The 21st-century devil — Meryl Streep acted as one — may wear Prada. But the original Beelzebub loves sporting those good old horns. What’s more, on March 8 — celebrated as ‘Be Nasty Day’ — the prince of darkness makes sure that men and women suffer no shame in letting their horns, as it were, down. Humans, over the years, have loved obliging Mr Diablo, and history reveals that writers have often taken the lead in growing the tallest of antlers made of baser — basic? — instincts.
Thus, in a television interview in 1968, Gore Vidal, the American writer and intellectual, gored Truman Capote, who tasted fame with Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by comparing him to a Kansas housewife with all her prejudices intact. Capote did not have to retaliate; Norman Mailer, the novelist and a paragon of liberalism, pulled punches on his behalf. In a talk show — television seems to bring out the nastiest of shades in authors — Mailer said that he considered himself to be an expert on ‘intellectual pollution’ only because he had read Vidal’s works.
Ruth Rendell would perhaps have met Mailer’s nasty punch with nastier jabs. Consider her opinion of Agatha Christie, who, too, churned out murder mysteries by the dozen: “To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.”
The literary equivalent of the Battle of the Sexes has been equally formidable in terms of spitefulness. In a letter, Mark Twain wrote this of Jane Austen, who had died years before his birth — “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her [Austen] up and beat her over the skull with her own shinbone.” (Even the dead are not spared the nasty scars.)
Virginia Woolf returned the favour — or should that be fire? But it was James Joyce, a contemporary titan, who was Woolf’s target. She apparently commented that anybody who had attempted to go through Ulysses and then given up was in very good company — presumably that of Virginia.
Should these unflattering anecdotes about writers put us on the horns of a dilemma? Is the aura of, say, Rendell, diminished by her uncharitable view of Christie? The impetuous fan may rush to form a judgment about the creator of Chief Inspector Wexford. But the discerning reader — of books and, more importantly, of the human mind — should have reasons to pause and reflect on another dilemma. Is nastiness, the kind that ‘Be Nasty Day’ is meant to celebrate, a vice or a virtue? Had Vidal and Co. not offered us glimpses of traits that would even make Ebenezer Scrooge cringe, authors would appear to be seraphic creatures, scrubbed of the grime of all-too-human emotions and failings. The proverbial horns — emblematic of nastiness — bear evidence of their mortal, not divine, self.
Modern therapy says that an occasional bout of nastiness is, indeed, therapeutic. Why should we begrudge writers for attempting to flush out their inner toxins?
