An article on the Big Think site described how Edgar Allan Poe was villified by his fellow writers, supposedly for not being successful. That sounds wrong to me; usually literary types turn on the colleague who IS successful.
Whatever the reason, there's no doubt that Poe had enemies. One was Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who wrote Poe's obituary under the name "Ludwig." It started: "Edgar Allen Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it."
Cold!
Griswold didn't stop there. He managed to get the rights to edit a collection of Poe's writing published as "Memoirs of the Author," into which Griswold injected hints that Poe deserted the army, betrayed his friends, and committed incest. Talk about adding insult to injury!
A more recent feud saw Vladimir Nabokov calling critic Edmund Wilson "a commonsensical, artless, average reader with a natural vocabulary of, say, six hundred words." The trigger was Wilson calling Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin "impenetrable." Hey, where I come from six hundred words is doing pretty well.
There was no love lost between Derek Walcott and V. S. Naipaul, either. After Naipaul wrote that Walcott "went stale," Walcott wrote a poem: "I have been bitten, I must avoid infection/Or else I'll be as dead as Naipaul's fiction." Low marks, Walcott, must try harder.
More elegant and satisfyingly nasty was Mary McCarhty's asseration about Lillan Hellman that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" Helmman rather unsportingly sued but died before the case got to court.
It was a difference in writing styles that led to the spat between Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. The latter said Hemingway "has never been known to use a word that might sent a reader to the dictionary." Hemingway: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from long words?" The decision goes to Papa H.
Norman Mailer didn't get along with anybody, but his most famours feud was with Gore Vidal. On The Dick Cavett TV talk show Mailer said to Vidal, "I've had to smell your works from time to time and that has made me an expert in intellectual pollution." As we used to say in the school yard, "Naah Naah Naah Naah Naaah Naah!"
Why can't we all just get along? Naah, that wouldn't be nearly as entertaining.
(Famous authors also left constructive advice for aspiring writers. You'll find lots of it, from the likes of Twain, Austen, Poe, Hemingway, Fitzerald and many more, in my book Your Creative Writing Masterclass, available now from Amazon or your other favorite book seller.)
