Purloined Literary Putdowns

by Richard Kostelanetz (June 2014)

With the single exception of J. D. Salinger, there is no eminent writer, not even Stephen King, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Susan Sontag. The intensity of my impatience with her occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig her up and throw stones at her, knowing as I do how incapable she and her worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity.

I grow bored in America, and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Danielle Steel, the queen of nincompoops, the princess of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokeswoman of janitresses.

Tom Clancy is a bad novelist and a political fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US.

If anyone thought that anything written by me was influenced by Charles Bernstein, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes. A more sententious, holding-forth old bore, who expected every hero-worshipping adenoidal little twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word I never saw.

Gore Vidal is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler, he is brim full of treachery, and he conceals his aristocratic birth as carefully as if he considered it a disgrace. How do I know? By the best of all evidence, personal observation.

To me Howard Fast was an enormously skillful fuck-up and his books will do great damage to our country. Probably I should re-read them again to give you a truer answer. But I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs.

The Grapes of Wrath is one of the books that the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.

Concerning no subject would Ms. Ann Coulter be deterred by the minor accident of complete ignorance from penning a putatively definitive opinion.

Why do you like Louis Auchincloss so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written By Love Possessed than any of his novels? I should hardly like to live with his ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.

John O’Hara was 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.

I have been reading a translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir. Is it good? To me it seems perhaps the very worst book I ever read. No American woman could have written such a book. I cannot remember a single good page or idea. Is it all a practical joke? If it really is Beauvoir that I have been reading, I am glad I have never taken the trouble to learn French.

Figure a fat flabby incurvated personage, at once short, rotund and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange brown timid yet earnest looking eyes, a high tapering brow, and a great bush of grey hair—you will have some faint idea of Walt Whitman.

If Katherine Anne Porter took twenty-two years, as she claims, to write A Ship of Fools, the book itself suggests at least eighteen years were wasted.

It may be laziness, but on the rare occasions when I do pick up Kurt Vonnegut, whose early books I enjoyed before he was as celebrated as he is now, he seems to me to suffer from American cleverness: the fear of being thought stupid, or dull, or behind the times. I think that’s a very bad attitude for the novelist to adopt. He must not mind being thought boring and pompous from time to time—let’s hope he avoids it, but if he runs too far in the opposite direction, he’s heading for disaster.

To be a really lousy writer takes energy. The average novelist remains unread not because he is bad but because he is flat. On the evidence of Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann deserves her high place in the best-seller lists. This is the second time she has been up there. The first time was for a book called Every Night, Josephine, which I will probably never get around to reading. But I don’t resent the time I have put into reading Valley of the Dolls. As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks, but as best-sellers go it argues for a reassuringly robust connection between fiction and the reading public. If cheap dreams get no worse than this, there will not be much for the cultural analyst to complain about. Princess Daisy is a terrible book only in the sense that it is almost totally inept.

André Malraux, though later on he was to write a history of the world’s art, looks at the past with the same sort of surprised disgust as a civilized man contemplating a tribe of cannibals. Writers like him, whether they liked their own age or not, at least thought it was better than what had gone before, and took the literary standards of their own time for granted.

Heller’s Catch-22 suffers not only from indelicacy but from prolixity. You are mistaken in calling it a novel. It is a collection of sketches, often repetitious, totally without structure.

I have heard a good deal about the wonders of Gertrude Stein’s style. She sometimes discovers a truly brilliant trope. The form of her sentences is rather tryingly monotonous, and the distance between her nominatives and her verbs is steadily increasing.

Now, of course, James Dickey did not sell himself solely for money. No writer ever does that. Anyone who wanted money before all else would choose some more paying profession. But I think it probable that Pound did sell himself partly for prestige, flattery and a professorship.

Flannery O’Connor writes of her characters as though they were animals circling around each other. On this sub-human plane no human destinies can be decided.

The cruelest thing that has happened to Abraham Lincoln since he was shot has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

Nothing in Theodore Dreiser’s books is so dim, significantly enough, as the human beings who live in them, and few are intensely imagined as human beings at all. It is obvious that his mind moves most happily in realms where he does not have to work in very complex types. What one sees in his handling of these types is not merely a natural affection for this simplicity, but a failure to interest himself too deeply in them as individuals.

Sylvia Plath took every unattractive aspect for the ambitious artistic psyche and shoved it right up front. In short, she pushed it. In retrospect it turns out that she pushed it to the limit. It’s doubtful whether the suicide of an artist should be allowed to lend force to her work, but it’s hard to see how one can stop it happening.

Christopher Hitchens’ recent prose is characterized by professional haste and a desire to be a stylist. The result is a knotted, cadenced, bogus lustiness: Every sentence is sure to contain some virile quirk or other, often (you feel) as a product of will rather than of inspiration or care.

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