The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History

[jochen stremmel]

Auden's comment on Browning sounds like a remark in a letter. Isn't an
insult to an author.

Faulkner's on Hemingway isn't an insult at all.

Faulkner's on Mark Twain must have been made after a bottle of sour mash.

And this one should be on the list:

Cooper's gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but
such as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects,
and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box
of stage properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks,
artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each
other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these
innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a
moccasined person tread in the tracks of the moccasined enemy, and
thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of
moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled
out of his box pretty frequently was his broken twig. He prized his
broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the
hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody
doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two
hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and
absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on
a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on, but that
wouldn't satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a
dry twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one.

I don't know a Faulkner novel that is better than Huckleberry Finn.


2011/6/20 Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net>:
> On 6/20/2011 1:12 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:
>>
>> Richard Ryan's instincts must be right.....
>>
>> i can not find that Auden quote anywhere in Google book search....i've
>> neverheard it either...(and i had
>> heard many)...................
>>
>
> Don't you suppose Auden was making a jocular comment on Browning's wife's
> (Elizabeth Barrett)  famous sonnet?
>
> There must have been at least a couple of ways in which she had cause not to
> love him. (that she didn't  enumerate in her poem)
>
> P
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: David Morris<fqmorris at gmail.com>
>> To: Richard Ryan<himself at richardryan.com>
>> Cc: Dave Monroe<against.the.dave at gmail.com>; pynchon
>> -l<pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Mon, June 20, 2011 12:26:06 PM
>> 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?
>>
>>
>
>