The Ten Dullest Authors: A Symposium

A Group of Eminent Literary Specialists Vote on the Most Unreadable of the World's Great Writers

We have had so many symposiums lately on the Ten Greatest Books in the Last Fifty Years, on the Ten Books One Has Most Enjoyed Reading, etc., etc., that Vanity Fair has thought it might he interesting to reverse the investigation and to ask a number of prominent literary experts to name the ten great writers whom they find most thoroughly boring—whom they find that, in spite of all moral and intellectual temptations to plough through or pretend to admire, they absolutely cannot read. We have all heard the people who "don't know much about art, but know what they like", Here we present you with a number of people who know a great deal about art, and who know what they don't like.

H. L. Mencken

T is hard for me to make up a list of books or authors that bore me insufferably, for the simple truth is that I can read almost anything. My trade requires me to read annually all the worst garbage that is issued in belles lettres; for recreation and instruction I read such things as the Congressional Record, religious tracts, Mr. Walter Lippmann's endless discussions of the Simon-Binet tests, works on molecular physics and military strategy, and the monthly circulars of the great bond houses. It seems to me that nothing that gets into print can be wholly uninteresting; whatever its difficulties to the reader, it at least represents some earnest man's efforts to express himself. But there are some authors, of course, who try me more than most, and if I must name ten of them then I name:

1. Dostoievski

2. George Eliot

3. D. H. Lawrence

4. James Fenimore Cooper

5. Eden Phillpotts

6. Robert Browning

7. Selma Lagerlof *

8. Gertrude Stein

9. Bjomstjeme Björnson

10.Goethe

As a good German, I should, I suppose, wallow happily in Faust; I can only report that, when I read it, it is patriotically, not voluptuously. Dostoievski, for some reason that I don't know, simply stumps me; I have never been able to get through any of his novels. George Eliot I started to read too young, and got thereby a distaste for her that has never left me; it is unsound but incurable. Against Cooper and Browning I was prejudiced by school-masters who admired them. Phillpotts seems to me to be the worst novelist now in practise in England: certainly no small eminence. As for Lawrence and Miss Stein, what makes them hard reading for me is simply the ineradicable conviction that beneath ail their pompous manner there is nothing but tosh.. The two Scandinavians I need not explain.

James Branch Cabell

BOUT every author in my list I am, in all likelihood, entirely wrong. For I find that, somehow, I have listed only such writers as have .their recognized "cults" of perfervid admirers, and such writers as a respectable lapse of time has attested—perhaps—really to make some sort of mysterious appeal to a largish number of persons. One may, of course, in private, assume that aesthetically these persons bemuse themselves with notions of their own superiority and refinement. Such anaesthetic notions still enable self-complacency to pull through many pages that are perused with rather less admiration of the author than of the reader. But, for that Matter, the majority of generally acknowledged and most permanent literary reputations would seem to be based upon some similar innocuous self-deceit.

Anyhow, here are the ten "established" authors endowed with "cults" who just now appear to me the most violently uninteresting:

1. Jane Austen

2. George Borrow

3. Miguel de Cervantes

4. Henry James

5. Herman Melville

6. George Meredith

7. Friedrich Nietzsche

8. Thomas Love Peacock

9. François Rabelais

10.Walt Whitman

I submit this list without any comment save that I have made all suitable endeavors toward Melville since 1907: the antipathy is not newborn. And upon consideration, Peacock has not, really, ever annoyed me with the relentless and deep tediousness of the other. I for the moment incline to strike out his name in disfavor of that of Marcel Proust or of James G. Huneker or of W. H. Hudson; but refrain because the moment's pother about any of these three may, after all, very well and speedily prove transient. The ten I have named, though, seem actually established in one or another sort of enduringness—which is, to me, a fact that rouses wonder not unmingled with regret. For there really must be something of enjoyment somewhere deep-hidden in the writings of these people. And naturally one dislikes to miss it.

Elinor Wylie

WITH my hand upon the famous Vanity Fair Chain Bible, I hereby swear that, the following statement is the truth and nothing but the truth; though space does not permit it to be the whole truth.

1.William Shakespeare as a Comic Writer.

Because I am sadly deficient in humor.

2.Dante Alighieri. Because I can't read Italian.

3.Walt Whitman. Because I can't read Whitman.

4.George Eliot. Because her dark brown binding got into her style.

5.Robert Louis Stevenson. Because his admirers call him R. L. S.

