BooksMay 8, 2023

The greatest literary feuds and gossip of all time… ever

Contributing writer

Most literary gossip does nothing for Hera Lindsay Bird. These rare historical morsels are the exceptions.

There’s nothing better than a good piece of gossip. Sadly, in the literary world, most gossip either falls into one of two categories: boring, or depressing. Blistering correspondences between great men of letters? Boring. Unhappily married poets? Depressing. Who cares who Phillip Larkin cheated on his girlfriend with, besides presumably Phillip Larkin’s girlfriend.

Nasty biographical revelations don’t constitute gossip. We all know David Foster Wallace threw tables. That Dickens, Eliot and Fitzgerald spent staggering amounts of time trying to send their wives to asylums. I don’t want to hear about Virginia Woolf’s horrible polycule, or Anaïs Nin fucking her own estranged father.

Anyway, the purpose of gossip isn’t to depress. It’s to astonish and uplift and edify. In no particular order, then, here are my top ten pieces of literary gossip

Dan Brown’s Friesian love horse

Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown and his wife had an extremely acrimonious divorce, after he cheated on her with her Dutch horse-trainer, giving the horse-trainer a $350,000 Friesian horse named LimiTed Edition as a romantic gift. His wife, an art-historian, sued him, claiming she thought up all the premises for his major literary works.

A Friesian horse not unlike the kind Dan Brown gifted to his wife’s horse trainer (Photo: Supplied)

Ian McEwan heckled by ex-wife at Cheltenham Literary Festival

In 2014, Ian McEwan was heckled at Cheltenham Literary festival by his ex-wife Penny Allen and her new partner, who showed up to his festival event in gags (and some sort of giant prop blunt?) and yelled derisively at him during question time. The heckling seems to be regarding a historic custody dispute between McEwan and Allen, which McEwan won. Allen complains of being legally unable to discuss their custody case to this day (hence the gag), while McEwan has managed to write a not-inconsiderable number of novels about bitter custody disputes and collapsing marriages. Apparently Allen is currently working on publishing her journals from around the time of the custody battle. Very ominous stuff.

Hans Christian Andersen overstays his welcome

I learned about this from a Guardian article – Anderson was a huge fan of Charles Dickens and came to stay with him for five weeks in 1857. After the visit (which appears to have been excruciating for Dickens and relaxing for Andersen) Dickens wrote to a friend that Andersen:

Spoke French like “Peter the Wild Boy”
Complained it was too cold, and there was nobody to shave him
Lay down on the lawn and cried, following negative reviews of his work in the paper
Gathered weird little posies of flowers in the woods
Cut creepy patterns out of paper

My favourite part: after Hans left, Dickens wrote on the guest room mirror “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks — which seemed to the family AGES!”

Timothy Bobbin

One of the reasons literary feuds are almost always boring is because one of the feuding parties is almost always Gore Vidal. But there’s something infinitely delightful about the blistering personal acrimony between P. G. Wodehouse and A. A. Milne. They were friends, before the Second World War, when Wodehouse and his wife were interred in France by the Nazis. Wodehouse was kept in a Paris hotel, where he made a series of satirical broadcasts about life as a detainee.

Though his broadcasts weren’t pro-German, their inevitably lighthearted tone brought criticism from Wodehouse’s contemporaries in Britain, particularly his friend A. A. Milne, who publicly reprimanded Wodehouse, calling him naive and irresponsible. Wodehouse, who had thought people would be sympathetic to his plight as a prisoner, considered this a grave personal betrayal, and later said “Nobody is as anxious as me that Alan Alexander Milne should trip over a loose bootlace and break his bloody neck.”

He then spent the rest of his career throwing in snide references to whimsical children’s authors in his novels, and “Timothy Bobbin” going “hoppity-hoppity-hop,” saying, “When we authors have infant sons, our first thought is to cash in on them.”

Christopher Robin, Winnie the Pooh et al.

From Rodney Has a Relapse: “What it comes to,” said William, “is that he is wantonly laying up a lifetime of shame and misery for the wretched little moppet. In the years to come, when he is playing in the National Amateur, the papers will print photographs of him with captions underneath explaining that he is the Timothy Bobbin of the well-known poems.”

This was as mean as it was prophetic. Milne’s son, Christopher, famously resented his famous father who barely spent any time with him, and his adult life was haunted by references to the Hundred Acre Wood. More details to come in a future article: Children’s authors are all miserable and depressing losers, or at least the good ones are.

Julian Horses

Q: Where do Julian Horses sleep?

A: Julian Barnes.

Usually I can’t get interested in literary affairs. Authors leaving their author spouses for other authors is the stale bread and butter of British literature. But there’s something kind of charming about Julian Barnes’s wife and literary agent Pat Kavanagh temporarily leaving Barnes for Jeanette Winterson, of whom she was also the literary agent. Jeanette Winterson, one of the first female writers to describe herself as a genius since Gertrude Stein, has since married and divorced Susie Orbach.

