The Shade Olympics

Originally published on The Writing Catalogue.

It is ironic how iconic authors rarely get along. You’d think these imaginative thinkers would appreciate each other’s creative expressions. Yet somehow, they found something to throw some bombastic side-eyes aimed at each other. 

Is it professional jealousy? 

Is it clashing personal and/or political beliefs? 

Were they being petty? 

You decide (and let me know your thoughts). 

Not all shade is bad shade. Some was done in jest. The poets had creative names for William Wordsworth. Lord Byron took his wonderfully literary surname and dubbed it Turdsworth. Samuel Coleridge liked to refer to “The Nightingale” as “Bird’s worth.” This is good shade. We are not talking about these - we are discussing the messy, mean ones. 

We can’t all be Milan Kundera and dislike everyone. So, let’s get specific, shall we? 

Sick Burns

Hemingway said this for Wyndham Lewis, "He has the eyes of an unsuccessful rapist." Poet and deep thinker T.E Hulme once hung Wyndham Lewis from the fence in Soho Square by his trousers over a girl. 

I get why he had these experiences because oof he is mean. Wyndham Lewis said this of Joyce, “The poet of the shabby-genteel, impoverished intellectualism of Dublin,” this of Gertrude Stein, “Stein's prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing: the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along.” Yikes! 

In a particularly catty letter to playwright Maryat Lee in May 1960, Flannery O'Connor dissed Ayn Rand. He wrote, “I hope you don't have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re: fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky." 

D. H. Lawrence was not fond of James Joyce saying, “My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness-what old and hard worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!” 

It’s a Llama

One writes a thesis on the other’s work, succeeds, friendship begins, there’s drama, then there’s a punch. Gabriel García Márquez (Gabo) was punched by Vargas Llosa who wrote a thesis on One Hundred Years of Solitude. A dramatic llama by the name of Patricia misunderstood support for flirtation. Llosa was told Gabo made a pass at Patricia and so he punched Gabriel García Márquez in the face. 

A scorned ex-beau, Nelson Algren resented Simone de Beauvoir from the moment they broke up. He held on to this grudge till the moment he died and continued to lambast her work in big, little ways as the years went by. She and Sartre's open relationship also was a point of contention, specifically the autobiography which reveals everything. 

This was Personal, maybe?

In an essay titled “Personality and Demonic Possession”, T.S. Eliot threw some shade at D.H. Lawrence (but then he peppered in some praise as well). “I find this same strain of morbidity in the work of a man whom I regard as a very much greater genius, if not a greater artist, than Hardy: D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence has three aspects, and it is very difficult to do justice to all. I do not expect to be able to do so. The first is the ridiculous: his lack of sense of humour, a certain snobbery, a lack not so much of information as of the critical faculties which education should give, and an incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking. Of this side of Lawrence, the brilliant exposure by Mr. Wyndham Lewis in “Paleface” is by far the most conclusive criticism that has been made. Second, there is the extraordinarily keen sensibility and capacity for profound intuition—intuition from which he commonly drew the wrong conclusions. Third, there is a distinct morbidity and hypertrophy of personality. Unfortunately, it is necessary to keep all of these aspects in mind in order to criticise the writer fairly; and this, in such close perspective, is almost impossible. I shall no doubt appear to give excessive prominence to the third; but that, after all, is what has been least successfully considered.” 

Mark Twain seemingly hate-read Jane Austen. He kept reading her work. He kept complaining to colleagues and friends in his letters. To quote him on multiple occassions, “Any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book”. Your work sounds like Austen’s words became his favourite insult. In a letter to William Dean Howells, he says, “To me his prose is unreadable – like Jane Austen’s. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on a salary, but not Jane’s. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.” I wouldn’t judge Austen for resurrecting and haunting Twain for this one, “Her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skill with her own shin-bone.” 

He had a similar dynamic with James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot). You can read his essay, titled "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," to get a taste of the hate-reading. 

Gertrude Stein hated Ezra Pound for his simplistic approach. In Alice B. Toklas’s Autobiography, she says how he is fit to be read by villagers, "Great if you're in a small village. If not, not." You’d think it would be all the fascism but no, it was something petty. This tea was spilled by Hemingway in “A Moveable Feast” where he mentions how Pound sat on Stein’s favourite chair in her salon and broke it. 

Inspired by the Shade

George Bernard Shaw was not a fan of William Shakespeare and his fame. He took great offence to the critical and commercial success of the bard saying, “With the exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. The intensity and impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity”. 

The word bardolatry or excessive admiration of Shakespeare was coined by Shaw. 

Writers are complicated. They are mercurial. Irrespective of how much we idealise them, they are still humans who have human problems (and pettiness). Whether it is calling each other sluts (Baudelaire about Geroge Sand), “supremely mediocre” (Will Self to George Orwell), or “great horse-faced bluestocking" (Baudelaire to Geroge Sand), writers can get creative when the situation calls for it.

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