文人相轻,看来也不仅仅是我们祖上留下来的特质哈:)
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A Nasty Way With Words
A survey of literary envy, irritation, resentment, condescension and contempt
By ALEXANDER THEROUX
Portly G.K. Chesterton once remarked to the exiguous George Bernard Shaw: "To look at you, anyone would think there was a famine in England." To which Shaw replied: "To look at you, anyone would think you caused it."
"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."
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.
—Mr. Theroux's latest novel is "Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual" (Fantagraphics).
- posted on 11/29/2009
读这个书评,好像对胃口。
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Can a novel about love and the illusions of love be created out of almost 900 satire-laced pages devoted to obscene invective, hatred, pettiness, ignorance, pity, pride and hubris? This is the question raised by Alexander Theroux's first novel in 20 years, Laura Warholic or, The Sexual Intellectual. If the answer is "maybe," the blame lies less with Theroux's prodigious natural talent than with how he has chosen to structure his narrative and the repetitive nature of his characterizations.
Eugene Eyestones writes a sex column for Quink, a Boston magazine edited by the slobbish Minote Warholic and staffed by an eccentric band of misanthropes with names like Duxbak, Ratnaster, Clucker and Discknickers. Eyestones has been seeing -- with the intermittent frequency and heat of a sputtering light bulb -- Warholic's estranged wife, Laura, while obsessing over the unobtainable bakery employee Rapunzel Wisht. Although apparently a Vietnam veteran, Eyestones acts like a teenager, idealizing Rapunzel while cataloguing Laura's every fault. The intensity of this scrutiny is magnified by the torrent of insults offered by Minote Warholic, most of Quink's staff and several others. They present Laura's defects in eloquent and lengthy detail, "slacker and total skullcase" being perhaps the most understated of these comments. Eyestones becomes complicit in this character assassination by his silence, a passivity also exemplified by his unwillingness to either ditch Laura or commit to her.
Theroux's use of metaphor in these sections remains as startling and daring in its brilliance as in his masterpiece, Darconville's Cat (1981). Through the early pages of this new novel, Theroux's genius appears to reflect a generosity of spirit toward character akin to that of 19th-century influences like Dickens and Trollope. However, it soon becomes clear that Theroux is using his amazing powers of grotesquery and caricature to make almost everyone look morally, ethically and intellectually ugly. As a result, the reader's delight at Theroux's descriptive powers quickly changes to disgust at the unrelenting brutishness of these characters, and that disgust, finally, is transformed into boredom as the barrage of details and constant repetitions begin to seem not only gratuitous but insulting to the reader.
Theroux does try to vary the tone and form of Laura Warholic. In addition to insults that have the wit and bawdiness of Shakespearean monologues, he includes pages of Eyestones's sex columns, notes for columns, a fairy tale and often scandalous monologues on Jews, religion and lust. In the middle of a lengthy road trip during which Laura and Eyestones argue their way across the United States, Theroux even offers up chapters on sex and democracy, hodge-podge collections of facts and observations with no particular organization. Darconville's Cat also contained digressions, but they served to intensify that novel's effect. Here, where the main characters practice indecision, digressions merely intensify the lack of movement.
Near the end of Laura Warholic, after the mismatched couple has broken up, Eyestones has a change of heart. He wonders: "Had not he blundered by looking at Laura far too closely, just as he had looked at Rapunzel from far too great a distance? Would not his attempt at solving both riddles have been avoided in a state of proper balance?" This epiphany is offered up around Christmas, that most sentimental of holidays, and it is so jejune -- creates a portrait of a character unaware through so many hundreds of pages -- that I began to wonder if Theroux meant for his novel to be satire, and satire only. But surely not. Surely he means to be sincere on some level because otherwise we have read his mammoth undertaking only to be told that life is a pointless farce, and that is not an answer worth enduring all these pages.
It seems only appropriate that Laura Warholic ends with a two-paragraph lecture from the author after the main characters have exited the stage. A little more space for the reader, a little less for the author, and this fiercely intelligent, frustrating, disturbing, wonderful, dawdling, horrible and ultimately didactic novel might have been a masterpiece.
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