Pens at 40 Paces: Writers' Tiffs
'Literary Feuds: A Century of Celebrated Quarrels -- From Mark Twain
to Tom Wolfe' by Anthony Arthur
By Jonathan Yardley,
whose e-mail address is yardley@twp.com
Thursday, January 9, 2003;
Page C01
By
Anthony Arthur
St. Martin's. 240 pp. $23.95
Writers like to fancy themselves collegial sorts, gathering in coffeehouses or taverns or classrooms to give each other sympathy and support; indeed, the whole writing-school phenomenon is predicated on the myth of writerly camaraderie and generosity. But myth is exactly what it is. Writers are the most competitive creatures on the planet. By contrast with them, stock traders and Olympic athletes are pussycats. No one -- not even a Hollywood producer -- is more deft at the stab in the back than a writer, no one more artful at the well-turned insult, no one more ready to take offense and respond in kind.
In part, no doubt, this is explained by a paraphrase of the old saw about academic politics: The competition is so vicious because the stakes are so small. Writers elbow each other for tiny fellowships and grants, eight inches of book review space, five minutes on "BookTV" at 3 o'clock on Saturday morning. But it's also explained by the undeniable truth that writers -- most, though certainly not all -- are smart, articulate and oh-so-sensitive. Their throbbing egos are forever on display and forever vulnerable, which makes them prime candidates for wounds both actual and imagined.
Certainly that is true of all 16 of the writers whose feuds come under Anthony Arthur's microscope. The combatants are, in chronological order: Mark Twain vs. Bret Harte, Ernest Hemingway vs. Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis vs. Theodore Dreiser, Edmund Wilson vs. Vladimir Nabokov, C.P. Snow vs. F.R. Leavis, Lillian Hellman vs. Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote vs. Gore Vidal, and Tom Wolfe vs. John Updike. Face it, there are some real heavyweights in that gang, not to mention a couple of characters (McCarthy and Vidal) whom you wouldn't want waiting for you in a dark alley, but get their dander up and they all revert to squabbling brats in a sandbox.
None of them, Arthur writes, "was reclusive or retiring by nature." They "were actively engaged with the world, writing about the Big Issues of their times: race, war, crime, poverty, sex, social upheavals, national and international politics, and, of course, literary art," so their feuds transcend "personalities and gossip" and "provide insight into the social and intellectual history of the 20th century." So at least Arthur claims, though when one contemplates Vidal calling Capote "that little toad" and Capote responding that he was "very sad that [Vidal] has to breathe every day," geopolitics somehow seems in the very distant background.
In truth, there isn't much weight to any of these quarrels. Wilson and Nabokov "each recognized the extraordinary abilities of the other and both delighted in their mutual approbation," and fell out over Wilson's mostly negative review of Nabokov's translation from Russian into English of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin." Similarly, the once-popular British novelist C.P. Snow and the singularly waspish critic F.R. Leavis came to rhetorical blows over the former's celebrated claim, in a 1959 lecture at Cambridge University called "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," that literary writers and scientists were separated by "a gulf of mutual apprehension -- sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding," because "they have a curious distorted image of each other."
These could pass as genuine differences of literary opinion -- though Leavis couched his attack on Snow in gratuitously ad hominem terms -- but they are the exceptions to the rule. In fact, Arthur is wrong: Most of these disputes boil down to "personalities and gossip." Bret Harte, whose early success (most notably with the short story "The Luck of Roaring Camp") was followed by prolonged failure, was envious of the universally adored Mark Twain. Ernest Hemingway turned on Gertrude Stein just as he did on everyone to whom he owed personal or literary debts; he was, purely and simply, a mean SOB. Theodore Dreiser was jealous of Sinclair Lewis's Nobel Prize -- he thought he should have got it himself, and he was right -- and Lewis was a strange, tortured soul who was quick to take offense, especially when under the influence of booze, as too often he was.
Lillian Hellman was a self-serving prevaricator and Mary McCarthy was poisonous in both tongue and pen. McCarthy was right in character when she said (on Dick Cavett's television show, of all places) that Hellman "is tremendously overrated, a bad writer and a dishonest writer," that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' " In time, the dispute between these two aging harridans engaged questions of the American left's response to Stalinism, but Irving Howe was wrong when he claimed that this "was not just two old ladies engaged in a cat fight." That's exactly what it was.
Ditto for Capote vs. Vidal. It is the most amusing of these eight duels, for the obvious reason that both parties to it were quick-witted, venomous and, when it came to mano a mano combat, utterly unscrupulous. Coming to prominence in the late 1940s along with the likes of Norman Mailer and Tennessee Williams, they were "members of a hugely ambitious and self-promoting group," every member of which carried a long knife and a concealed weapon. Vidal's vanity and rivalrousness were colossal, as Williams noted: "He's infected with that awful competitive spirit and seems to be continually haunted over the success or achievements of other writers, such as Truman Capote. . . . You would think they were running neck and neck for some fabulous gold prize."
Of course they were: They all are. The dispute between Wolfe and Updike, the least interesting of the lot, boils down to a sandlot turf war, one that also engaged Mailer and John Irving in the attempt by the literary establishment to deny Wolfe the literary respectability that he sought to claim with his two novels, "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and "A Man in Full." Not only was Wolfe a mere journalist (so, of course, had been Twain, Harte, Hemingway, Lewis and Dreiser, to name five), but his novels had enjoyed stupendous sales:
"Panic-stricken because their own recent books -- Updike's 'Toward the End of Time' and 'Bech at Bay,' Mailer's 'The Gospel According to the Son,' Irving's 'A Widow for One Year' -- had not been bestsellers, and jealous of Wolfe's astonishing success, they were now trying to deny him admission to the hallowed halls of literature; he was a mere entertainer. Tom Wolfe 'no longer belongs to us (if indeed he ever did?),' Mailer had said; Updike said that he appeals to an American public that Updike had elsewhere described as 'coarsened' in its tastes."
Here again, Arthur obviously is trying to bestow greater dignity upon the proceedings than the truth warrants. He must be admired for his determination to find meaning in what is essentially meaningless, and his analyses are mostly astute, but of Wolfe vs. Updike as of all the others there's only one thing to be said: Just another food fight.
