If you can't take critisism, don't go requesting reviews

[Derleth]

@Patch

Gads, I’m reminded of a anecdote about some classical author who wrote the same way (can’t remember who). Some other author of the time wrote a short bit about being in a cab with him, and he stops to ask directions. After a similar verbose question, the other author says to the confused pedestrian, “he wants to know where the Inn is.”

Think it came up on this board somewhere in the last few months, if that rings any bells?

Henry James, one of my bêtes noire:

@Edith Wharton

The most absurd of these episodes occurred on another rainy evening when James and I chanced to arrive at Windsor long after dark. We must have been driven by a strange chauffeur—perhaps Cook was on holiday; at any rate, having fallen into the lazy habit of trusting him to know the way, I found myself at a loss to direct his substitute to the King’s Road. While I was hesitating and peering out into the darkness James spied an ancient doddering man who had stopped in the rain to gaze at us. ’ Wait a moment, my dear—I’ll ask him where we are’; and leaning out he signalled to the spectator.

‘My good man, if you’ll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer—so,’ and as the old man came up: ’ My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station.’

I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have James go on: ’ In short’ (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramifications), ’ in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right) where are we now in relation to . . . ’

‘Oh, please,’ I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, ’ do ask him where the King’s Road is.’

‘Ah—? The King’s Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?’

‘Ye’re in it’, said the aged face at the window.

And, of course, I could hardly get away without quoting myself:

@Derleth

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. It is an over-wrought over-written travesty of a book and do not tell me it was the style at the time. I’ve read Poe. I’ve read Bierce. I’ve read Mark Twain and I’ve read Saki, O. Henry, and Bret Harte. I have loved all those authors because they actually wrote. They did not plant kudzu in their garden and capture it between pages after training and stultifying it to within an inch of its life.

Faulkner once referred to Henry James as the “nicest old lady I ever met”; I consider that a calumny against old ladies, who are, in my experience, capable of getting to a point without exhausting all the air in the average zeppelin.