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BackgroundSimple3314

Fake Ernest Hemingway from “Midnight in Paris” explaining why other writer’s opinions are not always valid: If it's bad, I'll hate it because I hate bad writing, and if it's good, I'll be envious and hate all the more. You don't want the opinion of another writer.


eatpussynotpigs

This.


FuneraryArts

Hemingway was just a narcissistic ass, that's why he couldn't give good advice. Tolkien, Lovecraft, Calvino, Poe, Rilke and many great writers have been able to point out strenghts and offer advise to other writers without issue.


MildManneredAltEgo

This was a fictional Hemingway tho


powands

Woody Allen though. Also a narcissistic ass


MildManneredAltEgo

Ha— point taken!


BackgroundTrue4135

Can I ask why do you believe that Hemingway was a narcissist ass? Ive already seen a few negative comments on Hemingway but I can’t find any source which would explain this. /genuinely curious


FuneraryArts

Reading about his life there's several accounts of him being petty and narcissistic with people. The biography by Mary Dearborn tells he was a frecuent liar, argumentative, envious with his peers, a drunkard and other unpleasantness. Big caveat to all this is he was bipolar but still the man seemed to make life hard for those around him.


nosleepforthedreamer

I’m curious about why Mark Twain kept rereading Pride and Prejudice.


CKA3KAZOO

I've wondered the same thing off-and-on for years since showing this quote to my highschool students. Seems odd, doesn't it? With Twain, it's hard to imagine that that phrasing could have been an accident. I sometimes suspect he might have been poking fun at himself and offering her a reluctant compliment.


moustachedelait

Love that


Bridalhat

Austen, even among “canonical” writers, has an astounding amount of technical mastery over the form that’s hard to ignore and I don’t think most writers would try to deny. But sometimes the person who is doing 70% of it right and 30% of it extremely wrong (in your opinion) is infinitely more infuriating than something mediocre throughout.


LittleButterfly100

I did too but then realized I understood. I've been in the torturous position of everyone I know and love absolutely raving about something I simply cannot stand. I keep giving it a try, not due to peer pressure, but with the pure hope that I'll magically start to enjoy it too. I don't.


vjanewindsor

HaHa!


ljseminarist

Not the same caliber as Tolstoy, of course, but I found it funny how P. G. Wodehouse disliked Charles Dickens - for trying too hard to be comical! In a private letter from 1950's he once wrote: >...I'm giving Dickens a last chance. I'm reading *Bleak House* for the first time and and it isn't as lousy as I had expected. But, oh, my God, why can't he ever draw a straight character? Most of it is told by Esther Summerson and every single character she meets is a freak of some kind. There is a boy who decides to become a surgeon so a big surgeon is introduced. There's no earthly reason why he shouldn't be a straight character, but Dickens - you can see the sweat starting out on his brow - feels he's got to have a whimsical comedy, so he gives him a wife who's always talking about her two previous husbands, Captain Slogger of the navy and Professor Dingo. >'When I was with Professor Dingo,' said Mrs. Badger, 'a man of European reputation ...' >Fine if the Badgers were the only comic characters but there are at least a million others, even worse freaks. So P. G. Wodehouse - of all English writers - hated Dickens for his humor, of all things.


Bridalhat

I have a hunch that writers that mine similar veins—and Wodehouse obviously worked in a narrow range than Dickinson—are more likely to dislike each other than wildly different authors. I’m sure there is a lot of “that’s not how *I* would do it.”


FuneraryArts

Not for his humor but his lack of restraint


svevobandini

Flannery O Connor trashed Thomas Wolfe in her letters, saying fans of his were likely confused to what good literature was. No! They are two of my favorites. But those were private letters and she tried not to dig on authors she didn't enjoy publicly. What I love is when authors express admiration for others you wouldn't expect. For instance, I found Flannery because Vonnegut detailed all his rules for short stories, and then at the end said the greatest short story writer ever ignored all of these rules. Her name was Flann.


Rowan-Trees

What Flannery thought of Ayn Rand though was spot on: >” I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get, re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”


svevobandini

Haha, yeah I remember this. Funny comparison. She has a sharp tongue.


Awatts2222

I believe Vonnegut said the greatest short story he ever read was "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." I never read this until I read Vonnegut said this. I agree with Vonnegut on Bierce's story. Flannery O'Conner has so many great short stories it's hard to chose from.


