Fighting Words: Writers Lambast Other Writers - From Aristotle to Anne Rice.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.

"Reading him is like wading through glue" is how Alfred, Lord Tennyson assessed Ben Jonson, and, whatever readers' own appraisal of Volpone and The Alchemist, the magnificent malice of the remark is likely to stick. When Lionel Trilling cautions: "Shelley should not be read, but inhaled through a gas pipe," one can savor the rancor.

James Charlton presumes that Envy and Enmity are authors' true Muses, at least when writing about colleagues and rivals. In Fighting Words, he collects approximately 400 smears directed by prominent writers at their peers, examples of how the strongest inspiration springs from the spleen as much as the heart. "If this man is a good writer," wrote Calder Willingham about William Faulkner, "shrimps whistle Dixie." The power of imagination in service to slander can steal the breath away.

Of course, any fool can ridicule a dunce, and it seems a misappropriation of genius for Nathaniel Hawthorne to describe the unspeakable Edward Bulwer-Lytton as "the very pimple of the age's humbug." It is when Dante is labeled, by W.H. Auden, as "a terrible prima donna" or Byron libels Chaucer as "obscene and contemptible" that the reader responds to the magnitude of the malice. "Vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic inventions, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge or the world" is how Ralph Waldo Emerson dismisses Jane Austen's novels, and one has to marvel at the majestic spectacle of divinities hurling thunderbolts across Olympus.

The Greek king Mithdridates inoculated himself against assassination by ingesting poison in minute doses. Readers will want to ration their exposure to the venom that Charlton has hoarded...