The storms of rivalry and feud currently blowing through America’s internet portals rise to the wind-scale force of Wagnerian opera, but it’s hard to know whether the sound and fury is personal, political, or pathological. The stagings of vengeful lies to destroy a graven Facebook image, or the voicing of competitive truth that is the vitality of a democratic republic?
The problem doesn’t yield to zero-sum solution.
’s twin Strifes are permanent members of the human condition; neither of them can be impeached. The pagan Greek poet was clear on the point. During his own lifetime, he was familiar with the news and fake news of the Trojan War wandering around on the eastern Mediterranean lecture circuit, and he would have known that cursed Strife “brings forth discord, nurtures evil war,” killed Hector, Agamemnon, and Achilles, bears “great honors to…gift-guzzling kings”; known also that blessed Strife launched a thousand ships, “spurs a man who otherwise would shirk” to surpass his neighbor in “racing to reach prosperity.” The difficulty is the knowing which one is which, with which one a man is better advised to keep company—with “mischief making,” “eavesdropping in the marketplace,” and the “spying on quarrels,” or trying to do his best with the Strife that is nearer to hand.
during his lifetime was personally acquainted with the cursed Strife inflicted on Florence by gift-guzzling Medici princes, also with the bonfiring of the city’s beloved vanities at the behest of Friar Girolamo Savonarola, a vengeful Dominican monk preaching the word of God as a howl of rage against the world, the flesh, and the devil. The history books tend to portray Machiavelli as a cynical Italian courtier supplying despots with murderous raisons d’état. The spin is travesty. Machiavelli was an idealistic civil servant who was also a poet and playwright seeking to provide early sixteenth-century Florence with a republican form of government. He rated the task as the most worthy of human endeavors when supported by a citizenry animated with the will to act instead of the wish to be cared for.
To promote his effort to equip Florence with a civilian militia, and acting on his authority as second chancellor of the Florentine republic, Machiavelli in 1503–4 encouraged both
to burnish the walls of the Great Council Hall with the scene of a famous battle in which the free city of Florence defeated a rival city dependent for its freedoms on hired mercenaries.
The story, as told in The Lost Battles by the British art critic Jonathan Jones, attributes the flowering of the arts in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence not to the city’s “wealth or taste or intellect” but to the “rabid competitive individualism” of its citizens, to what Leonardo in his
) that “will stimulate you to be among the number who are more praised than you, and the lauding of the others will spur you on.”
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We’re often told that the Beatles and Rolling Stones actually admired one another, that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were off-court friends. At the end of a fiercely contested battle, there are still handshakes, pleasantries, expressions of mutual admiration, prayer huddles for the only judgment that matters. When younger generations emerge to challenge the bygone revolutions of their forebears, it’s said to be in the service of a grand teleological arc, an earnest desire to do things better. But this has always struck me as an incomplete picture of how culture works. Sometimes brinksmanship tips toward true disdain, and desires to merely show someone up descend into fantasies of destruction. Can dark, trifling feelings produce uplifting art?
I became interested in a version of literary history that is animated not by camaraderie, or by the friendly rivalry of a close-knit cohort, but by antipathy, insecurity, jealousy. After all, writing is a profession like any other. And while literary culture rarely measures worth solely by sales, other metrics of achievement, such as awards and prizes, offer a vaguely reputable kind of side-by-side comparison. The Nobel Prize, for example, has become an annual referendum on the health of our greats. While it’s silly to say that one “loses” the Nobel Prize—the Swedish Academy’s inner workings can be secretive, and in recent years disconcertingly plagued by scandal—there have been writers who have seemed particularly glum about not having been chosen. In the 1920s,
Theodore Dreiser, known for his morally ambiguous masterworks of naturalism, felt he had a shot to become the first American winner for literature. Encouraged by his publisher, he began cozying up to European publishers, journalists, and radio broadcasters. But another American contender,
Sinclair Lewis, had already been doing this for years; he also had been more outward about his ambitions, describing the Nobel as “his one hope in life.” When Lewis won in 1930, it was seen as a reward for his consistent efforts to court Europe. Some even felt that his novels flattered old-world readers by offering American life as a series of exaggerated caricatures and archetypes.
