bete-noires

[truepenny]

I have a confession to make.

I hate John Milton.

And when I say, I hate John Milton, I don't just mean that I find him actively boring to read--although I do--or that I disagree with his politics, morals, ethics, and philosophy at almost every conceivable point--although I do--or even that I feel he personally would be someone to avoid being trapped in an elevator with, no matter what it took--although I certainly do. I find George Eliot actively boring to read, but I admire her and her work intensely. I disagree with John Bunyan, perhaps even more vehemently than I do with Milton, and yet I can't help having a kind of grudging half-respectful fondness for him, nutball that he was. And the list of authors who were, on all the evidence, complete assholes in their personal life probably starts with the first person who decided that a writing system could be used to write down things other than cargo manifests.

No, when I say I hate John Milton, I mean that the personality that rises off the pages of his work is as repellant to me as the stench of a pole-cat. This isn't a reasoned hatred, or a defensible hatred; it has nothing to do with the biographical facts of Milton's life or with my opinion of his artistic merits. It's a simple, flat-out, gut-level loathing.

I should admire John Milton's work; I know that, and objectively I can see it. But I don't. I just don't. Because my hatred gets in the way.

And my question on this Saturday, which is cold and snowy and peaceful where I am, is: does anyone else have an author they feel this way about?

Who are your bêtes noires?

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Donne. And Wordsworth.

Get 'em the fuck off my planet.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I hate Wordsworth too, but it isn't all his fault. I had a prep school English teacher who gave us months of his stuff (the worst--the impulse from a vernal wood crap) and kept telling us he was the greatest poet ever.

What's wrong with Donne?

[touch-of-ink.livejournal.com]

Did you ever see that movie about Howard Stern? At one point, the suits are talking about his numbers.
"The average radio listener listens to a show for 12 minutes before changing the channel. The average Howard Stern fan listens for 45 minutes."
"Well, what about the people that hate him? There are lots of people that hate him."
"They listen for an hour and a half."

There is an author that I hate. And yet I keep reading his work! Why? Why? I ask myself. It's the Howard Stern affect, I guess. I hate him and keep looking for more reasons to hate him and justify my hate for him.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I wrote a great final-year essay on Paul Claudel - and that's why!

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Kingsley Amis hated Milton, too.

I hate Jack Kerouac, D.H. Lawrence, and (I would if I had to read any more of his boring shit) Theodore Dreiser.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Oo. D.H. Lawrence is a good hate.

Hit me over the head with that symbolism stick again! Yeah! I love it when you do that! *drowns in an avalanche of rotten roses*

[moontyger.livejournal.com]

John Steinbeck. Oh, Steinbeck, how I hate thee. And Thomas Hardy. *shudders*

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Psychic twin.

[malinaldarose.livejournal.com]

I hate to say "practically everyone I read in high school" (especially Tolstoy) but, well.... One of the things that keeps me from returning to school to pursue and English degree (aside from cost, full-time job, and so forth) is that I'd have to read all these authors that I'd be sure to loathe. I'm sure there'd be those that I adored, too, but....

[supergee.livejournal.com]

That's what high school English is for.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I should add that I don't hate James Joyce, but he bores me into a coma.

[libskrat]

Ayn Rand. Hate, hate, hate, hate. Not alone in this, I know; one might even call it a cliched hate. But it's still hate.

Orson Scott Card, the loathsome little self-righteous toad.

Larry Niven. Gah. Chuck-at-wall-worthy. Who the hell reads that crap?

I hate bad Delany (Babel-17) with a violent passion, but I love good Delany (practically all his short stuff) with an equally violent love, so we'll call it a draw.

And a whole raft of bad Tolkien imitators, from Brooks to Salvatore... but you knew that.

Um, yanking myself bodily out of specfic... James Fenimore Cooper. WTF? Unreadable.

[libskrat]

Oh, yeah, and if I'm allowed to hate on an entire genre? The pastorale. Gaaaaaaaaaaaaah. Hate, hate, hate, HATE, hate, hate.

[vass]

Margaret Atwood. The way she winces up to a metaphor like someone might, God forbid, take it literally if she doesn't hedge it with enough simile. Her depressing characters. How right 'The Handmaid's Tale' is, and how good she is, just make it worse.