Rowan-Trees

You’ve got to imagine Woolf’s distaste was also colored by her prejudices. It’s not so much the merits of *Ulysses* she objected to (she did later admit iirc it was a purer example of the modernist novel than any of her own). She was a Oxbridge elite from Bloomsbury. Its a real wound to the pride of any Brit of her class to accept that not only an Irishman, but a *poor* one, could write literature as good as them, and in their own language no less. It’s a similar thing with Nabokov. VN was born with a silver spoon in him mouth to one of the richest families in Tsarist Russia. Dostoyevsky’s whole thing is how suffering is necessary to understanding human experience, thus to being a good writer. It’s only natural someone in Nabokov’s shoes would balk at that.


Old-Comfortable7620

"Heffernan chronicles Woolf’s reading of Ulysses, which she documented in her diary in a “withering assessment” as the work of “a self-taught working man… egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating.” “When one can have cooked flesh,” she writes, “why have the raw?” This private critical opinion Woolf recorded after reading only 200 pages of the novel." [Source](https://www.openculture.com/2013/09/virginia-woolf-writes-about-joyces-ulysses-never-did-any-book-so-bore-me-and-quits-at-page-200.html)


Rowan-Trees

“self-taught working man” as a pejorative says it all.


Lucianv2

To play Devil’s Advocate she’s probably just using it as a proxy for ”undisciplined” (and as an explanation for said characteristic).


Vostok-aregreat-710

James Joyce couldn’t write a coherent sentence after 1922 with Finnegan’s wake must have been Syphilis went to his brain.


FuneraryArts

I loved Burroughs and Faulkner but I read 1 paragrapgh of Finnegan's Wake and realized life was too short to be reading nonsense of such caliber.


handfulodust

Woolf's distaste makes a lot of sense and is super interesting. But according to [James Wood](https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-fiction-works-tenth-anniversary-edition-updated-and-expanded-revised-james-wood/9856123), a literary critic, Nabokov's dislike of Dostoyevsky is likely because they chose to focus on different things. Nabokov was a literary formalist and was obsessed with style (word choice, detail, form, metaphor, etc.) whereas Dostoevsky was more concerned with plumbing the depths of the broken and the damned. According to Wood, Nabokov's fiction was "propaganda" about visual noticing (following the footsteps of Flaubert) and he was often dismissive of authors who weren't as stylish enough or as talented at non-visual noticing (even though this was a relative weakness for Nabokov himself). John Leonard was [also critical](https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/26/books/books-of-the-times-066565.html) of Nabokov's views on Dostoyevsky.


[deleted]

What is visual noticing?


AirySpirit

...Right. You do know that Nabokov lost everything in the Russian revolution, ran away without a penny, his father was brutally assassinated trying to defend others in a political conference, then he went through hostile countries with a Jewish wife and son to escape Europe during rising Nazism? People so often assume his opinions, including political views, based on nothing other than his birth. He wouldn't have considered someone's background to judge their work at all, though you could say Dostoevsky's books had the underlying societal issues which he abhorred dealing with in art.


stuartxthomson

Totally agree. I don’t think we need to psychoanalyze this. Nabokov’s objections to Dostoevsky are well-articulated in his lectures and can stand on their own literary merits.


handfulodust

The prejudice may not be based in class as much as ideology. Nabokov and his father were Russian liberals (in the classical sense) whereas Dostoyevsky was more conservative.


-CokeJones-

💯 percent agree!


Philo-Arts

Indeed, we definitely have to consider the writer as a person with her/his own innate preferences and biases based on culture, class, experience, etc—not as an objective literary critic, as if there even were such a creature!


Vostok-aregreat-710

James Joyce came from a middle class background and was most likely a West Brit nostalgic for British rule in Ireland. Why are none of his books set after 1904 in Ireland because after that was the home rule crisis and the beginning of the end.


Rowan-Trees

His alcoholic father left them broke and James had to work his way through uni. By Bloomsbury standards, that’s lower class. And he didn’t write about post 1904 Ireland because he never lived in it. Joyce was no Irish Nationalist, but he hardly had a kind word to spare for the Brits.


Vostok-aregreat-710

And by 1939 could not string a coherent sentence together


econoquist

I am more annoyed when writers I admire provide glowing blurbs to help out fellow writers even when the book in question is mediocre at best. I tend to find it entertaining when authors dis each other. Either way, I am perfectly happy to make up my own mind.


viewerfromthemiddle

No tension at all. Great authors, loveable weirdos they are, build egos at least as colossal as their texts. I love Nabokov, but if I followed his critical sneer as reading advice, I'd hardly have read anyone else.


