Dishing It Out, Taking It

Writing and Reading

I reach instinctively for the cliche “poacher turned gamekeeper”, but that’s not quite it. Poacher turned pheasant, more like. This is the situation in which my comrade James Marriott (critic and columnist for the Times and here on Substack as https://jmarriott.substack.com/) finds himself, with his first book The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society coming out later this year. Judging by his posts on this platform, he’s nervous about it.

After all, as he knows, he’s written the odd starchy book review in his time. What’s it going to be like on the receiving end? Having merrily laid waste to the reputations of other writers, is he going to find it intolerable if he gets the odd critical review himself? The dildo of consequences, as he did not quite put it, rarely comes lubed. He declared: “I am discovering that the closer I get to the publication of my own book the more I morally disapprove of negative book reviews.” LOL, as F R Leavis would have said.

I quoted to him the wisdom of my old friend Peter McKay, who trained me up as a gossip columnist. He pooh-poohed the old saying that “if you dish it out you ought to be able to take it”. “What people fail to understand,” Peter would say shaking his head mournfully, “is that dishing it out and taking it are totally different disciplines.” I think he’s right. There’s no necessary connection between the two things at all.

Some are strong in only one suit; some can’t do either. I sometimes think, for instance, of Julie Burchill telling the story of being bearded in a supermarket by the victim of a recent column. “Here, aren’t you that Julie Burchill?” they said. “No I’m not!” she squeaked (this is especially funny because only Julie Burchill sounds like Julie Burchill), and fled. My friend Andy, on the other hand, cannot dish it out but can take it all day long, smiling beatifically as his friends shower insults on him.

But critics or literary editors who publish books are in a slightly peculiar position, and mostly, we should acknowledge, it is to advantage. If you regularly write reviews for newspapers, you’ll be a known name to literary editors. You’re more likely to get reviewed full stop. Getting well reviewed is just gravy. My own long-ago first novel The Coincidence Engine, for instance, was widely reviewed (as most first novels are not) and I was very grateful for it. The first review to appear was hostile, though: swings and roundabouts; had I no sort of profile at the time most lit eds would have considered it kinder to ignore the book, but as a sort-of-established critic I was fair game. (Annoyingly, because of my Highly Principled refusal to edit my own Wikipedia page, that’s still the only review linked there. Anyway, I’m a decent enough critic to know my novel wasn’t much good, so fair enough.)

I doubt James will have all that much to worry about, incidentally. I haven’t seen his book yet, but it’s an important and timely subject and he’s a very good writer. I like him as a critic because he shows every sign of being well read and of really liking books, including old and unfashionable ones; of thinking that this stuff is fun, but also that it’s important. And if he presents, as he sometimes mocks himself, as a slightly old-fashioned millennial, that’s to the good: what we’re interested in defending – the canon, literary quality, serious thought – does look a bit old fashioned these days.

And writing a book does change you, a bit, as a critic. Before I wrote a novel, when I listened to novelist pals moaning about the agonies of the creative process, I thought: how hard can it be? You just make stuff up. Then I did it, and realised how hard making stuff up is. Is it a doorknob, or a door-handle? Should the characters turn left, or right? (If your answer to these is “doesn’t matter” or “who cares?”, you may not be a natural novelist.)

It gives you a new respect for the process. It also, I think, helps rebalance the position you’re in as someone who in the course of your work as a reviewer sees a lot of new fiction. You go from noticing that most of it’s rubbish and thinking you could probably do better (may well be true) to recognising that the few people who are good at it are really good at it and you couldn’t compete with them in a million years of trying. Funnily enough, there’s quite a long list of critics whose forays into fiction are kinda meh: separate disciplines, again?

So, that might make you less of a hatchet-merchant. It might make you a better critic as well as a kinder one. Nonfiction – though it’s much more like journalism, so you’re on familiar ground – will have some version of the same effect. Pulling lots of research together and giving it a shape is not easy. My last book The Haunted Wood was also widely reviewed – and I hope that the generosity with which it was mostly received wasn’t all down to other writers hoping to stay on the right side of a literary editor. (Nicholas Shakespeare told me when I took over as lit ed on the Telegraph: “Best job in the world, and you’ll make three new enemies a week – but you won’t know who they are till you leave post.”)

That said, if you’re a literary editor and you publish a book you have a quandary about what you do in your own pages. I thought the only ethical thing to do (I’m also Highly Principled about not letting people use my pages to scratch the backs of their friends) was to ignore it altogether. Props, though, to the chutzpah of the reviewer who emailed to ask me whether she could review my new book for the Spectator. No, Melanie! Bad Melanie!

In support of his conversion to disapproving of negative book reviews, James quoted a passage of Martin Amis that has long been a touchstone for me too:

“Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realize how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember (Angus Wilson and William Burroughs nursed my animadversions – and no doubt the animadversions of others – to the grave). Admittedly there are some critics who enjoy being insulting well into middle age. I have often wondered why this spectacle seems so undignified. Now I know: it’s mutton dressed as lamb.”

The young critic’s slashing review is a gesture of pride, obviously. A reputation for savagery, for austerity, for high standards, is what you hope to cultivate. You want attention. As is often said, book reviewing is an implicitly competitive project because unlike most other forms of cultural criticism, the review is made of the same stuff as the object of study. It’s your prose against theirs.

