a poet attacks: or, what is art for?

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A week of internecine writerly dispute continues: this time, a 72-year-old Nobel laureate of previously unimpeachable character has lashed out in an unprecedented attack on a colleague – though neither of the two in question would probably appreciate my use of that “c word.”

There is something simultaneously amusing and depressing about this spectacle of two middle-aged – no, elderly – male writers slugging out their mutual animosity in public. One of whom is a by-word for literary gravitas. Derek Walcott, as we all know by now, capped a perfectly respectable hour-long reading at a literary festival in Jamaica the other day with a long, vituperative and very personal poem against his old arch-enemy VS Naipaul.

“Telling the audience, ‘I think you’ll recognise Mr Naipaul … I’m going to be nasty’, Walcott launched into The Mongoose amid a hubbub of surprised gasps and nervous laughter from the crowd.” As the poet Jackie Kay, who was there, says: “I remember the whole audience just suddenly leaning forward with a new kind of attention.”

I bet!

Bits of it have been printed in the papers. Here’s one:

I have been bitten, I must avoid infection

Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction

Read his last novels, you’ll see just

what I mean

A lethargy, approaching the obscene

The model is more ho-hum than Dickens

The essays have more bite

They scatter chickens like critics, but

each stabbing phrase is poison

Since he has made that snaring style

a prison

The plots are forced, the prose

sedate and silly

The anti-hero is a prick named Willie

Who lacks the conflict of a Waugh or Lawrence

And whines with his creator’s

self-abhorrence.

You have to admit. Lawrence/self-abhorrence – that’s fun.

The article in the Guardian contains one line I couldn’t read out loud while sitting in the garden – readers, Ms B was shocked.

On the other hand, is it not refreshing to be back in an age where writers could use their pens to attack, to draw another kind of blood? Are we mice? The pen should be mightier than the sword – and in this case, there is a longstanding feud at play, as well as a considerable local/political issue around Naipaul’s rejection of Trinidad, the place both writers came from.

The Sunday morning consensus here in Baroque Mansions (coming to you today from a remote south London location) is that Naipaul seems “uniquely unpleasant” – the memory of the revelations of a few weeks ago, and his other long-standing feud with Paul Theroux, is still fresh – and would pretty much bring out the worst in anyone.*

With all this in mind, we must cautiously say, Go Derek..! (but cover our eyes.)

So, to bring us to a sober Sabbath spirit of reflection on the literary tradition of the poetic flame-war, I leave you with the opening sentences of Byron’s introduction to his wonderful long satirical poem – which pretty much trashes everyone then living, in zesty rhyming couplets – English Bards and Scotch Reviewers:

All my friends, learned and unlearned, have urged me not to publish this Satire with my name. If I were to be ‘turned from the career of my humour by quibbles quick, and papers bullets of the brain,’ I should have complied with their counsel. But I am not be be terrified by abuse, or bullied by reviewers, with or without arms. I can safely say that I have attacked none personally, who did not commence on the offensive. An author’s works are public property: he who purchases may judge, and publish his opinion if he pleases; and the authors I have endeavoured to commemorate may do by me as I have done by them. I dare say they will succeed better in condemning my scribblings, Than in mending their own.

* Meanwhile, Naipaul at the ubiquitous Hay Festival:

Sir Vidia, 75, who won the Nobel in 2001, added that the 100,000-plus people who attend Hay were all ‘incredibly ugly’. His curmudgeonly comments, made on Wednesday evening at a party to launch the new political magazine Standpoint, did not go down well with his wife, Nadira. On hearing them, she said: ‘Oh, Vidia, please shut up. Your big mouth has already got us into enough trouble’.

Old people today, eh. Something must be done to curb this epidemic of anti-social behaviour!

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Filed under bagatelles, poetry, schadenfreude