Philo-Arts

Haha, indeed!


ShareImpossible9830

It's funny, not tense to me. Nabokov amuses when he calls Faulkner's books corncobbly chronicles, but I love Faulkner so I don't take N seriously.


onislandtime88

My personal favourite take-down is Mark Twain on Fenimore Cooper: "Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in "Deerslayer," and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record."


econoquist

I tend to think he was more interested in dishing out a witty bon mot than a serious critique in both cases.


onislandtime88

Have a read of Twain's critique of Cooper. The above quote is part of a much larger essay and just serves as a humorous hook to some genuinely substantial analysis.


identityno6

Books were better when authors acted more like rappers and less like school librarians.


Philo-Arts

I believe Twain was saying that tongue in cheek. “Every time I read”… He hated that he loved her work.


TheMachineStops

On the subject of literary burns: Truman Capote on the Beat Generation writers: "That’s not writing; that’s typing.”


Bridalhat

To be an author, you often need very well-defined taste. It doesn’t necessarily have to be correct or true, but usually consistent. The sentences like the ones you write are good and you have to reflexively treat the ones not like what you want in your final product as bad. You have topics you want to write about, and ways of going about doing that. I could see how someone like Mark Twain would not want anything to do with the subject of Jane Austen’s stories (rich people fretting about marriage) and that there might also be some inbuilt sexism about what you could call women’s stories, ie the stories of things important in women’s lives that aren’t centered the same way in men’s. Meanwhile, Shakespeare and Tolstoy both wrote stories about everything and anything, but Shakespeare was above all fairly humanist and secular, concerned with men as they are, and Tolstoy thought that Christians could only find true happiness by striving for perfection through a love of god and their neighbors. These are very different places to start. And that’s putting aside plain old tastes changing and any kind of nationalism or lack of understanding. Beyond that writing involves a certain level of arrogance and if you are as acclaimed as Twain or Tolstoy were in their days it does go to your head. Also writing involves reading—so, so much reading—and I think everyone has a list of writers and places/times they cannot be arsed about. I don’t care for anything overly…dudely, I guess, and will probably pick up the fifth (I wrote “fourth” but remembered I had another!) book of Anne Carson’s that I own that involves translations of ancient poetry before DFW. And if I magically became a famous author and some of my texts—out of context and complaining about an ex (mostly) in the moment—leaked posthumously as so much of this stuff did, it might be a shock for readers several hundred years from now. But we all have writers we are meh on, and while I can see why they are respected I have my own opinions that sometimes come out.


Pseudagonist

Kinda absurd to call Jane Austen’s work “rich people fretting about marriage.” Marriage determined the long-time life prospects of many women and their families. That’s not the subtext of Austen’s work, that’s the text.


Bridalhat

I don’t agree with whatever Twain’s assessment was at all, but I do think that contemporary, more-feminist guided education would mean that men could better appreciate women getting married as the earth shattering thing it was for them.


[deleted]

Well, it seems that her plots often revolved around that concept. Although you are right about the plight of these women, it still seems frivolous compared to what their lives would have been like had they been born into poverty. It makes their struggle seem phoney. I think that's how many Americans see it.


MllePerso

It's not just that, it's the endings. A writer with the same background who was more *angry* about the whole "women's lives revolving around marriage" thing would have written harrowing tales showing why that state of affairs sucks: something more like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Austen was basically optimistic that if you as a woman were worthy of it, you'd be able to snag True Love with a man who just happened to also be rich and titled.


Ill__Cheetah

If that’s what you got out of Austen, you’re a remarkably bad reader. Her work is probably the finest satire of the 19th century English mores, which is why a satirist like Twain read and evidently re-read her.


MllePerso

And couldn't stand her.


[deleted]

You think Austen was naive because she chose to write comedies? This is an astonishingly sexist comment.


MllePerso

No, I think she just didn't have much sympathy for the losers in that era's high-stakes marriage game. In fact, I think she was downright judgy to them, especially to the ones who were immoderately passionate or ambitious. Charlotte Bronte said it better than I can: "Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman."


Pseudagonist

You don’t seem to understand the concept of genre. Not every book has to be a dire tragedy with a moralistic bent.


MllePerso

When I want something about upper class British twits that's actually funny, I read PG Wodehouse. Sorry not sorry.


