My Bottom Four Writers/Books/Poems
He's beyond crabby.
As Dan’s post the other day mentioned the Internet meme about one’s top ten most influential books, I thought I’d turn things around a bit and mention a list of my least favorite writers/books/and poems that are widely revered in the canon. These aren’t the least influential books I’ve encountered (or haven’t?), so it’s not a perfect parallel, but you get the point.
I’ll try to be fair here; I’m only going to include folks I’ve given a fair shake to—people whose work I’ve read a significant amount of and done my best to enjoy, appreciate, and comprehend—and I’m only going to nominate the dead, as it’s still possible the living could win me over somehow (by writing a great book, or giving me gold bars or cake, for instance).
#1, Hart Crane, The Bridge
The Bridge was perhaps the most inaccessible piece of literature I’ve ever tried to read. It may have well been written in a made-up language. I didn’t understand a good goddamn of what he was saying, and I read the thing a few times over. Apparently, I’m not alone; Tennessee Williams had trouble with the individual lines too, according to Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, Williams could “hardly understand a single line–of course the individual lines aren’t supposed to be intelligible. The message, if there actually is one, comes from the total effect…”
That penultimate phrase sure isn’t a vote of confidence.
#2, Dickens, almost all of it.
One of my favorite professors was a Dickens scholar, and back in my undergraduate days, she taught the second half of my intro to British lit class, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Except for Dickens. Thankfully, we covered a lot of different Brits, many of whom I loved–Jonathan Swift (OK, he’s Irish, but close enough), Virginia Woolf, John Fowles, and of course, W.B. Yeats, the best poet—I’d even say writer—of the 20th century.
But Dickens? Where do I start? First, one has the heavy-handed narrators and the us v. them-type of names, Mr. Grandgrind, Mr. M’Choakumchild, etc.
And then there’s the sheer goddamn length of his books. David Copperfield tops 700 pages. Hard Times was just over 450. Given Dickens’ popularity and the general length of his books (and the number of reprints), that leads to a lot of dead trees. I was curious, so I tried to see if anyone had run the numbers on the age old question: How much paper can be produced from one tree? The folks at How Stuff Works had. According to their figures, the average tree is good for 80,500 sheets of paper (50% of the tree goes to waste thanks to knots in the wood, and so on). So let’s be conservative and say one printing of David Copperfield book had 20,000 copies (and they’d almost certainly do a lot more than that). At 700 pages a pop, that’s 14,000,000 pages.
14,000,000/80,500=173, meaning a small forest goes down for every 20,000 copies. That’s a lot of homeless squirrels. I don’t know about you, but maybe we can skip the next printing and folks can simply buy a used copy online. As of this writing, they cost a whole $0.62 on Amazon.
One last dig on Dickens: Even the title of David Copperfield is 27 words. The full title is: David Copperfield or The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (which he never meant to publish on any account)
#3, Crow, Ted Hughes
It’s easy to hate Ted Hughes. He played a part in helping push an already wrecked Sylvia Plath past her breaking point, and Plath was, no doubt, the better poet. (Backstory: Hughes left Plath for another woman and left her with their children in an unheated flat during one of Britain’s worst winters on record.) Plath promptly put her head in an oven; it was a gas oven, not electric. (I had a friend who thought it was electric; now that would be stamina.) Sidenote: The woman Hughes ran off with, Assia Wevill, committed suicide in the same manner as Plath. She also killed her young daughter too. Nice lady.
But that’s not why I disliked his book Crow. I’d read Birthday Letters, which consisted of poems Hughes wrote each year on Plath’s birthday. They were heart-rending and damn compelling, though it was hard to not read whatever one wanted into the works, given their rather public history.
Crow was my first attempt at giving him a read on his own terms, sans all the Plath drama-drama. I picked it up at a used bookstore along with Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares. I read Kinnell first, and instantly re-read it. I loved that book. Crow? Not so much. The poems were told from the voice of a crow, which I thought he could pull off.
Instead, it reads as if it were written by the main character from the movie Crow.
Two Legends
Black was the without eye
Black the within tongue
Black was the heart
Black the liver, black the lungs
Unable to suck in light
Black the blood in its loud tunnel
Black the bowels packed in furnace
Black too the muscles
Striving to pull out into the light
Black the nerves, black the brain
With its tombed visions
Black also the soul, the huge stammer
Of the cry that, welling, could not
Pronounce its sun.
