Words a weapon of choice

From behind the sandbags, TIM WATKIN watches the exchange of shots in a time-honoured tradition of New Zealand literary vendettas, a feud which spans generations


If only author Charlotte Grimshaw had reviewed Maurice Gee's The Scornful Moon as planned. Unfortunately, by the time she replied to the phone call from Listener arts and books editor Steve Braunias, the Gee commission had gone.

Instead, Braunias asked her to review Dame Fiona Kidman's latest novel, Songs from the Violet Cafe. And the trouble began.

Since Grimshaw's review ran in the Listener on November 29, the magazine's letters pages have played host to claims, recriminations and denials otherwise known as a literary feud. Mild words such as "sentimentality" and "lack of care" have evolved into "conflict of interest", "fabrication" and "lost the plot".

Literary feuds are a proud tradition. At least, they are a tradition full of pride; sometimes witty, sometimes tragic, and almost always entertaining from the sidelines. They are a bloodless blood sport; often ruthless in a way only arguments over reputation and ego can be.

New Zealand has a rich legacy of such squabbles - those between Allen Curnow and James K. Baxter, and Vincent O'Sullivan and C. K. Stead, a player again here, are perhaps the best known. There is a long history of stoushes between intellectual Auckland and romantic Wellington.

Victoria University English professor Bill Manhire says, "You could write much of New Zealand's literary history in terms of feuds".

Time to draft another chapter. It opens, dear reader, with Grimshaw's review of Songs in the Listener. While hardly a hatchet job, it was, Grimshaw says, "fairly negative". The book has been mostly well received by reviewers - the Herald's included - but Grimshaw didn't like what she saw as sentimentality, sloppiness and unlikely coincidences in the book. She concluded: "The story is conjured with eagerness, with energy. But wouldn't we be better able to believe in it if its tone were more rigorous and authentic, its humanity more closely observed?"

So far, so bad review. But Kidman saw the shadow of something more behind Grimshaw's words - she saw an argument reaching back a generation and 13 years.

In 1990, Kidman and her friend, poet Lauris Edmond, came to verbal blows with author C. K. Stead over the decision by the Labour Government of the day to buy a residence for New Zealand writers in Bloomsbury, London.

Kidman had gone to the Arts Minister, Michael Bassett, the year before with the idea of buying some land on an island in Ohiwa Harbour, near Whakatane, as a writers' retreat. Bassett, interested, began consulting writers. "But the general consensus," he recalled this week, "was that writers would set more store in having something that was offshore where they could escape for a while".

The property search moved to Sydney and London, with Stead agreeing to investigate the London option during a visit there. Bassett says most of the writers he spoke with preferred London, but divisions soon appeared. Led by Kidman and Edmond, 26 authors wrote an open letter opposing the purchase, accusing the Government of "cultural cringe". "I thought we had got Mother England out of our system," Kidman said at the time.

When National became Government that year, they used the furore as an excuse to sell the flat. Stead was furious. Without naming Kidman, he pointedly told the Herald "individual egos and competitiveness and envy got in the way of the collective good of the New Zealand writing community". However, neither Kidman nor Edmond were given right of reply in that story, leading to a Press Council complaint against the Herald that was finally upheld - without penalty, however - in September 1991.

A dragged-out, often personal, spat. But what has Grimshaw, 37 years old and winner of the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Writer's Fellowship in 2000, got to do with it?

She's Stead's daughter. And, claims Kidman, the instrument of his revenge.

"Your journal seems to be maintaining its impeccable record in settling scores for C. K. Stead," she wrote to the Listener following the review. "Instead of reasonable comment, the book columns appear largely devoted to the old feuds of one family, and its acolyte."

As evidence of bias she quoted a letter Grimshaw wrote to Edmond after the Bloomsbury squabble, in which she accused the late poet "of having, deep down, some shitty girlish malice".

Kidman concluded: "One can only suppose that Stead and Ms Grimshaw were waiting impatiently in the wings."

Kidman said this week her complaint must be seen in the light of legal action she took against the Listener following an analysis of her career in the magazine in October 2002, titled 'All men are appalling etc'.

"It was an extraordinary personal attack on me by somebody I didn't know and I sought legal advice for several defamatory statements made about me and my family," said Kidman.

The Listener admitted some fault, printed a retraction and paid legal costs.

Given that settlement, Kidman finds it "extraordinary" that a year later the magazine would publish "a pretty unpleasant review ... by somebody who might perhaps have been perceived to have had some difficult dealings with me in the past."

"If I was the literary editor of the Listener ... the sane thing would surely not be to go - apparently - to find somebody who could beat me up again."

As Stead's daughter, she says Grimshaw had a clear conflict of interest and should have declined the review. For the Listener's part, she says many writer friends are concerned it seems to be seeking critical reviews for the sake of being critical.

Braunias replied to Kidman's letter in print, writing: " ... Kidman seems to assume I am familiar with the history of the grindings of axes in New Zealand literature. I am not."

The only advice he gives reviewers, he wrote, is "be honest".

Listener editor Finlay Macdonald also denies the review was informed by malice. "It doesn't read that way at all," he says.

"Anybody who has run a weekly magazine knows that running agendas is completely counter-productive. You cannot waste your time fighting feuds."

Grimshaw is floored by the fuss.

"It's so implausible what she's saying, that there's a past between us, because there is no past," she says. "There's no conflict of interest because I've had no contact with her. I've been trying to remember if I've ever met her. I may have, but only as a child.

