolf, who employed interior monologue in "Mrs. Dalloway" and other novels, bitterly dismissed James Joyce, famous for his pages of stream-of-consciousness. "I dislike Ulysses more & more," she said. "That is I think it more and more unimportant; and don't even trouble conscientiously to make out its meanings." William Faulkner, who clearly borrowed from Mark Twain the idea of giving the "tall tale" a literary spin, called Twain "a hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven 'sure fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy." Not that Twain himself was kind. "Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone," he wrote of Jane Austen.
Some put-downs have a lapidary quality. "I am reading Proust for the first time," Evelyn Waugh wrote in a letter. "Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective." Clive James said of contemporary romance-novelist Judith Krantz: "To be a really lousy writer takes energy," adding: "As a work of art [her novel "Princess Daisy"] has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks."
Authorial contempt is democratic and need not depend on category differences. Women writers, for instance, easily dislike each other. Ayn Rand lost no time running down Isabel Paterson, a libertarian like herself: "I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing." Edith Sitwell said of Virginia Woolf: "I consider her 'a beautiful little knitter.' " Mary McCarthy famously excoriated Lillian Hellman, who she considered "tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and dishonest writer." (Hellman filed a lawsuit that ended only with her death.) "His work is evil," Anatole France wrote of his countryman Emile Zola. "He is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he not been born." Noël Coward dismissed Oscar Wilde as a "tiresome, affected sod." Wilde in turn lambasted Henry James for writing fiction "as if it were a painful duty."
The canonized masters can be as every bit as catty as anyone else, but perhaps that is not such a bad thing. In his introduction to "Poisoned Pens," Gary Dexter notes, truthfully, that the splenetic is a truer barometer of thought than the gushy or the kind. "What is negative is, if nothing else, generally sincere," he writes. "Good reports of fellow writers can easily be flattery or log-rolling: just think of the ways book-reviewers operate. It is only in the negative and the scabrous that we can be sure of a writer's true feelings."
Spite makes for better show business, too. Edmund Gosse once observed of the 18th-century critic John Dennis that his "acute, learned and sympathetic treatises" were long forgotten, though he was indeed known for not perceiving the genius of Pope. Likewise, Gosse said, no one paid any heed to the "grace and discrimination" of the critic Francis Jeffrey, who would go down in history as the ill-tempered man who attacked the Romantic poets, including Wordsworth. Jeffrey's shrewd judgments "weigh like a feather" beside "one tasteless sneer at Charles Lamb."
The insults taxonomized in "Poisoned Pens" take the form of lengthy denunciations, one-line waspish barbs and sheer bitchery. Entire paragraphs of truly memorable spite, such as Mark Twain on James Fenimore Cooper or D.H. Lawrence on Aldous Huxley—or harangues like E.M. Foster's lengthy evisceration of Sir Walter Scott—are far more effective than mere angry quips and brief nastiness.
One can't help recalling, in this context, the only serious line delivered in the movie comedy "Animal House." The English professor (Donald Sutherland) makes a sour—and stupid—remark to his class that it is not only boring but indeed pointless to study the poetry of John Milton.
Still, hatred alone is what lasts, Mr. Dexter suggests. Reasonlessness in the matter of assault is not to be avoid—it positively helps.
Many venomous attacks are thus ad hominem, in the physical sense. Bertrand Russell mocked Alfred Lord Tennyson for having "an almost theatrically pink complexion and two red spots on his cheeks." Charles Baudelaire called George Sand "stupid, heavy and garrulous." Algernon Swinburne's cruel description of Ralph Waldo Emerson: "A foul mouth is so ill matched with a white beard." Thomas Carlyle thought that Samuel Coleridge lacked will ("he has no resolution") but chose to focus on his homeliness: "Figure a fat flabby incurvated personage, at once short, rotund and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange brown timid yet earnest looking eyes, a high tapering brow, and a great bush of grey hair—you will have some faint idea of Coleridge." Samuel Butler was no less cruel: "Yes it was good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four." In our own time, Martin Amis, after a literary dinner in London, recounted how Salman Rushdie failed to respond to one of his points: "No answer; only the extreme hooded-eye treatment." He looked, Mr. Amis wrote, "like a falcon staring through a Venetian blind."
For sheer schadenfreude "Poisoned Pens" is a book that one can pick up and put down anywhere. There are some notable gaps in the collection. We see nothing of H.L. Mencken. (The focus is mainly British.) Neither is mention made of Baron Corvo, one of literature's most contumacious practitioners, a man who lived to dish and to vilify. Nor are we are treated to anything from the late Truman Capote—"That's not writing," so went his famous remark on Jack Kerouac, "that's typing"—who could have taken up a whole chapter by himself.
The nastiness is amazing. Do buy copies of "Poisoned Pens" for your curmudgeonly friends. It is a perfect Christmas book for those seeking to stem the glut of good will.—Wall Street Journal

