Category: Essays

  

“I think of the three of them now as Larry, Curly & Moe.” Tom Wolfe, of John (Updike), John (Irving) & Norman (Mailer)

 

A century and a half after the Poe/English bout, three pedigreed but aging novelists shanked a colleague shorter than the Baltimore bete noire, but with a larger tongue and following.

Swords were first crossed when Tom Wolfe made millions on The Bonfire of the Vanities; but John Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer dismissed the novel as populist drivel. Wolfe counter-attacked with his 1989 Harper’s essay, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” about a fiction Old Guard too fossilized to appreciate his revolutionary fiction nonfiction.[1]

Resentments seethed for a decade, and erupted again with Wolfe’s latest bestseller, A Man In Full.

“Entertainment, not literature,” sniped Updike in his New Yorker review, “even literature in a modest aspirant form.”[2]

“At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred-pound woman: Once she gets on top, it’s over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated,”[3] argued Norman Mailer, speaking from the experience of tackling his own 1,310 page Amazon, Harlot’s Ghost. Man in Full tipped the scales at a mere 742. He went on to coronate his colleague as “the most gifted best-seller writer… since Margaret Mitchell.”

Wolfe dismissed the creators of Rabbit and Dear Park as “two piles of bones.”[4]

Their comrade-in-arms, John Irving, flew over the ropes and spelled the hyperventilating tag team. “I can’t read him,” he said of Wolfe, “because he’s such a bad writer.”

Now it was three against one — the hoopster, the headbutter, and the wrestler – against the diminutive dandy in full. “I think of the three of them now — because there are now three –as Larry, Curly and Moe,” he said. “It must gall them a bit that everyone — even them — is talking about me.”

“If I were teaching fucking freshman English,” Irving fumed, “I couldn’t read a sentence [of his] and not just carve it up.” When the Canadian TV Hot Type host asked if he was at war with the little man in white, Garp’s creator — overlooking a proletariat revolution or two — bristled, “I don’t think it’s a war because you can’t have a war between a pawn and a king, can you?”

But, in the end, the southern gentleman had the last word, aware that Irving and his stooges were the best PR reps he’d ever had. “Why does he sputter and foam so?” Wolfe wondered in a statement released by his publisher.[5]

In the mid-sixties, the 34-year-old heretic had published The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine- Flake Streamline Baby. The title, a collection of his pieces from the Washington Post and elsewhere, replete with exclamatories, ellipses, and neo-street speak, spawned The New Journalism. To create a buzz by tossing a Molotov cocktail over the battlements of the Bastille, he strode into his editor’s office at the Herald Tribune one morning and asked —

“How about blowing up The New Yorker, Clay?”

So the Tribune ran “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead,” Wolfe’s assault on the alma mater of his Moriartys – Larry, Curly, and Moe. It featured a portrait of editor, William Shawn, as head funeral director, surrounded by his dutiful retainers and embalmed guardians of literature, the Tiny Mummies. The satire had been inspired by The New Yorker’s invitation-only 40th anniversary party at the St. Regis, which the stooges had attended and Wolfe crashed.

Shawn, who received an advance copy, fired a letter off to the Tribune’s owner, Jock Whitney. He called the article “murderous and certainly libelous,” and demanded that it be pulled from Sunday’s upcoming edition. Jock declined.

The magazine called in its cavalry. The Tribune was barraged with diatribes from Muriel Spark, to J.D. Salinger, to The Elements of Style E.B. White himself. Then the magazine’s enforcer, Dwight MacDonald, fired off a 13,000-word polemic, “Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe & His Magic Writing Machine,” for its sister publication, The New York Review of Books. MacDonald called Wolfe’s style “a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction.”[6]

When the smoke cleared, the magazine had a shiner, and Wolfe’s new Streamline Baby was a sensation.

Just as the man in full had pioneered a new literary form, he had bested a boxer-wrestler- hoopster tag team by means of a revolutionary literary sparring technique: JuJutsu. The gentle Eastern art of rechanneling the opponent’s own aggression against him.

“Bullshit reigns!” the new champion of American letters proclaimed in Bonfire of the Vanities.

 

“Poe’s jealousy of other writers amounted to a mania.”

Frederick Saunders, biographer of Edgar Allan Poe

 

Dueling preceding boxing, headbutting, and backstabbing as the gentleman’s way of resolving literary and extra-literary disputes.

