Jun. 23, 2003 - 7:21 a.m.

It wad frae mony a blunder free us

Well, it's more the fact that he exists, if you know what I mean...
— one of the worst bullies ever to study at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, answering a question about what his favorite victim had ever done to him

In Frederick Crews' classic The Pooh Perplex, one of the essayists is a man without a good word for anybody. Simon Lacerous (whom I've mentioned before), editor (with his wife Trixie) of "the now defunct but extremely influential quarterly, Thumbscrew", is said to be

perhaps the most feared and respected critic in England. An implacable foe of sentimentality, flabby aestheticism, and inflated reputations [...] he despises the entire English university system. Of his fellow [Oxonian] Fellows he has said: 'They can all go to hell. Of course, some should go before others. One has a responsibility to make discriminations.'

His attitude to the Pooh books is summed up in the title of his essay: "Another Book to Cross Off Your List". He begins his second paragraph by stating point-blank that "D.H. Lawrence is the only English novelist worth reading." He admits that at this time last year, he had said there were four great English novelists, but points out that he'd had to quit liking the other three (Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney and Benjamin Disraeli) since seeing them praised, in the meantime, by his claimed nemesis, one Lord Wendell Dovetail. His attitude to other critics is found in his reaction to a symposium on Pooh:

every critic, while pretending to praise A.A. Milne, was in reality attacking me! Pages and pages of vile invective, so base and dastardly that the perpetrators dared not mention me by name or even allude to any of my work!

His attitude to literature (what he calls "the absolute canons of taste") is that it must "reflect, conform to, and serve the interests of Life; [...] This is to say that it must be about Life, it must be lifelike (i.e., no decadent 'artiness' or 'pure intellection'), and it must help to smash the Establishment." In this sense, Winnie-the-Pooh does indeed constitute a vast betrayal of Life: "Not one character is from the Midlands; not one is of working-class origin, and there is not even a coal mine on the ideal landscape where they jump and play."

I suspected that Lacerous was based on an actual critic, but now I know his name. F.R. Leavis said that poetry "must be in relation to life, it must not be cut off from vulgar living, it should [...] testify to spiritual health and sanity, [...] there should be no emotion for its own sake in it". He also had a four-person list of the great English writers (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad). He had (per the Australian page just cited) a wife named Queenie, corresponding to Trixie Lacerous. Apparently, he even shared Lacerous' tendency to see enemies in everyone who wasn't actively and constantly supporting him. (A tendency, one might note, which of late seems to have become our national creed.)

I mentioned my self-loathing last time. Well, it may just be that self-loathing, properly understood and only applied when necessary, is one of the keys to the quality Lacerous (and Elliot McGucken, whom Lacerous parodied in advance) so egregiously lacks: self-awareness.

Or maybe it's that the more self-loathing you have, the less you actually need, and vice versa. Judging on the evidence that's been presented to me, neither Ann Coulter nor Michael Wiener ever show any trace of self-awareness or self-loathing (or if they ever approach either of those qualities, they immediately project the reason for the thing out onto "the liberals"). For that matter, one of the gags of the sequel to the Perplex is apparently that none of its authors ever quite gets round to deconstructing emself.

Then again, what I manage not to know about myself, I can just about squeeze in the Grand fucking Canyon. So who am I to talk?

Which Harry Potter Marauder Are You?

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-30-

last time, on The Slack Shack - our next inciting exstallment