Time & Perspective Quote by Marguerite Young

The most cutting detail here is how ordinary the cruelty sounds: “no one would give her a decent review.” Marguerite Young isn’t mythologizing the literary world; she’s rendering it as a gate-kept marketplace where reputation is something you can be denied by consensus, not by merit. Anais Nin doesn’t call to discuss art, influence, or ideas. She calls for “help,” the kind that happens offstage: introductions, advocacy, strategic placement, the quiet labor of making a writer legible to the right tastemakers.

Young’s phrasing also reveals a gendered insult masquerading as criticism. “She was made fun of” lands like the real verdict, harsher than a bad review because it suggests dismissal at the level of personhood. Nin’s work, with its erotic candor and diaristic intimacy, sat uneasily inside mid-century critical expectations; to be laughed at is to be classified as unserious, indulgent, possibly scandalous - a writer treated as a spectacle rather than a peer.

The subtext is about proximity and exile. Young has “been away,” and the call that reaches her across time implies a small ecosystem where a handful of connections matter. This is literary history as phone tree, not marble bust: the canon shaped by who gets defended when the room decides to sneer. Young’s tone stays flat, almost reportorial, which makes the anecdote sting more. She’s not pleading for Nin; she’s indicting a culture that confuses mockery with discernment and calls it criticism.