The good folks at the Illinois Humanities Council pass along this collection of the best author-vs-author insults in history. Below, I offer metacommentary.

1. Mark Twain on 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.

Yet the words “every time” suggest otherwise. Just how often do you read this book you claim to despise, Mr. Clemens?

2. Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.

Just as a reflection on James is the mark of a decidedly senile form of enthusiasm.

3. Gore Vidal on John Updike

I can’t stand him. Nobody will think to ask because I’m supposedly jealous; but I out-sell him.

And Stephenie Meyer outsells you, Vidal. Go suck an egg.

4. Noel Coward on Oscar Wilde:

Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.

Unlike Coward, whose writing is as exciting as a thrill-ride and as serious as a heart attack.

5. Roger Scruton on George Bernard Shaw:

Concerning no subject would he be deterred by the minor accident of complete ignorance from penning a definitive opinion.

That’s just a fancy way of saying he’s an Irishman.

6. Wyndham Lewis on Gertrude Stein:

Gertrude Stein’s prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along.

Doesn’t this make you wonder about Lewis’ diet? Fun fact: Lewis spent his boyhood at a boarding school in Warwickshire where, centuries ago, they invented the game of rugby.

7. Anatole France on Emile Zola:

His work is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he never been born.

A wise man once said: “Stupidity is far more dangerous than evil, for evil takes a break from time to time, stupidity does not.”

The wise man? Anatole France, who is a little stupid sometimes.

8. William Faulkner on Mark 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.

How do you “trick out” a skeleton? Maybe Twain knows, since he spends practically all his time fantasizing about Jane Austen’s bones.

9. Hemingway on Faulkner:

Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes — and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one.

At which point the writing improves immensely. I don’t know what you’re complaining about.

10. Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire:

The king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.

I’m delighted to learn there is a French word for “nincompoop.” Also, there’s one in Urdu:

11. Vidal on Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US.

That explains why Vidal outsells Updike, I guess.

12. Dylan Thomas on Edith Sitwell:

Isn’t she a poisonous thing of a woman, lying, concealing, flipping, plagiarising, misquoting, and being as clever a crooked literary publicist as ever.

Whereas Thomas is all sweetness and gentility, as evidenced by the above showcase of lightness and tact.

13. Arnold Bennett on Henry James:

It took me years to ascertain that Henry James’s work was giving me little pleasure….In each case I asked myself: ‘What the dickens is this novel about, and where does it think it’s going to?’ Question unanswerable! I gave up.

Thus was born the What-the-Dickens school of literary criticism, whose ramifications continue to reverberate through literature departments at venerable institutions of higher learning the world over.

14. Norman Mailer on Tom Wolfe:

At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred pound woman. Once she gets on top, it’s over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated. So you read and you grab and you even find delight in some of these mounds of material. Yet all the while you resist — how you resist! — letting three hundred pounds take you over.

Classy, Mailer. No wonder you command such great respect in a profession marked by vast mutual understanding and touching collegiality.

Tweet  Print This Post

Tags: books & writing // Add Comment »