In Competition No. 3238, you were invited to submit a poem about a literary feud.
Wallace Stevens’s 1936 fisticuffs with Ernest Hemingway cropped up several times in what was a modestly sized but entertaining entry. The insurance executive-poet broke his hand, in two places, in the course of an unedifying punch-up in Key West (‘Stevens hit me flush on the jaw with his Sunday punch bam like that…’).
Norman Mailer headbutting Gore Vidal backstage at the Dick Cavett talk show also loomed large, but it was a war of words between two female writers that caught the imagination of Sylvia Fairley. She heads the winning line-up below with a verse account of the spat between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy that inspired Nora Ephron’s 2002 play Imaginary Friends.
The victors earn £30 apiece.
Mary McCarthy unleashed the blind rage of Lillian Hellman, whose writing she stated was riddled with lying on every page, and stuck in the past; grossly overrated. Hellman responded with litigation, ‘I’m calling my lawyer, and when I am through you’ll swallow that bullshit; your reputation won’t count for a dollar – it’s war, and I’ll sue! ‘You’re going to pay for this slander, you bitch!Two million or more, or I’m not satisfied, if you’re messing with me, then you gotta be rich!’ – but before it could happen she dropped down and died. ‘I still say her every darn word was a lie,’ said McCarthy. ‘And now all my plans are cut short, that talentless charlatan would go and die, I wanted to see her demolished in court.’ Sylvia Fairley
Competing authors scream and rage, Trade derogations on the page, Breathe innuendo, bile and spite, Or even shed their coats and fight. Was it a case of writer’s block When Hemingway punched Stevens’ clock Or envy of the poet’s scope, His talent for the drop-dead trope? And Norman Mailer – picture this – Gave Gore Vidal a Glasgow kiss, As if to banish pangs of dread By going promptly head to head. Though
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