How do writers survive their critics?
With some choice kung fu moves.
The young man charged with the attack on Salman Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution in August 2022 was allegedly outraged by Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, even though he later admitted in a jailhouse interview that he’d only “read like two pages.” Imagine the would-be-killer halfway through the second page of the 547-page novel, mystified by the magical realism of it all, as Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, Rushdie’s two larger-than-life protagonists, fall to earth from an exploding jumbo-jet “like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar” only to be transformed into an angel and a devil on the way. Was this the metaphysical plunge that called-forth the murderous, real-life plot?
If you know that a book is going to rile you, it’s probably best not to read it. I can’t help thinking, here, of that 2018 Ricky Gervais sketch (love him, or hate him), which James Corden rehashed on the Late Show. The one where Gervais is talking about how easily people get offended. “They choose to read my Tweet, and then take that personally,” he says. “That’s like going into a town square, seeing a big notice board and there’s a notice—guitar lessons—and you go, ‘But I don’t want fucking guitar lessons!’” As the Nigerian novelist and poet Chinua Achebe once observed more decorously, “If you don’t like someone’s story, you write your own.”
But you have to read a book to judge it. YouTube videos of the author, which Rushdie’s would-be-assassin had apparently watched, won’t fill the blanks. As D. H. Lawrence wrote, “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.” It definitely isn’t to murder the artist. Rushdie was stabbed fifteen times, sustaining multiple wounds to his face, neck, stomach, chest, hand, and thigh. The blade plunged into his right eye, damaging the optic nerves.
Compared to this level of violence, vindictive reviews are trifles. Still, even they can be hard for an author to take. Especially when it’s obvious the reviewer hasn’t read the book. At best, it’s been a flick-through with a scan of the back cover as a prelude to a thousand words of strong opinion, feigned offense, and condescension.
One response to this kind of negativity is to look on the bright side because there’s no such thing as bad publicity. But then again, Phineas Barnum, the American showman often credited with this gem, is also the man who allegedly claimed there’s a sucker born every minute.
Another response is to thank your lucky stars because it used to be a lot worse. As the Economist observes, “critics are getting less cruel.” Just remember poor John Keats whose poetic romance ‘Endymion’ (which begins with those memorable lines “A thing of beauty is a joy forever/ Its loveliness increases; it will never/ Pass into nothingness”) was trashed by one reviewer in Blackwood’s Magazine as “imperturbable driveling idiocy.” A few years later, Keats was dead of TB, although Lord Byron claimed he was “snuffed out by an article.”
Recently, I heard a French novelist telling an audience that he valued feedback on his writing from his readers because he was writing for them. No doubt this was a strategy aimed at appeasing potentially censorial readers, but what does “feedback” mean in this context? If authors are servicing demand in this way, aren’t they ipso facto ghostwriters? So, why not have done with it and bring on ChatGPT? Let the readers write or barring that, the machines. As the saying goes “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”
The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk once confided that in the 1970s, when his mother would ask him who he was writing for, “her mournful and compassionate tone” suggested that she was really asking, “How are you planning to support yourself?” “And when my friends asked me who I was writing for, they were mockingly suggesting that no one would ever want to read a book by someone like me.”
George Orwell got to the nub of the matter when he wrote: “Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living.” According to Orwell, they’re egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. “All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery,” he claims. “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality.”
Criticism brings out the tension between a craving to be noticed and an urge to hide. And while Orwell acknowledged the mixed motives that compel the writer, he also recognized “the poisonous jungle” of the literary world, “in which only weeds can flourish.” This, from a green-fingered grower of roses and a cultivator of vegetables at a time of war.
Orwell got his fair share of criticism and still does. In his lifetime most of his work received mixed reviews. Down and Out in Paris and London was rejected by several publishers, while Animal Farm was passed over by Victor Gollancz, Jonathan Cape, and Faber and Faber before being published by Secker and Warburg in 1945.
But reasons for writing aside, perhaps the best way of surviving criticism is to approach it as entertainment, a peculiar kind of self-validation, a form of upended approbation. Rushdie has done this with his book Knife, harnessing a hate crime to catalyze his writing. His attacker—Rushdie never names him but calls him “the A” for Assailant, Assassin, Asinine, Assumptions, and Assignation—didn’t silence the author, he gave him a new book. This may be one of the best illustrations ever of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s tired adage, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Or, in this case, the knife. As Rushdie writes, “If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back. It could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hand on my wall, to take charge of what had happened to me, to won it, make it mine.”
James Joyce, a major influence on Rushdie, seems to have developed a similar self-defense move which, like a form of emotional kung fu, redirected his critics’ rage against them. Allegedly, he circulated bad reviews of Ulysses, some of which were real stinkers. Like the one published in Dublin’s Daily Express: “All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the name of Christ.” Note the distinctly Joycean twist to this anti-Joyce tirade; a relishing of the filth in the pious act of denouncing it, which Joyce must have appreciated. And in this “flood of unimaginable thoughts,” he must also have discerned echoes of another emotional “surge,” which several years before had prompted his defiant young alter-ego Stephen Dedalus to declare: “I will express myself as I am.”