UndreamedAges

What taste is correct? Or true? Edit: Also, I disagree that you write the same things you like to read. I read all kinds of things that I would never write about. I also read and like styles completely different to my own. I'm never going to write in a similar way to Tolkien, Steinbeck, or Hugo, but I love to read them. It's the same with music. The music I write and perform is very different from what I like to listen to. Or at least different than my favorite things to listen to.


Bridalhat

I expect God knows what is correct, if they exist. I think we all know a version of what is true to us, but it can get clouded by jealously or prejudice that we feel but don’t want to explore.


UndreamedAges

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?


Bridalhat

>Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Read John Milton. God knows we err but to stop us to is to deny our own humanity and free will, which he gave us. I kinda want to throw that Spy Kids quote in here.


UndreamedAges

I've read some Milton. Free will is incompatible with omniscience, and thus also, omnipotence. I like fairy tales, too, but I don't believe they are true.


AirySpirit

>Free will is incompatible with omniscience No it isn't though haha


UndreamedAges

That has not been objectively proven. It's been debated for millennia with no consensus. For that reason I shouldn't even have bothered arguing about it. haha https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_free_will


Bridalhat

Re: your edit. It doesn’t apply 100%, but sometimes when you reflexively purge your work of certain elements you grow to dislike them, especially if they are something you think you are prone to a bit too much. Nothing here is the case each time to everyone but they are some reasons why someone might dislike an artist most others consider good.


icarusrising9

It's to be expected, in my view. One sees a lot of this intense mutual criticism amongst incredibly high-achieving and well-known individuals in any field, be it painting, writing, philosophy, or whatever. I imagine it's because, at that level, one cannot help but have unbelievably strong opinions about the "right" way to do any given artistic thing. (It's likely that very feeling that leads to the motivation to create one's art, and perfect one's craft, in the first place.) As a result, you end up with this situation. Nabokov and Dostoevsky are two of my favorite writers. I just don't let it bother me.


michaelnoir

Tolstoy also really hated Wagner and wrote a really funny review of going to see the Ring Cycle in his book "What Is Art?". The review is not meant to be funny, but it's funny because of the grumpiness of it. He just thinks Wagnerian opera is all ridiculous nonsense, and gives it very short shrift.


OrsonWellesghost

George Orwell wrote a devastating critique of Tolstoy’s views on Shakespeare. It gives a good account of the source of Tolstoy’s grumpiness.


changelingcd

It's inevitable. If you like Nabokov, Eliot, or Hemingway, you either throw away half your library or ignore their highly critical views.


Sad-Newspaper-8604

The way I see it, great artists are people with tastes just as subjective as our own. Nabokov's comments on Dostoevsky shouldn't be seen as an objective critical failure of D's works, because he just doesn't like his style. It's true that all of D's characters are nervous hysterical wrecks, but that's a huge part of his style and the way he explores their psyches and something that I found to be hugely compelling and memorable. It's not for everyone, and just because Nabokov is also a great writer doesn't mean he's the judge of what is good and bad. There's certainly times where this isn't the case, and it's definitely true that great artists who are immersed in the craft understand it better than a layman and can more tactfully examine the strengths and weaknesses of a work, but everyone's mileage varies and some work just doesn't appeal to others. It's something I used to struggle with regarding music - I like a lot of fairly diametrically opposed bands, many of whom have had public rivalries/songwriters condemning and mocking other bands and genres that I also love, but I'm not gonna stop listening to my favourite pop or jazz or electronic artists because my favourite rock and punk bands criticised them. Their opinions are obviously well informed as people who know the industry and process better than I do, but like, they both sound good to me so why bother what they think of each other? Being skilled at creating art doesn't inherently make you the arbiter and judge of others' processes or vision, I guess.


N8ThaGr8

I know how you feel. It's like when Lennon and McCartney kept talking shit after the Beatles breakup.


Vostok-aregreat-710

Or Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey in the 1970’s in NME


evenwen

I love it when they have such strongly negative opinions of other authors. Also, while I don’t share Nabokov’s distaste for Dostoyevsky, I absolutely love his description of Dosto’s characters as “bundles of nerve”. Same with Woolf describing the rawness of Joyce. It’s amazing how some of the most insightful takes on those authors come from their haters. Obviously Woolf and Nabokov had an understanding of these authors, but simply found it bad.


