“The Art of the Literary Feud” by Adam Page

Writers are, famously, the most thin-skinned creatures ever to accuse another creature of being thin-skinned. In this sharp, panoramic tour through three centuries of literary combat, Adam Page explores the art of the public intellectual grudge match, from Voltaire and Rousseau’s Enlightenment warfare to Norman Mailer headbutting Gore Vidal backstage at the Dick Cavett Show. Page argues that the most memorable feuds are never purely about ideas or purely about ego, they’re about both at once, entangled so deeply that even the combatants couldn’t separate them. Then he turns to the internet, asking whether today’s Twitter pile-ons are producing anything as durable as the feuds they replaced. The answer is quietly damning: speed has killed the careful processing that once turned combative heat into lasting criticism. This is an essay for anyone who believes that how we argue about art still matters.

There is something very wrong with writers. And I say that as someone who has spent almost three decades in close proximity to, and studying, them. At parties where too much drink is imbibed and they praise each other’s faces while eviscerating their backs, readings where the applause has a sharper competitive edge than any editor’s pen, in the letters column of magazines that no longer exist, and comments sections of blogs that probably shouldn’t. As a species, writers are the most thin-skinned creatures to ever accuse another creature of being thin-skinned. In the abstract, they are capable of vast generosities; they’ll write 3000 beautiful words on the suffering of strangers on the other side of the globe. And yet they are just as capable of spending 20 years holding a grudge because their prose was called “occasionally overwrought” by someone in a mid-tier literary journal that collapsed in 1987.

The literary feud is not a new pathology. It isn’t a product of social media, of attention economy or the degraded discourse of the current moment, although all those things have really given it new and more virulent strains to work with. The literary feud is as old as literature itself, which is to say it’s as old as the first time someone decided arranging words in a particular order was a high calling, and the second moment another person decided they were doing it wrong.

Let’s begin at the beginning, or at least close enough to it for our purposes.

Voltaire was basically a machine made for the purpose of savaging other people’s work, and he did it with a joy and precision that still remains almost unseemly in its relish. He feuded with Rousseau across continents and decades, with the correspondence between their camps reaching levels of baroque contempt that make today’s Twitter pile-ons look like mild parking disagreements. Rousseau wrote to Voltaire with an earnest philosophical grievance, and Voltaire replied that the letter made him want to walk on all fours. This was meant as an insult. For his part, Rousseau believed with building intensity that Voltaire was conspiring with the government of Geneva to destroy him. He was probably wrong about the conspiracy, but not wrong about Voltaire wanting to watch him suffer.

And what was any of this about? Supposedly, ideas. The question of civilisation, the nature of man, whether humans were corrupted or improved by society. They were real and serious questions, and ones which still matter. But the combat, the performance and utter theatrical pleasure each man took in the destruction of the other man’s reputation, that was about something else. That was about the terrible and ancient need to be the smartest one in the room, when the room was the whole Enlightenment.

I have thought about this a great deal. Maybe too much. The question of whether public intellectual combat has ever been about truth, or is truth just the flag you wave when you’re actually fighting about territory, status and that need to feel your version of reality is the correct one? My own conclusion, arrived at through a lot of observation and some personal embarrassing experiences, is that it is usually both things together, and any attempt to separate them is probably doomed. And the feuds that burn brightest and longest are those where the philosophical disagreement and personal vendetta are so totally entangled that even the combatants couldn’t tell you where one ends and the other begins.

Consider the brilliant wreckage of the Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal situation. In almost every way that mattered, these two men were the same person. Both came out of World War II with grandiose ambitions. Both wanted to be the Great American Novelist, and Public Intellectual. They wanted to be the man whose opinions on politics, culture and the nature of masculinity would define the age. There wasn’t room for two of them, and both knew it. And so for decades, they fought. In television, in print, and finally in a memorable occasion, backstage at the Dick Cavett show, Mailer headbutted Vidal, and Vidal, with the composure of a man who has been waiting for precisely this moment, says something along the lines of: “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer.”

That line. I have been thinking about it for years. In the context of a literary feud, it is almost perfect. Because Vidal’s whole attack on Mailer had always been exactly that: that all Mailer’s celebrated machismo and performances of masculine aggression and violence, were compensating for his failure of the only thing which really mattered, which was the precise control of language. And here was Mailer in a moment of maximum exposure, physically proving the point. It couldn’t have been written better. Vidal sure couldn’t have, and neither could Mailer. And in a sense, that was the whole argument.

Again, though, what was it about? The answer which suggests itself, if we read the actual body of work, the essays they wrote about each other, the interviews given, retracted and revisited, was that it was about two very different visions of what American literature was supposed to be. Vidal believed in irony, clarity, the Augustan tradition filtered through American cynicism. Mailer considered the novel to be an act of aggression towards complacency, a sweat-soaked confrontation with reality. They are genuine aesthetic differences, producing different kinds of books. There is a real and interesting argument between them worth having.

