Why Writers Attack Writers

The small but insignificant world of media chitchat was fluttered last week by Renata Adler's new memoir that takes a brilliant flamethrower to the New Yorker magazine. Adler is a scrupulous, usefully unsettling critic, not to be yoked with casual hit men. She eviscerates so elegantly that her corpses remain standing. But her book and its overheated reception invoke the whole delightful genre of vengeful, venomous, and ultimately purposeless, literary assaults.

Recently John Irving attacked Tom Wolfe as being unreadable. Wolfe responded by attacking Irving as being washed up as a novelist, along with Norman Mailer and John Updike, who had attacked Wolfe earlier. So it has always gone. Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing." Gore Vidal on Capote: "He has made lying an art. A minor art." The novelist James Gould Cozzens, perhaps expressing sour grapes of wrath: "I cannot read 10 pages of Steinbeck without throwing up."

Jazz musicians say only the most adoring things about one another; actors, generally the same. Only writers claw and spit, even though nobody cares but other writers, and public opinion of the attackee is affected not at all.

Yet here is H.L. Mencken's generous assessment of Henry James: "an idiot and a Boston idiot to boot, than which there is nothing lower in this world." And William Allen White's gracious description of Mencken: "With a pig's eyes that never look up, with a pig's snout that loves muck, with a pig's brain that knows only the sty, and a pig's squeal that cries only when he is hurt, he sometimes opens his pig's mouth, tusked and ugly, and lets out the voice of God, railing at the whitewash that covers the manure about his habitat." Small attack big, big attack small. What drives this pointless sniping?

Often the reasons have to do with professional advancement. An unknown writer with no other means of getting noticed will attack someone to climb upward. Not long ago, a fellow wrote an ambitious op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal attacking me as the worst writer in history. (I shall try to improve.) But even important writers will attack for success. James Baldwin admitted that he felt he had to "kill" Richard Wright in an essay, to supplant him.

The trouble with the genre is that it makes for wasteful digressions in a writer's career and is the antithesis of real, worthy writing itself. The aim of real writing is to make lives larger, more alert and, with luck, happier. Attack writing is personal and seeks to do personal injury; it shrivels up everything it touches.

It is also, by nature and intention, unfair and incomplete, and frequently irrational. Macaulay said of Socrates, "The more I read him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him"--which might have made sense if Socrates (whom we know only from Plato) had left anything to read. Charles Kingsley called Shelley "a lewd vegetarian"--an intriguing idea but difficult to picture.

And it creates a false sense of accomplishment. Friends of an attacker will always rush to congratulate him on the meanness of his attack, because they get a twofer: one writer has been belittled and another has looked like a jackass doing it.