After publishing Pleasures and Days, Marcel Proust challenged critic Jean Lorrain to a duel for a review depicting him as “one of those pretty boys who’ve managed to get themselves pregnant by literature.”[1] He had taken critic Robert de Montesquiou’s broadside – “a mixture of litanies and sperm” – in stride, even finding it flattering. But Lorrain’s was below the belt. The two gay asthmatics managed to rise before dawn and find a free meadow. But both shot over each other’s head, returning home for hot compresses and cognac. Proust staged several other such duels, health permitting.[2]

Then came the Turgenev-Tolstoy showdown that didn’t happen, a bitter disappointment for Dostoyevsky. It all started when Ivan badmouthed the motherland in Smoke, and Fyodor suggested the novel be “burned by the public executioner.” Ivan in turn called the newly patriotic gulag con a “madman” and a “petty, dirty gossip”; Fyodor then parodied him in The Devils as “the most written-out of all written-out authors”; whereupon Ivan called him “the Russian Marquis de Sade.”[3]

Tolstoy found all this deeply disturbing since he liked both the fussy dilettante and the excitable epileptic. He’d even called The House of the Dead, “the finest work in all of Russian literature.” In turn, Dostoyevsky heaped praise on Tolstoy (though, in private, he found his masterpiece, Anna Karenina, “rather tedious”). So, diplomatically, Tolstoy was between a rock and a hard place.

The scales were tipped one day when Tolstoy scolded Turgenev about his poor treatment of his daughter born to his mother’s slave, “If she were your legitimate daughter, you would educate her differently.” Ivan threatened to slap Leo’s face. Instead Leo suggested a duel. But soon, conscience getting the best of him, Leo apologized to Ivan and called the whole thing off so as not to interrupt his work on War and Peace.

At about the time Dostoyevsky returned from Siberia and got into it with Turgenev, he was thrilled to discover Baudelaire’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe, no less excitable and choleric than himself. Inside the great American bete noir raged a perfect storm of megalomania, touchiness, frustration, and rage even greater than that of his hypercompetitive successors, Hemingway and Faulkner.

The poet had many unwilling sparring partners. His early favorite was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow had done nothing in particular to piss off Poe, other than outselling him, being an esteemed professor, and having a rich wife.

Initially, the young firebrand had called Longfellow a genius and begged him for an endorsement of his work so “my fortune will be made.” When Longfellow declined, Poe dismissed him as “the GREAT MOGOL [his caps] of the Imitators” and a plagiarist.[4]

Henry played rope-a-dope with Edgar, stoically taking his most devastating shots, and saying only, “Life is too precious to be wasted in street brawls.”

Beside himself, Poe threw haymakers at his rival’s Poems on Slavery, saying they were written “for the especial use of those negrophilic old ladies of the north, who form so large a part of Mr. LONGFELLOW’s friends.”

Returning to his corner at the bell, the father of Horror cooled down with the sponge. He then counted himself one of his opponent’s “warmest and most steadfast admirers,” and regarded him as “the principle American poet.” Ignoring the olive branch, Henry still stubbornly refused to endorse the ambitious upstart’s work.

Poe soon traveled to Boston to deliver his lecture “On Reason.” Receiving a chilly reception from unreasonable Bostonians, he called everyone in the audience a plagiarist. He then carriaged across town to the Lyceum to read “The Raven,” only to realize, en route, that he’d forgotten to pack his popular poem. So he recited it by heart with some stammering and hyperventilation. As audience members walked out, he hectored the stage, cackling that he had “demolished” the Walden “Frogpondians.”

Back in New York, Poe courted patronesses while his wife/cousin, Sissy, was in the last stages of TB at home. He boasted that one, Mrs. Ellet, was sending him love letters. She charged him with libel and enlisted gentlemen to protect her honor. The penniless poet hurried to his colleague, T.D. English, asking to borrow his pistol.

T.D. had recently published a parody of “The Raven.” Poe felt that the least he could do, by way of making amends, was to lend him a piece to protect himself against Mrs. Ellet’s champions. But English insulted him again, suggesting that he apologize to the widow. Poe had recently finished “The Cask of the Amontillado” in which his hero, Montressor, making good on his motto — “Nemo me impune lasessit” (No one insults me with impunity) – buried his rival, Fortunado, alive.

Instead of walling up T.D. in a wine cellar, Edgar boasted that he “gave English a flogging which he will remember to the day of his death… [and] had to be dragged from his prostrate, rascally carcass.”

English had a different take on the bout. He said he flattened the bard’s nose with a signet ring punch, sending him “to bed from the effect of fright and the blows he received from me.”

Poe wrote “Literati,” a caricature of the work and physical peculiarities of English and his allies. After its publication, the author announced his plans for a sequel, “American Parnassus,” which would discredit the entire American literary population. According to biographer, Kenneth Silverman, he vowed that the title would be “a culmination of his work as a critic, aesthetician, and tastemaker.”