But you do not headbutt your way to a position on aesthetics. There’s something else happening there. The women have done it differently. And by that, I mean done it with more precision and as a consequence, more damage.

Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy had their collision in 1979, and again on The Dick Cavett Show. It’s one of those moments in the history of literary warfare that seems too perfectly constructed, something an author would write then remove from the manuscript as it was just a little on the nose. When McCarthy was asked which writers she thought were overrated, she replied that Lillian Hellman was one and said, in the line which still lingers, that every word Hellman wrote was a lie. And that included “the” and “and.”

Hellman sued. And that lawsuit consumed money, years and Hellman’s remaining health, as she died before it was resolved. McCarthy never apologised. Not really. When she was asked if she regretted it, she said that she regretted the lawsuit but not her opinion. And this is the purest possible expression of the literary feud as a philosophical position: I will accept the personal and legal consequences of my contempt, because my contempt is true and I am a truth-teller.

Except. Except, of course, the full context of their feud is much messier. Both women had been circling each other’s antagonism for years. Part of it was political; Hellman had a complex relationship with her own Stalinism and McCarthy was a committed anti-Stalinist. For a certain generation of New York intellectuals, this wasn’t an abstract discussion, but the main political and moral question of their lives. So there was a real and serious argument there about courage and complicity and what you owed the historical record.

But also, there was the sheer pleasure McCarthy clearly took in the destruction. We can hear it in the sentence “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'” That isn’t a sentence from a woman reluctantly correcting the historical record. That’s a sentence from a woman who has been creating devastating sentences all her professional life, and who finally found the perfect target for the best one.

The Romantics deserve their own special category in this, because as a community, the Romantics were an almost clinical study in what happens when you put together a large number of people with genuine talent, huge egos, visionary ambition and no relationship at all to their own emotional lives in close proximity and give them too much wine.

Byron and Keats did not like each other. Byron’s dismissal of Keats, referring to his poetry as the “Cockney school” and worse, implied it was poor reviews that killed him, that Keats had been “snuffed out by an article” is one of the great acts of aristocratic literary condescension on the record. But it is almost certainly unfair. Keats didn’t die of a bad review, he died of tuberculosis in Rome, at 25, after writing in his final year some of the finest poetry in the English language. On the scale of literary history, what Byron thought about any of it is largely irrelevant. And yet that condescension burns across two centuries because, underneath the aesthetic objections, Byron was attacking Keats’s class along with his background and presumption in thinking that someone like him was entitled to the ambition he had.

The literary feud has, in part, always been a class war conducted in the language of aesthetics. It has always been, in part, a war about who is allowed to speak and who is taken seriously. This doesn’t make it less about ego; it makes it about a larger and collective ego, the ego of a tradition defending its sense of what it actually is.

And so inevitably, we arrive at the internet.

Watching the evolution of literary combat online, I felt a mixture of despair and fascination I imagine primatologists felt when they observed particularly sophisticated acts of territorial aggression. The form may have changed but the substance has not.

With social media, the lag time in the literary feud has been removed. With the Voltaire/Rousseau situation, weeks would go by between provocations. You wrote and sent your contemptuous letter, it travelled across France. It was received, the furious and wounded response composed, and that response travelled back. During that lag time, occasionally people reconsidered. They would perhaps reread the original offence and discover it wasn’t quite as offensive as they remembered on first reading. The medium enforced a certain cooling.

Now, that cooling never happens. The sentence now goes out into the world in the moment of maximum affect, and is responded to before you’ve had time to enjoy the original. Twitter, or whatever the hell we’re calling it this week, the platform formally known as Twitter before it was bought, renamed and driven into a cultural ditch from which there may be no recovery, that platform compressed the literary feud from weeks to minutes. An author publishes a book, a critic tweets a dismissal. The author’s followers respond, then the critic’s followers do likewise. So by the time anyone actually reads the book, the argument has moved so far beyond the book, that the book is incidental. It’s a pretext in the same way the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was a pretext for World War I.

The pile-on is very different from the feud, and we should make that distinction. The old style literary feud required two closely matched combatants. At minimum, it needed both parties to have something to lose and something to fight for. The pile-on just needs a target. And those targets are easy to find because the online world has given everyone who has ever felt slighted by the literary establishment, everyone ever rejected by a publication or ignored by a prize committee, anyone ever dismissed at a party by someone whose condescension was rife with the entitlement of the Successful Author, it has given them all a voice, an audience, and most crucially, each other.

