Saturday, January 13
A brief and very funny history of writers' feuds
"With great sadness we learn that the Colombian Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Márquez and the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, after a thrillingly long and bitter feud, are patching up their differences. (...) Writers have always conducted colourful feuds, and the García Máarquez-Vargas Llosa vendetta was one of the best. Once they were the closest friends. García Márquez was godfather to Vargas Llosa’s son. Then relations cooled, their political paths diverged, and three decades ago, for reasons that have never been fully explained by either side, the friendship came to an end with a fierce fist-fight in a Mexican cinema."
(...)
"Norman Mailer, the veteran fighter-writer, is another who upholds the long-established tradition that if you can’t beat ’em, thump ’em. Mailer sat on Truman Capote, headbutted and punched Gore Vidal, and stabbed his first wife with a penknife when she called him a 'faggot'. He wrote to William Styron, after a disobliging review: 'I will invite you to a fight in which I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.'"
(...)
"Revenge should be served not only cold, but with the most elaborate garnish. Bevis Hillier recently served up such a dish to A.N. Wilson, his rival Betjeman biographer, by planting on him a fake letter from an invented mistress in which the first character of each sentence spelt an offensive message.
"Vladimir Nabokov and the critic Edmund Wilson fell out after a quarter-century of close friendship over the precise translation of a single Russian phrase in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin."
(...)
"The joy of Cook and Mailer was their eagerness not only to give but to take offence openly; to respond to an original slight, whether intended or not, with overwhelming and disproportionate rudeness; to hone resentment over time, and deliver the insulting punchline immediately after the punch. 'Words fail Norman Mailer yet again,' said Vidal, after Mailer had floored him with a single blow in a television studio. The remark was far too brilliant to have been spontaneous.
"These are the hallmarks of the truly great feud. Never forgive or reconcile. Never back down. Land the first blow and extract the last laugh, even if that means chiselling it onto your headstone. ('I told you I was ill!' wails Spike Milligan’s epitaph.) Above all, take the fight to the enemy. In 1936 Wallace Stevens the poet, drunk, accosted Ernest Hemingway at a party and sneered: 'So, you think you’re Ernest Hemingway?' The resulting punch-up left both writers battered, and even more famous."
(...)
"Norman Mailer, the veteran fighter-writer, is another who upholds the long-established tradition that if you can’t beat ’em, thump ’em. Mailer sat on Truman Capote, headbutted and punched Gore Vidal, and stabbed his first wife with a penknife when she called him a 'faggot'. He wrote to William Styron, after a disobliging review: 'I will invite you to a fight in which I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.'"
(...)
"Revenge should be served not only cold, but with the most elaborate garnish. Bevis Hillier recently served up such a dish to A.N. Wilson, his rival Betjeman biographer, by planting on him a fake letter from an invented mistress in which the first character of each sentence spelt an offensive message.
"Vladimir Nabokov and the critic Edmund Wilson fell out after a quarter-century of close friendship over the precise translation of a single Russian phrase in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin."
(...)
"The joy of Cook and Mailer was their eagerness not only to give but to take offence openly; to respond to an original slight, whether intended or not, with overwhelming and disproportionate rudeness; to hone resentment over time, and deliver the insulting punchline immediately after the punch. 'Words fail Norman Mailer yet again,' said Vidal, after Mailer had floored him with a single blow in a television studio. The remark was far too brilliant to have been spontaneous.
"These are the hallmarks of the truly great feud. Never forgive or reconcile. Never back down. Land the first blow and extract the last laugh, even if that means chiselling it onto your headstone. ('I told you I was ill!' wails Spike Milligan’s epitaph.) Above all, take the fight to the enemy. In 1936 Wallace Stevens the poet, drunk, accosted Ernest Hemingway at a party and sneered: 'So, you think you’re Ernest Hemingway?' The resulting punch-up left both writers battered, and even more famous."
