Venom, spite, and a poison pen: a sample of writers' best-thrown punches

Vladimir Nabokov: not a fan of Fyodor D., either

It's proven that writers generally tread lightly when discussing other writers, at least in public. There are moments, though when exasperation, frustration and sheer cussedness break through the professional literary mold -- usually when the target is well out-of-range or (in the case of Twain savaging Jane Austen) safely beyond reply.

Emily Temple has compiled a list of the thirty best zingers between writers. As she writes, we forgive our dear authors for their spite....it 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.

Here's a sample from her selection, re-published on the Flavorwire site, culled from world literature. It's a small sample of the sport of the poison pen -- authors writing about other authors out of earshot. Martin Amis finds Cervantes just as much a bore at that run-at-the-mouth Proust. Not to be outdone, readers sent in a few of their own favorites that seem worthy of a second set of thirty.

28. Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante Alighieri “A hyena that wrote poetry on tombs.”

25. Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound “A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”

17. Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes “Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.”

15. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

14. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

11. 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.”

5. Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust (1948) “I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”

4. 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.”

And a few readers' contributions:

Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman “Every word she writes is a lie, including the "and"s and the "the"s.”

H.G. Wells on Henry James “A hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea.”

Jack Kerouac, father (and son)

Of his friends and girlfriends and cross-country exploits Jack Kerouac wrote much, and made the Duluoz legend a never-ending odyssey whose narrator never reached home. Kerouac never was easy at home, and the periods when he felt obligated to stop traveling were made even more uncomfortable by the fact that he was a father.

Jan Kerouac, born in 1952, met her father only twice. By all accounts -- including hers -- marriage and fatherhood were adventures he never cared to discuss. He never acknowledged Jan as his daughter with his first wife, Joan.

This estrangement adds support to one of the more honest assessments of Beat writers that for the most part they formed a boys-only club. If he wasn't guilty of outright misogyny, as some claim, Kerouac's attitudes became a hallmark of his relationships and his writing. His books, as much as they are equally praised and reviled in their diary-like inclusiveness, avoid mention of much life that would reflect Kerouac "at home," other than in a round of sexual exploits and their inevitable consequences.

It's a surprise that Kerouac's early relationship to his own father was not as strained and faulty. He doesn't write much about his old man -- in his Book of Dreams, where Jack allows himself his darkest misgivings, Leo appears as "so mysterious and un-Kerouac." Leo's gradual dissolution and drinking after a series of setbacks were aspects of his own adult character that Jack obviously came to dislike, however.

In the eternal way all men turn into their fathers in some aspect, Kerouac admits "maybe this is me" in the haunted life of his dreams as early as 1960 and probably earlier. Kerouac would have turned 89 this year and even in his dreams Kerouac couldn't avoid becoming the shade of his father: sitting with nowhere else to go, reading the paper in Memere's house, with his father Leo's "lost and distant air" about him:

LAST NIGHT MY FATHER WAS BACK in Lowell --- O Lord, O haunted life --- and he wasnt interested in anything much---He keeps coming back in this dream, to Lowell, has no shop, no job even---a few ghostly friends are rumored to be helping him, looking for connections, he has many especially among the quiet misanthropic old men---but he's feeble and he aint supposed to live long anyway so it doesnt matter---He has departed from the living so much his once-excitement, tears, argufying, it's all gone, just paleness, he doesnt care any more---has a lost and distant air---

We saw him in a cafeteria, across street from Paige's but not Waldorf's---he hardly talks to me---it's mostly my mother talking to me about him---"Ah well, ah bien, he vivra paslon temps ce foi icit!"---"he wont live long this time!"---she hasnt changed---tho she too mourns to see his change—-but God Oh God this haunted life I keep hoping against hope against hope he's going to live anyway even tho I not only know he's sick but that it's a dream and he did die in real life--ANYWAY---I worry myself ... (When writing Town and the City I wanted to say "Peter worried himself white"—for the haunted sadness that I feel in these dreams is white---)

Maybe Pop is very quietly sitting in a chair while we talk---he happened to come home from downtown to sit awhile but not because it's home so much as he has no other place to go at the moment---in fact he hangs out in the poolhall all day---reads the paper a little---he himself doesnt want to live much longer---that's the point---

He's so different than he was in real life---in haunted life I think I see now his true soul---which is like mine---life means nothing to him---or, I'm my father myself and this is me (especially the Frisco dreams)---but it is Pa, the big fat man, but frail and pale, but so mysterious and un-Kerouac---but is that me? Haunted life, haunted life---and all this takes place within inches of the ironclouds dream of 1946 that saved my soul (the bridge across the Y, 10 blocks up from 'cafeteria'---) Oh Dammit God—

This is a darkness that is not often acknowledged in Kerouac's work, but biographers who do comment on it cite the tough working-class neighborhoods of Lowell and the alcoholism he shared with his father. It balances the decades-long image of the freewheeling beat writer whose "first thought, best thought" impressions became a template for an entire generation of writers. It is a darkness that Kerouac struggled with and never reconciled in his lifetime or in his relationship with his own daughter.