II
Black is the wet otter’s head, lifted.
Black is the rock, plunging in foam
Black is the gall lying on the bed of the blood.
Black is the earth-globe, one inch under,
An egg of blackness
Where sun and moon alternate their weathers
To hatch a crow, a black rainbow
Bent in emptiness
over emptiness
But flying
#4. Everything by Gertrude Stein.
Yes, she had great taste in art, and would have made one hell of a literary agent, but I can’t stomach her writing. At all. A rose is a rose is a rose? Really?
Just before I left for graduate school, I remember finding a recording of her poem, “If I told him,” which was dedicated to Picasso, one of her close friends (who also painted a damn good portrait of her). I hit play, and after a few seconds, I stopped. I thought the damn thing was broken. She kept repeating phrases, and nothing made any sense, and even when I went home and read the poem on the page a few times over, I hated it. It was so damn gimmicky and self-important, and it really, really didn’t work. I just read it again, and I still hate it. No thanks.
Finally, to prove I’m not a total hater, here’s a good poem by Hart Crane:
My Grandmother’s Love Letters
by Hart Crane
Just when I was going over my own list of most influential books. I like this spin, however, I find one of the books I hated the most- and I may get skewered for this, I couldn’t necessarily consider lacking in influence. I hated Lord of the Flies, hated everything it supposedly meant and represented, hated the story, just hated it. I can’t quite get over the notion that my extreme negative reaction and my desire to dismiss it from existence is in fact a different sort of influence, but if it is, I’m not sure I could identify what exactly it may have influenced about my writing or my person.
1. I hate Dickens too, though I’ve only read one of his novels all the way through, Great Expectations, and that was when I was in my forties. The plot movement felt completely unbelievable and ridiculous to me.
2. Hawthorn. I read The Scarlet Letter 3 times, hated it every time, made myself reread it the last time to make sure it deserved my hatred. It did.
3. The Reef, by Edith Wharton. My copy of this novel is about 350 pages, though it felt like 1,000. The book felt so shapeless to me that it seemed that 150 pages could have been cut or 600 added with no real impact.
4. Here’s one that I’m supposed to love as a fiction writer, and don’t: Madame Bovary, by Flaubert. I’ve read it twice and remember next to nothing from it. I hated it the first time and read it again in my early thirties, knowing I was supposed to love it. I tried to have a good attitude. I tried to love it. I hated it.
I too harbor all sorts of hate for The Scarlet Letter and Madame Bovary—and I think that the sheer number of other existing books should keep me from ever having to re-read them, only to discover I hate them again.
I hate to say it–and I should re-read it now that I’m a real person (over thirty)–but I did not like Heart of Darkness any of the three times it was assigned in my English classes.
Though I love some of Crane’s work, I often become angry when I read him; he seems to make the reader’s work unnecessarily difficult and sometimes futile.
This ranting is a little too fun. I feel like I’m in a confessional–or what I imagine a confessional to be like. I’m drinking Earl Gray in mine.
Yeah, it was a bit fun to write, but I didn’t want to get all Mr. Meanface either, as that’s pretty easy to do. My confessional has coffee.
And what is this about “a real person!?”
I’m <30 but I still hope I qualify as a real person. If not, am I a proto-person? Can I least be a partial person? (I'd like to be a leg, please.)
Well, I hope you don’t feel bad about yourself finding this out–that you aren’t a real person yet–and that, instead, you just live in a state of hopeful bliss knowing you will be more complete someday.
But what if I don’t make 30? Keats was only 25 when he died,; was he a real person? (I’d say he gets a consumption exemption, at least.)
And no, I don’t feel bad about my apparent demotion, but I am weeping wildly nonetheless.
I always do that, so it’s OK.
That’s why we’re especially sad about those who die before thirty–because we didn’t even get to see their human forms yet.
Steinbeck and Ken Kesey top my list. Can’t stand either of them. Both have some real gifts as writers, but seem to me simplistic and bombastic as idea-smugglers. Tom Joad is Jesus. McMurphy’s got big old balls. bleh…
i can’t really disagree about Dickens, either. I read Great Expectations not that long ago, and there were certain things I admired about it, especially early on. But that plot — it piles the coincidental onto the improbable onto the ridiculous.
