'A Call to Malice and Envy'

“(What novelist without malice is any fun to read?)” 

The parenthetical questioner is Frederic Raphael in his review of The Family Arsenal, a 1976 thriller by Paul Theroux I have not read. It’s a worthy question, one that demands unflattering honesty from those who choose to answer. Few among us are immune to the charms of malice, which should not be confused at one extreme with slobbering hatred or at the other with mere irritation. Malice has about it a cool aura of justice-to-be-performed. Malice is active, not passive, a desire to make sure someone gets his comeuppance. Malice is the fraternal twin of revenge.

 

Some novelists – Evelyn Waugh, Ivy Compton-Burnett – specialize in malice, which is part of the reason we enjoy them. Others dabble in it – think Nabokov, Kingsley Amis. A novel fueled by a distillation of empathy and love would be unreadable. Among poets, two amusing aficionados of malice are Turner Cassity and Tom Disch. Malice often finds a good home among writers of light verse. Edward Gibbon could appreciate the allure of malice. Wittily, he writes of the cruel and feckless emperor Constantius Gallus (326-354): “He furnished the malice of his enemies with the arms of truth, and afforded the emperor the fairest pretence of exacting the forfeit of his purple, and of his life.”

 

Some thirty-five years after the review quoted above, in an email to his friend Joseph Epstein (collected in Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet, 2013), Raphael writes:

 

“[T]he literary vocation is a call to malice and envy as well as, we like to think, Higher Things; nothing like the sublime to have an Acherontic [OED: “infernal, hellish; dark, gloomy”] downside. I am not very ashamed of a certain kind of malice, as long as it comprises accuracy.”