Most cutting critics? Take a wild stab. . .
THE author and playwright Anthony Horowitz has taken revenge on critics in his latest book, by having one of them stabbed in the heart with an ornamental dagger.
‘ Being attacked by critics always hurts,’ Horowitz told the Hay Festival. ‘I go into a dark place when that happens. It can last years.’
This is not the first time an author has fantasised about killing a critic, nor will it be the last. It’s no fun reading a damning review of your latest work, particularly if, in the months prior to publication, your publisher and agent and close family members have all been assuring you it’s a masterpiece. When someone takes a dimmer view, it’s human nature to want to exact revenge.
One’s immediate sympathies are with the author, not the critic. Who would want to be Martin Amis, as he first read Tibor Fischer declaring his novel Yellow Dog ‘isn’t bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It’s not-knowing where-to-look bad’?
Or Ann Widdecombe, as she read Rachel Cooke comparing her autobiography to her performance on Strictly: ‘No rhythm, no beauty, no humour and, above all, no feeling’?
I, too, have written some negative reviews in my time. Happily, I have rarely bumped into my victims, though Tim Rice once muttered the word ‘bastard’ as we passed, and Harold Pinter made a rude face at me across a crowded room.
Damning reviews — and threats to their perpetrators — have been around since the first caveman drew a bison on his cave wall, took a step back to admire it and overheard a fellow caveman muttering: ‘Doesn’t look anything like a bison. A child of four could do better.’
The poor caveman was hoping to be acclaimed for his brilliance, of course — but what if his fellow caveman was simply telling the truth and the drawing of a bison was, indeed, completely hopeless?
Those who are most testy about criticism are, more often than not, the most merciless in criticising others. Poets are sensitive flowers when a word is spoken against them, but are more like stinging nettles when it comes to others.
‘Thomas Gray walks as if he had fouled his small-clothes and looks as if he smelt it,’ wrote Gray’s fellow poet, Christopher Smart, in the 18th century.
Lord Byron privately described John Keats’s work as ‘drivelling idiotism’ and called for him to be flayed alive.
At least critics have the courage to make their thoughts public. Most poets and authors prefer to be scathing in private. Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis were best friends, but this didn’t stop them being rude behind each other’s backs.
‘ The only reason I hope to predecease him,’ Larkin wrote to a mutual friend about Amis in 1983, ‘is that I would find it next to impossible to say anything nice about him at his memorial service.’
Thankfully, Larkin died first, giving Amis the licence to repeat an unpleasant anecdote that he knew his old friend would have hated, about Larkin’s drunken incontinence.
‘ He went on to extract from me some sort of promise
not to go round repeating it, which I interpreted as a ban on any sort of publication,’ Amis explained in his memoirs. ‘ But now I consider myself released from that undertaking.’
Good critics are brave enough to say what they believe at the time; authors tend to wait a good few years, until their victims are safely dead and buried.
‘With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his,’ wrote George Bernard Shaw, sure in the knowledge that none of the three he mentioned was still around to biff him.
ANTHONY HOROWITZ himself is more a bull than a lamb. I know him a little, and like him, but whenever we bump into each other he is always sounding off at full volume against this, that or the other.
As far as I know, he is the only castaway on Desert Island Discs ever to have confessed to hating his own grandmother so much that he danced on her grave.
As criticism goes, this must surely take the biscuit, particularly as his grandmother is destined to be in her own dark place for many years to come.