discreditability

With, at the age of 82, much of my life's work still pressing for completion, I have found the assaults of the book itself, and those of the reviews, which without exception have made the book's slanderings of me their own, so indicative of a pervasive demoralization of literary-world standards as almost to make me yield to the urgings of some of my friends not to waste my forces on what carries evidence of its own discreditability.

Reply Riding 1983