What happened to the literary feud? 8 of the most memorable literary feuds

From Byron and Keats to Hemingway, Capote and Bret Easton Ellis: A Short History of writers behaving badly

In 1971, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal appeared together on The Dick Cavett Show. It should have been an opportunity for two distinguished American writers to discuss literature, politics and perhaps the future of the novel. Instead, Mailer had reportedly headbutted Vidal backstage, and the subsequent television appearance became an extraordinary display of literary hostility. Mailer was belligerent, Vidal was cutting, and fellow guest Janet Flanner looked increasingly unimpressed by the whole business. It was the sort of evening that rather undermined the idea that reading great books necessarily makes people more civilised.

But then writers have never been particularly good at being civilised about other writers. Literature may be concerned with understanding the human condition, but literary history suggests that understanding your fellow novelist is considerably less appealing than telling everyone why they're a fraud. Some of the greatest writers have also been accomplished practitioners of the grudge, capable of sustaining an argument for decades, dismantling a rival's reputation in a review, or transforming a private disagreement into something approaching a public spectacle.

And the remarkable thing is how entertaining some of these quarrels remain. We can still read the insults, enjoy the audacity and occasionally discover something interesting about the books themselves. Which makes me wonder: what happened to the literary feud? Have writers become more polite, or have we simply lost the art of disagreeing with style?

8 of the most memorable literary feuds

1. Lord Byron vs John Keats

2. Ernest Hemingway vs F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. Virginia Woolf vs Katherine Mansfield

4. Truman Capote vs the Swans

5. Norman Mailer vs Gore Vidal

6. John Updike vs Tom Wolfe

7. Martin Amis vs Julian Barnes

8. Bret Easton Ellis vs David Foster Wallace

A very old grudge

The literary feud goes back a long way, and one of the most famous and earliest war of words was the one between Lord Byron and John Keats. Two poets regularly placed alongside Percy Bysshe Shelley in the great company of second-generation English Romantics. From a comfortable historical distance, they seem to belong to the same movement, sharing an interest in imagination, beauty and the possibilities of poetic expression. Up close, the relationship was rather less harmonious.

Keats was suspicious of Byron's celebrity and what he saw as the theatrical qualities of his poetry. Byron, meanwhile, could be spectacularly dismissive of Keats, particularly after his death, treating his work as the product of a fashionable poetic school rather than the achievement of a serious artist. Their hostility was not a sustained, equal exchange between two men standing on opposite sides of a literary battlefield, but it revealed something important about the culture in which they wrote. Literary reputation was already a competitive business, and writers were already inclined to regard another person's success as evidence of declining standards.

There's something wonderfully contradictory about the Romantic poets. They gave us some of the most beautiful writing about the natural world, the imagination and the human spirit, yet could be extraordinarily unromantic about one another. 

Perhaps that is the first thing worth remembering about literary feuds. They are rarely just about whether somebody has written a good poem or a bad novel. They are about who gets to decide what good writing is, whose reputation deserves to endure, and why the reading public seems incapable of recognising the obvious superiority of one's own work.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the dangers of friendship

By the twentieth century, literary rivalry had acquired a particularly American flavour, helped along by magazines, publishers, expatriate communities and writers who were increasingly conscious of themselves as public personalities.

Few relationships illustrate the uneasy territory between friendship and competition better than Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

When the two met in Paris in the 1920s, Fitzgerald was already the successful author of This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby, while Hemingway was still establishing himself. Fitzgerald admired Hemingway's talent and helped draw attention to his work. There was genuine affection between them, as well as a shared belief that literature mattered enormously.

But admiration between writers is a complicated business, and in their case it did not last. Hemingway's later treatment of Fitzgerald was far from generous. In A Moveable Feast, his posthumously published memoir of Paris, Hemingway portrayed Fitzgerald as talented but fragile, troubled by alcohol, insecurity and his marriage to Zelda. The portrait tells us something about Fitzgerald, certainly, but it may tell us just as much about Hemingway's determination to establish his own legend.

Hemingway was particularly skilled at presenting himself as the man who understood what real writing required. His literary world was populated by people who either possessed courage, discipline and artistic honesty, or who fell disappointingly short of those standards. Fitzgerald, for all his brilliance, became one of the figures against whom Hemingway could define himself.

What makes this relationship interesting is that it wasn't a simple feud between enemies. It was a friendship in which admiration, affection, resentment and competition became almost impossible to separate. Fitzgerald could recognise Hemingway's gifts, and Hemingway could recognise Fitzgerald's, but neither recognition necessarily made the relationship easier.

Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and the uncomfortable business of admiration

The relationship between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield offers another variation on this theme, and a useful reminder that literary rivalry was not exclusively the preserve of men competing to be the loudest person in the room.

