Frank McLynn
Write To Reply
EARLY IN MY career I used to reply with outrage to the many monstrous injustices any worthwhile writer receives at the hands of the critics. The litany is familiar: charges of professional incompetence, poor craftsmanship, plagiarism, etc. A favourite ploy is to pick up on a subtle distinction the author has carefully made between X and Y and then announce that the author has failed to distinguish X from Y. This is rather like that well-known technique of management consultants. Interview the senior personnel in a firm about what they think their management shortcomings are, and then send in a report, complete with an invoice for tens of thousands of pounds, which simply repeats the misgivings expressed by the interviewees as if they were the original insights of the consultants. It is, of course, one of the peculiarities of being a writer that one makes enemies of people one has never clapped eyes on and often never will. Sometimes the hostile critic writes in terms of such unbalanced stridency that one imagines an amnesic interlude. Did I seduce his wife or his daughter in a moment of madness? I must have done, for surely only such egregious wickedness would justify such an effusion of critical bile? Alas, there is something about authorship that elicits the worst forms of human behaviour and emotion in others.
I used to take my cue from Sir Richard Burton and reason that if one did not answer one's critics, this was to concede their case. Burton always flew into a towering rage if anyone ever criticised his mastodonic productions. In his case the critics had a point, for Burton
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘I have to change’, Miles Davis once said. ‘It’s like a curse.’
@rwilliams1947 tells the story of how Davis made jazz cool.
Richard Williams - In Their Own Sweet Way
Richard Williams: In Their Own Sweet Way - 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lo...
literaryreview.co.uk
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson - review by Terry Eagleton via @Lit_Review
for the new(ish) April issue of @Lit_Review I commissioned a number of pieces, including Deborah Levy on Bowie, Rosa Lyster on creative non-fiction, @JonSavage1966 on Pulp, @mjohnharrison on Oyamada, @rwilliams1947 on Kind of Blue, @chris_power on HGarner