"To pretend that there's some ongoing feud is just fabrication. When I set out to write the review I had no preconceived ideas; even about her writing."

Of the 1990 letter, she says: "I didn't write it to Fiona Kidman, I wrote it to Lauris Edmond. So that wasn't even on my mind."

Stead has stayed out of the argument until now - because "it's so manifestly absurd". But this week he defended his daughter saying, "She just happened to not like the novel".

Alongside the Bloomsbury row, Kidman may have been hurt by critical pieces he's written since Edmond's death saying "her reputation was exaggerated beyond her worth", he added.

"Fiona's the sort of person who reacts very emotionally to things, who doesn't have a clear, purposeful vision of the consequences of what she does. The current nonsense is just another example of Fiona losing the plot," he says. "To invent a reason why somebody didn't like a novel, apart from the reason that they just didn't like it, is silly."

Kidman says Grimshaw has the right to her opinion, but "enough is enough". "People who know me know that I'm not artistically petty and these must be exceptional circumstances for me to respond in this way."

Grimshaw: "The only thing I can do is refer people back to the review. As far as I'm concerned it's completely fair."

Fair or not, Grimshaw might now come to the same conclusion as columnist and author Gordon McLauchlan: "It's a dangerous pastime, reviewing."

"What's always amazed me is the hyper-sensitivity of writers and how unkind they are to each other. Otherwise mature, intelligent, thoughtful people behave like children," says the 2004 president of honour of the New Zealand Society of Authors and host of National Radio's Book Club.

He believes the tradition of literary feuds is based on two pillars of the writer's life: solitude and insecurity.

Most jobs - and even arts such as music - require teamwork. "But writers spend lots and lots and lots of their time in solitude, beavering away in quiet rooms. And they never really know how good they are."

Worse, their work never stays in those quiet rooms. Having exposed themselves for the sake of their art, they must then endure public debate over their sometimes intensely personal stories. Defensiveness often follows, which in turn can lead to extreme fragility.

Take that lifestyle and toss in artistic temperaments, access to the public via media or their own works, and sizeable egos (George Orwell once said he only wrote out of sheer egotism). It's fertile ground for feuds.

And, says historian and writer Michael King, "because writers have such facility with words, when they want to be hurtful and cruel, they can do it like nobody else".

Consider some of the more famous literary feuds of the 20th century, between some of its greatest writers. Tom Wolfe has had an ongoing feud with Norman Mailer and John Updike, who he's called "two piles of bones". Mailer, in turn, has said reading a Wolfe novel is like "making love to a 300-pound woman. Once she gets on top it's all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated".

In Britain, the most famous feud is between Martin Amis and, well, just about everybody. He feuded with his father, Kingsley, with close friends Christopher Hitchens and Julian Barnes, and last year with Tibor Fischer, who said Amis' Yellow Dog was "like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating".

Barnes was furious with Amis when he ditched his agent, Pat Kavanagh, who was also Barnes' wife. In a letter to Amis he ended their friendship with two words: "The words consist of seven letters. Three of them are fs."

The feuds where friends fall out seem the most tragic. Paul Theroux started a famous feud with mentor V.S. Naipaul when he opened a rare book catalogue to see one of his first editions, given as a gift to Naipaul, on sale for £1500.

Others, though, are entertaining for the quality of the insults. Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman's feud led McCarthy to say of her rival, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."

Words are usually the weapon of choice, but fists have left their mark. Gore Vidal once wrote of Mailer that "no one reads him, they hear of him". When Mailer next saw Vidal, at a party, he knocked him to the ground. Still on the floor, Vidal said, "Words fail Norman Mailer yet again".

New Zealand authors' rows seem mere ankle-kicking by comparison, but they're intensified by the fact that the writing community and the retail market are so small. Writing is a precarious, select business here, which veers some towards preciousness. In his column this week Braunias, without referring to the present debate, takes a swipe at "the high seriousness of how to approach New Zealand literature - fragile, be careful, and do please be kind".

Another factor in New Zealand is that the number of reviewing publications is also small.

"Say you have a novel published in Britain and you get a bad review in The Spectator," says Stead, "well, you look at the Sunday Times, The Observer, there's a whole range of things, so one review anywhere is not going to carry huge weight. But when there are only a few reviews, as in New Zealand, then a review in the Listener probably makes you very anxious."

"It's not just about judgment," says Fergus Barrowman, editor of literary magazine Sport and publisher of the Victoria University Press, "it's about money, having a viable income and the opportunity to do further work."

The business of publishing is one reason why some critics say, with regret, that they just don't make literary feuds like they used to. Authors are too busy begging to get on Oprah to properly critique each other and the state of the literature around them.

Walter Kirn, reviewer for New York and Time magazines, has said "art flourishes in the kind of uproar that was going on in the 50s and 60s. If you hear a noise from a room you know that something is going on ... Most children could sleep through the amount of noise being generated now."

Perhaps the Kidman-Grimshaw-Stead spat might wake a few. It's not over yet. Grimshaw, indignant at the conflict of interest allegations, has another letter in this weekend's issue.

Both Kidman and Grimshaw say they wish the war of words was over. Perhaps they would do well to take the advice Naipaul offered Theroux the only time they've met since their feud began. The pair bumped into each other in London and Theroux challenged Naipaul over his "betrayal". Naipaul replied, "Take it on the chin, dear fellow, and move on".