Literary feud

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A literary feud is a conflict or quarrel between well-known writers, usually conducted in public view by way of published letters, speeches, lectures, and interviews. In the book Literary Feuds, Anthony Arthur describes why readers might be interested in the conflicts between writers: "we wonder how people who so vividly describe human failure (as well as triumph) can themselves fall short of perfection."[1]

Feuds were sometimes based on conflicting views of the nature of literature as between C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis, or on disdain for each other's work such as the quarrel between Virginia Woolf and Arnold Bennett. Some feuds were conducted through the writers' works, as when Alexander Pope satirized John Hervey in Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot. A few instances resulted in physical violence, such as the encounter between Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, and on occasion involved litigation, as in the dispute between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy.

Classical Greece

A literary feud involves both a public forum and public reprisals.[2] Feuds might begin in the public view through the quarterlies, newspapers, and monthly magazines, but frequently extended into private correspondence and in-person meetings.[3] The participants are literary figures: writers, poets, playwrights, critics.[4] Many feuds were based on opposing philosophies of literature, art, and social issues, although the disputes often devolved into attacks on personality and character.[1] Feuds often have personal, political, commercial, and ideological dimensions.[3]

In Lapham's Quarterly, Hua Hsu compares literary feuds with the one-upmanship of hip-hop artists, "animated...by antipathy, insecurity, jealousy" and notes that "Some of the great literary feuds of the past would have been perfect for the social media age, given their withering brevity."[5] It is not uncommon for observers, particularly the press, to label writers' rivalries and deteriorations in friendships as feuds, such as the rivalry between sisters A. S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble[6] or when Mario Vargas Llosa punched Gabriel García Márquez for an incident involving Vargas Llosa's wife.[7]

Lord Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review

During the Romantic era, feuds were encouraged by the Quarterly Review, Edinburgh Review, and Blackwood's Magazine as a marketing tactic. The Edinburgh editor, Francis Jeffrey, wanted a nasty review in each issue, as the responses and reprisals would attract readers. Reviewers were generally anonymous, often using the collective "we" in their reviews, although the actual authorship of reviews tended to be open secrets. Thomas Love Peacock said of the Edinburgh, "The mysterious we of the invisible assassin converts his poisoned dagger into a host of legitimate broadswords." Blackwood's attacked the Cockney School, much as Edinburgh attacked those it dubbed the Lake Poets. Lady Morgan boasted that the Quarterly's attacks on her work just increased her sales.[3]

Coleridge described the Romantic era as "the age of personality" in which the public is preoccupied with the private lives of people in the public eye and accuses the periodicals of the time of having "a habit of malignity".[3] In footnotes to his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge made accusations against Jeffrey without naming him but providing sufficient detail that others would easily know the person he meant. Through his responses, Jeffrey "magnifies a footnote into a feud", going so far as to sign his initials to his rebuttals despite the commonly accepted culture of reviewer anonymity at the time. Coleridge complained that media attention to his quarrel with the Edinburgh editor left him unable to escape from "the degrading Taste of the present Public for personal Gossip". The British Critic weighed in, siding with Coleridge, while Blackwood's launched its own attack on the poet.[3]

Just as attacks could take the form of "persecution by association" in which a writer might be maligned for an actual or perceived allegiance to another writer, reprisals could bring in more participants to engage in "self-defense by association". Scholar John Sloan says of the late 19th century writers, "In the age of mass culture and the popular press, public rowing was regarded as a favourite device for the attention-seekers whose wish was to astonish and arrive."[8]

Dr. Manfred Weidhorn, the Abraham and Irene Guterman Chair in English Literature and professor emeritus of English at Yeshiva University,[9] says "At least one such major confrontation appears in a different country during each of the traditional major phases of Western culture — classical Greece, medieval Germany, Renaissance England, Enlightenment France and England, nineteenth-century Russia, modern America."[10]