Writers attacking other writers makes for a

About the Author

Gary Dexter is the writer of a long-running column for the Sunday Telegraph.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Frances Lincoln; 1 edition (September 22, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0711229295
• ISBN-13: 978-0711229297
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #967,624 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars CRITICALLY SPEAKING....., October 3, 2009

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola (Hardcover)

Most knowledgeable readers pay scant attention to book jacket blurbs. You know, those comments by other authors placed prominently in quotation marks praising a title with such phrases as "a compelling new voice on the literary scene" or "another pulse pounding tale of suspense." It's pretty commonly known that often these complimentary words are traded - you do a blurb for my book and I'll do one for yours. Of course, there's never even the slightest criticism in a blurb, which makes reading Poisoned Pens all the more fun!

Gary Dexter, author of Why Not Catch 21: The Stories Behind The Titles, has gathered a collection of what authors really, really thought of the works of other writers. Thus, there are a number of excoriating comments included, and whether penned in anger, jealousy, jibe or gravitas all are superbly written.

For instance, Virginia Woolf wrote of Jane Austen, "I'd give all she ever wrote for half what the Brontes wrote......." Gore Vidal had nothing kind to say about John Updike, "I can't stand him. Nobody will think to ask because I'm supposedly jealous; but I out-sell him...."

And so it goes from one barb to another beginning with Aristophanes and closing with Michael Crichton. Poisoned Pens is a welcome addition to a library not only for reference but also for smiles.

- Gail Cooke

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Many authors, it seems, actually take delight in trashing their contemporaries as you will see in Poisoned Pens., February 12, 2010

By 

Blaine Greenfield "eclectic reader" (Belle Meade, NJ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola (Hardcover)

If you want to read garbage, check out this newsletter!

The above are words that I have not yet seen in print, but after reading POISONED
PENS--edited by Gary Dexter--I can only hope that continues; i.e., no
reader ever writes them . . . if so, I'll be grateful because as the author
points out in the subtitle of his informative book, there's been LITERARY
INVECTIVE FROM AMIS TO ZOLA . . . in other words, for a long time.

Many authors, it seems, actually take delight in trashing their contemporaries . . . for
example, here's what Samuel Butler had to say about Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe:

* I have been reading a translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Is it good? To me it seems
perhaps the very worst book I ever read. No Englishman could have written such a book.
I cannot remember a single good page or idea, and the priggishness is the finest of its kin
that I can call to mind. Is it all a practical joke? If it really is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister that
I have been reading, I am glad I have never taken the trouble to learn German.

Mark Twain had nothing good to say about another famous writer:

* 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.

What's fair is fair, though . . . Dexter found others who weren't crazy about Twain's
writing, including William Faulkner:

* [A] hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked
out a few of the old proven "sure fire" literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue
the superficial and the lazy.

Lastly, I don't pay much attention to the documentation in a book . . . I made an
exception for POISONED PENS because what was included (182 footnotes) was
done quite well and actually provided additional tidbits about the various authors,
such as this comment from Tom Wolfe about a negative review he received
from Norman Mailer:

* Wolfe's comment on this in a letter to writer Anthony Arthur was: "All I got out
of that is the fact that Norman has made love to a lot of three-hundred-pound women."

2.0 out of 5 stars less fun then you would expect, February 12, 2011

By 

Steve Rogers (Azur, Israel) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola (Paperback)

It seemed a good idea when I purchased it and the authors are appropriately bitchy when reviewing each other but somehow the whole is less then the sum of its parts and it becomes a bit boring after a while. It is on my bedside table and occasionally I read a page or two before sleep but on the whole I would not recommend this book unless you are really into this type of thing.