Culturebox can't think of a relationship more appalling than the benign bond alleged to exist between mentor and prot,g,. How humiliating for the supplicant, to grovel before the living proof of his own inadequacy! How nervewracking for his benefactor, that soon he'll be forced to compete with the poor resentful bastard! Why, one wonders, don't more prot,g,s grow up to become character assassins?

The short answer is, they do. One of the great examples of prot,g, ingratitude is Ernest Hemingway, whose second book, The Torrents of Spring, was a vicious parody of his unusually indulgent mentor, Sherwood Anderson. (Hemingway dashed it off in ten days before submitting it to his publisher; he was deliberately trying to break his multi-book contract.) Philip Roth's portrait of E. I. Lonoff, a.k.a. Bernard Malamud, in The Ghost Writer, involves a subtler form of backstabbing: the unkind portrait masquerading as homage. (See Note 1 below to see what Culturebox means.)

But where mentor-murder really thrives is in the somewhat less elevated genre of literary memoir. Brendan Gill's Here at the New Yorker is the most delightful example that comes to Culturebox's mind. Damning with faint praise and exceptionally witty prose, Gill skewers both Harold Ross ("As for manners, Ross might truly be said not to have had any") and William Shawn ("Shawn, by contrast, might be a revenant from some small eighteenth-century court"). Less amusing, but more typical, is an 1983 essay by James Atlas in The Atlantic Monthly, in which he offers up the spectacle of himself cringing at the feet of the New York intellectuals who helped him with his biography of poet Delmore Schwartz--and equally nasty portraits of the intellectuals themselves. (See Note 2 for a typical exchange between Atlas and Alfred Kazin.)

Then there's Paul Theroux, whose book on his former mentor V.S. Naipaul is excerpted in this week's New Yorker. Never before has Culturebox encountered such dizzying heights of disingenousness--the prot,g, pretending to be taken in by the mentor, while storing up anecdotes that prove his foulness. The pinnacle of disingenousness isn't Theroux's, though--it's the New Yorker's headline: "The Enigma of Friendship." As if! This is not a nuanced exploration of the mysterious bonds that form between writers. The portrait may well be accurate--Naipaul is not a writer with a reputation for warmheartedness--but all that can be concluded from the exercise is that, at best, one monster deserved the other. (See Note 3 for a choice passage.)

It was while contemplating further instances of mentor-murder in this issue of the New Yorker--see the "Talk of the Town"'s paeans to the departing Tina Brown, particularly Anthony Lane's meditation upon her query, "Is Housman hot?" (Note 4)--that Culturebox was moved to invent a subgenre, spiterature. It rhymes with literature: literature as spit, composed in spite. Readers are hereby invited to submit suggestions to culturebox@slate.com for the most spiteful work of spiterature they've ever encountered. A warning, however: Should your suggestions turn out to be superior to Culturebox's, she might well be forced to write an expose in which you are roundly damned with her faint praise.

Note 1:

Here's Nathan Zuckerman on his hero, who can't stop fussing with a malfunctioning record-player arm:

This, I realized, is the excruciating scrupulosity, the same maddening, meticulous attention to every last detail that makes you great, that keeps you going and got you through and now is dragging you down. Standing with E.I. Lonoff over the disobedient arm of his record player, I understood the celebrated phenomenon for the first time: a man, his destiny, and his work-all one. What a terrible triumph!

Note 2

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