If you say a book is badly written, you’re proposing that a) you’re qualified to judge and that b) at least if the reader is supposed to take you seriously, your writing is better; that this isn’t pot denouncing kettle. So it is that you get a steady queue of ambitious young shavers determined to Cut That Ian McEwan Down To Size. (Side note: in one, otherwise generous, review of a book by Piers Morgan I noted that he’s a lousy writer. This obviously stung, and he took to social media to ask: “How would you know?” Easy riposte to that: “I read your book, Piers.”)

There’s a line of good newspaper critics who made their early reputations with negative reviews. Amis, obviously. The young A N Wilson and D J Taylor — when initials were the thing — James Wood and David Sexton. Dale Peck was so famous for hatchet jobs that he called the anthology of his reviews Hatchet Jobs, and was never heard of again. In recent years Leo Robson, Claire Lowdon and Lauren Oyler have caught the attention by being a bit fighty in print (all three of them seem to me first-rate critics, I should say: they can back it up). Craig Raine and Michael Hofmann show that dropping anvils on reputations is not just a young person’s game.

But those slashing reviews are often, in a weird way, also a gesture of humility — especially from the younger critics Amis describes. I know they were for me. I said shockingly rude things about certain books because at some deep level I didn’t believe that the authors were real, flesh-and-blood people. To be a published author was a condition so far above my station, so Olympian, that the idea the opinion of some 23-year-old showing off in a newspaper could hurt them seemed absurd. As I saw it I was chipping away at the marble toe of a colossus (big as a Frisco seal) with my tiny toothpick. They were Over There, on Parnassus: the occasions for an exercise in playing the critic, just as like those long-dead authors you’d been talking about so cleverly at university.

But then you hang around, and you get into the world, and you start meeting these people at parties. A couple of days after publishing a particularly stinky review of Pat Barker I was introduced to Shena MacKay at a launch event, and she recognised my name from the review. “Aren’t you...?” I gathered myself up a little pridefully. “You didn’t need to be that cruel,” she said and (at least as I remember it) turned her back on me. That was a teachable moment for a young smart-aleck.

And, yes, they do notice. They do mind. They do remember. One Booker prize winner, who a long time ago my publisher rung up in the hopes of getting them to endorse one of my books, exploded in expletives: I’d written an unenthusiastic review of one of their novels years previously. I’ve had full sentences of decade-old reviews quoted at me verbatim by their victims; or reviews resentfully mentioned on first meeting an author that were so old I had forgotten writing them and they had vanished from the internet. Iain Duncan-Smith grumbled about me on the Today Programme after I was rude about his useless book. Another writer with whom I’ve been friendly off and on over the years not long ago emailed to tell me that I “marry the bovine anti-intellectualism of the English middle-classes to a bizarre disdain for anything you cannot understand”. Which (*Big Lebowski gif*): that’s just, like, your opinion, man.

That’s part of the game. You might become, as you mature and as you publish books of your own, less keen on the preening would-be zinger. As Amis puts it in the sentence that precedes the bit James quoted: “You hope to get more relaxed and confident over time; and you should certainly get (or seem to get) kinder, simply by avoiding the stuff you are unlikely to warm to.” But you do, finally, write for the readers not for the authors. If you’re not prepared to say – gently, constructively, but clearly -- when something’s not good your praise won’t mean anything either.

Anyway, as my Dad used to say: if you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have joined.

***

In other news:

Forgive me for not doing a detailed rhetorical run-through of the State of the Union address here. I feel like we’ve mostly got a handle on Trump’s rhetorical style, by now, and it was very in the middle of the night for me. Also: very long. Cf Stalin: “Quantity has a quality all its own.”

I thought that quality/quantity quote was Clausewitz, by the way, and was surprised to find when Googling to check that it’s more often attributed to Stalin. And that’s the thing about very long speeches. They are not, typically, what you expect in a democracy. Audiences — if not nervous about how walking out would affect their career prospects or hopes for continuing to breathe — tend to vote with their feet when they get bored. That’s why the champions of marathon oratory tend to be people like Fidel Castro and, for that matter, Josef Stalin. (Also, Gyles Brandreth, but that’s a slightly different story.)

And the long speech/short speech thing does resonate with a pivotal moment in American history. What we now call the “Gettysburg Address” wasn’t actually the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln — who was down to make some “Dedicatory Remarks” — was actually sixth on the bill at the dedication of that graveyard, behind Birgfield’s Band and the Marine Band. To quote Half-Man, Half-Biscuit: “You’re going on after Crispy Ambulance.”

The offical address was by the now forgotten figure of Edward Everett, hailed as the great classical orator of the age. Everett was a right windbag. He spoke for more than two hours: so long, in fact, that they had to set up a special pee-tent by the stage so that he could relieve himself as soon as he was done talking (he was 69; prostate stuff). On he droned, off he stumbled for a piss — and not long afterwards Lincoln spent two minutes delivering 250-odd words. As the historian Garry Wills put it: Everett’s speech was "obsolete within a half-hour of the time when it was spoken”.

***

I interviewed Francis Spufford this week about his almost indecently entertaining new novel Nonesuch. Discussed (among much else): C S Lewis, church services, how a 61-year-old bloke can safely write as a 20-something woman, and supersizing Dr Manhattan.

Also, I wondered about whether Andrew M-W’s downfall spells the end of the monarchy.

And finally, plugola: I’ve an event coming up at the British Library with the great Philip Pullman. We’re going to be talking about fairytales. Book your tickets now and come and say hi.

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