I won’t pretend that every pile-on is unjust. Some writers who have been dragged publicly deserved to be dragged publicly, for reasons going well beyond aesthetic disagreement and into territory that involved actual harm to real people. Literary criticism’s democratisation has been truly corrective in some ways. Those who were able to behave badly for years and hide behind their reputation have found that protection a lot less reliable in recent years. On balance, this is a good thing.

But the pile-on has also consumed things which deserve better. It’s consumed arguments that should have been carefully had and replaced them with the ritual humiliation that tells you a lot more about the anxiety of the community doing the piling than the merits of whatever the original offence was. If a writer publishes something wrong-headed, the correct response is a serious response; a considered engagement with the argument, identifying the errors and explaining why they matter. The correct response isn’t 140 characters and a ratio. One of these responses is interested in truth. The other is more concerned with the feeling of being on the right side.

The uncomfortable truth I’ve been building towards, and the thing that the whole history of literary feuding keeps insisting on and nobody wants to plainly say is: the best of these feuds have produced, as a byproduct of the fighting, some excellent criticism.

The Vidal/Mailer situation produced essays that are still worth reading. McCarthy/Hellman’s fight forced, no matter how ugly the circumstances, a reckoning with questions about complicity and honesty that the literary world needed to have. The Romantics pulling each other apart produced a body of critical reflection about the purpose and nature of poetry which still informs how we talk about those things. Cyril Connolly, who fought with pretty much everyone at some point, wrote criticism that remains useful and sharp and alive even decades after the grudges that generated it have been forgotten.

It suggests something uncomfortable about the relationship between truth and ego. It suggests they may not be quite as inseparable as we’d like. That the personal, passionate, aggravated quality of the best literary feuding, the fact something real was at stake for those involved and they were fighting for their version of reality with the desperation of people who believe their version matters, may be exactly what gave the criticism its staying power and energy. Disinterested criticism, or that written from a position of serene objectivity, has a tendency to be dull. It tends to be technically correct and totally forgettable. The feuds were memorable because they were about something, even when it was partly vanity.

The question then is whether the Twitter version has that quality. If the pile-on, for all the collective energy and velocity, is producing something that will last.

My own assessment, of which I’m fully aware may be just that of an ageing person not understanding the new forms, is: not much. Not in its current form. The speed is the issue. The emotional metabolism of the online feud is just too fast for the kind of secondary processing that turns combative energy into something useful. By the time the definitive essay could be written about why the argument mattered, the argument has been turned into compost and we have all moved on to the next one.

There are exceptions, of course. There are people doing serious critical work on serious platforms and are capable of engaging with bad ideas in ways that are substantive and fierce. The form isn’t impossible. It’s just rare, because the incentive structure of the online world rewards the quick and devastating take over a slow and careful argument. People have a habit of responding to incentive structures.

So what are we to conclude from all this, stumbling out of the wreckage of three thousand years of writers tearing each other’s work apart? I think the literary feud is not as noble as its practitioners claim. And not as ignoble as its critics insist. It’s a human activity, so it’s a mix of real passion and self-interest, real conviction and a lot of vanity. Truth seeking and territory defending. When Voltaire attacked Rousseau, he was protecting his version of Enlightenment rationalism from what he considered dangerous sentimentality and enjoying Rousseau’s discomfort. McCarthy destroying Hellman was making a real point about honesty and accountability and savouring the delivery of the best line of her career. These things aren’t mutually exclusive, and they never were.

The question isn’t whether literary fighting is more about ego than truth. The question is whether that combat, regardless of its motivations, produces something worth having. Whether the heat, anger and wit of it generates light as a byproduct. Occasionally it does. And when it does, we remember it. When it doesn’t, we eventually forget it.

The writers currently ripping each other apart on social media are doing something older than social media, something which is as old as the desire to arrange words in a certain order and believe that arrangement matters. They’re doing what writers have always done; fighting for their version of reality with every tool and weapon available to them. Some are right about what they’re fighting for. Some are wrong. Most are partially both.

But across every century and medium, what they all share is the conviction that it matters. That language matters, and the argument about what good writing is and does and means is worth having even at considerable personal cost. That the world, in some small and non-negotiable way, is shaped by how we talk about it and those who talk about it badly should be held accountable.

They aren’t wrong about this. But also, they aren’t always right about who is talking about it badly. But the conviction itself, furious, excessive and occasionally headbutting, is probably the most honest thing about them. The world is filled with those who have decided that nothing quite matters enough to fight for, so the writer who is willing to make a public enemy of a colleague over prose style, at a minimum is someone who believes prose style is a thing which matters.

There’s something to be said for that, even if what is to be said involves a small amount of shaking one’s head.

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About the author:

Adam Page is a freelance writer whose work has been published in FlickeringMyth, HighOnFilm, and FilmEast, among others. He has spent nearly three decades studying writers and the chaotic ecosystem they inhabit.