And, as mentioned above, D.H. Lawrence. Please never have sex again, also get some therapy.

Hmm, Milton

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

I take it you did not celebrate his birthday yesterday? ;-)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Dickens. Because he seems mean-spirited. I don't mind people being in total disagreement with me, or complete loons, but it's mean-spiritedness I can't stand. I mean I hate Hardy in the sense that I can't bear to read his books (I think I have read them all once; he was my grandmother's favourite writer) but I don't hate him as a person I just can't bear the despair and gloom. I quite like his poetry. But Dickens is mean-spirited and sentimental and I cannot like him.

[heresluck]

Yes! Dickens! ::pokes Dickens with sharp sticks::

...and not even for biographical reasons, although reading the biographies while working on a dissertation chapter certainly lent fuel to the fire.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

I used to loathe T.S. Eliot so much that I couldn't read him, but I got over it. Now, Orson Scott Card and Robertson Davies.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

Well, I second DH Lawrence and Dickens, but my absolute tops of the loathing list is Salman Rushdie. His style makes me feel as though someone's scraping a knife over a plate, and he comes over as so appallingly superior to absolutely everyone else around him.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes!, Yes! I ploughed my way through Midnight's Children years ago, and still hate him. And DH Lawrence, of course.

[renenet.livejournal.com]

For the looooongest time I didn't consider that I was *allowed* to hate authors. Not Dead Authors of Literature, anyway. Then it seems I had an awakening of conscience in my senior year of high school and suddenly I had a mad hate on for Wuthering Heights that expanded to include all Brontes (of course the only other work by a Bronte that I'd read at that point was Jane Eyre back in ninth grade). This state of affairs lasted almost exactly five years, until I was reading WH again at the end of my college career and fell in mad, passionate love with its brilliance (I had understood technically why it was brilliant back in high school because I had a fantastic teacher that year, but that was outweighed by my resentment of its overwrought emotion) and the Brontes were redeemed en masse (well, Emily and Charlotte, anyway &mdah; I've still never read Anne).

In that same course in college I reversed my position on Dickens. Now, I'd always dutifully read whatever Dickens I was assigned (Great Expectations in 8th grade English and Tale of Two Cities in 10th grade World Lit). I'd even tried to pep talk my little sister through Great Expectations when she hit 8th grade. (This devolved rapidly to me sitting on the couch *reading* the second chapter to her. She kept falling asleep, and I had to disavow all responsibility for her literary education ever after.) But in my senior year of college all it took was a brief dash through a slim edition of Hard Times to put the stank on Dickens permanently. Fucking pedantic bastard. His entire style did *not* bear up well for me in a course alongside Thackeray, George Eliot, E. Bronte. I realized in retrospect that I'd attributed my lack of enthusiasm for the other Dickens I'd read to the annoying English teachers, which...well, that's still true. But I can't think of anything that would make me like Great Expectations. ::shudders::

Which brings us to Thomas Hardy. I couldn't even finish The Mayor of Casterbridge senior year of high school because I despised it so utterly. I mean...it's like a soap opera, but without the fun. So I blamed Hardy. Then, in that same course late in college, Jude the Obscure turned me around.

The author from high school who has yet to be redeemed for me is Joseph Conrad. We read Lord Jim in that class. Ugh. So ugh.

Huh. I should reconstruct the rest of the syllabus from that high school class. I'm sensing some themes here. Damn, she was a great teacher, even if I did hate half the books we read.

[libskrat]

JOSEPH CONRAD! Yes yes yes with the hate!

(Read Susan Shwartz instead. Much better.)

[mmarques.livejournal.com]

I don't hate many authors. Maybe I'm just too forgiving in what I read. But I do have a few:

John LeCarre - I enjoy movies & miniseries made from his books, but I'm just bored silly when attempting to read them. I hate being tempted to read something I won't enjoy.

Tom Clancy - Someone recommended The Sum of All Fears before it was released as a movie. I wanted to like it. I wanted to finish it. It's still sitting partially read in my "to-read" pile. I should really just transfer it to my donations pile.

There are other authors whose work I've hated, but not feeling guilty about disliking their work, I don't hate the authors.

[eliade.livejournal.com]

Tom Clancy - Someone recommended The Sum of All Fears before it was released as a movie. I wanted to like it. I wanted to finish it. It's still sitting partially read in my "to-read" pile. I should really just transfer it to my donations pile.