Jan Kerouac (1952-1996)

The doubts and fears followed him to the end, though he kept writing. At the last, in October 1969, he was sitting at home, drinking malt liquor and whiskey at 11 am, and scribbling notes about his father's print shop in Lowell. After a prolific writing career that revealed the history about everything else in his life, Jack was at last thinking about a novel of the "old man" whose drinking had led to his death in 1946 at the age of 58.

When he himself died of cirrhosis on October 21, 1969, Kerouac was 47. Jack was then living with his third wife Stella and his devoted mother, Gabrielle, who was 74. As one reviewer notes, Memere "held a tight grip on her son's life, and was rather cantankerous to almost any outsider who dared to come between herself and her son." This mother's-protectiveness may have even extended to family: In 1967 at the age of 15, Jan Kerouac was in Mexico, living as far away as possible from any family life with the Kerouacs.

"Nightclubbing": '70s NYC punk rock videos sneak into library

Who could ever imagine that Patti Smith (of all people) would emerge as a certain kind of pop-culture icon, if such a distinction were ever granted? Her bohemian, romantic literary swoons and the nearly-Biblical declarations of her lyrics, which seemed so cantered to the prevailing popular culture of the 1970s and day-glo '80s, are now being celebrated as the unique visions her fans always knew they were.

The mirror of art is a subjective one, and clarity comes only with the passage of time, but Patti was right all along: I got nothin' to hide here save desire, she sang on that first single in 1975, Oh, watch me now. It was her big kiss-off to her Jersey childhood, and with its lyrical echoes of the Velvet Underground a hint of the fireworks to come.

She rocked out in a way that challenged the boys-club, but she was a quick study in opposites: Easter, the 1978 album that contained her biggest chart hit "Because the Night," was graced with a cover of Patti that was guaranteed to mess with the heads of many who bought it. Even as the song climbed in the charts (the single eventually reached 13 in Billboard -- a feat in itself during the Fleetwood Mac juggernaut year of Rumours) the cover image was there to remind us that rock'n'roll, like much art, is more about surprise than expectation.

Surprise, not expectation. Patti has continued to make a career out of contradiction, long after the term "downtown art" seems often to have lost any edge at all except as a weapon in the continuing "culture wars" of the moment. Just ask David Wojnarowicz about the recent furor at the Smithsonian. Patti's punk past -- along with the participation of the Ramones, Television, and others -- has come to seem a revelation with the right three chords.

Nightclubbing is a recent documentary that manages to capture some of the 1970s New York spark that Patti helped ignite, a five-part series of performances from 1975-1980 caught on Bowery stages and compiled by filmmakers Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong. The two brought video equipment to CBGBs and other New York clubs; some rock bands (including Patti Smith) refused to be recorded, others agreed and then changed their minds. But the two kept coming back. When Ivers and Armstrong began paying 75 cents for beers -- the artists' rate at CBGB's -- Armstrong says "they had it made."

Kim Davis of The Local / East Village profiled efforts to preserve the hours of video at the Fales Library Special Collections. The filmmakers' entire treasure trove of early NY punk (more than one hundred bands) is now being digitally transferred and added to the Fales Library, and a series of five one-hour presentations of Nightclubbing are available for screenings with an arrangement by the film-makers themselves.

The shows feature the early Heartbreakers with Richard Hell, Talking Heads, Blondie, The Cramps, DNA, the Contortions, Dead Boys, John Cale, and more. The filmmakers are asking for comments and suggestions during the ongoing restoration process. For complete details and contact information the Nightclubbing website is here, and the documentary's Facebook page is here.

While it's to be expected that artists look back on their rough-and-tumble years with a certain tough fondness, Patti's personal history since those incendiary days has been just as challenging. Patti's book is without regret, if tinged with a sadness for the loss to AIDS of so many that created her Lower East Side universe. Here is Maureen Dowd, in a New York Times column, adding to the accolades for Patti and her memoir Just Kids.

Shocking! Patti, 1978, high on rebellion: some girls don't shave

... For anyone who has had a relationship where the puzzle pieces seem perfect but don’t fit — so, all of us — “Just Kids” is achingly beautiful. It’s “La Bohème” at the Chelsea Hotel; a mix, she writes, of “Funny Face” and “Faust,” two hungry artists figuring out whom to love, how to make art and when to part.

It unfolds in that romantic time before we were swallowed by Facebook, flat screens, texts, tweets and Starbucks; when people still talked all night and listened to jukeboxes and LPs and read actual books and drank black coffee.

Smith describes the wondrous odyssey of taking the bus from South Jersey and meeting a curly-haired soul mate who wanted to help her soar, even as the pair painfully grappled over the years with Mapplethorpe’s sexuality and his work’s brutality.

“Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art,” Smith writes about the former altar boy from Floral Park, Queens, who was bedeviled by Catholic concepts of good and evil. “Robert sought to elevate aspects of male experience, to imbue homosexuality with mysticism.”

When he began exploring his own desires in San Francisco, she said it was an education for her too.

“I had thought a man turned homosexual when there was not the right woman to save him, a misconception I had developed from the tragic union of Rimbaud and the poet Paul Verlaine,” she writes, adding that she mistakenly considered homosexuality “a poetic curse” that “irrevocably meshed with affectation and flamboyance.”

As they redefined their love, she writes, “I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth.” ...

(Top: Photo of videotapes by Emily Armstrong, from The Local / East Village)