Author Envy

SPEND enough time around writers and you’re certain to hear it. Often it’s barely caught at the tail of a comment, or in certain murmurings, or else heard in an outright hiss or snarl. It can wear the cloak of sarcasm or ridicule or calm contempt; some cloak or other is required because writers, like everybody else, won’t admit to it, such is the shame, the self-squashing of the admission. You might detect it at that narcotizing pageant called AWP or at any wholesale gathering of writers: Among the various strata of talent and ambition there’s that murmur, that hiss again, a facetious barb. I don’t mean from the attendees, lurching toward their first book deal. The attendees of writers conferences, I’ve found, excepting the occasional repellent nag, are dutifully gracious, earnest, modest in the right moments. I mean the established writers, the workshop conductors or presenters, Cains leering at Abels, authors with a handful of books who have been tagged with the shrugging slur “midlist,” or those such as myself who hardly qualify as even that.

In his 1625 essay “Of Envy,” Francis Bacon makes some wittily instructive distinctions between different brands of this persistent green pest. At the start he pairs envy with love because “both have vehement wishes”—both are blood-borne, engined from the gut—and then he points out that “Scripture calleth envy an ,” meaning that the envious look upon the envied with wishes of ruin: Nothing makes the envious happier than to behold the envied in tatters. (“Evil eye” is a nod to the Latin for envy, , the literal meaning of which is “to look upon,” which is why in Dante’s the envious have their eyes sewn closed.) Someone who “is busy, and inquisitive, is commonly envious,” says Bacon, while someone who “mindeth but his own business” doesn’t