Woolf and Mansfield were friends, fellow modernists and attentive readers of one another's work. They could also wound one another deeply. Woolf could be sharply critical of Mansfield's self-presentation, while Mansfield's reservations about Woolf's fiction were particularly painful because they came from someone whose judgement Woolf respected.

Their relationship contained something more interesting than straightforward dislike. Each recognised in the other a serious artistic intelligence, someone whose work was worth measuring against her own. That recognition could be exhilarating, but it could also make criticism feel uncomfortably intimate.

Truman Capote and the ultimate betrayal

If Hemingway's treatment of Fitzgerald demonstrated the dangers of becoming another writer's material, Truman Capote took the principle to an almost breathtaking extreme.

By the 1960s, Capote had become one of America's most recognisable literary celebrities. In Cold Blood's success had established him as a major figure, and his celebrated Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in 1966 confirmed his place at the centre of New York society. He was witty, charming, outrageous and extraordinarily well connected.

Among his closest companions were a group of wealthy, fashionable women whom he called his Swans. They included Babe Paley, Slim Keith and Gloria Guinness, women whose beauty, marriages and social standing made them fixtures of an exclusive world. Capote was welcomed into their homes, entrusted with their secrets and treated as an intimate.

Then, in 1975, he published La Côte Basque, 1965 in Esquire, an extract from his long-promised novel Answered Prayers.

The story presented thinly disguised versions of people Capote knew, exposing humiliating details of their private lives and marriages. His friends recognised themselves, or recognised the people around them, and the reaction was devastating. Many of the Swans cut him off. Capote had spent years cultivating access to their world, then turned that access into literary material.

Something about his apparent surprise at the consequences is almost astonishing. Capote seemed to believe that his talent, charm and status as a writer entitled him to transform other people's confidences into fiction, and that those people ought somehow to appreciate the artistic achievement.

The episode raises a question that goes beyond the literary feud. What does a writer owe the people who become their material? Is betrayal justified if it produces great literature? And what happens when the people who have trusted you discover that they have been turned into characters?

In Capote's case, the cost was enormous. His social world collapsed, and Answered Prayers remained unfinished.

The great irony is that Capote had spent much of his career turning himself into a celebrity, only to discover that celebrity did not protect him from the consequences of his writing.

And Capote was hardly innocent when it came to literary hostilities of a more conventional kind. His rivalry with Gore Vidal produced its own catalogue of insults and legal disputes. When Capote died in 1984, Vidal reportedly described his death as a good career move.

It is an appalling thing to say about somebody. It is also, in its horrible way, an exceptionally well-constructed insult.

Which brings us to one of the peculiar attractions of the literary feud. Writers are supposed to be good with words, and when they decide to be unpleasant, they sometimes produce sentences that survive longer than the arguments themselves.

When the feud became entertainment

Mailer and Vidal understood this better than most.

Both were serious writers with substantial literary achievements, strong political opinions and a considerable appetite for public attention. Both also possessed the conviction, common among literary celebrities of their generation, that their opinions deserved an audience beyond the pages of their books.

Their hostility was partly personal and partly intellectual, but it also belonged to a culture in which writers could become public combatants.  It came to a head on TV on the infamous Dick Cavett Show appearance. Mailer's pugilistic aggression and Vidal's composure became the story. 

Mailer headbutted Vidal backstage. His attacked was sparked by a New York Review of Books ("In Another Country"), article where Vidal compared Norman Mailer's views on gender politics and The Prisoner of Sex to Charles Manson's philosophy, and referenced Mailer's past personal scandals.

It shows how something distinctive marked this period. Writers could occupy a place in public culture that now seems unusual. They were expected to have opinions about politics, morality, culture and the direction of society, and people were prepared to watch them argue about those things.

John Updike, Tom Wolfe and the argument about literature

Not every literary feud was simply a contest of personalities. Some were rooted in genuine disagreements about what novels should do.

When Tom Wolfe published A Man in Full in 1998, he attracted considerable criticism from established literary figures, including John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving. Updike's review questioned the novel's literary achievement, distinguishing its considerable entertainment value from the qualities he believed made fiction enduring.

Wolfe did not respond with quiet gratitude for the attention. He attacked his critics and the literary establishment he believed they represented, presenting himself as a novelist committed to the large social canvas at a time when other writers had become preoccupied with smaller, more inward-looking concerns.

Behind the bruised egos was an argument worth having. Should the novel attempt to capture the full noise and complexity of contemporary society? Should it privilege psychological subtlety, formal elegance and the interior life? Could a book be immensely readable, socially ambitious and commercially successful while still falling short of literary greatness?

