Literary feud
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.
"[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.
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.
[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] 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.
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".
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.
[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.
[12] 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.
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.
[18] Stung by More's attacks, de Brie wrote an aggressive reply, the Latin verse satire Antimorus (1519), including an appendix which contained a "page-by-page listing of the mistakes in More's poems".
[19] Sir Thomas immediately wrote another hard-hitting pamphlet, Letter against Brixius, but Erasmus intervened to calm the situation, and persuaded More to stop the sale of the publication and let the matter drop.
The feud between Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey was conducted through pamphlet wars in 16th century England and was so well known that Shakespeare's play Love's Labour's Lost included references to the quarrel.
[25] John Hervey was the object of savage satire on the part of Alexander Pope, in whose works he figured as Lord Fanny, Sporus, Adonis and Narcissus.
In the first of the Imitations of Horace, addressed to William Fortescue, Lord Fanny and Sappho were generally identified with Hervey and Lady Mary, although Pope denied the personal intention.
[26] Pope's reply was a Letter to a Noble Lord, dated November 1733, and the portrait of Sporus in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1743), which forms the prologue to the satires.
[26] In 1810, Ugo Foscolo wrote a satirical essay, Ragguaglio d'un'adunanza dell'Accademia de' Pitagorici, that mocked a group of Milanese literary figures.
Their disagreements on the origins of literary craftsmanship and the limits of historical knowledge were reported on by other periodicals, such as The Critic, the Boston Gazette, and the Penny Post.
Neither writer was satisfied with the script that resulted, and both of them were dealing with other difficulties in their lives at the time: Harte with financial troubles and drinking, and Twain with his Huckleberry Finn manuscript.
[32] Later that year, Poe harshly criticized English's work as part of his "Literati of New York" series published in Godey's Lady's Book, referring to him as "a man without the commonest school education busying himself in attempts to instruct mankind in topics of literature".
He claimed that Poe often wandered the streets, either in "madness or melancholy", mumbling and cursing to himself, was easily irritated, was envious of others, and that he "regarded society as composed of villains".
[38] Griswold, along with James Russell Lowell and Nathaniel Parker Willis, edited a posthumous collection of Poe's works published in three volumes starting in January 1850.
Many elements were fabricated by Griswold using forged letters as evidence and it was denounced by those who knew Poe, including Sarah Helen Whitman, Charles Frederick Briggs, and George Rex Graham.
[39] Though he didn't respond immediately, Bennett later began an anti-Woolf campaign in a weekly column in the Evening Standard, giving negative reviews of three of Woolf's novels.
In his book The Feud, Alex Beam describes Wilson's review as "an overlong, spiteful, stochastically accurate, generally useless but unfailingly amusing hatchet job".
"[1] In 1975 Vidal sued Capote for slander over the accusation that he had been thrown out of the White House for being drunk, putting his arm around the first lady and then insulting Mrs. Kennedy's mother.
After much drinking, Lewis rose to give the welcome speech, but instead declared he "did not care to speak in the presence of a man who has stolen three thousand words from my wife's book.
"[1] The article attracted a great deal of negative correspondence in the magazine's letters pages[52] and some of Snow's friends suggested that he sue Leavis for defamation.
[15] The feud lasted fifteen years, until the writers were reconciled at the 2011 Hay Literary Festival,[58] although there is some speculation that the reconciliation was engineered by their agents and publishing houses to increase sales.