Extremely dumb and incredibly predictable

Jonathan Safran Foer leaving his wife, the novelist Nicole Krauss, for the already-married Natalie Portman, based on a fatally incorrect belief about unspoken but reciprocated feelings of romantic love, following some sort of pretentious email correspondence, is a staple on any literary gossip list. Also did we all know that Natalie Portman is married to a guy called Benjamin Millepied? Cute.

James Joyce’s wife’s hot farts

I never want to see Hemingway on a literary gossip list, unless he’s being punched in the face by Wallace Stevens, or being used as a human shield by James Joyce. Apparently Joyce would go around carousing and picking fights on the streets of Paris, and then jump behind Hemingway and cry “Hemingway protect me!” Also cute. But the real reason Joyce deserves a place on the list, are for his delightfully tender and horny letters, about his wife’s hot farts. Consider this excerpt:

“I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.”

Joyce’s wife was called Nora Barnacle, which is as good, if not better than Benjamin Millepied. Almost enough to make one consider reading Ulysses.

Everybody vs. Nicholas Sparks

One of the best things I discovered while researching this list, is how universally disliked Nicholas Sparks is. Not only did he try to shut down the LGBTQIA club at his local school, to quote some guy on Reddit:

“A friend of mine is related to Nicholas Sparks and has always talked about what a jerk he is. He shows up during the holidays and talks about himself and how much money he has the entire time. It annoys his kids. I crack up every time my friend talks about him.”

In the past, Sparks has gone on record calling himself a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy, and that his novels are like Greek Tragedies. In the course of my research I discovered that:

Sparks jumped in the shower when his wife began labour with their first child, so he could look fresh for the birth photos.
Most if not all of his books are set in North Carolina.
When asked in a recent interview “What assumptions do you think readers make about you that aren’t true” he said “I would say they might not know that I exercise as much as I do.”
After Sparks’s recent divorce, he is writing a television show about a bestselling author named BEN DIAMOND who must find the strength to love again.

Ayn Rand’s entire biography

Read it and weep.

Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman and Neil Gaiman’s Goodreads account

Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer were briefly living (and being publicly applauded) in New Zealand during the pandemic. They appear to have had several public break ups – the worst of which occurred when Neil Gaiman’s Goodreads account was allegedly hacked – and a book titled “Splitting: Protecting Yourself While Divorcing Someone with Borderline or Narcissistic Personality Disorder” was added to his public “to read” list. This can happen through password hacking OR if you accidentally link your Amazon purchases to your Goodreads account and don’t notice. As soon as Palmer’s fans saw this, they sent her a message, causing her to make a public statement confirming their break-up. Gaiman later claimed his Goodreads account was hacked.

Whatever you believe, it just goes to show that supporting Amazon and Amazon subsidiaries doesn’t pay. Another good reason to support your local bookshop.

Keep going!

Image: Archi Banal

BooksMay 7, 2023

Not just for the fangirls: An innovative new book about Katherine Mansfield

Hannah August

Guest writer

Image: Archi Banal

Hannah August finds an accessible and art-first approach in Claire Harman’s new biography All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything.

Nearly two decades ago, I took an English Honours course at Victoria University that is still taught today. Entitled “Mansfield and Friends”, it looked at the works of New Zealand’s most famous modernist export alongside those of writers she’d been influenced by and those she’d known personally: Oscar Wilde, Anton Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence. Something about the course’s title and its focus on writerly social networks licensed a particular attitude to the figure who tied the course content together.

For several of the young women in the class, Katherine Mansfield was clearly not just an often-overlooked innovator of literary modernist form. She was someone they identified with, someone they felt they knew intimately. They spoke enthusiastically in tutorials about aspects of her life that weren’t particularly relevant to the stories we were examining. They occasionally showed up wearing her signature coloured stockings. They called her “Katherine”, or, sometimes – with no hint of embarrassment – “Kathy”.

Katherine Mansfield’s signature coloured stockings. (Photo: Stephen A’Court for Katherine Mansfield House & Garden exhibition)

It’s not hard to see why Katherine Mansfield is a talismanic figure for certain bright, young, female-identifying Pākehā, convinced that they can only become the best versions of themselves if they move to Europe – only to discover that, once there, they can’t quite shake a nostalgia for the country they left behind. (For those unfamiliar with the details of Mansfield’s life, that’s a very condensed summary of its trajectory.) But while Mansfield might have enjoyed her transformation into a celebrity, she’d have hated to see it happen at the expense of careful critical attention paid to her writing.

Like Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath – two other women writers whose work is often overshadowed by the details of their lives – Katherine Mansfield took her craft extremely seriously. To fixate on her approach to living and to read the writer’s work through the lens of her sexual relationships, her nationality, her class, is to belittle her professional achievements. Yes, writers write what they know, but they also use their skill and their imagination to turn what they know into something new.