Rebutting “Literati” in the New York Evening Mirror, magazine publisher, Charles Briggs, described his former editor and book critic as a self-confessed forger and a loan cheat. Adding insult to injury, Briggs described Poe as:  “5 feet 1…. His tongue too large for his mouth… his head… of balloonish appearance.”

The poet sued the Mirror for libel, insisting that his character was unimpeachable. Furthermore, he described himself as 5 feet 8, English a dwarf by comparison, and the Mirror’s owner, Hiram Fuller, “a fat sheep in reverie.”

English scorned his rival’s “exhibition of impotent malice,” adding: “The kennels of Philadelphia streets… have frequently had the pleasure of his acquaintance.”

Edgar launched a flurry of body blows, calling T.D. out for his “filthy lips,” his “wallowing in hog-puddles” and his resemblance to “the best-looking but most principled of Mr. Barnum’s baboons.”

Two years later, Poe was in a Baltimore ER watching, according to his physician, Dr. Moran, “spectral and imaginary objects on the walls.” In a brief moment of coherence, he told Moran “the best thing my best friend could do would be to blow out my brains with a pistol.”

The next day he muttered, “Lord help my poor soul” and expired. Some say of drink, others “congestion of the brain,” others of rabies. 

 

“I don’t think writers are comfortable in each other’s presence.

We can talk, of course, for five minutes or so, but I don’t think we want to socialize.”

Joseph Heller

                     

The last half of the 19th century was enlivened by a literary free-for-all in the English-speaking world. Thackeray was trashing Dickens; Conrad, Melville; Wells, James; Orwell, H.G Wells; Poe, everybody.

Nor was it all just boys being boys. George Eliot jumped into the fray with her essay, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” After the turn of the century, Dorothy Parker, observed, “As artists, women novelists are rot, but as providers they are oil wells – they gush.” Her expatriate colleague, Gertrude Stein, begged to disagree, tersely informing her Random House publisher, Bennett Cerf, “20th century literature is Gertrude Stein.”

After the Montparnasse matriarch passed, Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy squared off for the title. Even before the heat of it, the former observed, “Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.” Proving it, Ms. McCarthy announced on the Dick Cavett Show, “Everything she [Hellman] writes is a lie, including the ‘and, and the ‘the’.” The author of Julia sued for $2.5 million, including $1.7 for “pain and anguish.” In the New York Times, pugilist turned peacemaker, Norman Mailer, scolded the defendant for hitting her opponent “when down,” and appealed for truce. Instead, Hellman had a heart attack and the libel suit was dropped.

“What’s not understood sufficiently about novelists is how competitive we all are. We’re as competitive as star athletes,” Mailer told the Paris Review. Why can’t talented writers just “enjoy” each other without becoming “envious”? he asked rhetorically. His cloud-parting explanation: “It doesn’t work that way!”

Mailer disdained Faulkner for his “mean small Southern streak” and for never saying anything “interesting,” but shared his supreme vanity and ambition.

Elite competitors have a fire in the belly; but in writers, unlike athletes, that fire can be fueled by frustration and anger over the blindness or biases of the refs – Pulitzer judges, Times’ critics, armchair academics. Like most novelists, Faulkner, Hemingway and the other masters suffered punishing sacks throughout their careers, and often complained that a work had been unfairly judged or eclipsed by lesser talents.

“Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed at!” fumed Flaubert.

Deciding the best defense is an offense, Hemingway cut loose on his rivals in his second title, The Torrents of Spring. The first target: his mentor and patron, Sherwood Anderson. “Wrote it to destroy Sherwood and various others,” the young war correspondent wrote Ezra Pound. “It’s the first really adult thing [I] have done. Jesus Christ, it is funny.” He later added: “A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”

Norman Mailer idolized Hemingway. Following the master’s lead, The Naked and the Dead novelist took on his own peers one by one[1] in Advertisements for Myself. Meanwhile, the Light Heavyweight champ, Jose Torres, was teaching the Village Voice bete noir The Sweet Science: Boxing. In The Fight, Mailer would later write: “No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.” Except in the writing game, he might have added.

When encountering a critic, Norman would — like Papa — drop into a fighter’s crouch. He soon got into the habit of sparring in bars. “I seemed to have turned into a slightly punch- drunk and ugly club fighter who can fight clean and fight dirty, but likes to fight,” he said. Later, proving himself a multi-talented martial artist, he head-butted Gore Vidal, sat on Truman Capote, and shanked the second of his six wives for calling him a eunuch.

