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The tension of authors you love hating other authors you love
Tolstoy absolutely despised Shakespeare, with King Lear a particular object of his disdain. Mark Twain famously said, "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig Jane Austen up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone." Nabokov thought Dostoesvsky largely wrote "not works of art but pathetic hysterics...his characters not human beings but bundles of nerves." Virginia Woolf said Joyce's "Ulysses" read like "the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." That last one is harsh, but as someone who has failed (only temporarily!) in my own Ulysses adventure, I sympathize.
Should this be surprising, or even notable? Just because we love a painter it doesn't mean we'll want to buy the same paintings as they do. But there's something strange about cases where it's two authors you love, two of your favourites, and one absolutely rejects the other. Think of the two writers that have been the most influential on you; now imagine one of them called the other a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. It's an uncomfortable tension, and one that can't be easily resolved by reference to the fact that you love author X as a *writer* not as a literary critic.
Tolstoy absolutely despised Shakespeare, with King Lear a particular object of his disdain. Mark Twain famously said, "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig Jane Austen up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone." Nabokov thought Dostoesvsky largely wrote "not works of art but pathetic hysterics...his characters not human beings but bundles of nerves." Virginia Woolf said Joyce's "Ulysses" read like "the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." That last one is harsh, but as someone who has failed (only temporarily!) in my own Ulysses adventure, I sympathize.
Should this be surprising, or even notable? Just because we love a painter it doesn't mean we'll want to buy the same paintings as they do. But there's something strange about cases where it's two authors you love, two of your favourites, and one absolutely rejects the other. Think of the two writers that have been the most influential on you; now imagine one of them called the other a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. It's an uncomfortable tension, and one that can't be easily resolved by reference to the fact that you love author X as a *writer* not as a literary critic.
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