Fighting words: Six classic literary feuds

Although F. Scott Fitzgerald helped Ernest Hemingway get "The Sun Also Rises" published, Hemingway later had no problems criticizing his friend. "I always knew he couldn't think -- he never could," Hemingway wrote in 1936, criticizing an article Fitzgerald had written. "He had a marvelous talent and the thing is to use it -- not whine in public." The relationship between the two giants of American literature is explored in "Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Work and Days," reviewed in today's paper.

Fitzgerald and Hemingway were not the only writers to have a public falling-out. Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne might have been the first high-profile American writers to have a friendship publicly sour. Melville dedicated "Moby-Dick" to Hawthorne, but two years later ceased corresponding with the more successful writer, perhaps because Hawthorne had failed to secure Melville a government job. 

Meanwhile, several thousand miles away, three giants -- Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ivan Turgenev -- carried on their dispute in public. They called one another names, satirized one another in print, and in 1861, Dostoevsky challenged Turgenev to a duel. It never happened, but they did stop speaking for almost 20 years.

More feuds were written up in today's paper:

Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine met in 1871 and became lovers; within a year or so, the relationship grew fraught. In 1873, they reunited in Brussels, but it took only two days before Verlaine bought a gun and got drunk and shot Rimbaud in the wrist. Verlaine was charged with attempted murder and sentenced to a two-year prison term.

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: Even in the early days of their relationship, there was an undertone of suspicion on Kerouac's part; in a 1952 letter, he wrote that Ginsberg should "leave me alone . . . & dont ever darken me again." But in the 1960s, after Kerouac rejected the counterculture that he and Ginsberg had helped create, things turned truly virulent, with the "On the Road" writer veering into anti-Semitism to denigrate his onetime friend.

And though it's been said they've made up, in 1976 Mario Vargas Llosa (right) punched Gabriel Garcia Marquez (left) in the face after a film screening, for reasons neither has acknowledged; the two didn't speak for 30 years.

What's your favorite literary feud?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos: Left, Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Mexico City in April. Credit: Ronaldo Schemidt / AFP/Getty Images. Right, Mario Vargas Llosa in Caracas, Venezuela, in May. Credit: Ariana Cubillos / Associated Press.

Comments

[bruce]

mary mccarthy/lillian hellman "every word she wrote is a lie, including the articles 'a', 'an' and 'the'."

[D. Cloyce Smith]

Great topic for a post!

One of the most infamous literary feuds among American authors of the nineteenth century was known as the Longfellow War, in which Edgar Allan Poe accused Longfellow of plagiarism and (even worse) bad poetry. The older poet never responded personally, but his many defenders did--accusing Poe himself of the very charges he had made against Longfellow--and the battle waged on in the nation's literary press for months.

[lenny]

You say that Kerouac used anti-semitic remarks against
Ginsberg in the 1960s, you cite no example, is this some sort of off-hand slanderous remark you are
making against Kerouac.

[Tony]

How about Sartre vs. Camus?

[BLT]

Ben Marcus vs. Jonathan Franzen

[Dark Horse]

Tough to choose a favorite, but Richard Ford's had some good ones. The spitting-on-Colson-Whitehead, vs. Whitehead's infinitely more dignified response ("not the first time some old coot has drooled on me") springs to mind. Plus he shot up some negative reviewer's book and mailed it to them. I can't recall who.

[Guy Aron]

It would have to be Paul Theroux and V. S. Naipaul, as reported in fascinating detail in Theroux's book. The recent Naipaul biography (also fascinating, as in fascinated horror) has some background about it too. Maybe it's not a feud, exactly, but it sure was a falling-out. There's also Martin Amis & Julian Barnes and J D Salinger with just about everyone. Pity feuds are so much more interesting than friendships!

[Barry Menikoff]

Henry James and H. G. Wells, started by W's publication of "Boon" in which he stripped and diced every aspect of James's work from style to subject (like a hippopotamus struggling to pick up a pea).

Graham Greene and J B Priestley, started by Greene's disguised but instantly recognizable portraitt of Priestley (both his fiction as well as his northern English background) in Greene's first commerically successful novel, "Stamboul Train."

[David]

Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. Good fun.

[drax]

How about John Gardner vs Everybody when Gardner published ON MORAL FICTION?