The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Not author-on-author, but director-on-director:

Billy Wilder on Charlie Chaplin (from 1963 Playboy interview):

In Munich not long ago I saw Chaplin's Limelight for the first time; it was never shown on the West Coast, and I was anxious to see it. A girl in our party said she had seen it eight times, and later I told her I knew how she felt, because I saw it once and it seemed like eight times. I found it completely shallow and commonplace. If only he had stuck to comedy. In the silents he never philosophized. In sound he never stopped philosophizing; when he finally found a voice to say what was on his mind, it was like a child writing lyrics to Beethoven's Ninth. I found it shocking to think that he was attacked for his political convictions and forced to leave the U.S. when everything he was saying was on a grammar school level. Mind you, I still think he was an authentic genius, and I would do a picture with him today for free - if he would only shut up.

LK


-----Original Message-----
>From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>Sent: Jun 20, 2011 12:26 PM
>To: Richard Ryan <himself at richardryan.com>
>Cc: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>, pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History
>
>I'm sure there's no samll amount of jealousy involved.
>
>On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 11:12 AM, Richard Ryan <himself at richardryan.com> wrote:
>> Interesting that many of the targets are almost certainly greater figures than the writers casting stones (Woolf on Joyce; Wells on Shaw; Stevenson on Whitman).
>>
>> Quite funny, some of them, though mostly inaccurate or (worse)
> uncomprehending.  Auden on Browning is asinine  - and Auden was a
>bright, witty man, so where did this come from?