Scorn (19 page)

‘Well, you'll see, Piglet, when you listen. Because this is how it begins. The more it Snows-tiddely-pom-'

‘Tiddely what?' said Piglet. (He took, as you might say, the words out of your correspondent's mouth.)

‘Pom!' said Pooh. ‘I put it in to make it hummy.'

And it is that word ‘hummy', my darlings, that marks the first place in ‘The House at Pooh Corner' at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.
Dorothy Parker on
The house at Pooh Corner
by A.A. Milne, Constant Reader review in the
New Yorker

Oh for the hour of Herod.
Anthony Hope Hawkins on
Peter Pan
by J.M. Barrie

Nothing but a pack of lies.
Damon Runyon on
Alice in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll

Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and' and ‘the'.
Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman. Hellman responded with a $2.25 million lawsuit

From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.
Grouch Marx on
Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge
by Sidney J. Perelman

To see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.
Evelyn Waugh on Sir Stephen Spender

Mr Waugh, I always feel, is an antique in search of a period, a snob in search of a class, perhaps even a mystic in search of a beatific vision.
Malcolm Muggeridge on Evelyn Waugh

Insects sting, not from malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics – they desire our blood, not our pain.
Friedrich Nietzsche

In the ‘About the Author' note … we are told ‘Roy Blount, Jr
is a novelist. Now.' This makes sense only if the errant ‘w' at the end of the last word is omitted. Apart from this bit of inadvertent humour,
First Hubby
is flawlessly lame.
L.S. Klepp on
First Hubby
by Roy Blount, Jr, in
Entertainment Weekly

The covers of this book are too far apart.
Ambrose Bierce, review

Book reviewers can be divided into batchers (who review several books at a time), betchers (‘betcher I could have written it better'), bitchers, botchers and butchers.
Paul Jennings

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what he feels about dogs.
Christopher Hampton

They point to an elephant and say that ‘that is a terrible rhinoceros'.
Ford Madox Ford on literary critics

Like a person who has put on full armour and attacked a hot fudge Sunday.
Kurt Vonnegut on critics who rage against novels

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.
W. Somerset Maugham

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.
Alberto Moravia

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson, recalling the advice of a college tutor

A vain, silly transparent coxcomb without either solid talents or a solid nature.
J.G. Lockhart on Samuel Pepys

It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter lack of decorum of any kind in his dreadful little volume. Howl is meant to be a noun, but I can't help taking it as an imperative.
John Hollander on
Howl
by Allen Ginsberg, in the
Partisan Review

The face to launch a thousand dredgers.
Jack de Manio on Glenda Jackson in
Women in Love

That face that lunched a thousand shits.
Anonymous, of the conviviality of the (Greek-born) Arianna Stassinopoulos (now Huffington)

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
Alan Bennett on Arianna Stassinopoulos, in the
Observer

Reading is a pernicious habit. It destroys all originality of sentiment.
Thomas Hobbes

That's not writing, it's typing.
Truman Capote on James A. Michener

You can type this shit, George, but you can't say it.
Harrison Ford to George Lucas after reading the script for
Star Wars

Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the doorbell while in the middle of making love.
Noël Coward

Beckett was early commandeered by Enthusiasts whose object is always to quarantine their heroes. Under their influence, critics dwindle into a priesthood, readers vanish into a congregation, and art freezes into a sacrament that can never be questioned.
Robert Robinson on Samuel Beckett's enthusiasts

I love it when you talk like that. It reminds me of how much we lost when the grammar schools went comprehensive.
Ann Leslie on Robert Robinson, who had been talking for some time

Sir Walter Scott, when all is said and done, is an inspired butler.
William Hazlitt

He could not think up to the height of his own towering style.
G.K. Chesterton on Tennyson

Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot.
G.K. Chesterton on Thomas Hardy

Chesterton is like a vile scum on a pond … All his slop – it is really modern Catholicism to a great extent, the never taking a hedge straight, the mumbo-jumbo of superstition dodging behind clumsy fun and paradox … I believe he creates a milieu in which art is impossible. He and his kind.
Ezra Pound on G.K. Chesterton

Where were you fellows when the paper was blank?
Fred Allen to editors who heavily edited one of his scripts

February 1755
My Lord
I have been lately informed by the proprietor of The World that two papers in which my dictionary is recommended to the Public were written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished is an honour which, being very little accustomed to favours from the Great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.

