Sharpened pens – Alison Healy on the cattier side of writers

How do you react when a friend has some success at work? Do you identify with the writer Gore Vidal who admitted that every time a friend succeeded, a little part of him died inside? Do you plaster on a smile when a friend gets good news and ignore the murderous jealous rage that furiously swirls around your gut? Perhaps you wonder why your friend is merrily swinging the world by the tail when you are fishing your cleanest dirty shirt from the laundry basket because you forgot to do the washing. After all, you gave him your Irish homework all through secondary school so how is he the successful one?
Always a great man for the bon mot, Oscar Wilde once said that anybody could sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, “but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success”. It requires such a fine nature that most people do not know the word that describes taking pleasure in another’s happiness. It’s confelicity, in case you are wondering.
The professional contrarian Morrissey is an admirer of Oscar Wilde so perhaps that informs the singer’s approach to successful friends. After his old friend Simon Topping appeared on the cover of music newspaper NME, he dramatically proclaimed: “I died a thousand deaths of sorrow and lay down in the woods to die”.
Morrissey changed his mind about staging a sorrowful death in the woods and instead went on to release a song entitled We Hate it When our Friends Become Successful. Ironically, NME declared it to be the singer’s least successful single and said it sounded like “five men bashing around in the darkness in search of a tune”.
What is it about creative people that makes them so jealous of the success of others? Have you ever heard of a plumber announcing his plan to lay down in the woods to die because another plumber got the job of installing a bathroom in the house around the corner? I’ve never come across a farmer who threatened to shut down his milking parlour because a neighbour’s Holstein Friesian had triumphed in the Champion Dairy Cow of the Year competition.
Writers in particular seem to relish eviscerating their fellow artists whenever they get a chance. Just look at Mark Twain who was always taking swipes at Jane Austen’s success. “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin bone,” he fantasised.
Digging up dead writers who annoy you seems to have been a trend back then. George Bernard Shaw was so irritated by Shakespeare that he wrote “it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him”.
Virginia Woolf was a contemporary of James Joyce so she had no need to dig up his grave but she did describe Ulysses as “an illiterate, underbred book”. She told a writer friend she had never read such tosh. “As for the first two chapters, we will let them pass, but the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth – merely the scratchings of pimples on the body of the boot-boy at Claridge’s,” she wrote. Who’s afraid of Virigina Woolf? Anyone on the receiving end of her withering book reviews.
Nor did DH Lawrence have much time for poor Joyce. Upon reading extracts of his most famous book, Lawrence wrote: “This Ulysses muck is more disgusting than Casanova” and said the ending was “the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written”. And this from the man who scandalised everyone with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Elsewhere, he dismissed Joyce’s writing as: “Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness”.
But back to Gore Vidal and his hatred of his friends’ success. He hated the success of his enemies too and cradled these jealous rivalries more tenderly than you’d nurse a newborn baby.
Truman Capote particularly seemed to rile him and Vidal once said he mistook the Breakfast at Tiffany’s author for a colourful ottoman.
“When I sat down on it, it squealed. It was Truman,” he declared. Capote was nothing more than “a Republican housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices” he added, for good measure.
Even Capote’s death wasn’t enough to end the rivalry, with Vidal describing it as a wise career move. If you think that such an impressive ability to hold a grudge suggests he had some Irish blood, then you would be correct. His mother’s ancestors were the Gores, an Anglo-Irish family who moved to the US from Donegal.
That explains everything.