Monday, May 19, 2014

If You Have Nothing Good To Say About Somebody, Come Sit Next to Me!

Sigh. Authors just don’t insult each other like they used to.

Sure, Martin Amis raised some eyebrows when he claimed he would need brain damage to write children’s books, and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan made waves when she disparaged the work that someone had plagiarized, but those kinds of accidental, lukewarm zingers are nothing when compared to the sick burns of yore.

It stands to reason, of course, that writers would be able to come up with some of the best insults around, given their natural affinity for a certain turn of phrase and all. And it also makes sense that the people they would choose to unleash their verbal battle-axes upon would be each other, since watching someone doing the same thing you’re doing — only badly — is one of the most frustrating feelings we know. So we forgive our dear authors for their spite.

Plus, their insults are just so fun to read.

Martin Amis
 
D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce (1928) “My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.”
D.H.Lawrence
 
William Faulkner on Mark Twain (1922) “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.”
Mark (Samuel Clemens) Twain
 
Virginia Woolf on James Joyce “[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
Virginia Woolf
 
Mark Twain on Jane Austen (1898) “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.”
Jane Austen
              
Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust (1948)
“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”
 Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
 
Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman
"Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'
Lillian Hellman
 
W. H. Auden on Robert Browning “I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.”
 
Robert Browning


Elizabeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger “I HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”
Elizabeth Bishop
 
Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
Truman Capote


Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope
“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”
Oscar Wilde
 
 Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway (1972) “As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”
Vladimir Nabokov

 William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
 William Faulkner
 
 
Gore Vidal on Truman Capote “He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”
Gore Vidal
 
Lord Byron on John Keats (1820) “Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”
 Lord George Gordon Byron

and if  you really want to tell it like it is ...

H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw
“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”
H.G. (Herbert George) Welles
George Bernard (G.B.) Shaw

I hope you've enjoyed the cattiness of some of America (and the world's) greatest writers ... nobody can do a smack down like a good writer!

Now, go make something beautiful!

¸.•´¸.•*´¨) ¸.•*´¨)
(¸.•´ (¸.•´♥ Tristan
 
 

 




 



 
 

7 comments:

Gloria Stengel said...

The comment about Jane Austin made me snort out my nose.

Castles Crowns and Cottages said...

I absolutely loved the one from Capote and Wilde. Few words, but down right to the point! I love your wit, Tristan!

Castles Crowns and Cottages said...

Oh, and Faulkner's observation of Hemingway's lack of challenging the reader! Good reminder!

DollZandThingZ said...

Fantastic post, Tristan! Loved the cattiness, the photos, everything!

Castles Crowns and Cottages said...

WOOOOOOOO! "Hallelujah" on the HARP? Now I need to find that! Hey there Tristan! Great to see you this morning! We finally have spring here in Minneapolis and is it ever glorious my friend. Thank you for skipping on by my post. I do enjoy free verse and the simpler but more poignant, the better!

Hope you're creating something gorgeous today my friend, and it is so wonderful to find you again. XOXOXO Anita

Thornton Berry Shire Press said...

AH! So glad I checked in..very fun!

Castles Crowns and Cottages said...

I so love this post....TRISTAN, darlin', so good to see your comment! THANK YOU for coming by and also for taking interest in Scarlet Pink. This will be my second time in the magazine. It is a new mag and I'm contributing my articles when I can, being a busy teacher, but writing is what I love and it's exciting to get this start in what I hope will be a fun career of writing.

Now you go and keep making something SPARKLY! Anita