6.Walter Pater. Because of his infinite' capacity for taking pains.

7.Selma Lagerlof. Because an English lady read her aloud to me.

8.Henry James. Because of Mrs. Wharton and Mrs. Gerould.

9.Paul Claudel. Because he has a beautiful mind.

10.Gertrude Stein. Because . . .

Carl Van Vechten

1. Dr. Sigmund Freud

2. Gabriele d'Annunzio

3. Edith Wharton

4. Walter Pater

5. Gerhart Hauptmann

6. James Joyce

7. Pierre Loti.

8. D. H. Lawrence

9. Amy Lowell

10.J. M. Barrie

Christopher Morley

IT is quite obvious that the editor of Vanity Fair, in asking this appalling question hopes to be answered, not by a list of such classic bores as Carlyle or John Stuart Mill or Dryden or Dr. Frank Crane, but by the names of contemporaries. This, obviously, will lead to a rousing hullabaloo and healthy irritation.

As a matter of fact, I don't let anyone bore me, dead or living. If he bores me, I don't read him, though very likely I continue to love him. Many of the writers who cause me the most painful ennui in print are people for whom I have warm personal regard or affection. I don't know, of course, if they are great-minded enough to hear the truth without being angry. This is a chance to find out.

But I console myself by reflecting that more than likely I shall find my name on several of these lists; but I shall not be annoyed. Rather flattered, in fact; for I believe in boring people.

The chaps I should like to vote for are the really first-class Sedatives who can fatigue you in a paragraph. You don't have to plod through pages and pages to know whether they weary you or not. No: these fellows are considerate, they ring the gong instantly. Some fine preservative instinct tells you at once that though this may be great art, it is Not For You. For instance W. L. George on Women, or Hal Stearns on Why Young Intellectuals Leave Home, or waggishnesses by Donald Ogden Stewart, or Community Masques by Percy Mackaye, or biographies by Edward Bok, or novels by Rupert Hughes, Bernard Shaw or Theodore Dreiser. But these fellows are Olympians; they are out of bounds.

Confining myself to the more temperate zones of achievement, which almost any conscientious student of the wearisome might attain, I compose my list as follows:

1.Arthurian poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson

2.Books about Eugene Field

3.Plays by William Vaughn Moody

4.Poems by Cale Young Rice

5.Ectoplasm stuff by Conan Doyle

6.The second half of Zuleika Dobson

7.Posthumous collections of O. Henry's odds and ends

8.Domestic verse by Eddie Guest

9.Fantazius Mallare by Ben Hecht

That, as you observe, is only nine items. I thought it best to leave one place open in case Burton Rascoe should publish a book.

Now a gruesome thought strikes me. Suppose I'm the only one who has really been honest in answering this question.

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Edna Ferber

ARROWING such a list down to ten is a thing that requires gifts of selection and elimination, neither of which I possess. Still, here are some books that nothing could make me read again:

1. Plane Geometry

2. Eat and Grow Thin

3. The Book of Job

4. Elsie Dinsmore

5. Jurgen

6. The Genius

7. Pollyanna

8. Anything of F. Scott Fitzgerald's written since his first novel and first book of short stories

9. The Congressional Record 10. Bleak House

Ernest Boyd

ONE is tempted to begin at the beginning and list all the five-foot bookshelf geniuses, Homer, Vergil, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and so forth, but here is an opportunity to be indiscreet. So, instead of taking refuge amongst the defenceless dead, I will mention my imperfect sympathies amongst the modems:

1. Robert Louis Stevenson, the father of all contemporary bores, the archetype of the literary gent with illusions about the life of adventure.

2. Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts, an unpoetic poem and an undramatic drama, a lapse on the part of a great novelist.

3. Rudyard Kipling, as intolerable to a civilized mind as the professional Tommies of the British army whose mentality he so perfectly reflects.

4. Gilbert K. Chesterton, the cheap punster in excelsis, strenuously engaged in persuading clean-limbed Englishmen that there was ever such a place as "Merrie England", full of beer and Catholicism.

5. J. M. Barrie, the sentimental Scot raised to the nth degree, Harry Lauder without kilts.

6. Joseph Conrad, the perfect example of the "romance" of the sea, born in Poland and the greatest maritime glory in modern English literature.

