Writing for The Telegraph days after Tom Wolfe died, Jake Kerridge recalls a feud between Wolfe and writers who dared criticize him in public reviews—among them, John Updike.
Kerridge sides with Updike and the others. “There are many reasons to mourn Wolfe, who has died aged 88. I can’t say that the thought that he won’t write any more novels is one of them,” admits Kerridge, who reviewed Wolfe’s last “bloated” novel, Back to Blood.
As for the feud with Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving, which Kerridge says was “possibly more entertaining than anything the four of them actually published in the 1990s,”
“It began when Wolfe, who had made his name as a brilliant journalist, wrote an essay condemning modern American novelists for navel-gazing when they should be out researching and reporting on modern America.
“Norman Mailer then denounced Wolfe as a show-off, reserving his strongest contempt for Wolfe’s flamboyant dress sense,” and Wolfe “declared war, dismissing Updike (a year younger than himself) and Mailer as ‘these two old piles of bones.'”
Below is a link to the entire article, photo by The Telegraph staff:
“When writers knew how to fight: Tom Wolfe and the lost art of the literary feud”
I read thoroughly and admired the 3 dueling authors: Wolfe, Mailer, Irving. I will say that I loved Mailer, especially, and then Irving for obviously differing literary reasons, and Wolfe never so much although I worked as a film tech in 1983 on “The Right Stuff”, a very good movie based on Wolfe’s book. Mailer was meat, raw and bloody, and I was especially infested with his anti-Vietnam war novels (and his hilarious, brutally obscene humor), and was so charged I left for Canada and a 5-year stay in opposition to the lies American presidents made for our reasons to be there. Irving was the novelist I always and continue to aspire. His look at the world with irony but compassion and his apparent kindship with best human behaviors and worthy aspirations. Wolfe was a good and clever jokester, entertaining to read and absorb but in the end a pompous and hollow journalist. Hey, I love all good writers and wanted to be one myself.