Opening his diary for 2007 (published in the London Review of Books), Alan Bennett mused that the literary world was an endemically cantankerous place. Contrasting it with the theatre, he put this literary grumpiness down to the fact that actors don't generally have supplementary careers as critics, in the way that writers do. Review sections are largely written by biographers, historians and writers of fiction who need the extra cash to fill the penurious gaps between instalments of the advance. "It's harmless enough," commented Bennett, "but it makes literature a nastier world."
Since acting is by all accounts (and from my own distant memory) a famously bitchy profession, we can only shudder at the carnage that would be produced were its members to be given press passes to each other's new productions. And Bennett surely has a point in identifying one possible source of literary vituperation in some unacknowledged resentment that somebody else has been paid to do what you could have done better. This is also reflected in the often-toxic letters that appear on the correspondence page from readers who feel they could have done a more conscientious job than the critics.
I suspect, though, that reviewing isn't quite the whole story. Above and beyond whatever professional and amateur envy drives these bilious spasms, there is the inescapable fact that writing is a lonely trade. There's no getting around the fact that it requires the spending of long hours alone in rooms where nothing else goes on, apart from the odd intrusive phonecall. We are forced to live the lives of misanthropic recluses simply to do the job, and all too often find ourselves growing into the role.
The mere fact of working in solitude needn't in itself make us ratty. There are (and were) plenty of professions that demand it. Do we expect security guards on night duty to be bad-tempered? Rather the reverse, one would have thought. Victorian lighthouse-keepers might have been a little wild-eyed, but surely not permanently tetchy. It's more that writing involves a continuous process of self-appraisal, precisely because you don't know as you set to on any given day what or how you're going to do. And the only authority in the vicinity to condemn the chaff for what it is, is you. So you're playing the roles of both master and apprentice, raising your own hopes but also letting yourself down.
Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the writer in whom all social graces have atrophied through disuse in James L Brooks' As Good As It Gets (1997), remains the touchstone. He manages to get out to a café each day, but only to make a bullying nuisance of himself on arrival. The list of real-life examples of such types could quite possibly serve as a history of western letters.
Is there a cure? I think not. We must just accept that backbiting is innate to the literary world. And it may be that we prefer our writers to be irascible old spooks. It was said of the late jazz cornetist Ruby Braff that he positively delighted in being unamenable to pleasantries. When wished a happy new year by a colleague, he who was capable of angelic delicacy in his work snarled back, "Don't tell me what kind of year to have!"
Spoken like a writer.
