Beware your friends — they really hate you
Success has a habit of expanding a writer’s woes. The more vociferous the acclaim, the greater the neediness. According to si r sal man Rushdie’s ex-wife, Padma Lakshmi, whenever the annual winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was announced, Rushdie would go into a terrible sulk.
One might have thought that sir salman already had more than his fair share of acclaim. His own website boasts of all his various awards and prizes at excessive length.
‘A Fellow of the British Royal society of Literature, salman Rushdie has received, among other honours, the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (twice), The Writers’ Guild Award, t he James Tait Black Prize, the european union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature, Author of the Year Prizes in both Britain and Germany, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre etranger . . .’ it begins.
And it doesn’t stop there. Far from it: the website goes on to remind us that, among other honours, ‘ he has received the Freedom of the city in Mexico city, strasbourg and el Paso, and the edgerton Prize of the American civil Liberties union’ and that he ‘holds the rank of commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et Des Lettres’ which, it points out, is ‘France’s highest artistic honour’. Not only that, but ‘in June 2007 he received a Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.’
Three cheers for sir salman! But still the poor man feels in need of consolation when, at the same time each year, he hears the Nobel Prize has just been awarded to someone else.
That unrewarded wit Logan Pearsall smith put his finger on t he problem. ‘ every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast,’ he noted.
Tales of authorial vanity abound. edgar Allan Poe once proclaimed his own work, The Raven, ‘the greatest poem that was ever written’. The 18th- century writer samuel Richardson prefaced his novel Pamela with a letter from an editor singing its praises, but failed to mention that the letter was in fact written by himself.
And John O’Hara, the secondrate American novelist, composed this inscription for his own gravestone: ‘Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time.’
Gore Vidal’s lifelong companion Howard Austen called him Mr Me, because Vidal only really came alive when he was the centre of attention. On the wall above his desk, he kept 20 or so framed magazine covers, with his face on each one.
With vanity comes envy. A recent biography of Vidal drew its title from one of his most notorious sayings: ‘every Time A Friend succeeds something Inside Me Dies’.
That little aphorism revolves around the word ‘friend’. We can deal with our enemies: it is our friends that we have to outdo. I imagine that if next year’s Nobel Prize is awarded to a friend of Rushdie, such as Martin Amis or Ian Mcewan, then he will be inconsolable.
One of the most celebrated writerly friendships of the post-war years was between Philip Larkin (left) and Kingsley Amis (below). They first met at university in the early 1940s. envy was immediate. Am is recalled being ‘appalled’ to find himself ‘for the first time in the presence of a talent greater than mine’.
‘I am beside myself with anger and grief and envy,’ he wrote in 1946, after Larkin had achieved some small success — and he was only half-joking. In turn, Larkin seethed when his best friend’s first novel, Lucky Jim, became an overnight bestseller.
He then yearned for Amis’s publishers to give his second novel the thumbs-down. ‘Oh, please God, make them return it, with a suggestion that he “rewrites certain passages”!’ he wrote to his girlfriend. ‘Nothing would delight me more.’
A year on, Larkin’s envy had quadrupled. ‘It’s not his success I mind so much as his immunity from worry and hard work, though I mind the success as well . . . He and Hilly [Amis’s wife] strike me as a pair of DIRTY RICH CHILDREN — they have no worries, they REFUSE TO SUFFER . . . ’
Is the writing profession more prone than others to the deadly sins of pride and envy? I suspect so.
THe letters pages in The London Review of Books and the Times Literary supplement often read like all-in wrestling, while their equivalents in the magazines Total Wrestling or Fighting spirit are much more easy-going and dainty.
And, sadly, the thin skin of an author can often be visible from a very young age. When Dame edith sitwell was just four years old, she was sitting in a pram when the actress Mrs Patrick campbell peeped i n and said: ‘ What a beautiful baby.’ Young edith so hated being called a baby that she formed a fist and biffed Mrs Patrick campbell on the nose.