How far did you get? I got to somewhere around page 28 and felt as if I'd trudged 28 miles through waist-high snow in a subzero storm at night with wet clothes and a dead elk on my back.

[menin-aeide.livejournal.com]

W.H. Auden. Byron. Sylvia Plath.

[surfer-911.livejournal.com]

You hate Sylvia Plath?! lol- She's one of my favorites.

[deepad]

Funny how some of my favourites are in the hate lists of other people. John Steinbeck? Hardy? Me likes!
On the other hand - Conrad. Die Die Die overwrought racist bastard.
And Robert Jorden, before I stopped reading the series, annoyed me to pieces.

[mmarques.livejournal.com]

Yes, I loved Tess of the Durbervilles!

[ombriel.livejournal.com]

Ernest Hemingway. :shudder:

[dhole.livejournal.com]

Robert Frost. I can't entirely defend it, but I loathe Frost.

Also Willa Cather.

[larryhammer]

Milton, Virgil, and William Carlos Williams.

I don't like Wordsworth, but not with the same distaste. Dickens, I simply find unreadable; ditto Pound. But those three -- bleagh.

---L.

Virgil, the parody

[enevarim]

A colleague of mine who teaches classics at Cambridge has a quite well-detailed theory that Virgil's Aeneid is actually a parody of Homeric epics, and in spite of its apparent boot-licking servility it's actually sending the whole thing up behind the scenes. I don't know if this helps with the Virgil-hate at all...

[branchandroot]

Norman Mailer.

He's actually the only one. I mean there are plenty of authors who fall into the category of writers I love to hate, and take ferocious joy in ripping into tiny, critical shreds. Kipling comes to mind, and Tennyson, as, indeed, does Donne. But those are complex hates, hates with reason and texture to them.

Mailer is different.

Mailer is the one I loathe with such mighty passion that I start back in my chair when I read but his name. Merely opening a book by him makes me feel as though I'm wading through vile swamp muck, and brings on the same cringing, nauseated certainty that, although I can't feel it yet, my feet and legs will be covered in slimy leeches when I step out...

Yeah. Really hate Mailer. This despite the fact that, technically and philosophically, he's probably not much worse than many another author I trudge through with no more than a grimace of distaste or resignation. Heck, I got through that piker De Man without this kind of reaction.

Go figure.

[redplum.livejournal.com]

Oh, I so get that. James Joyce used to produce this very personal loathing. Now I'm down to Milton (loathe!) and Paul (of Tarsus), not as you say because of their acts, but because of their personalities. This is getting out of bounds, but it's the same loathing I feel for Lars von Triers, the film director. There are many other authors whose *work* I detest more, but it's a different thing.

You are so right!

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

I hate him too. And Tennyson. And Wordsworth. And Umberto Eco.

[eliade.livejournal.com]

I think it can take a lifetime to unlearn the tastes instilled in us in our first eighteen years. All the crap rock music I listened to--it has taken me 20 years to realize I hate David Bowie's atonal screech and that Lynyrd Skynyrd isn't the second coming.

Likewise, it's hard to disentangle yourself from all the Lit Canon authors whose words have been stuffed like stale wool into your head. Looking back on everything I read up through college, I'm not sure there were more than a handful of books I really enjoyed, rather than feeling I was obliged to respect. And since then, almost every time I try to pick up one of those well-dressed trade paperbacks that pose self-consciously as contemporary literature my hand goes numb and I fall asleep standing.

These days I mostly read fan-fiction and genre fiction--mysteries--and occasionally reach out and hope to stumble across other cool authors, like Stephen Fry. A few months back I went on a jag reading/re-reading Patricia Cornwall, and posted about what a freaky vibe she gives me. Her creepiness just shimmers off every page. I still can't work up a good hate but that's probably the closest example I have.

[surfer-911.livejournal.com]

Henry David Thoreau. Hard as I tried, I could not get through Walden. Pompous, self-righteous ass.

[atheilen.livejournal.com]

Terry Goodkind. *LOATHE*

I think my distaste for Beckett may yet evolve into what you're talking about, but I can't bring myself to say it yet.

I don't hate Milton, but I've always felt so awful for his poor daughters.