Last week's Westminster Abbey memorial service for the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes seems to have been quite a moving affair, if a little on the staid side for a man whose life was so tumultuous.
Only Seamus Heaney, when speaking of Hughes's "personal and historic sorrows", referred, obliquely, to his stormy relationship with Sylvia Plath. Otherwise you might think things had been as quiet as the waters that Hughes loved and celebrated so famously.
The storms actually began on a Cambridge evening back in 1956 when Hughes first met Plath, at a magazine launch. The poet had brought along a lady friend who took objection to the instant attraction between Ted and Sylvia. "Girl-friend like a loaded crossbow" wrote Hughes, "the hall/like the tilting deck of the Titanic." He kissed Sylvia "bang smash on the mouth" as she later recalled, robbed her hairband, nuzzled her neck and in return got bitten on the cheek, resulting in a permanent scar, or "ring-moat of toothmarks".
That's one way to inject a little excitement into a dull launch.
Speaking of literary demises, I was sorry to hear of the death of some time back of former Guardian and Observer literary critic and sportswriter Christopher Wordsworth, who wasn't at all upset to learn only a short time before he died that he was not related to his poetry-writing namesake, William.
According to one obituary, Christopher "wasn't trained as a newspaperman but he shared most journalistic traits, like a tendency to paranoia, heightened by a lack of interest in the tiresome business of production".
Paranoia indeed. Many of us in this office would take instant action at such a slur if we we were not well aware that management has its spies everywhere.
Meanwhile the writer Andrew Miller is to be congratulated for winning the International Impac/ Dublin award with his first book, the historical novel Ingenious Pain. Mr Miller picks up a cheque for £100,000, the world's biggest literary prize.
The author is now working on a book to be called Oxygen. It will deal, he says, with "what can be saved and who saves what - whether mistakes you make years before are ever rectifiable".
This is a bit passe considering that the Bible is already widely available, but good luck to him.
Now let us take a look at the fresh new business of literature and loathing, vengeance in print, the book as battering ram and the whole damn thing.
ACCORDING to a recent obituary on the late writer Felicia Gizycka, she and her American millionaire mother, Eleanor "Cissy" Patterson, made a formidable mother-daughter act: "They and the dynamic of their mutual loathing are entwined in modern American history."
This particular mutual loathing, exacerbated by Felicia in her book Flower of Smoke (1939) with its portrait of a heartless socialite mother, seemed to actually sustain these unattractive people.
But the whole vengeance thing among the literary set is taking off in a big way. It may well be the new black.
Ms Joyce Maynard, for example, who caused a flurry last September with her book At Home In The World, about her teenage affair with the reclusive author, J.D. Salinger, is now selling the letters he wrote to her. Sothebys is to auction the collection of 14 letters next month and expects them to sell for about $60,000. Ms Maynard, herself a writer, says she simply wants the money to fund her children's education.
However, when At Home In The World was published, many critics focused on Ms Maynard's obvious anger regarding Salinger's treatment of her, and her apparent desire to wreak vengeance. Selling the letters written by an author so obsessive about his privacy is already being seen by many people as twisting the dagger.
Prime among vengeance writers of recent times is Paul Theroux. This man has taken the thing to new levels, made it an art form in itself. The American author, who in his spare time conducts an ongoing public display of mutual loathing with his brother, recently published a pseudo-fictional book entitled Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship across Five Continents, whose theme is simply the awfulness, as a human being and a writer, of the author V.S. Naipaul.
Naipaul inadvertently drew down this unique punishment on himself by quietly selling off a few copies of Theroux first editions, which the writer, up to then a close friend, had personally inscribed for him.
So. You want to write. You want to make money. The love thing is overdone. Maeve has the romantic saga tied up. Wake up: today's theme is vengeance, and what you need to find is someone to hate, and preferably someone famous. For God's sake, there must be some semi-celebrity with whom you have had a serious row. Just write it up.
