He’s in my “way too Britishly British” pile along with the Carry On movies and (sorry) Douglas Adams. Just can’t get over the image of someone leaning over a lectern to place emphasis on a line like, “I should rather we have taken the train, Beatrice,” to a smug well dressed audience of British people drinking brandy and taking dainty nibbles out of cucumber sandwiches. Ghastly.
Oh man I am MADE of this trope. It turned me into the twisted little man I am today. I found /lit/ at about fourteen and went headfirst into the big boy canon. I think what I read was less important than my attitude to reading, I was definitely an insufferable elitist dickhead for most of my twenties even though I didn’t understand half of what I had read in my teens. I thought I understood Celine when I was sixteen! Now that I’ve been in the work force for another sixteen or whatever years I have this dual sense of deep empathy for the guy and also a deep hatred and shunning of his entire shit. I will say that the main positive to come out of it was a rigorous need for books to be “good,” like you can’t go from Marquez at age twelve to Rowling at fourteen and have a good time, you just can’t. I dodged entire waves of Young Adult trash and while what I replaced it with wasn’t all good or comprehensible, I think it’s made my internal vocabulary and reference system much more useful and “”“pure”“”. It fostered a lethal allergy to any kind of Joss Whedon Andy Weir kind of writing and when you can’t deal with that you have to go elsewhere so I’ve found some fantastic stuff in my elitist dickheadery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-USX9BNYd0