From Lord Byron to Truman Capote: Author Rivalries Across Time

Byron and Keats are now associated with the early 19^th-century cultural movement known as Romanticism, but their writing differed both in terms of style and influence.  As Keats himself wrote to his brother, George, in September 1819: “There is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees—I describe what I imagine,” before tellingly adding, “Mine is the hardest task.”

Keats was influenced by the innovative poets of his own era, men like Coleridge and Wordsworth, who were inspired by the beauty of the natural world and wrote lyrically of love and the power of the imagination. In contrast, Byron was seven years older than Keats and his work owed more to the traditional classical influences of early 18^th-century authors. Like his literary hero, Alexander Pope, Byron displayed a penchant for dark satire and a preoccupation with the more unsavory aspects of human nature.

The two men’s backgrounds were distinctly different too. The flamboyant Byron came from an aristocratic family, enjoying all the privileges that provided in terms of a fine education (Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge) and access to the highest echelons of society. Keats, however, was the son of a London livery stable manager and left school at the age of 14 to become a surgeon’s apprentice. He faced an uphill struggle to gain recognition for his poetry, let alone reap any financial rewards from it. 

As a result, Keats appears to have been envious of his older rival and the remark to his brother, George, on their poetic differences was not the only occasion on which he referenced Byron in family correspondence. On hearing that he had been described as “quite the little poet,” Keats wrote home: “Now this is quite abominable… You see what it is to be under six foot and not a lord.” The diminutive Keats was notoriously sensitive about his height and here displays not only an underlying resentment towards Byron’s class privileges but even an envy of his rival’s more impressive physical stature. 

In turn, for all his perceived superiority, Byron’s correspondence also reveals occasional discontent towards any critical acclaim awarded to his literary rival, particularly in the influential periodical, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. The Scottish publication had proven an early and important champion of Byron’s poetry but, from around 1818 onwards, became increasingly critical of the effects of the writer’s hedonistic lifestyle upon the quality of his writing. 

Upon hearing, in 1820, of a favorable review for Keats’ poetry, Byron wrote to his friend, John Murray: “Of the praises of that little dirty blackguard KEATES in the Edinburgh… Why don’t they review and praise ‘Solomon’s Guide to Health’ it is better sense—and as much poetry as Johnny Keates.”

Cut down in his prime by tuberculosis, Keats died in Rome, in February 1821, at the age of just 25. His death was rumored to have been hastened by a harsh critical review of his last published work, Endymion, which prompted a typically sardonic response from Byron. “Is it true… that poor John Keats died at Rome of the Quarterly Review?”, he wrote to John Murray. “I am very sorry for it, though I think he took the wrong line as a poet, and was spoilt by Cockneyfying and Suburbing.”

By this date Byron had long fled England for the continent because of mounting debts and scandalous rumors regarding the breakdown of his short-lived marriage to Annabella Milbanke. He never returned to his homeland and, aged 36, died just three years after his bitter rival. 

The long-running feud between these two undisputed giants of 20^th-century American literature dated from the late 1940s when both men first began to make their mark on the cultural scene. 

As the up-and-coming authors battled for media attention and critical recognition, a 1947 Life Magazine feature on promising young writers proved a particular flashpoint. Even though he was yet to publish his first novel, Capote was given much more prominence than Vidal, including a large photo that took up nearly half a page.

The two men moved in the same social circle in New York and are reported to have clashed publicly soon afterwards whilst attending a soirée at the apartment of playwright and mutual friend, Tennessee Williams. Vidal accused his rival of lifting his plots from the works of Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, who, like Capote, had been raised in the Deep South. Capote reportedly responded by suggesting Vidal got all his plots out of the Daily News.

Their antagonism towards each other soon attracted the attention of the gossip columnists. “There’s a feud between the two boy genius authors, Truman Capote, 23, and Gore Vidal,” reported Newsday in March 1949. “Capote flew into a rage when he saw the ad for Vidal’s new book, saying Vidal’s 23. ‘Why,’ frothed Capote, ‘he’s 24 if he’s a day!’”

What started out as a relatively minor spat eventually escalated into a notoriously long-running court case. By the mid-1970s, Capote was already struggling with the alcohol and drug addiction problems that would eventually lead to his premature death. In a 1975 interview with Playgirl, he alleged that Vidal had once been thrown out of the White House during the Kennedy administration for “drunk and obnoxious” behavior after insulting the President’s mother. In response, Vidal announced his intention to sue Capote for libel. 

The case dragged on for years and was only finally resolved when Capote’s former close friend, Lee Radziwill, refused to testify on his behalf. As Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister, her testimony would have proved crucial. Without it, Capote had no chance of winning and, in late 1983, he finally admitted defeat and issued a formal written apology to Vidal.

Capote died less than a year later, in August 1984, a month before his 60^th birthday. Upon hearing the news of his death, Vidal is reported to have described it as a “wise career move.” 