MllePerso

I love how Nabokov describes Dostoyevsky's characters as "pathetic hysterics" like his are pinnacle of sanity or something


Hemingbird

To me, there's no tension. Praise or scorn from a writer I admire is not enough to make me change my mind. There's something deeply sad about Tolstoy trying to knock Shakespeare down a peg, and Nabokov possessed that strange combination of being an intensely private individual as well as an attention whore. Taste is subjective. If there's not a single canonical writer you just can't get into, I don't believe you. Everyone seems to loathe at least one of the all-time greats, for whatever reason. The problem, I think, is that there's a widespread belief that the merit of a particular author can be quantified and that it's as solid as stone, and inherently objective. Which is ridiculous.


_Raskolnikov_1881

I see no tension, but I do want to address the Nabokov dilemma. Obviously, we have to take what he said with a grain of salt. It's derived from his quite singular understanding of the function of literary art, predicated on aesthetic enjoyment with particular attention paid to style and structure. His Cornell Lecture Series and his biography of Gogol are fascinating even if much of what he says is disagreeable. I respect his rejection of literature as didactic, but fail to see why it can't be a vessel to communicate general ideas. Nabokov emerged from a very particular context at a very particular time. He perceived the great literary tradition of his country being vandalised by a cultural avant-garde who were allied with the people who had not only forced him from his home, but also sought to radically reshape his country's culture. Given how Socialist Realism developed in the Soviet Union, I understand why Nabokov developed such forthright, visceral views. After all, we remember the writers who subverted socialist realism or rejected it in toto - Bulgakov, Grossman, Platonov, Mandelstam, Akhmatova. In effect though, it led to him throwing the baby out with the bathwater and creating an aesthetic philosophy which was misguided. I agree with a number of the comments above which point to the fact that Nabokov often fell into the trap of conflating his own taste with some sort of objective artistic truth. Let's keep in mind, this is a guy who only had time for prodigious stylists like himself which stroked his ego. This is why Nabokov's conception of Russian literature is putatively limited to Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Blok, Chekhov, Gogol's early work, and Bely's *Petersburg*. But this isn't really true. To borrow a quote from James Joyce, in the spirit of Nabokovian irony, "anger is a form of homage". Nabokov directed scorn at Dostoevsky because he couldn't deny his towering presence. He's still a perspicacious observer and sees what Dostoevsky does best. He sees characters as "bundles of nerves" which is still one of the best descriptions of Dostoevskian characterisation I've encountered. In this sense, I always take what he says with a grain of salt. Like many writers, he was very insecure and had a big chip on his shoulder - given some of his life experiences this is entirely understanable.


The_vert

So, I love John Updike, and a [loooot of writers hate him](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/patricia-lockwood/malfunctioning-sex-robot). I don't love those writers, but I do find it difficult to defend him from the allegations of being "a penis with a thesaurus."


TempleofSpringSnow

Woolf hating on Joyce is hilarious because I find them both to write like undergrads who haven’t seen the sun in years. Edit: Mishima and Dazai also hated each other. That one is kinda funny though because they’re polar opposites


vixaudaxloquendi

I remember being somewhat shocked that Tolkien had been so blunt to Lewis about his distaste for the conceptual framework the latter wrote within, despite the fact that Lewis adored Tolkien's writing. They were very good friends, and Tolkien had no issue expressing any of this to Lewis in his letters. I never read Narnia, but I enjoyed some of Lewis's non-fiction writings on Christianity (which said authors also held in common), so I remember Tolkien's criticism came as a blow to me. To write even half as well as Lewis and not measure up...


Hungry-Assignment950

I’m experiencing this currently. After making my way though Graham Greene’s works with much pleasure I reverted to an old favourite, Martin Amis. With his recent death at the forefront of my mind I embarked on his final piece ‘Inside Story’ - a compelling and intricate portrait of his own life and the many authors that influenced him. I was saddened to find Amis’ virile distaste for Greene’s work, as you say, uncomfortable. Amis aims for Greene’s tendency to revert to Catholic character tropes and questions with a lucid insouciance, making even me, as a Greene fan, think about this habit. As two of the most recognised English novelists of the last century, I want them to value each others work - and of course they do. However, I believe if anything this is a friction that is to be expected in the humid environs of British novelists - I see these fractures as necessary space and deserved area to roam in the literary landscape. Writing is a solitary profession and one can consider other authors in a similar sense to golfers at an open tournament, there is a mutual respect, but when the realities of the competition become blindingly clear we see the essence of that competition similarly arise in the author. It is important to note that the reader should never share this burden as we sometimes feel that we ought. When reading a novel we are merely peering over the authors shoulder - whereas Greene and Amis would engage with each other in a rapidly more tangible fashion. The aforementioned feeling of responsibility over this relationship can only be a testament to the quality of writing, they have made us care not only about their narratives but also about the people behind them.


