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 George Orwell |
Literary masters of a carefully crafted cruelty
What did Mark Twain make of Jane Austen? And was Evelyn Waugh a fan of Proust?
Gerald Isaaman discovers that some authors don’t mince their words as they judge others
Poisoned Pens:
Literary Invective from Amis to Zola.
Edited by Gary Dexter. Frances Lincoln £9.99
IF it wasn’t bad enough already, there is something else significantly missing from our Parliament, amid the debris of money-grabbing peers and MPs. They are all so dull and dumbstruck when it comes to wit and invective.
And that was evident too on the BBC’s ill-fated Nick Griffin benefit night.
There may well be political spats and expressions of spleen, but hardly a handful of examples these days of brilliant rhetoric, dazzling digs that compare with Disraeli or Churchill, Nye Bevan or Michael Foot – even Denis Healey’s memorable jibe when he likened being attacked in the House of Commons by mild-mannered Sir Geoffrey Howe to being “savaged by a dead sheep”.
The thought come to mind reading this delicious tome, in which Gary Dexter has provided us with devastating literary examples, from Aristophanes and Martin Amis to AN Wilson and Emile Zola. And all in a book you can tuck into your pocket.
It is mainly writers on writers, critics excluded. That’s because, as Gary Dexter points out, no one cares what paid hacks might have thought compared with Byron’s exuberant, “Here are Johnny Keats’s piss a-bed poetry…there is no bearing the driveling idiotism of the Mankin.”
Indeed, if you stay with the petulance of those who lived locally then you will be richly rewarded with their negative blasts of malice and venom, to divert you from the dreary scripts of TV drama.
It is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind, unique in nature, let alone content and perhaps an indication that writers do have a demented streak, glorious though it may be.
Here are some of the cutting comments out of Camden, so to speak, moments of rancour worth recording and that make a delightful dish to serve up in someone’s Christmas stocking.
Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust: “I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective…on one page he is being taken to the WC in the Champs Elysees by his nurse and the next page he is ging to a brothel. Such a lot of nonsense.”
George Orwell on John Galsworthy: “At the bottom of his heart he despises foreigners, just as much any illiterate businessman in Manchester.”
George Orwell on Aldous Huxley: “And do you notice the more holy he gets, the more his books stink with sex. He cannot get off the subject of flagellating women. Possibly, if he had the courage to come out and say so, that is the solution to the problem of war. If we took it out in a little private sadism, which after all doesn’t do much harm, perhaps we wouldn’t want to drop bombs etc.”
Cyril Connolly on George Orwell: “He would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.”
Virginia Woolf on Somerset Maugham: “A grim figure, rat-eyed, dead man cheeked, unshaven; a criminal I should have said had I met him in a bus.”
Katherine Mansfield on E M Forster: “Never gets 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.”
John Middleton Murry on DH Lawrence: “Life, as Mr Lawrence shows it to us, is not worth living. It is mysteriously degraded by a corrupt mysticism. Mr Lawrence would have us back to the slime from which we rose.”
Dylan Thomas on Edith Sitwell: “So you’ve been reviewing Edith Sitwell’s latest piece of virgin dung have you? Isn’t she a poisonous thing of a woman, lying, concealing, flipping, plagiarising, misquoting, and being as clever a crooked literary publicist as ever.”
Edith Sitwell on Peter Ustinov: “I thought his manner was most odd: he behaved exactly like a blackbeetle that thinks it is going to be killed – tried to climb into the wall…”
And beyond the local hills, how about George Bernard Shaw on Shakespeare? “There are moments when one asks despairingly why our stage should ever have been cursed with this ‘immortal’ pilferer of other men’s stories and ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the subtlest problem of life to commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt.”
Alexander Woollcott on Dorothy Parker: “It is not so much the familiar phenomenon of a hand of steel in a velvet glove as a lacy sleeve with a bottle of vitriol concealed in its folds.”
Jacqueline Susann on Philip Roth: “He’s a fine writer, but I wouldn’t want to shake hands with him.”
And, finally, Mark Twain on Jane Austen: “I haven’t any right to criticise books and I don’t do it except when I hate them…Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shine-bone!”
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