English author Arnold Bennett was once among the country’s bestselling fiction writers, with most of his 34 novels set in the industrial heartlands of the Midlands where he was born and raised. In a career lasting over three decades, he was also an accomplished freelance journalist including several bestselling self-help books to his name.

52-year-old Bennett was at the height of his commercial success when he first met fellow novelist, Virginia Woolf, at a 1919 dinner party. The 37-year-old Woolf’s most famous novels were yet to come, but she was already a prominent figure in the Bloomsbury set. Taking its name from the fashionable London suburb where they lived, this influential early 20^th-century movement of writers, artists and intellectuals aimed to modernize the cultural landscape. Bennett’s novels were grounded in working-class realism, whereas Woolf’s literary characters were wont to express their feelings in long internal monologues, a groundbreaking technique that is now known as stream-of-consciousness. 

Such were their social and cultural differences, then, that perhaps inevitably the two authors are reported to have barely acknowledged each other at that first meeting. Yet there was little indication of the bitter war of words that came next. 

In late 1922, Woolf published Jacob’s Room, her third and most experimental novel to date. Bennett reviewed the book for Cassell’s Weekly, one of the era’s most respected literary journals, and did not hold back in his criticism of the younger author, particularly highlighting her inability to create memorable characters that “will survive in the mind.”

Woolf responded by publishing an essay entitled Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. “Mr. Bennett says that it is only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance of surviving,” she wrote. “But, I ask myself, what is reality? And who are the judges of reality?” She went on to contrast her own writing with that of the—in her view—outdated novelists of the Edwardian era, like Bennett, famously declaring: “In or about December 1910 human character changed.”

Undaunted, Bennett continued his mainly unflattering reviews of Woolf’s work. “Mrs. Woolf (in my opinion) told us ten thousand things about Mrs. Dalloway, but did not show us Mrs. Dalloway,” he wrote of the title character of his rival’s now famous 1925 novel. He did, however, later reluctantly concede that Woolf was “the queen of the highbrows; and I am a lowbrow.” 

Only following Bennett’s death from typhoid fever in March 1931 did Woolf reveal a sneaking admiration for her literary nemesis. She wrote in her diary: “Queer how one regrets the dispersal of anybody who seemed—as I say—genuine; who had direct contact for life—for he abused me, and yet I rather wished him to go on abusing me; and me abusing him.”

When Jean Lorrain wrote an unflattering review of Marcel Proust’s Pleasure and Days in 1897, he surely could not have imagined that his fellow French author would literally throw down the gauntlet and challenge him to a duel, but that was exactly what happened. This collection of short stories was admittedly Proust’s earliest published work, but his extreme reaction to Lorrain’s negative review was motivated by far more than sensitivity about his first book. 

Although France was one of the first countries to decriminalize homosexuality (with the introduction of the Penal Code during the French Revolution), it was still widely regarded as immoral a century or so later. Both Lorrain and Proust were involved in same-sex relationships. However, whereas the former was openly gay, Proust preferred to keep his personal life out of the public eye. 

Born Paul Duval, Lorrain was a leading figure in the Decadent Movement, a groundbreaking group of writers and artists who rejected the traditional morality and materialism of mainstream society in favor of a more sensual and unconventional lifestyle. By the time of his now infamous review, he had published several novels and poetry collections, so, for all Proust’s later success, Lorrain was then the more established writer.

Lorrain criticized Pleasure and Days for its “elegiac spinelessness” and “vain, inane flirtations,” along with its “pretentious style,” but he didn’t stop there. He then proceeded to write about Proust’s private life, hinting of a relationship with Lucien Daudet, the 18-year-old son of celebrated French author Alphonse Daudet, and suggesting humorously that the elder Daudet might be persuaded to write the preface to Proust’s next book. Such was Proust’s fury at this outrageous violation of his personal privacy that he challenged Lorrain to a duel.

The conditions were set by a representative, or “second,” chosen by each man. The duel was to take place three days later, on February 5, 1897, in the Foret de Meudon, a location close to Paris long associated with such contests. The weapons of choice would be pistols, to be shot at a distance of 25 paces.

According to a close friend, Proust displayed an impressive “coolness and firmness” on the run-up to the duel and, on the day, shot first, hitting the ground close to Lorrain’s feet. His opponent, in turn, then fired, thankfully wide of the mark, so that both men escaped unharmed. Proust, though, claimed a symbolic victory and, as the incident was widely reported in the French newspapers, believed that his honor had been restored.

Their relationship thereafter, unsurprisingly, remained hostile until Lorrain’s death nine years later. Neither his rival’s unfavorable review, nor the ensuing duel, did much harm to Prost’s future literary career. Now regarded as one of the 20^th-century’s most influential novelists, he would go on to publish the critically acclaimed Remembrance of Things Past some two decades later.