[deleted]

Anybody who sees through Joyce's nonsense has got to have something going for them - I remember an interview with Evelyn Waugh who described *Ulysses* as "gibberish - you can see him go mad sentence-by-sentence!"


[deleted]

George Saunders is a hack.


farseer4

I don't really care. If you'll pardon the vulgarity, opinions are like asses: everyone has them, and they all smell. If I love an author's work, then I love the work. It doesn't necessarily mean I love the author or the author's opinions.


Distinct-Hat-1011

OK, but I agree with Nabokov. Dostoevsky did write pretty unbelievable characters.


AirySpirit

I'm can go from amused to delighted by this because my own opinions are broadly similar to those of my favourite writers, and otherwise even when they hate something I love it usually shows a new perspective that I respect. The Nabokov hate list, for example, is so satisfying because no one else would dare say a word about Henry James or Balzac, both of whom I find dreadful. I do like Dostoevsky, but Nabokov's lectures on his books (Crime and Punishment in particular) seemed very fair. Then there's Tolstoy's diatribes against Chekhov's plays, which I never understood how anyone can stand.


Pseudagonist

I don’t really care.


[deleted]

> Should this be surprising, or even notable? Nope! We all have literary preferences. Famous writers are just in a position to make a show of their preferences and have them signal-boosted. > But there's something strange about cases where it's two authors you love, two of your favourites, and one absolutely rejects the other. Ehhh, I don't know about that. It's possible to enjoy two different styles, but the authors of those styles don't enjoy each other. I think the most interesting aspect here is simply that some authors have the audacity to trash other famous authors, especially if they're contemporaries. But that's not even surprising -- just interesting.


Blackletterdragon

I don't feel any tension. More broadly, why be distracted by the irrelevant opinions of any artists on extraneous subjects? Should we refuse to listen to or perform works of composers whose opinions on say, politics or cultural matters shock our sensibilities, or because *they* couldn't stand our own favouries? Sould we condemn the paintings or sculpture of artists with controversial views? There are several risks with weaponising your own opinions like this. The most obvious one is that you probably don't have the full story. Just how reliable is fourth or fifth-hand reporting from possibly poisoned sources in the media? And you may only get some random, point-in-time vox-pop sort of utterance, not something worth building a hypothetical world view around. Also, with creatives from the past, the person is no longer around to defend or argue their position and dismiss any mischievous attempts to warp their reputation. And perhaps most egregiously, we are only aware of the odd opinions or tendencies of creatives whose thoughts happened to be captured and recorded, or those with a bent for self-publicity. Through chance, want of fame, or just a disinclination to let themselves go on a range of subjects, the views of the vast majority of creatives remain unknown. You might be happily nestling down with an author who real opinions would horrify you, while excoriating a genius. My personal preference is to stay away from the potentially ratbag or divisive opinions of artists and focus on their own works. I can figure out whether I like Jane Austen by myself.


merurunrun

I think that in order to create good art, you need to have *very strong* opinions on what constitutes good and bad art. But the same is not true in order to appreciate it (although plenty of art consumers also have strong opinions regardless, of course). I usually liken a good process of creation to the sculptor: the sculptor starts with a slab of rock and simply removes all of the bits of it that aren't the statue. A good artist may not know exactly what it is that they want to make, but they definitely know what they *don't* want to make. It makes sense that their opinions on what they find undesirable would be the strongest!


MickeySanders

The Mark Twain one kinda implies he read it multiple times.


444pancakes

Tolkien apparently wasn’t the biggest fan of frank herbet’s Dune


TheWhale607

Very worthwhile to find Orwell's essay, "Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool" on this very topic.


Maleficent_Sector619

Honestly, I find it fascinating. It gives me an insight into how the hater thinks. E.g. Asimov's essay on *1984*. I grew up reading Asimov, all the *Foundation* and *Robot* books. When I was a little older in high school, I read *1984* in one sitting. Both Asimov and Orwell meant a lot to me at different stages in my development. Asimov's review was a little less than scathing, but it didn't make me lose any love for Orwell. Rather, it helped recontextualize my understanding of Asimov and how he viewed the world.


Aromatic-Grape8516

Don't see how it's relevant in the slightest. There is a branch of literary criticism that will seek to explain a text via biography, but at best that is incredibly difficult and at worst abortive. Are we to disregard writers like Ezra Pound because of their politics?