I don’t want to come on like a Dickens booster—I’ve read not that many of his books and don’t have too much stock in him—but I will say, if this is any sort of defense, that what’s great in his work are assorted characters, sketches, and setpieces. The plots are godawful. Any “good” character is godawful. I think the non-writing reader is in a better position to like Dickens, because they enjoy the things that are enjoyable and ignore the rest. Writers tend to be infuriated by how bloated and ridiculous the books become. There’s a reason so many Dickens characters are iconic, while his plots go unremembered.
Dickens booster
but you’re right
I never understood why Steinbeck isn’t taught more in college. I think he’s great. Sweet Thursday is my favorite. Travels With Charley is an excellent travel/non-fiction book. Of Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row. Very funny, all. They make me want to keep reading and give me something to carry around with me, maybe incorporate into the way I live my life. “Discontent is the lever of change,” Steinbeck wrote in Sweet Thursday. There’s an idea for you. Perfectly phrased. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said that to myself and, sometimes, to others. And I think One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of the great American novels–it defines, for me, a certain defiance, generosity, and humor that are necessary for holding onto some kind of contentment, some kind of satisfaction in life. And sometimes you have to take a stand against stupidity and cruelty, no matter what the odds are against you. You have to help a guy when he needs a hand, when he needs someone to stand up for him, even if your actions may be costly to you. And Kesey’s book is also funny. Things get so fucking grim in, you know, “serious” literature–nobody believes anything, nobody hopes anything, nobody laughs with any real joy–to do so is very, very uncool.
And what’s wrong with “ideas” in books? C.S. Lewis was one of the great “idea” fiction writers. I think The Screwtape Letters is the best psychological book I’ve ever read. But writing rule-makers should watch out, it does discuss morality and God. And, yes, it’s funny. C.S. Lewis said something like “A man is most himself when he likes, enjoys, a thing simply for itself. He does not concern himself with style, or what others think about it, or trying to impress anybody with his taste and knowledge. He loves the thing just for itself. It is when a man is at his purest.”
I guess it was the “idea-smugglers” comment that got me. I mean, why in the world should you have to smuggle, ashamedly, ideas into writing? And I’m not talking about religious tracts or public service announcements or the latest based-on-a-true-story, made-for-tv Lifetime movie when I’m defending ideas in writing. How about this: Do you look forward to reading the book when you get home from work? Do you carry it around inside you during the day? Does it revisit you over time? Do you quote ideas and phrases from it to yourself and others as it becomes part of your being? Do you reread it, and each time it seems new, sometimes better? Enlighten and entertain. I don’t know. What’s wrong with that?
I’m with you about Steinbeck. One of my favorite books of all time is East of Eden. I have to say, though, that it took me about a hundred pages to get into it, and for some people that’s just too much, understandably.
Well, you should read those novels if you like them.
To my mind, what’s wrong with the ideas in Steinbeck — take Grapes of Wrath — is that the characters are turned into walking, talking message machines, and these messages are not interesting or surprising in any way. I find the Joads essentially unbelievable. They are so beatified, and their enemies so vilified, that they lose all trace of humanity, and simply march out the “themes.” It’s perfectly suited to write an essay about. In my view, you’ve left the realm of the authentic when you have purely good and purely evil characters.
In Kesey, I felt two problems with the ideas — one is that they exist on a high-school-level notion of countercultural defiance. All of the world coheres into a system that opposes freedom, that keeps you down. The other problem for me is the sexism in the book — i find Kesey’s formulations of manhood and womanhood — ballbreakers — ridiculous. And i don’t think it’s all that funny. I used to, though.
Finally, I think that when novelists are more interested in their ideas than in their characters, I just don’t care anymore. You may differ — but this was, after all, a comment about my own reading preferences. With ideas, there is always the risk that they will seem less deep and interesting over time. I mean, help your fellow man? That is a very, very good idea, but it’s also a pretty common one. If that idea comes to the fore, ahead of the story, ahead of character, i find it simply deflating.
All the questions you pose at the end of your comment — I answer those questions yes when a book is moving me at the character and story level.
I find Dostoevsky unreadable.
And I hate the Beats. All of them. Really. I know I sound exactly like the generation they were reacting against, but Beat work always makes me think: “Boo-fucking-hoo. Why don’t you get a job, and then do something worthwhile with your life?”
yeah, me too (not Dostoevsky, he’s awesome, but the Beats.) i probably should re-read On the Road to make a fuller assessment, since it’s been a while and I might have been “on something” when I read it initially. But I really, really don’t want to.
