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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Status Anxiety

Incredibly, nobody has yet punched me in the nose over what I have written in a review

I was told at a very early stage in my writing career never to seek revenge on critics. If you get a poor review, you just have to take it on the chin. To write a letter of complaint to the publication in question — or, worse, punch the critic on the nose — is a terrible faux pas. The correct response when asked about a bad notice is to pretend you have not read it.   

But what if the boot is on the other foot? Is it acceptable for critics to write about the efforts that have been made to retaliate against them? Or is that a breach of etiquette, too? Earlier this year, my friend Sebastian Shakespeare was confronted by an angry young man who objected to something that had appeared about him in the Londoner’s Diary, the column Sebastian edits on the Evening Standard. He punched him in the face, then deposited a bucket of manure on his head as he sat in the driver’s seat of his open-topped BMW. With superhuman restraint, Sebastian has chosen not to write about this, believing it to be a private matter between him and the young man.   

I am not so honourable. Last week, after reviewing the memoirs of a literary grandee in the Wall Street Journal, I received a vitriolic email from the man’s son. ‘I imagine some people may find you entertaining, as most jealous people enjoy the frisson of a vicious barb,’ he wrote. ‘Perhaps if you had actually read the vignettes through, or still had the cranial horsepower actually to understand the wit and wisdom behind them, there would be more to you than the sad spectacle of a man who believes being a bitch in a bespoke suit (paid for with his father’s money) is somehow continuing a great critical tradition.’ He went on to accuse me of having a very small penis.   

At least he had the good grace to deliver this jeremiad via email and not in person. After I gave one of Alain de Botton’s books a less than favourable review — ‘He’s in the habit of regurgitating a fairly rudimentary bit of common sense with the air of someone imparting a startlingly original observation’ — he buttonholed me at a party. It wasn’t the review itself that upset him, he explained, but the fact that I had come to his launch party the previous week. If I was not a fan of the book, why had I bothered to turn up? ‘I hadn’t read it at that point,’ I explained. He did not believe me — rightly, as it turned out. I had already submitted my review, but simply couldn’t resist the lure of a good party.   

John Gross, who used to work as the chief book reviewer of the New York Times, told me that the best response to questions along these lines was delivered by Hilton Kramer, the Times’s former art critic. When he appeared at the opening of an artist whose work he had ridiculed in that morning’s paper, the artist marvelled at his effrontery. ‘Aren’t you embarrassed to show your face?’ he asked. ‘Me?’ exclaimed Kramer. ‘Certainly not. You’re the one who should be embarrassed for having produced such bad art.’   

Still, de Botton was remarkably good-humoured compared to another author, who shall remain nameless. My review had appeared in the pages of this magazine which, then, was edited by Boris Johnson. I was chatting to Boris, along with Dominic Lawson, another former editor, at The Spectator’s 175th anniversary party when Boris spotted this writer across the room. ‘I think it’s time you two made up,’ he said, summoning the man over. I thrust out my hand, ready to let bygones be bygones, whereupon he spat in my eye. ‘I’m not shaking his hand,’ he screamed. ‘He’s a c***, an absolute c***. Everyone told me he was a c*** and it’s true: he’s a c***.’ It is fair to say that Mrs Dominic Lawson, aka Rosa Monkton, was somewhat taken aback by this fusillade.

He stopped short of punching me in the nose which, incredibly, has never happened. (Will Self once threw me into a fire, but that’s another story.) Perhaps he thought this would be doing me a favour. The furious email I received last week was accompanied by an equally angry letter that the correspondent had fired off to the Wall Street Journal. ‘Mr Mailer might have advised me to break Toby Young’s nose,’ he wrote, ‘but that would leave him with no critical faculty to appreciate his own fetid, fly-blown, second-rate life.’

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

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