Dave Wood

Writers and thinkers have a cruel way of damning their colleagues with faint praise, and the same may be said for just plain folks who get the same treatment. So as a service to all common Upper Midwesterners, I have compiled a list of famous faint praisers in history.

For a start, here’s New Yorker magazine’s nasty Alexander Woolcott on novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky in a letter to Mrs. Otis Skinner: “I have come to the last healing chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. It always chokes me up and fills me up with a love of mankind which sometimes lasts until noon the next day.”

And Virginia Woolf on James Joyce’s Ulysses: “Never have I read such tosh. Of course, genius may blaze when I get to page 632, but I have my doubts.”

Samuel Johnson, famous biographer of James Boswell on Mrs. James Boswell: “I have seen many bears led by men, but I never have before seen a seen a man led by a bear.”

Robert Browning on wife Elizabeth Barett: “The simple truth is that she was the poet and I a very clever person by comparison.”

Versifier Ogden Nash: “The cow is of the bovine ilk, one end is Moo, the other milk;” on poets in general: “They aren’t very useful because they aren’t very produceful.”

The stinging wit Dorothy Parker on how she stacks up against Edna St. Vincent Millay: “I followed in her exquisite footsteps in my own horrible unhappy sneakers.”

Ivy Compton Burnet on her life, to the London Times: “I wasn’t very Deedy.”

Robert Benchley on himself:” It took me 15 years to discover I had no talent, but I couldn’t give up because I was already famous.”

Anonymous reviewer of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland:” “He sometimes seems to be walking very near the limits of coherence.”

Playwright George Bernard Shaw on how to act in anything by Shakespeare: “Always read THROUGH the lines but never TO the lines. There simply isn’t time for it.”

Fran Leibowitz on the publishing industry: “Having been an unpopular student in High School is no cause for publishing books.”

Wolcott again, this time on newspapers: “Germany was the cause of Hitler just as much as Chicago is for the Chicago Tribune.”

Literary critic R.P Blackmur’s opinion on writing for Henry Luce’s Time and Life: “It’s like choosing a fur-lined Purgatory.”

Mark Twain on Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner: “He’s a hack who would not be judged even fourth rate in Europe.”

Let’s end on an ambiguous note: Winston Churchill’s commentary on the publication of his Nobel prize-winning six- volume history of the second World War:

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and amusement. Then it becomes a mistress. Then it becomes master, then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling it to the public.”

What would you call that trope? Certainly not Damning with Feint Praise. How about “Damning with Damned praise?”

Researcher’s note: In my scouring of almanacs for the above quotations and sayings I ran across an entry for a gent whom our genealogist claims was a 17^th ancestor on the Wood family tree:

Pilgrim William Bradford spoke in his memoirs on God: “But it pleased God to visit us then with death daily, and it was so general a disease that the  living were scarce able bury the dead.”

Is that damning that isn’t supposed to be damning?