A Million Little Pieces fabulist and fight fan, James Frey, was bummed about being “a fucking pariah” of publishing, until he had the good fortune of meeting his role model, Norman Agonistes. “If you would have called me, I would have explained to you how to get through all this mess!” the 83-year-old legend told him. Like a boxer, every rebel artist takes a beating, he explained. Just as the philistines had for forty Biblical years “stomped on me,” the author of The White Negro went on, “now you have the privilege of being stomped on for the next forty years.”

Poet John Dolan had called Frey’s bestselling rehab “memoir” “A Million Little Pieces of Shit”; Liar’s Club author, Mary Karr, dismissed it as “horse dookie”; and The New York Daily News branded Frey “a lying sack of dung.” After The Smoking Gun outted Pieces as pure fiction, his patroness, Oprah, the Queen of Empathy, skewered him on air. “I’ve been through so much shit…. I’ve been stabbed over and over and over again,” Frey told Esquire magazine.

Like his heroes Hemingway and Mailer, the pariah was determined to “write the best book of my generation,” and be regarded as “the hottest shit in the world.” Exploiting his experience  with  crucifixion,  Frey went on to write  Illumination:  The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, a post-modern tale of Jesus’ Second Coming to New York, inspired perhaps by Mailer’s first-person novel, The Gospel According to the Son, in which Jesus corrects the apostles’ record vis-a-vis his miracles, his love life, his persecution and Passion.

Meanwhile, James, determined to do unto others before they did unto him again, got a “FTBSITTTD” wrist tattoo — “Fuck the Bullshit, It’s Time to ThrowDown.” Doing so, he trashed A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, telling Dave Eggers and his fans to “fuck” themselves for thinking the novel deserved to be the Pulitzer finalist for 2000. Then he laid into the other critical darling of his generation: David Foster Wallace.

In 2012, Bret Easton Ellis tag teamed the winded Frey: he went American Psycho on Wallace. The Less than Zero novelist notified his 300,000 Twitter followers that the Pulitzer nominee was “the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation.” He added that anybody who considered the MacArthur Genius a genius belonged in “The Literary Douchebag-Fools Pantheon.”

Wallace might have defended himself except he was dead.

He’d bloodied The Lit Brat Packer with his own broadsides back in ’87. After the tradition of Hemingway’s Torrents and Mailer’s Advertisements, Wallace critiqued his Twenty- Something rivals in a Review of Contemporary Fiction essay, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young.” He argued that many suffered from “Workshop Hermeticism,” “Catatonia,” and/or “Yuppie Nihilism,” and that Ellis held the triple crown, writing “trash” no better than TV. The polemicist compared the L.A. author to a hooker: she “titillates, repulses, excites, transports—without demanding any intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses.” At the time, Ellis was at work on his second trick, American Psycho, the hero of which dismembers and eats prostitutes while playing the stock market.

There was a larger issue at stake between the X-Gen novelists, as there often is with such literary showdowns. Their editor, Gerald Howard, alludes to it in “I Know Why Bret Easton Ellis Hates David Foster Wallace.” Minimalism against Maximalism. The new Pop vs. the new Proust. Commercial vs. Purist.

When he wrote “Fictional Futures,” Wallace, 25, had one novel (The Broom of the System) which concerned symbolic language and Wittgenstein’s philosophy: it sold 2,200 copies.

Ellis, 23, had one novel (Less Than Zero) about partying yuppie junkies and Hollywood sex slaves: it sold over 50,000 copies in the first year, and would be made into a major motion picture. In 1990, Wallace wrote his bestselling friend, Jonathan Franzen: “Right now I am… a failed writer at 28, who is so jealous, so sickly searingly envious of you and Vollmann and Mark Leyner and even David F–kwad Leavitt… that I consider suicide a reasonable…option.”

By the time he took that option in 2008, he had eclipsed his peers. Especially Ellis. Wallace’s last complete novel, Infinite Jest, sold well and earned a slot on Time’s 100 Best Novels list; Ellis’s last, Imperial Bedrooms, a Less Than Zero sequel, tanked critically and commercially. Rattling Ellis further, the martyred Wallace was canonized in D.T. Max’s 2012 biography, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. So, before his rival was beatified, the American Psycho delivered the final blow to the Pale King: he called him a “fraud” and his fans “Douchebags.”

As for Franzen’s relationship with Wallace, the National Book Award winner told the Paris Review: “Our friendship was haunted by a competition between the writer who was pursuing art for art’s sake and the writer who was… getting public attention and money.”[2]