It's easy to recall the moments in my life when I've been so overwhelmed by sudden shame and remorse that I've prayed for a meteorite to smite me on the spot. One occurred this summer at the Curious Art Festival at Hampshire's Pylewell Park.
I greeted a friend who gesticulated to the table behind him, saying, "You must know Fay Weldon".
Yes, yes, I know - by daunting reputation - the celebrated writer and feminist icon. You could even say she's welded on my brain, because I once gave a complete stinker of a review to an erotic novel written under a pseudonym; only to be told later that the author was almost certainly Weldon. By then I'd dismissed the book as "fearful tosh". I am generally a big fan of Weldon's oeuvre. However, my first duty as a reviewer was to the reader, and I wasn't sure they'd be well advised to allocate hard-earned cash to a pseudo-Dennis Wheatley sex romp.
So the review ran in its unflattering entirety, pointing me inexorably to the day when I would stand quaking before Weldon, wondering whether it was best to apologise or hope merciful amnesia had drawn a veil over the episode. But long experience tells me that praise, however extravagant, will be absorbed or taken as talent's due while criticism, however trivial, will remain engraved on the artiste's heart. So I grovelled and blushed and the leonine Weldon was magnanimity personified.
It doesn't always turn out so well, by any means. Alain de Botton once responded to a poor review by Caleb Rain in the New York Times by posting underneath the critic's blog: "I will hate you 'til the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make."