Dreiser was crestfallen. It was unlikely that another American would win for many years. Yet somehow it was Lewis who bore a grudge. In 1931 they were both at a dinner in New York honoring the Russian novelist Boris Pilnyak. Dreiser congratulated Lewis, who responded with a sneer. Lewis was asked to give an impromptu speech but declined, accusing Dreiser of having plagiarized from
The New Russia by Lewis’ wife
Dorothy Thompson for
Dreiser Looks at Russia. Lewis also called out two unidentified critics in the room who he said had “publicly lamented” his Nobel victory. The night ended with Dreiser slapping Lewis twice.
It stands to reason that artists who possess a sensitivity to human nature would themselves be hypersensitive people. And it makes sense that those with gifts for storytelling and narration are capable of shaping petty jealousy into something noble and epic.
Most rivalries grow out of differences of opinion rather than personality, though the two often become conflated.
John Keats, who grew up middle-class, burned with hatred for
Lord Byron, whose snobbishness reflected his privileged upbringing. (The feeling was mutual; Byron didn’t care much for “Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry,” either.)
Albert Camus and
Jean-Paul Sartre fell out over the question of whether “absolute freedom” and justice could coexist. (A tawdrier possibility is that these questions of agency grew out of a failed Sartre-approved tryst between Camus and
Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s lover.) In the beginning of their acquaintance
Edmund Wilson and
Vladimir Nabokov were soul mates, enthralled by each other’s intellect and ego. But their differences, particularly when it came to communism, grew insurmountable. They fell out in 1965, when Wilson savaged his former pal’s translation of
Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin, displacing all of his personal and political ire into a comprehensive assault of Nabokov’s quirk-filled approach to form and style.
Even snide, passing disses communicate a sense of aesthetic distinction.
Truman Capote once said of
Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road that it wasn’t writing so much as it was “typewriting.” The “King of Horror,” Stephen King, once complained of James Patterson’s boilerplate best sellers that “every one is the same.”
Rarely are competing visions of literary goodness as clear as in reviews. In 2002, Dale Peck famously called Rick Moody “the worst writer of his generation”—a feud that ended amicably, with Moody throwing a pie in Peck’s face for charity. After Colson Whitehead playfully bashed a short-story collection by
Richard Ford in the
New York Times, Ford spat on him. (This seemed a more improvised response than the time Ford shot Alice Hoffman’s novel and then mailed her the carcass after she gave his novel
The Sportswriter a lukewarm review.)
But the harshest accusation might be to deem your rivals unequal to their onetime promise—that they have somehow failed themselves. In the early 2000s, the rappers Jay-Z and Nas duked it out to see who could claim the crown of “King of New York.” Jay-Z was seen as someone who continually tried on different guises, whereas Nas was the prodigy who had arrived fully formed, as a teenager, with 1994’s Illmatic, an album so admired that it kept him in the good graces of fans even as he struggled for years to return to that preternatural peak. There are few compliments as backhanded as Jay-Z’s withering summation of Nas’ career: “That’s a one-hot-album-every-ten-year average,” as though Nas had let himself down.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tragic death didn’t soften
Ernest Hemingway’s view on his erstwhile friend: “I never had any respect for him ever, except for his lovely, golden, wasted talent.” In 2007,
V.S. Naipaul wrote that
Derek Walcott had “exhausted the first flush of his talent.” The line came from a long review that also praised the great poet, but it was read as an accusation that Walcott was coasting. Walcott retaliated the following year, at the Calabash Literary Festival, with a poem that begins: “I have been bitten, I must avoid infection / Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.”