In classical Greece, poets and playwrights competed at festivals such as City Dionysia and Lenaia. Weidhorn cites a conflict between Euripides and Sophocles as evidenced by the line in Aristotle's Poetics, "Sophocles said that he himself created characters such as should exist, whereas Euripides created ones such as actually do exist."[10] Aristophanes notably caricatured Euripides in his plays.[11] Centuries later, George Bernard Shaw and John Davidson would refer to themselves respectively as Aristophanes and Euripides in correspondence, and their relationship would later deteriorate into a counterpart of the mythical ancient quarrel.[8]

Medieval Germany

In medieval Germany, Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, which were published at the same time, differed on social, esthetic, and moral viewpoints, and resulted in what has been called "one of the more famous literary quarrels in medieval literature",[10] although that characterization based on interpretations of fragments has been disputed by other scholars.[12]

Renaissance England

For a major confrontation in Renaissance England, Weidhorn posits Shakespeare versus Ben Jonson,[10] referring to the War of the Theatres, also known as the Poetomachia. Scholars differ over the true nature and extent of the rivalry behind the Poetomachia. Some have seen it as a competition between theatre companies rather than individual writers, though this is a minority view. It has even been suggested that the playwrights involved had no serious rivalry and even admired each other, and that the "War" was a self-promotional publicity stunt, a "planned ... quarrel to advertise each other as literary figures and for profit."[13] Most critics see the Poetomachia as a mixture of personal rivalries and serious artistic concerns—"a vehicle for aggressively expressing differences...in literary theory...[a] basic philosophical debate on the status of literary and dramatic authorship."[14]

Enlightenment France and England

The conflict between Voltaire and Rousseau in France would erupt whenever either of them published a major work, beginning with Voltaire's criticisms to Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality. When Voltaire published Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (English title: Poem on the Lisbon Disaster), Rousseau felt the poem "exaggerated man's misery and turned God into a malevolent being". Their various disagreements escalated to Rousseau revealing that Voltaire was the author of a pamphlet Voltaire had published anonymously to avoid arrest.[10]

Title page of Shamela

In England, Henry Fielding's novel Shamela and Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded posed opposing views on the purpose of novels and how realism and morals should be reflected. A portion of the subtitle to Shamela was In which the many notorious Falsehoods and Misrepresentations of a Book called Pamela are exposed and refuted.[15] Literary critic Michael LaPointe suggests that Fielding's Shamela in response to Richardson's Pamela represents an exemplary literary feud: "a serious argument about the nature of literature that takes place actually within the literary medium."[4]

A wider ranging literary quarrel became known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. In France at the end of the seventeenth century, a minor furor arose over the question of whether contemporary learning had surpassed what was known by those in Classical Greece and Rome. The "moderns" (epitomised by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle) took the position that the modern age of science and reason was superior to the superstitious and limited world of Greece and Rome. In Fontenelle's opinion, modern man saw farther than the ancients ever could. The "ancients," for their part, argued that all that is necessary to be known was to be found in Virgil, Cicero, Homer, and especially Aristotle. The dispute was satirized by Jonathan Swift in The Battle of the Books.[16]

Nineteenth-century Russia

Both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were respected writers in Russia and initially thought well of each other's work. Then Dostoyevsky objected to War and Peace being referred to as an "act of genius", saying Pushkin was the real genius. The writers had opposing views during Russia's war with Turkey, and Tolstoy's view on the war as expressed in the final installment to Anna Karenina angered Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy, in turn, was critical of Dostoyevsky's work, describing The Brothers Karamazov as "anti-artistic, superficial, attitudinizing, irrelevant to the great problems" and said the dialog was ""impossible, completely unnatural.... All the characters speak the same language."[10]

Modern America

Although Faulkner and Hemingway respected each other's work, Faulkner told a group of college students that he ranked himself higher than Hemingway among American writers because Hemingway was "too careful, too afraid of making mistakes in diction; he lacked courage". Faulkner's remarks were leaked and published in a New York newspaper, infuriating Hemingway. Especially troubled by the comments on his courage, Hemingway requested a letter from an Army general to attest to Hemingway's bravery. Although Faulkner apologized in a letter, he would continue to make similar statements about Hemingway as a writer. Their disputes continued over the years, with Faulkner refusing to review The Old Man and the Sea with what Hemingway took as a vicious insult, and Hemingway saying A Fable was "false and contrived".[10]

Notable feuds

See also

References

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