We live in a culture defined by public confrontation: the age of the Twitter spat, the diss track and the celebrity cage fight. Demand for an undignified scrap is at an all-time high. The literary world has enjoyed a distinguished tradition of disgraceful public exchanges, but now it is bucking the trend. These days, writers shy away from conflict. It wasn’t so long ago that writers got into fights with each other — when the personal was literary, and the literary was personal.
Literary feuds were a regular and entertaining occurrence in the British literary scene. When writers argued, the reading public looked on with the grin of schadenfreude. We all know the canonical examples. John le Carré and Salman Rushdie’s 1997 shouting match in the letters section of The Guardian over The Satanic Verses controversy is always wheeled out whenever literary feuds are discussed.
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