7. D. H. Lawrence—the average Briton in the toils of sex, a sad spectacle.

8. George Santayana, platitudes across the sea.

9. Paul Claudel, pseudo-simple religiosity in the worst French style for two hundred years.

10. Giovanni Papini's Story of Christ, the collapse of a remarkable mind into intellectual Fascismo, an attempt to rebuild the Church of God with the bricks previously hurled by anti-clericalism.

George Jean Nathan

1. Dostoievski

2. Paul Claudel

3. Paul Bourget

4. Paul Heyse

5. Charles Dickens

6. Sir Walter Scott

7. Nathaniel Hawthorne

8. Knut Hamsun

9. Charles Rann Kennedy

10. Woodrow Wilson

Hugh Walpole

THE ten writers whom I dislike the most—(And when I say writers I mean Writers)

1. Edith Wharton

2. George Meredith

3. W. B. Yeats

4. Oscar Wilde

5. Henri Bordeaux

6. August Strindberg

7. Rémy de Gourmont

8. Brander Mathews

9. Glutton Brock

10. Robert Herrick (A. D. 1923)

Thomas Beer

1. Publius Vergilius Maro. I can stand smugness and tedium taken separately but the combination floors me.

2. Saint Paul. They left him alone with the Christian church and he made it what it is today.

3. Ben Jonson. There may be something psychopathic in my loathing of this fellow's stuff, but I can't afford to waste any more of a life already past high noon.

4. Blaise Pascal. I am told by one young enough to be an authority that "Pascal's sad, burning thought descends to the inmost seat of being." Let it work while I sleep.

5. Walter Scott. He said that no line of his could debase the youth of England.

6. Emile Zola. His books sold tremendously in the United States between 1879 and 1891. Why say another word?

7. D. H. Lawrence. I wish to heaven that Mr. Lawrence would transfer his exquisite mastery of the English language to the making of a history of the coal business.

8. Upton Sinclair. He means so well.

9. Nat Gould. Whenever I have tried to read any of this wholesome favorite of the British lower classes, I have thanked God for our own Gene Stratton Porter.

10. Orison Swett Marden. The only author living as dull as J. J. Rousseau, but he has not written his confessions yet and may improve.

Burton Rciscoe

1. John Milton

2. D. H. Lawrence

3. P. Virgilius Maro

4. W. D. Howells

5. Marcel Proust

6. Sir Francis Bacon

7. H. G. Wells

8. William Wordsworth

9. Henry James

10. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

If I am to be frank, these are the authors who have bored me beyond all others. And in making out such a list I must explain it a little. A great many writers among the classics and among my contemporaries might have bored me to a greater extent had I not made short shrift of their endeavors to entertain and instruct me. But since I came of age, I have not permitted many writers to bore me. Ordinarily I give them a fair trial and if I find them dull I am rude enough to turn my attention elsewhere. When I was very young that was not the case. My eagerness for knowledge made all books, good or bad, dull or lively, seem wonderful in my eyes. For a long time I did not know what it was to be bored. At the age of sixteen I read that intolerable compendium of tediousness, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason from beginning to end, understanding scarcely a word of it, and yet I was enchanted. Emerson, who in his essays was my intellectual proctor in those days, had, in his divinely allusive fashion hinted that there was rich meat in Kant and I chewed the German philosopher's words with self-hypnotic relish and never once suspected that I was not. in doing so, growing big with wisdom.

Nowadays I am occasionally bored out of a profound loyalty to a writer, or from a vague sense of duty. Milton, who bored me at college (except in his shorter poems and in his prose) bores me now on an aver age of once every six months. After such a lapse of time, I turn again to Paradise Lost in high hope of sustaining that thrill of pleasure which some friend or some essayist has just reminded me is to be had from the epic. The time may come when I shall arise from a reading of Paradise Lost in a state of jubilance, ecstasy, and self-congratulation. But not yet.

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My loyalty to writers .whose works I have admired and loved grants these writers full liberty to bore me. I do not admit the right of others to presume so much. Henry James is so favored, and George Moore, and D. H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad. Few writers charm me as much as Moore, no one I think has a more seductive prose style, and yet I could not read In Single Strictness and I foundered on A Story-Teller's Holiday. I could feign attention to D. H. Lawrence during the interminable spinning of Women in Love and Aaron's Rod because I consider Sons and Lovers among the great novels of our time. I keep on reading Wells with great weariness and exasperation because of Tony Bungay and The Island of Dr. Moreau. I have taken stimulants to listen out Henry James because with him a seeming quality of boresomeness is only the legitimate demand he makes upon the reader's undivided and intelligent attention.