The author’s big mistake

The essay purports to be about something small: authors’ letters-to-the-editor contesting negative reviews. But it is really about something larger: vanity, foolishness, and man (and woman’s) irresistible reflex to abase themselves in defense of their amour propre.

Grounding himself in the writing of Samuel Johnson, who, by the way, had no objection to bad reviews, Fussell dissects the bathetic essence of the wounded author’s plaint. First, the insistence that he or she hardly ever objects to painful reviews. Then the rote suggestion of incompetence or bias on the part of the reviewer. Often, the “wronged’’ author appeals to better-known reviewers at more august publications who properly valued the work.

Fussell chuckles at the woes of May Sarton, who claimed that she suffered “something close to a nervous collapse’’ and became physically ill, after an abusive review in The New York Times. “We should not be ashamed of ourselves if we find these misfortunes essentially comic,’’ Fussell writes.

Meet Richard Bernstein. He recently published what Slate magazine reviewer Johann Hari called a “strange new book,’’ “The East, the West, and Sex,’’ “the sordid history of the sexually exotic East.’’ (Slate again.) In a nutshell, Hari accuses Bernstein of feasting on the Orientalist delights of Western sex travelers like Gustave Flaubert and the explorer Richard Burton, while refusing to acknowledge that they were little more than glorified rapists.

“How is having sex with slaves or people who are terrorized by your countrymen, or who are sunk in poverty created by a long colonial rape, simply doing ‘what they were invited to?’ ’’ Hari asks. “How could these women have said no?’’

In his lengthy reply to the magazine, Bernstein follows the script just as Fussell wrote it: “Normally I think book writers should take their lumps in silence, but the Slate review was so willfully uncomprehending, so brim-full of moralistic error and ad hominem falsehood, that it’s too hard not to reply.’’

Bernstein then unleashes what reads like a legal demand letter, chock full of code words that whisper “lawsuit’’ under the slather of overheated argument. “Slanderous meaning . . . demagogic bit of character assassination . . . false statement . . . personal defamation.’’

In the end, bad writing wins out. “Do I ejaculate approvingly over the Western men who engage [the] services [of Bangkok bar girls]? I do not,’’ Bernstein writes. What was that great line Spy magazine used to use, in re the late New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal? “I’m writing as bad as I can!’’ The lure of sex notwithstanding, I can’t say I would want to read a book full of this guy’s prose.

Fussell’s essay should be required reading at Famous Authors School, so scribes like Jack Beatty would not leap into print suggesting that a review of his 2007 book “Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900’’ “betrayed The [New York] Times’s standards of fairness and accuracy.’’ Why? Because it was negative! Apparently the reviewer indicted Beatty for “hidebound Marxist analysis.’’ Again writing off the Fussell script, Beatty refers readers to more objective, i.e. positive, assessments of his book, in Commonweal, the Chicago Tribune, and the Globe.

Outraged letters to mainstream media dinosaurs are so . . . 1782. Alice Hoffman trashed a Globe reviewer in a now-famous Twitter message: “Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron. How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away?’’ Another writer previously regarded as sane, Alain de Botton, took to the internets to trash reviewer Caleb Crain: “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.’’

Boys and girls, attend now Samuel Johnson, perhaps both the greatest writer and the greatest heart of the English language. Hearing a peer whine about bad reviews, Johnson exclaimed: “Nay, sir, do not complain. It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock . . . to keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.’’

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.