Thank goodness, then, for the approach taken by Claire Harman in her highly readable new book, All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything, published to commemorate 100 years since Mansfield’s death. Herself a short-story-writer and poet, Harman’s method is to examine Mansfield’s short stories alongside key stages of her life, but – in each of ten chapters focused on an individual story – to place the literary analysis before the biographical account, such that (guided by chapter sub-headings) we read about “The Story” before we read about “The Life”. In this way, the thing that takes precedence is Mansfield’s extraordinary inventiveness and skill as a short-story writer, unpacked via Harman’s perceptive and accessible close analysis.

If you’re someone who’s read Katherine Mansfield’s stories and struggled to put your finger on what, exactly, makes those bite-size slices of prose stick in the mind – or if you’ve avoided Mansfield entirely and are curious about what’s behind all the centenary fuss – Harman’s commentaries illuminate just what she is doing and why it was so revolutionary. Choosing stories written at different stages of her short life (Mansfield died from tuberculosis aged 34) allows Harman to show how insatiably experimental she was, how she eschewed narratives that were “plotty” in favour of “a different sort of experience, free from the burden of cause-and-effect”.

This is, of course, a hallmark of literary modernism, but Harman demonstrates how Mansfield’s writing refuses neat classification, noting that in a story such as ‘Je ne parle pas français’, the effect of the unreliable first-person narrator creates the feeling of “Mansfield speeding right past modernism and into the postmodern”. Nor is her modernism entirely “literary”. Harman shows, for instance, how a story such as ‘Prelude’ draws inspiration from editing techniques and storytelling devices used in a relatively new artistic medium, that of film, while the pacing of a late story, ‘The Fly’, mimics the tempo of a musical composition.

If these observations sound drily academic, they’re not – Harman excels at bringing unfamiliar stories alive, enticing the reader to encounter them on their own terms, while also putting her finger on just what a more famous story does to justify its fame. Take, for instance, this apt summation of ‘The Garden Party’: “It’s as if the sound of the band and cheerful animation around the party casts a spell on the reader which the reader willingly stays under, even though nudged to do otherwise; an effect of deep, structuralised irony.” In noting that “the story both has its cake and eats it”, Harman nods to the fancy cream puffs that are a centrepiece of the catering in this story in which rich people party while a poor man lies dead. It is the type of criticism that is enjoyable to read for its own sake, as well as astutely pinpointing the reasons for the stories’ success.

‘The Garden Party’ is one of Mansfield’s New Zealand stories, set in a clearly recognisable Thorndon – the party itself takes place at a house modelled on 133 Tinakori Road, one of the Wellington homes in which Kathleen Beauchamp (later Katherine Mansfield) grew up. Do we need to know this to better understand the story? Probably not. Do we need to know it to better understand the person who wrote the story? Possibly.

Having emigrated permanently to Britain at the age of nineteen, where she struggled to shake off the feeling of being a “little colonial”, Mansfield would have felt deeply ambivalent about her home country’s subsequent determination to describe her as a “New Zealand writer”. The British Harman is freed from the need to claim Mansfield as such. Instead, in the parts of the book focused on “The Life”, she captures the intensity with which the erstwhile New Zealander hurled herself at a life that was in opposition to the one she felt able to have in the country she’d been born in.

If you don’t know anything about the details of Katherine Mansfield’s life, prepare to be enthralled by her sexual escapades, her reinventions of self, her catty comments, her tragic premature death. If you know all these things already (there are several other biographies), appreciate instead the way Harman draws on Mansfield’s notebooks and correspondence to show how forcefully committed she was to her writing career, determined to continue working as she battled the debilitating symptoms of both gonorrhoea and tuberculosis. If every biography recasts its subject in a new light, the light shone on this version of Mansfield reveals both her disability and her queerness, describing her early affairs with women with a “so what?” frankness that feels possible only in 2023.

Throughout, the portrait Harman constructs of Mansfield – passionate, self-involved, deeply committed to art – feels as convincing and grounded in evidence as her literary analysis. Only once does she overreach, speculating about what might be behind an odd event towards the end of Mansfield’s life, in which she allowed herself to be blackmailed by a former lover who demanded a large sum of money in return for some incriminating letters Mansfield had sent him. Imagining the letters to have contained “something sexual”, Harman muses: “Could her knowledge of the demi-monde have been more than that of an observer[?]”, co-opting a character from one of Mansfield’s stories to support her supposition. It is a moment where the divide between artist and work should have been maintained, and a mystery retained rather than stabbed at in the dark.

Elsewhere, All Sorts of Lives illuminates the many facets of Katherine Mansfield and her writing in ways that are rewarding and engaging for all sorts of readers – not just the stockinged fangirls.

All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything by Claire Harman (Penguin, $37) is available to purchase from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.