These are not trivial questions. They concern the purpose of fiction and the standards by which we judge it.

And this is where the literary feud becomes genuinely interesting. A savage review may be unpleasant for its recipient, but it can force the critic to explain what they believe literature ought to achieve. The writer who responds must then defend their own artistic choices.

The result can be more illuminating than a dozen polite interviews in which everybody agrees that storytelling is important and books are wonderful.

A serious literary culture needs room for disagreement. It needs critics willing to say that a celebrated novel is not particularly good, and writers willing to explain why the critics might be wrong.

What it doesn't necessarily need is the headbutting.

Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and the British falling-out

This one was definitely personal. Martin Amis and Julian Barnes were close friends and prominent members of a generation of British novelists whose reputations became intertwined with the literary culture of the 1980s and 1990s. Their friendship fractured in the mid-1990s amid controversy over Amis's decision to change literary agents, leaving Pat Kavanagh, Barnes's wife, and the publicity surrounding his substantial advance for his novel The Information.

The episode became part of a wider media fascination with Amis's career, money, private life and status. It also acquired an almost suspiciously literary quality because The Information itself concerned two novelists whose friendship is poisoned by professional envy and unequal success.

You could hardly invent a more suitable backdrop for a real-life literary falling-out, although Amis had, in a sense, already done so.

Amis, who had written so brilliantly about the absurdities of literary ambition, found himself at the centre of a story that seemed to have wandered out of one of his own novels.

And perhaps that was part of the fascination. We like to imagine writers as detached observers of human vanity, people who can expose the ridiculousness of ambition and jealousy. Then we discover that they are just as susceptible to those feelings as everybody else.

Possibly more so.

Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace and the modern literary insult

Inevitable with the arrival social media, the literary feud found a place online. Bret Easton Ellis's attacks on David Foster Wallace offer a striking example.

Ellis and Wallace were very different writers, but they belonged to overlapping conversations about contemporary American fiction. Wallace became associated with intellectual ambition, emotional sincerity and the desire to move beyond the ironic detachment that had shaped so much late twentieth-century culture. Ellis, whose novels included Less Than Zero and American Psycho, was closely identified with a colder, more abrasive vision of modern life.

After Wallace's death, Ellis used social media to attack both his literary reputation and the mythology surrounding him, questioning his talent, sincerity and the admiration he inspired. It was a literary feud of sorts, although Wallace was no longer alive to answer.

And that changes the nature of the exchange. Whatever one thinks of Wallace's work, attacking a dead writer is not quite the same as an argument between living rivals. No one can reply, no escalation can turn it into a new essay, and no disagreement can reveal something unexpected about both participants.

Have we lost the art of the literary argument?

It would be easy to conclude that literary feuds were once witty, intelligent and gloriously entertaining, whereas contemporary arguments are merely nasty, hurried and conducted in the comments section.

But that would be much too convenient. The old feuds could be vicious. They could be driven by sexism, snobbery, professional jealousy and an almost pathological need for attention. Hemingway's treatment of Fitzgerald was hardly generous. Capote's betrayal of his friends caused genuine harm. Mailer's behaviour towards Vidal was not redeemed by the fact that both men happened to be distinguished novelists.

And we shouldn't confuse cruelty with criticism simply because the person delivering it knows how to write a memorable sentence.

But something does seem to have changed in the way literary disagreements unfold.

A writer could once spend months composing a devastating review, developing an argument and choosing exactly the right words with which to dismantle a rival's achievement. The recipient might respond in another essay, and the disagreement could become part of a larger conversation about literature. The process was slow, often pompous, and occasionally absurd, but it allowed ideas room to develop.

Today, the speed of public argument often works against that kind of sustained engagement. Social media rewards immediacy, certainty and the striking phrase detached from its context. A disagreement can become a controversy before anyone has properly explained what the disagreement is about.

There is also the question of literary culture itself. Writers now operate in an environment where visibility matters enormously. Social media, festivals, podcasts, newsletters and public appearances have become part of the work of maintaining a readership. The writer is expected to be accessible, personable and, ideally, somebody readers would enjoy spending time with.

At its best, the feud was a form of criticism with the volume turned up. At its worst, it was two insecure people turning their problems into everybody else's entertainment, and sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.

The pleasure of a really good disagreement

I suspect what I miss isn't the hostility itself. Public life already has more than enough hostility, and we hardly need novelists contributing to the general atmosphere of bad temper.

What I miss, or perhaps what I imagine I miss, is the idea that a literary disagreement might be worth reading for its own sake.

There is a peculiar pleasure in encountering a writer who has thought carefully about another writer's work and concluded, with considerable force, that something has gone wrong. Not because the judgement is necessarily correct, but because it obliges us to reconsider our own assumptions.