The Literary Feud

In June 1858 a young journalist named Edmund Yates, with a deadline looming, scribbled a profile of W. M. Thackeray for the London magazine Town Talk. Thackeray’s “bearing,” according to Yates, is “cold and uninviting, his style of conversation either openly cynical or affectedly goodnatured and benevolent.” As for Thackeray’s novels and essays, “there is a want of heart in all he writes, which is not to be balanced by the most brilliant sarcasm and the most perfect knowledge of the workings of the human heart.” Thackeray, who frequently practiced the same brand of sneering portraiture, took offense at what he considered an ungentlemanly attack by a fellow Garrick Club member, and he sternly rebuked the upstart Yates. The Garrick was a place to dine and converse with other writers and men about town. One didn’t, Thackeray harrumphed, exploit the comaraderie of the club to peddle slanderous gossip. Yates fired back a haughty unyielding reply. The continuing skirmish might have amounted to a dispute between a literary nobody and the famous author of Vanity Fair, except that Yates turned for help to an older friend who was himself beset by personal difficulties. The friend was Charles Dickens.

In the course of the “Yates affair” or the “Garrick Club affair,” Thackeray petitioned for Yates’s expulsion from the Garrick Club, while Dickens took his young protégé’s part and offered to mediate between the two writers. Thackeray rebuffed him. When a general meeting of the club upheld Thackeray’s demand, Yates began assembling a legal team, but the suit proved too expensive to pursue. The relationship between Dickens and Thackeray, never the warmest, was completely sundered by the protracted wrangling. Dickens probably acted under the strain of his disintegrating marriage; for in addition to thinking Yates had been wronged, Dickens believed Thackeray had stoked rumors about himself and the actress Ellen Ternan. For Thackeray the quarrel was merely triggered by Yates: “I am hitting the man behind him,” he explained to a friend.

The Yates affair bore all the identifying marks of that biographer’s feast and playground—the literary feud. Prior to Yates’s unfortunate squib, Dickens and Thackeray were low-key, halfhearted rivals. Thackeray did most of the scorekeeping, while Dickens, comfortable with his celebrity and sales, stood aloof. Yates ignited any hard feelings between the two novelists into something more serious—a contest of wills fueled by enmity and pride. No longer content with merely competing, they devoted themselves to wounding each other.

This active hostility distinguishes the literary feud not only from the literary rivalry but also from the sad, spiritless, all-too-common occurrence known as falling out. Thackeray and Dickens had a feud. P. G. Wodehouse and A. A. Milne had a falling out (after Milne criticized Wodehouse’s radio broadcasts from Nazi Germany). Saul Bellow fell out with Alfred Kazin after Kazin gave Mr. Sammler’s Planet a bad review. Ernest Hemingway fell out with Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, and practically everyone else he ever knew. None of these misunderstandings reached the outsized proportions and sustained malice of the full-blown literary feud.

The literary feud requires a public forum, because a fight can’t really be a feud unless the whole world is watching. Town Talk, in which Yates thumbed his nose at Thackeray, was a tiny out-of-the-way periodical, but in the noisy world of London “penny papers” it added its piping voice. Eventually anyone the magazine tweaked would hear about it, and a crowd of friends, enemies, and other onlookers would assemble. An insult appearing in print, after all, is intrinsically important to literary people. Disparage someone at a party, and a certain circle knows about it. Commit the same indiscretion in print—any form of print—and you’ve provoked, potentially at least, a far wider, more enduring controversy. You have instigated a feud.

Once an author has been publicly maligned, the literary feud tends to escalate by means of a more public retaliation. Thackeray and Dickens used the Garrick Club as their arena, thus attracting to the brouhaha the overlapping memberships...