John Barrell roasts Christopher Hitchens' new book on Thomas Paine in the London Review of Books:
"if any radical, misled by George Galloway's description of Hitchens as 'a drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay', should suggest that this book was written out of vanity, he would surely be mistaken. A vain man would have taken care to write a better book than this: more original, more accurate, less damaging to his own estimation of himself, less somniferously inert. The press release accompanying the book led me to expect something much livelier; Hitchens, it exclaims, 'marvels' at the forethought of Rights of Man, and 'revels' in its contentiousness. There is a bit of marvelling and revelling here and there, but it is as routine as everything else in this book, which reads like the work of a tired man."
This passage is by way of a polemical introduction to the meat of the review, in which Barrell pitilessly anatomises the book's errors, and lays out some intriguing similarities between passages of Hitchens's book and passages of a previous Paine biography. But the paragraph I quote above strikes me as ill-aimed abuse, superfluous to the sharp textual criticism that follows. The way in which Barrell brings up Galloway's quote is already cheap. The final flourish, that the book "reads like the work of a tired man", is, if taken seriously, merely nonsensical.
Even if Barrell does not mean by "tired" to invoke Private Eye's famous periphrastic "tired and emotional" (for which read, "drunk"), one is left wondering what exactly "the work of a tired man" reads like. Do all books written by "tired" men read the same way? Joseph Conrad was famously tired while writing his masterpiece, Nostromo, and finished it in a state of nervous exhaustion: "no elation, no relief, even," as he lamented. Does Nostromo thus read the same way as Moby Dick, after finishing which Melville too reported immense fatigue? Personally, I cannot see any literary similarities between the two that may be attributed to tiredness.
It is not even clear to me that being "tired" is likely always to make the quality of one's work suffer. The special delirium of exhaustion may even be a creative spur rather than a hindrance. Perhaps there is a magical window between when the words have started swimming, but before one actually collapses headfirst over one's keyboard, where there is a temporarily renewed sense of fluidity and possibility. Or maybe this is just true of my comrades in the ancient and noble sport of deadline brinksmanship. Even so, one might suspect that any author who is not at least a little bit "tired" is not, on that account, to be trusted. A writer who is not tired while still trying to finish a book is possibly not trying hard enough, settling instead for glib facility. It might therefore be a more pointed criticism of some recent writing by Christopher Hitchens that it reads like the work of a man who is not tired. Except that this, too, would be just as vacant and odious a generalisation.
The phrase "reads like the work of a tired man", which Barrell chooses instead of just "Hitchens is tired", affects to make a general literary observation, but it is one that is spurious. The point is to smuggle in a personal insult, based on no empirical evidence, disguised as a sage generality. A critic who invokes an author's fatigue is either projecting his own boredom onto the figure of his tormentor, or is just trying to find another way to say a book is bad. Well, there are plenty of ways to say a book is bad without speculating as to the psychological state of the author. It is a rule of reviewing that, as I notice in embarrassed retrospect, I have not always succeeded in following myself, but it should be a rule nonetheless: do what you like to the book, but leave your fantasies of the author out of it.
