In 1923, nine of the most prominent literary experts were asked by the editors of Vanity Fair to name “the ten great writers whom they found most thoroughly boring.’ They were instructed to put aside all intellectual and moral pretense and simply name the writers they absolutely could not read. The lists and the amusing explanations reveal much about individual and generational tastes.
The Ten Dullest Authors: A Symposium (1923)
A Group of Eminent Literary Specialists
Vote on the Most Unreadable of the World’s Great Writers
H. L. Mencken
IT 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:
Dostoevski
George Eliot
D. H. Lawrence
James Fenimore Cooper
Eden Phillpotts
Robert Browning
Selma Lagerlöf
Gertrude Stein
Bjöstjerne Björnson
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. Dostoevski, 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 is unsound 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 practice in England. As for Lawrence and Miss Stein, what makes them hard reading for me is simply the ineradicable conviction that beneath all their pompous manner there is nothing but tosh. The two Scandinavians I need not explain.
George Jean Nathan
Dostoevski
Paul Claudel
Paul Bourget
Paul Heyse
Charles Dickens
Sir Walter Scott
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Knut Hamsun
Charles Rann Kennedy
Woodrow Wilson
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.
William Shakespeare as a Comic Writer. Because I am sadly deficient in humor.
Dante Alighieri. Because I can’t read Italian.
Walt Whitman. Because I can’t read Whitman.
George Eliot. Because her dark brown binding got into her style.
Robert Louis Stevenson. Because his admirers call him R. L. S.
Walter Pater. Because of his infinite capacity for taking pains.
Selma Lageröf. Because an English lady read her aloud to me.
Henry James. Because of Mrs. Wharton and Mrs. Gerould.
Paul Claudel. Because he has a beautiful mind.
Gertrude Stein. Because…
James Branch Cabell
ABOUT 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 short 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 anesthetic 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 the “cults” who just now appear to me the most violently uninteresting:
Jane Austen
George Borrow
Miguel de Cervantes
Henry James
Herman Melville
George Meredith
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thomas Love Peacock
François Rabelais
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 others. I for the moment incline to strike out his name in disfavor of that of Marcel Proust or of James G. Huneker or W. H. Hudson; but refrain because the moment’s pother about any of these three may, after all, very well and speedily prove transient.
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. 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.
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 plow 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, I compose my list as follows:
Arthurian poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Books about Eugene Field
Plays by William Vaughn Moody
Poems by Cale Young Rice
Ectoplasm stuff by Conan Doyle
The second half of Zuleika Dobson
Posthumous collections of O. Henry’s odds and ends
Domestic verse by Eddie Guest
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.
Burton Rascoe
John Milton
D. H. Lawrence
P. Virgilius Maro
W. D. Howells
Marcel Proust
Sir Francis Bacon
H. G. Wells
William Wordsworth
Henry James
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.
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 an average of once every six months.
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 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 Tono-Bungay and The Island of Dr. Moreau. I have taken stimulants to listen out Henry James because with him a seeming quality of borsesomeness is only the legitimate demand he makes upon the reader’s undivided and intelligent attention.
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 defenseless dead, I will mention my imperfect sympathies amongst the moderns:
Robert Louis Stevenson, the father of all contemporary bores, the archetype of the literary gent with illusions about the life of adventure.
Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts, an unpoetic poem and an undramatic drama, a lapse on the part of a great novelist.
Rudyard Kipling, as intolerable to a civilized mind as the professional Tommies of the British army whose mentality he so perfectly reflects.
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.
J. M. Barrie, the sentimental Scot raised to the nth degree, Harry Lauder without kilts.
Joseph Conrad, the perfect example of the “romance” of the sea, born in Poland and the greatest maritime glory in modern English literature.
D. H. Lawrence—the average Briton in the toils of sex, a sad spectacle.
George Santayana, platitudes across the sea.
Paul Claudel, pseudo-simple religiosity in the worst French style for two hundred years.
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.
Carl Van Vechten
Dr. Sigmund Freud
Gabriele d’Annunzio
Edith Wharton
Walter Pater
Gerhart Hauptmann
James Joyce
Pierre Loti
D. H. Lawrence
Amy Lowell
J. M. Barrie
Edna Ferber
NARROWING 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:
Plane Geometry
Eat and Grow Thin
The Book of Job
Elsie Dinsmore
Jurgen
The Genius
Pollyanna
Anything of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s written since his first novel and first book of short stories.
The Congressional Record
Bleak House