There was no such thing as an Asian American person until the late 1960s. Around then Yuji Ichioka, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and his classmates began using the term; before that Americans of Asian descent didn’t have an umbrella term to describe their shared experience. But being able to name themselves, and reject epithets like
Oriental or
Asiatic, raised complications. What did this new identity mean, and who qualified for inclusion? It was a debate that played out most vociferously in the era’s literature. In 1974 the writers Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong put together
Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers, an earnest attempt at building an archive of authentic, politically self-aware Asian American experiences.
Two years later Maxine Hong Kingston published her first novel,
The Woman Warrior, a dazzling and whimsical attempt to reframe identity as improvisatory and inauthentic. It toggled between the epic and the everyday, following a young woman growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1960s, making sense of her path through imaginative, radiant retellings of Chinese folktales and family secrets. It was a sly, often ironic work of fiction, yet it became a surprise best seller and ubiquitous presence on college syllabi, in part because it was frequently misread as a work of autobiography and thus an earnest attempt to define the Chinese American experience.
But Kingston’s flippant attitude toward historical truth invoked the ire of a circle of Asian American writers linked to
Aiiieeeee! Frank Chin, an idealistic young Chinese American playwright, dismissed her novel as “another in a long line of Chinkie autobiographies by Pocahontas yellows blowing the same old mixed-up East/West soul struggle.” In Chin’s estimation, Kingston had not only commodified her cultural heritage, she had produced a version of it that was fantastical, whimsical, not at all real, full of historical inaccuracies. For Kingston,
The Woman Warrior had always been a work of fabulism, or, as she describes it in the novel, “talk-story.” Their back-and-forth went on for years. In 1989, Kingston published
Tripmaster Monkey, a novel about Wittman Ah Sing, an idealistic young Chinese American playwright in the 1960s who bore a striking resemblance to Chin. She denied that it was about him. But if Chin had been sending her hate mail all these years, she later joked, it was as though she were sending him back love letters.
There’s always been a sense of fatalism baked into expressions of identity politics—after all, the need to claim a name of one’s own presumes that you’ve been answering to the wrong one for your entire life. The war between Kingston and Chin was a foundational moment in Asian American literature, and it illustrates some basic, competitive dynamics that seem ever-present within circles of creativity that aren’t safely part of the mainstream. What Chin feared was that Kingston’s version of their experience would become popular and immovable. In the view of Chin and the other
Aiiieeeee! editors, the Asian American was an outsider, and the truest expressions of this sensibility could exist only outside of the popular. What did it mean that white readers were buying
The Woman Warrior?
Variants of this question haunted nonwhite readers throughout the twentieth century. Was something lost in that ascendancy to the mainstream? Black literature, for example, was propelled by a constant reassessment of values and audiences.
Richard Wright was critical of how younger writers like
Zora Neale Hurston wrote of gender and sexuality, wondering if it all wasn’t a ploy to titillate white readers.
James Baldwin attacked his former mentor Wright’s “protest novel”
Native Son as a harsh and inhumane portrait of black life—one that feasted on the sympathies of white liberals. And
Ralph Ellison was uncomfortable with Baldwin’s homosexuality, as well as the feverish, declarative style of his writings.
In these small segments of the literary marketplace, rivalry and beef came to mean something different. Squabbles over aesthetics or philosophy can usually accommodate different sides. But the literary establishment is overwhelmingly white, and it often anoints but one or two figures to speak on behalf of their marginalized community. To sell your story was to legitimize an identity. In other words, what was at stake when Chin faced off with Kingston, or Baldwin assailed Wright, was who the market would allow them to be: what it meant to be black, or Asian, or a woman, whose version of existence would be the one recorded in history. Often this meant foreclosing possibilities for other writers, other versions of Asian American life that didn’t fit within market-proven tropes like intergenerational struggle or family melodrama. These rivalries called attention to the problem of the market, where notions of authenticity and who would be allowed to embody an entire community’s essence were made solid.
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