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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Authors Playing Critic

Good Intentions

23:21 / 26.12.06

It's an old but important observation that quite often authors are the worst judges of their own work. And very often they aren't good critics either - for instance, I found the essay on Heart of Darkness by Achebe (an author of great economy) to be misconceived and insightless. But it isn't always true - I'm thinking especially of Nabokov, whose foreword and afterword to Lolita are amongst the best things of that magnificent novel. His various critical essays are also conspicuously brilliant.

The only other authors who has written noteworthy criticism that I have read has been Oscar Wilde, who is beautifully erudite and often shockingly naïve, and George Orwell, who was too smart for his own or his audience's good. So, Barbelith, recommend to me authors who have written volumes of criticism so incisive that I'd have to fan myself to avert swooning.

01:40 / 27.12.06

t.s.eliot had a few things to say. the 'selected essays' are a good place to start. mor ewhen i'm not hugely drunk, but his attempt to rehabilitate the jacobian dramatists is interesting, and 'tradition and the individual talent' isn't complete pants.

02:10 / 27.12.06

I've heard it said that Anthony Burgess was much more respected for his criticism than his fiction... I've only ever read his fiction though, so I can't really vouch for this.

04:15 / 27.12.06

I'd add Borges to the list of authors that make good critics. His essays, especially "Kafka and his Precursors", are fantastic.

Actually, his fiction and his criticism read almost identically - I once had a collection that put the short stories and the essays side-by-side and ended up making it a kind of game for the reader to figure out which ones were talking abou real books and events and which were fictional. Probably exactly the way Borges would have liked it.

All Acting Regiment

11:56 / 27.12.06

I would second Nabokov, Eliot and Burgess (whose name incidentally is the anglicised version of Borges, they once met at a party and took to turns in reciting sections of Caedmon's Hymn to the chagrin of the secret service agents bugging them), and add that you can get lots of good interviews and articles from the website of the Paris Review- their Nabokov one is especially good.

All Acting Regiment

11:59 / 27.12.06

Oh, there are also some good essays associated with Pound and his Imagistes...you should be able to find them somewhere.

16:01 / 27.12.06

... though i'd stear clear of the pound book called something like 'how to read', because it's pompous horseshit.

to plug my usual bestest friend dead white men:

william carlos williams wrote some good stuff, but i've yet to find enough of it in the same place to be sure if he's really that interesting. he wrote an essay on whitman that takes a hilarious side-swipe at eliot; it's extremely funny when you combine it with that bit in 'paterson' where he effectively lists reasons why aprils' actually quite a NICE month.

beckett's short book on proust, cunningly entitled 'proust', is so good that when i read it, i kicked my mum in the face. it's both a sexy meditation on proust, and an equally nadsy piece on beckett himself; if you want an example of a great author being a great critic, in my humble, there's nothing better.

perhaps reversing the poles a little, but roland barthes's 'roland barthes on roland barthes' warms the cockles of my dry-rotten heart. barthes was always an extremely good writer, but his later stuff, 'camera lucida' as well, provides an example of someone who's usually thought of as a critic producing something i can't help but feel could step into the artistic ring and have most literary texts, with both hands tied behind its back and its left eyebrow shaved off.

22:27 / 27.12.06

Martin Amis is a consummate stylist and a spectacular prose writer. His criticism is pretty good. I got his collection of literary essays and it's a thrill to read somebody so articulate rip into someone like Crichton (among other, more literary authors)

All Acting Regiment

09:39 / 28.12.06

Is that essay online anywhere, Matt? And did you know- although this won't stop me judging his literature objectively- that the guy's become a bit of a raving Islamaphobe?

Janean Patience

14:16 / 29.12.06

Martin Amis is a superlative critic, especially when let loose on genre writers. His dissection of Thomas Harris's Hannibal is unrelentingly smart and made me realise exactly why I was so disappointed with it. He pulls writers apart using their own words - read The War Against Cliche, and you'll be insecure about every sentence you type...

As far as Islamophobia goes, I read some fairly surprising and racist quotes in an interview for the Times or Sunday Times, I forget which. I seem to remember he later apologised for what he said there. The Amis on Islam stuff that was in the Observer was concerned with Islamism, as he called it, the political fringe of the religion that demands the death of the West. In my hazy recollection.

All Acting Regiment

18:34 / 29.12.06

Well, there's an article about it here that's certainly interesting. I would need to read Amis's actual words, though.

Moving on- William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, a study of ambiguity (in a general and much-more-important-than-you-realise sense) in poetry, taking in everyone, is a great read: very clever, and very lucid, and fair and balanced even about that which he doesn't like. Will- or at least can- teach you how to write good poetry.

22:29 / 29.12.06

allecto, could you point me in the direction of a ground-floor entry into empson's non-critical writings? he's a godlike critic, but i've never paid him a blind bit of notice as an author.

i've been sitting on my desire to whip out the c.s. lewis for that very reason; his stuff on middle english is excellent criticism, but he's lop-sided in terms of the thread; always struck me as a massive critic with a withered authorly side.

islamaphobia aside, isn't the problem with amis that he's just a bit shit? i have no sound literary reason for saying this, of course, he just strikes me as a tosser of the highest choir, and i've really never understood what all the fuss was about.

04:20 / 30.12.06

I like E.M. Forster's classic short monograph, Aspects of the Novel, and Virginia Woolf's reviews are wonderful. Steven Fry is also very good at, well, pretty much everything he takes a mind to doing, including writing about other writers.

16:46 / 03.01.07

I like David Foster Wallace's criticism more than I like his fiction. Nabokov and Borges have already been mentioned. John Barth has written some good criticism, collected in his Friday books. William Gass is another whose criticism is better than his fiction. Ralph Ellison wrote some pretty good criticism, as well, after Invisible Man. Barthelme also has some good stuff, particularly his essay Not Knowing.