"Rotten Reviews" (Patricia Potter)

I just received the page proofs of my March book, “Catch A Shadow." It’s my last chance to fix things. I always agonize over every word, worrying that I picked a less effective one than I wanted, that I repeated too much information, that a little more tweaking is not only needed but essential.

The publisher disapproves of that last minute tinkering, but I fear I’m a chronic offender.

I wince when I see something really . . . ah, wretched, because I know the page proofs are also on the way to reviewers and buyers. The book, I worry, is terrible. It’s that way with every book, and it takes five years before I pick it up again and decide, hey, this isn’t really so bad.

But for this moment in time, I worry about what the reviewers will say, and I reach for one of my most read volumes, “Rotten Reviews.” It always comforts me.

It’s a compilation of truly rotten reviews of classic books. I thought, for this blog, I would share a few of them with you.

My all time favorite is a comment on “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte. Said James Lorimer of The North British Review, “Here all the faults of ‘Jane Eyre’ (by Charlotte Bronte) are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.”

And about Jane Austen, Ralph Waldo Emerson had this to say, “I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world.”

But then Mr. Emerson had detractors himself. Thomas Carlyle called him a “hoary-headed and toothless baboon.” And Edgar Allen Poe had this to say about Mr. Emerson: “Belongs to a class of gentlemen with whom we have no patience whatever – the mystics for mysticism’s sake. . . the best answer to his twaddle is ‘cui bono’ . . .”

One editor with The San Francisco Examiner wrote this note to Rudyard Kipling, “I’m sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.”

“Moby Dick” drew this criticism from a magazine, “. . .an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter of fact . . . Mr. Melville has to thank himself only if his errors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature - since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning he craft of an artist.”

About “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine, “Shallow, violent and scuriless.”

Shakespeare was the recipient of some of the worst reviews. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” inspired this comment: “The most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.” And, “Romeo and Juliet,” “. . . it is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life, and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do.” Both comments were made by Samuel Pepys in 1662.

He was not alone in his opinions: George Bernard Shaw in The Saturday Review had this to say about Shakepeare’s “Julius Caesar”: “There is not a single sentence uttered by Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that is, I will not say worthy of him, but worthy of an average Tammany boss.” He was equally as critical of “Hamlet.” This, Shaw complained, “is a vulgar and barbarous drama, which would not be tolerated by the vilest populace of France, or Italy . . . one would imagine this piece to be the work of a drunken savage.”

The Christian Science Monitor gave this review of “From Here To Eternity”: “Certainly America has something better to offer the world, along with its arms and its armies, than such a confession of spiritual vacuum as this.”

There are also predictions of short-lived fame.

According to The Atlantic Monthly, “An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse (Emily Dickinson) in an out-of- the way New England village – or anywhere else – cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar. . . Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood.”

And poor Charles Dickens was skewered. Says the Saturday Review, “We do not believe in the permanence of his reputation . . . fifty years hence, most of his allusions will be harder to understand than the allusions in 'The Dunciad', and our children will wonder what their ancestors could have meant by putting Mr. Dickens at the head of novelists of his day.”

One of the most excruciatingly brutal reviews was written by Mark Twain. The book was “The Deerslayer” by James Fenimore Cooper. “In one place in Deerslayer, and in the restricted space of two thirds of a page,” Mr. Twain wrote, “Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks a record.”

There’s more. Much more. But you get the idea. Whenever review time comes, I read this handy little book and no longer worry a bad review will doom my career.

In fact, the opposite just might be true.