Stranger Than Fiction
Start at A in this book and right away you discover that writers have no harsher critics than other writers. Take Truman Capote’s brief but bitter assessment of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.“It’s not writing, it’s just typing.”
Imagine what he would have said if he’d heard the rumor that Kerouac wrote his first draft on sheets of tissue from public toilets.
It gets better. Joseph Conrad, author of such sea faring dramas as Lord Jim dismissed Herman Melville (Moby Dick) with the words, “Melville knows nothing about the sea.” In turn Conrad was roasted by Vladimir Nabokov, who huffed “I cannot abide his souvenir shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romantic clichés.”
But none tops English poet Thomas Babington Macaulay, who said of Socrates; “The more I read him, the less I wonder why they poisoned him.” Nasty.
Stranger Than Fiction is a little treasure house of trivia about writers, some of it positively mind boggling. If you can’t stand another day without knowing which writers suffered from `Portnoy’s Complaint’, or which writer killed himself by Japanese ritual suicide, get this book. Others went insane, went to jail, went bankrupt or went to the bottle. Others just stopped writing altogether, like Robert Southey, who became Poet Laureate in 1843 and never wrote another poetic word. What a time to get writer’s block!
But none of this is surprising, really, when you read how many times best sellers were rejected before eventual publication. Can you imagine M*A*S*H getting rejected? The book that became the film that became the TV show engraved on viewers’ hearts? No less than 21 publishers turned down Richard Hooker’s original manuscript.
In the case of Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, one could only wish it had been rejected 19 times instead of the recorded 18.
See, I can do it too! Get this book and brush up on your epithets. Or just while away the time with some thoroughly entertaining reading.
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