CS Lewis never liked John Betjeman. The author of the Chronicles of Narnia happened to be the younger man’s tutor at Oxford in the 1920s and confessed to his diaries that he found the future Poet Laureate an “idle prig” and “very conceited.”
As the literary scholar Simon Horobin recently revealed, Lewis was also instrumental in ensuring Betjeman received the lowest grade of the entire student body in 1928. Worse, when Betjeman asked Lewis for a reference, Lewis described him as “kind-hearted and cheerful” (brutal) which Betjeman claimed had cost him three jobs. Betjeman was so wounded by the encounters, he confessed that he needed psychoanalysis.
As literary feuds go, this is one to treasure: so English, so understated. It does not have the theatrics of Gore Vidal vs Norman Mailer. The pair famously sparred over a book review on American TV in 1971 (truly, these were different times) and were still at it six years later when Mailer punched Vidal at a cocktail party. “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer,” said Vidal as he picked himself up.
It’s not quite Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman, either: “Every word she writes is a lie. Including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” (This one backfired: Hellman sued.)
But as with the best literary feuds, it combines grandstanding eloquence with marvellous pettiness and a hatred that barely seems rational. The death of his rival, John Keats at 25, seems to have caused Lord Byron great amusement: especially when Shelley claimed that a bad review had hastened Keats’s decline. “Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.”
What did Betjeman do to incur his tutor’s disdain? We can’t fully know. And so we enter the realm of myth. Why is Medea evil? Why is Satan so mad? Why did the tiger come to tea?
What is delicious about these public (and more often than not, posthumous) eruptions of author-on-author violence is that you just know these resentments and jealousies are always there simmering under the surface most of the time. Vidal was rare in that he actually seemed to relish confrontation: “What are the three most frightening words in the language? Joyce Carol Oates.”
In today’s literary world, writers are much more careful to be nice about each other. It’s only rarely that it breaks out, as when Richard Ford confronted Colson Whitehead for a tepid review of a short story collection. “You spat on my book,” Ford is reported to have said, before spitting on Whitehead.
But no one does it quite like the Russians. Leo Tolstoy once challenged Ivan Turgenev to a duel in 1861 after a dinner party set-to, though thankfully retracted before one or other of them got shot.
But perhaps the bitchiest of all was Vladimir Nabokov, who absolutely loved dismissing grand names of literature as miserable failures and was taken to task for this by his (soon to be former) friend Edmund Wilson in a review of Nabokov’s four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. “What right has he to prevent me from finding mediocre and overrated people like Balzac, Dostoevsky, Sainte-Beuve, or Stendhal, the pet of all those who like their French plain?” Nabokov demanded. If he was permitted to share his love of Pushkin, surely he also had the right to declare Dostoevsky “incredibly banal”, a “claptrap journalist”, and “a slapdash comedian,” again and again and again?
Still, I don’t think even Nabokov could have quite equal the ecstatic venom of Michael Hofmann reviewing the memoirs of Stefan Zweig (“the Pepsi of Austrian writing”) in The London Review of Books in 2010. Hofmann takes his critique right up to Zweig’s actual suicide note, “which, like most of what he wrote, is so smooth and mannerly… that one feels the irritable rise of boredom halfway through it, and the sense that he doesn’t mean it, his heart isn’t in it (not even in his suicide).” Stop, stop! He’s already dead.
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