Henighan vs. Beale: the cage match
Rushing in where angels fear to tread (as is his wont), and flagrantly flouting the dictum that discretion is the better part of valour vis-à-vis answering review(er)s, author and essayist Stephen Henighan responded in Saturday’s Globe and Mail to Nigel Beale’s recent review (it’s behind the paywall) of Henighan’s new volume of criticism, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture:
By quoting Dr. Johnson at the beginning and end of his review of my A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, Nigel Beale strikes the pose of a crusty fellow who’s not going to put up with any nonsense — particularly, as his disparaging references to Susan Sontag and Naomi Klein make clear, leftist nonsense.
But in order to pull off the crustiness act you need to get your facts straight. As Beale’s review demonstrates, crustiness combined with historical inaccuracies, questionable summaries and turgid prose soon becomes unconvincing.
Henighan accuses Beale of betraying his “ideological type” in arguing for the market as a determinant of literary quality: “So the great novelists of our time are Dan Brown and J. K. Rowling?”
Not to be deterred, Beale responds to the response, accusing Henighan of getting his facts wrong and castigating him unjustly:
[T]here is no ideology at work in my hostility toward Henighan’s book. I dislike a good many of its essays for the simple reason that they are poorly argued and sloppily constructed.
Since it appears that no quarter is to be given from either party, perhaps the best solution is to go the Craig Davidson route, and have the two pugilists climb in the ring and duke it out. The last man standing gets bragging rights, and a claim to historical accuracy.
What a shrill response.
Henighan can dish it out, but he can’t take it.
Henighan has never taken criticism well. After When Words Deny the World came out, I wrote to him about his statements that Carol Shields was writing “free trade fiction” in the Stone Diaries because of all the cross-border stuff going on with her characters and themes. My comments amounted to my explaining how in that part of the country (where I grew up, actually) the attitudes and behaviours of people towards the Canada/US border were exactly as Shields depicted them. His response was essentially (and I’m paraphrasing) that I would understand when I got older (I was 22 at the time).