Great Gatsby. Seems to me proof that flowery writing masks content. Can anyone tell me what “So we beat on, boats against the current, born ceaselessly back into the past” means in the context of the book? Beautiful sentence, never been able to figure out how it applies to the book. That, and oh, the last 10 or 15 pages. I feel like a lot of people are seduced into following the melodrama of vapid empty characters by the beauty of the prose, and then try to defend it by saying its a satire. If it’s a satire, I certainly never pick up on it, and I read it 5 or 6 times throughout school. Huck Finn is satire. Great Gatsby is written in earnest.
I’m with the majority here on Dickens. I can see how he would have been popular in serial form to people who enjoy simple plots and moral clarity. If Dickens were alive today, he would be writing stuff that would outsell Harry Potter, and every time I saw a grown up reading one of his books without a child by their side, I would want to kick them in the face.
While I didn’t particularly enjoy The Scarlet Letter either time I read it, I think it increased the impact Hawthorne’s short stories had on me when I finally read them.
I’m totally with Shira on Heart Of Darkness. Without Apocalypse Now, it would have no redeeming value in my eyes.
The Beats… Dan, in response to your post about Influential Books, I mentioned Auggie March and it wasn’t until I read Auggie that I realized much of the fiction the Beats were writing were shabby imitations of what Bellow had done in ’51. That said, I did enjoy some of Ginsburg’s poetry like 20 years ago, and Burroughs can be absolutely hilarious in spots. In fact, Martin Amis wrote a review of a Burroughs biography where he called the author out for taking Burroughs seriously, rather than admitting that Burroughs was a guy who wasted an enormous talent for humor. Amis’ review can be found in “The Moronic Inferno,” which I highly recommend. In any case, I largely agree with your assessment of The Beats, though I do think they can serve a purpose in turning young people on to literature.
I haven’t read that Amis essay. but his tough reviews are always great.
It’s a great review/essay. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
I have a collection of essays by Burroughs called “The Adding Machine” which is by far the best book he ever wrote. There’s no dangling, ejaculating pubescent corpses and any hint of paranoia has some basis in reality. They are very funny, smart essays full of trenchant socio-political satire.
I’ve never gotten Emerson and Thoreau’s work. It’s all too romantic for me. Nature’s great, blah blah blah….man is flawed, blah blah blah.
Wordsworth, William Carlos Williams, Thoreau. All people whose work I have never, ever been able to get into.
Never was a fan of Grapes of Wrath, Heart of Darkness or The Scarlett Letter either.
Annd… I’ve gone over my 4.
I believe Dickens and Hawthorne made the owners of Cliff’s Notes into very wealthy people. The Scarlet Letter may have made them multiple millions all by itself. Once I discovered those “study guides” sometime in high school, I was able to escape the sit-down threat sessions with my parents telling me how dismal my adolescent future was going to be if I didn’t start getting better grades and stop being such a disruption in class. Once I had those Cliff’s Notes, you should have seen how insightful I became in classroom discussions. I guess everybody thought I’d “matured.” I believe you can get through your undergraduate work using only Cliff’s Notes, and maybe your graduate work as well. Probably get A’s. I used them, sometimes, in college. Ever try to read Jude the Obscure? What great moral victory could possibly be won by carrying the dead weight of those pages to some kind of finish line? Boring books are called “dense.” Unreadable ones, “challenging.” And as for “Good for its time”: “Good for its time,” someone once said to me, “means bad.”
You gave up too early on Jude. Thomas Hardy is one of the better 19th century English novelists.
Hardy’s poetry isn’t shabby either.
I guess it was when the character named “Little Father Time” showed up that I had a hard time holding on. I just kept thinking, “Dick Dastardly,” “Sweet Polly Purebread,” “Dudley Do-right,” and, of course, “Boris Badanoff.”
Don’t knock Rocky and Bullwinkle. Bullwinkle is clearly the best moose for reciting poems.
Exhibit A: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv1L-8f2erg
Plus, I’m not too far from the real Frostbite Falls.
I love moose and squirrel. Everytime I see daffodils in the spring, I immediately think of Bullwinkle’s recitation on “Poetry Corner.” And I’m not kidding. Dr. Wrongway Peachfuzz, Whatsamatta U–what’s not to like? I just think Jude the Obscure might be rendered better in claymation.
[...] Brett opened the door for some Dickens-bashing a couple weeks ago, it occurred to me that many of Dickens’s books might be called [...]