What writers really thought of each other

Percy Bysshe Shelley on Byron’s Childe Harold

Nothing can be less sublime than the true source of these expressions of contempt and desperation. The fact is... the Italian women with whom he associates are perhaps the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon — the most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted; countesses smell so strongly of garlic that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them.

Letter to Thomas Love Peacock, December 22, 1818, in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, ed M Shelley (1845)

Charles Lamb on Shelley

Shelley I saw once. His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with.

Letter to Bernard Barton, October 9, 1822, in The Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb (1897)

George Meredith on Dickens

Not much of Dickens will live, because it has so little correspondence to life. He was the incarnation of cockneydom, a caricaturist who aped the moralist; he should have kept to short stories.

In Edward Clodd, Memories (1916)

GK Chesterton on Tennyson

He really did hold a great many of the same views as Queen Victoria, though he was gifted with a more fortunate literary style... He had a great deal to say; but he had much more power of expression than was wanted for anything he had to express.

The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)

Edith Sitwell on DH Lawrence

Mr Lawrence looked like a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden. At the same time he bore some resemblance to a bad self-portrait by Van Gogh... Poor Mr Lawrence had a very bad chip on his shoulder. He hated men who were magni­ficent to look at. He hated men who were “gentlemen”.

Taken Care Of — An Autobiography (1965)

Virginia Woolf on Henry James

Very highly American, I conjecture, in the determination to be highly bred, & the slight obtuseness as to what high breeding is.

Diary for September 12, 1921, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed AO Bell (1977-84)

Katherine Mansfield on EM Forster

Putting my weakest books to the wall last night I came across a copy of Howards End and had a look into it. Not good enough. EM Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.

Journal for May 1917, in The Journal of Katherine Mansfield, ed JM Murry (1927)

Virginia Woolf on Katherine Mansfield

The dinner last night went off: the delicate things were discussed. We could both wish that one’s first impression of KM was not that she stinks like a — well, civet cat that had taken to street walking.

Diary for October 11, 1917, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed AO Bell (1977-84)

Christopher Isherwood on TS Eliot and Auden

The earliest symptoms of Eliot-influence [on Auden] were most alarming. Like a patient who has received an overpowerful inoculation, Auden developed a severe attack of allusions, jargonitis and private jokes. He began to write lines like: “Inexorable Rembrandt rays that stab...” or “Love mutual has reached its first eutectic...” Nearly all the poems of that period are now scrapped.

New Verse (1937)

Zelda Fitzgerald on F Scott Fitzgerald

It seems to me that on one page I recognised a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr Fitzgerald — I believe that is how he spells his name — seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home... In every other way the book is absolutely perfect.

Review of The Beautiful and Damned in The New York Tribune, April 2, 1922, in F Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, ed JR Bryer (1978)

Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust

I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective. I remember how small I used to feel when people talked about him, & didn’t dare admit I couldn’t get through him.

Letter to John Betjeman, February 1948 (?), in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed M Amory (1980)

Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway

I read him for the first time in the early ’40s, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

The Contemporary Writer: Interviews with 16 Novelists and Poets, ed LS Dembo and CN Pondrom (1972)

Philip Larkin on Kingsley Amis

The only reason I hope I predecease him is that I’d find it next to impossible to say anything nice about him at his memorial service. What a nasty thing to say, but you know what I mean. He probably thinks the same about me.

Letter to Robert Conquest, October 30, 1983,in Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940-85, ed A Thwaite (1993)

Kingsley Amis on Dylan Thomas

[Misspellings Amis’s own] I have got to the stage now with mr toss that I have only reached with Chaucer and Dryden, that of VIOLENTLY WISHING the man WERE IN FRONT OF ME, so that I could be DEMONICALLY RUDE to him about his GONORRHEIC RUBBISH, and end up by WALKING ON HIS FACE and PUNCHING HIS PRIVY PARTS. I know young chaps sometimes dislike the men they copied, but I copied Auden too, and I don’t HATT him.

Letter to Philip Larkin, January 9, 1947, in The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed Z Leader (2000)

Bertrand Russell on Aldous Huxley

[Of the Encyclopaedia Britannica] It was the only book that ever influenced Huxley. You always could tell by his conversation which volume he’d been reading. One day it would be Alps, Andes and Apennines, and the next it would be the Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath.

Letter to Ronald W Clark, July 1965, in A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell, ed K Blackwell and H Ruja (1994)

Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman

Interviewer: We don’t have the overpraised writer any more?

McCarthy: The only one I can think of is a holdover like Lillian Hellman, who I think is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and dishonest writer...

Interviewer: What is dishonest about her?

McCarthy: Everything. I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”.

The Dick Cavett Show, January 26, 1980, in Literary Feuds, ed A Arthur (2002)

Gore Vidal on John Updike

I can’t stand him. He goes grumbling away on those born with silver spoons in their mouths — oh, he comes on like the worker's son, like a modern-day DH Lawrence, but he’s just another boring little middle-class boy hustling his way to the top if he can do it.

Front Row (Radio 4), May 23, 2008

John Irving on Tom Wolfe

Interviewer: You didn’t read The Right Stuff?

Irving: Oh please. If I were interested in astronauts I would have tried to be one. Bullshit.

Hot Type (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation TV show), December 17, 1999

Gore Vidal on Alexander Solzhenitsyn

He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US.

Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal, ed RJ Stanton (1980)

Martin Amis on Michael Crichton

At his best Crichton is a blend of Stephen Jay Gould and Agatha Christie. Animals — especially, if not quite exclusively, velociraptors — are what he is good at. People are what he is bad at. People, and prose.

Review of The Lost World in The Sunday Times, October 1995, in The War Against Cliché (2001)

Introductory text and commentary © Gary Dexter 2009. Extracted from Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola, to be published on October 22 by Frances Lincoln at £9.99. To buy it for £9.49, inc p&p, call The Sunday Times Booksfirst on 0845 271 2135 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst