Umbrage, high dudgeon, the taking of offense, the mounting of one’s high horse, Up Yours!ism, Well, I Never!ism — SOS has warned you against this sort of writing for years. She has directed you to this Onion article as a cautionary tale. She has provided real-world examples of what she calls Harrumphs.
Harrumphs are often letters to the editor, in which writers, offended by bad reviews, lose all restraint (Emotion, SOS always says, is the enemy of good writing.) and let their wounded egotism rip. If you want your writing to work for you, to persuade your audience to take your side, it’s a good idea not to reveal yourself to the world as an arrogant thin-skinned fool.
Here’s a recent rather amazing Canadian Harrumph, from Victoria’s poet laureate.
An English professor from Camosun College reviewed the laureate’s latest book of poetry (It was a perfectly ok review… thorough, not particularly exciting… critical here, admiring there…), and the laureate blew a laurel.
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I wasn’t going to dignify the badly written, inaccurate and savage review of my book Muscle Memory in last week’s Times Colonist with a response. [Harrumphs always, always start like this. I wasn’t going to write! I have better things to do than stoop to that! I’m busy doing the Lord’s work!]
I considered the source and decided to ignore it. [Consider the source — a playground cliche.] The record speaks for itself. It is the first negative poetry review in a lifetime of writing and most of the poems have been published elsewhere and won national and international awards. [Never got a negative review, eh? Think that’s a sign of a strong poet, do you? Along with all the awards you just boasted about?]
… That the Times Colonist would publish hate mail in the form of a book review at a time when the world is focused on the devastation of lives in Haiti is in appalling taste. [Now we’re right round the bend. What does this sentence mean? Can you figure out what she’s saying? I can’t. It’s absolutely mad.] The newspaper insulted the suffering [and] insulted the city that has chosen me to be poet laureate …
February 6th, 2010 at 12:28AM
While I agree that the harumph is pretty egregious, I’d also disagree with your characterization of the review as “pretty OK.” That was a polite, but firm, smackdown.
February 6th, 2010 at 1:38AM
I went too easy on it, you’re right – but I wouldn’t say it was a smackdown. Some of it is just descriptive, and some of it is quite critical, but it’s not poet-assassination…
February 6th, 2010 at 12:59PM
[…] negative review. And she would have got away with it, too, if it weren’t for that meddling Scathing Online Schoolmarm […]
February 7th, 2010 at 2:33PM
Taking offense, especially with the unrelated twist (the people of Haiti) placed to associate the critic with vermin, is the national sport of Canada, having replaced hockey in the 1990s. Right behind taking offense is moral superiority, usually claimed right after the taking of offense. This exchange is typical of Canadian public discourse. In Canada, any disagreement or criticism is hate, and especially so for the far left, which constitutes most of the narrow political spectrum there.
February 8th, 2010 at 11:20AM
This is what happens when the arts get too much subsidy, perhaps?
Recipients begin to see themselves as arts employees, and how dare you criticize their performance on the job?
February 10th, 2010 at 11:16AM
Great analysis, thanks for that. I won’t quite call it a Canadian Harrumph — but it’s pretty close. (See Steven Galloway’s letter to the NP when someone dared to call ‘CanLit’ boring. His rejoinder? Pretty much identical to the above, with the omission of his million-dollar novel having been capitalised on a real-life cellist who is entirely pissed off.)
It’s the tawdriness of it all that’s most annoying. You identified the typical strategies of the muse-scorned in this diatribe. But, at the end of the day, we’re not exactly witnessing W. B. Yeats lashing out at the Irish newspapers over the role of Protestants in a new republic. ‘Victoria’s Poet Laureate?’ Talk about pushing the limit of ‘no one really cares.’
Honestly, these people kill poetry with their own insolence.
Come back, _Dunciad_, we need you.