The Effort of Bad Writing

pornography can, being like the stain on a napkin, exactly the size of themselves. Hasn’t everybody on occasion wished for badder books? Roland Barthes famously remarked that he wrote books because he didn’t like the books he read. When younger I thought he must be talking about the books reviewers called bad, but later I realized books like that rarely inspire anybody. Is badness, at bottom, more like incompe-tence or like evil? Ronald Sukenick once confided to me his ambition to write books no one would know how to judge either bad or good. I feel that.

I dream of the book so horrendous it denies me peace, tracks me down in my haven, and compels me to vomit rejoinders. To think that the author of How It Is (1964) won the Nobel Prize! Bad writing has its muse, its geniuses.

The Effort of Bad Writing

Michael Bérubé

Pennsylvania State University

Women in Love (1920) by D. H. Lawrence. As the great W. Y. Tindall once wrote,

Gudrun dances, for no reason, before cows. They understand. Even Hermione, that intellectual, has her moments. In voluptuous consummation with violence, she hits Birkin on the head with her paperweight. He goes off to lie among the flowers and, on returning to full con-sciousness, approves of her momentary triumph over repression.

Or as Andy Bienen, my grad-school colleague turned screenwriter, more pithily put it, “It’s like someone put a gun to Nietzsche’s head and made him write a Harlequin romance.” No question, it took a lot of

effort to produce a book that bad.