When upon some slight encouragement I first visited your Lordship I was overpowered like the rest of Mankind by the enchantment of your address, and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself Le Vainqueur du Vainqueur de la
Terre, that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending, but I found my attendance so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in public, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly Scholar can possess. I had done all that I could, and no Man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little. Seven years, My Lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward Rooms or was repulsed from your Door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of Publication without one Act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a Patron before …

Is not a Patron, My Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a Man struggling for Life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my Labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it was delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it, till I am known and do not want it.

I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligation where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Public should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.

Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any Favourer of Learning I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less, for I have
been long wakened from that Dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exaltation, My lord, Your Lordship's Most humble Obedient Servant, Sam: Johnson
Samuel Johnson to Lord Chesterfield

PATRON: n.s. One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.
Samuel Johnson,
Dictionary of the English Language

Very nice, though there are dull stretches.
Antoine de Rivarol on a two-line poem

Chaucer, notwithstanding the praises bestowed upon him, I think obscene and contemptible; he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity.
Lord Byron on Geoffrey Chaucer. Attrib.

A hyena that wrote poetry in tombs.
Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante

A Methodist parson in Bedlam.
Horace Walpole on Dante

Dr Donne's verses are like the Peace of God, for they pass all understanding.
James I on John Donne

His verse … is the beads without the string.
Gerard Manley Hopkins on Robert Browning

He has plenty of music in him, but he cannot get it out.
Lord Tennyson on Robert Browning

Our language sunk under him.
Joseph Addison on John Milton

Thomas Gray walks as if he had fouled his small-clothes and looks as if he smelt it.
Christopher Smart

There are two ways of disliking poetry. One is to dislike it. The other is to read Pope.
Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope

In science you want to say something nobody ever knew before, in words everyone can understand. In poetry, you are bound to say something everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand.
Mathematician Paul Dirac

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
Adrian Mitchell

The truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.
Overheard in a Washington DC bar by author Michael Lewis

My favourite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.
Groucho Marx

Great Wits are sure to Madness near alli'd
And thin Partitions do their Bounds divide …
John Dryden on the Earl of Shaftesbury,
Absalom and Achitophel

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.
Thomas Babington Macaulay on John Dryden

Who is this Pope I hear so much about? I cannot discover what is his merit. Why will my subjects not write in prose?
George II on Alexander Pope

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike;
Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,
A tim'rous foe, and a suspicious friend …
Alexander Pope on Joseph Addison,
Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot

Steele might become a reasonably good writer if he would pay a little attention to grammar, learn something about the propriety and disposition of words and incidentally, get some information on the subject he intends to handle.
Jonathan Swift on Richard Steele

A monster, gibbering shrieks and gnashing imprecations against mankind – tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame: filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene.
William Thackeray on Jonathan Swift

Thackeray settled like a meat-fly on whatever one had got for dinner; and made one sick of it.
John Ruskin on William Thackeray

Here are Jonny 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 Byron on John Keats

A mere sodomite and a perfect leper.
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Algernon Swinburne

Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation … a bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium.
Lord Byron on John Keats, letter to John Murray

The world is rid of Lord Byron, but the deadly slime of his touch still remains.
John Constable (the artist) on news of Byron's death

A tadpole of the Lakes.
Lord Byron on John Keats

A denaturalized being who, having exhausted every species of sensual gratification, and drained the cup of sin to its bitterest dregs, is resolved to show that he is no longer human, even in his frailties, but a cool, unconcerned fiend.
John Styles on Lord Byron

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
Lady Caroline Lamb on Lord Byron

A man must serve his time to every trade
Save censure – critics all are ready made.
Lord Byron,
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

Byron! – he would be all forgotten today if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to
The Times
about the Repeal of the Corn Laws.
Max Beerbohm on Lord Byron

Here is Miss Seward with six tomes of the most disgusting trash, sailing over Styx with a Foolscap over her periwig as complacent as can be – Of all Bitches dead or alive a scribbling woman is the most canine.
Lord Byron on Anna Seward

A system in which the two greatest commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife.
Thomas Babington Macaulay on Byron's poetry