Writers as Fighters By Jeet Heer National Post (July 29, 2004) Book reviewing can sometimes be a dangerous profession, as Dale Peck recently discovered. In 2000, Peck panned Stanley Crouch’s novel Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome in the New Republic. “Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome is a terrible novel, badly conceived, badly executed, and put forward in bad faith; reviewing it is like shooting fish in a barrel,” Peck sniffed. Two weeks ago, Crouch went to Tartine, a Manhattan restaurant, where he saw Peck eating lunch. The novelist went up to the reviewer, and after a brief introduction, slapped him. Because Peck’s harsh reviews have offended many writers, Crouch has become a hero in literary New York. As word of the incident spread, Crouch has received numerous congratulatory phone calls. "You bitch-slapped Dale Peck?” former New Yorker editor Tina Brown asked Crouch, with a mixture of incredulity and admiration. Stereotypically, a writer is a sensitive and fragile soul who spends many hours every day struggling to find the words and forge the syntax that will make a sentence sing. Yet, even among highly literate authors, there is a tradition of the writer as fighter, equally adept at throwing punches and making metaphors. In an interview with the New Yorker, Crouch situated himself within this tradition, alluding to the famous brawls of Norman Mailer. "I have a kind of Mailer-esque reaction to the way some people view writers," Crouch said. "I want them to know that just because I write doesn't mean I can't also fight." Mailer himself crafted his persona in imitation of Ernest Hemingway, the most macho of all the great American novelists. To trace the genealogy of literary pugilism, we just have to consider the line of descent from Hemingway to Mailer to Crouch. In 1933, Max Eastman wrote a scathing review of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon for the New Republic, which even back then was the favorite home of literary hit-men. Indulging in amateur psychoanalysis, Eastman argued that Hemingway was a fake he-man, trying to win applause for his tough deeds in order to hide an insecure masculinity. “But some circumstance seems to have laid upon Hemingway a continual sense of the obligation to put forth evidence of red-blooded masculinity,” Eastman argued. “This trait of his character has … begotten a veritable school of fiction-writers – a literary style, you might say, of wearing false hair on his chest.’ Hemingway was infuriated by this review and wrote a blistering letter to Maxwell Perkins, an editor he shared with Eastman. “Then they pay Eastman, who knows nothing about it, to say I write sentimental nonsense,” Hemingway complained. “You see what they can’t get over is (1) that I am a man (2) that I can beat the shit out of any of them (3) that I can write.” Four years later while visiting Perkins in New York, Hemingway got a chance to prove the manliness that Eastman had questioned. Eastman was also in the offices of their common publisher, Scribners. At first, Hemingway was pleasant with his critic. They both unbuttoned their shirts to compare their respective chest hairs. Unfortunately, Hemingway then saw a copy of a book that reprinted Eastman’s offending review. “What do you mean accusing me of impotence?” the novelist asked, before taking the book and slamming it against Eastman’s face. After a farcical scuffle, the two feuding writers were separated. (The same year Hemingway also punched up the poet Wallace Stevens, who had the temerity to suggest that the novelist was “not a man”). When Norman Mailer grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, he idolized Hemingway. In due course, Mailer was able to replicate the pugnacious career of his hero, getting into many dust-ups, both literary and physical. By the early 1970s, he had made a particular enemy of his fellow novelist Gore Vidal. The two men quarreled over sexual politics. In many books and essays, Mailer had cast himself as an unorthodox defender of traditional sexual norms by sharply criticizing feminism, gay rights and even the use of birth control. For Vidal, a witty champion of sexual liberation, Mailer had become a retrogressive joke. “The Patriarchalists have been conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons, at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated and killed.” Vidal wrote in New York Review of Books in 1971. “There has been from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression.” Mailer was particularly incensed by the last jibe, which linked him to a mad killer. Mailer took his feud to a television audience later in 1971, when Vidal was scheduled to appear on the Dick Cavett Show. Mailer pushed Cavett to let him appear on the same program. “By the time of the show, I was explosive,” Mailer would later recall. “I had been drinking for a few hours before the show, and I confronted Gore in the dressing room before the show. I was steamed up and very angry. I was in battle mode. I ran at him and butted him in the head in the dressing room. Being a very cool professional, Gore just went onstage and acted as if nothing had happened and told some wonderful stories, particularly the one about Eleanor Roosevelt putting flowers in her toilet bowl to keep the flowers fresh.” When Mailer went on stage, he created an even more outlandish display by making the bizarre accusation that Vidal ruined Jack Kerouac’s life by having sex with the beatnik writer. Five years later, Mailer was still looking for revenge. At a dinner party he threw a drink at Vidal before trying to tackle him to the ground. In his old age, however, Mailer has mellowed and in a well-publicized 1985 event he publicly reconciled himself to Vidal. The issue of sexual identity hides behind all these writerly scuffles. Female writers don’t seem to have the same need to prove themselves by fisticuffs. There are no stories of Virginia Woolf getting into barroom brawls or Alice Munro sucker-punching Margaret Atwood. Male writers of the Hemingway mold, by contrast, are always anxious that by engaging in a literary trade they run the risk of being called sissies. Aside from getting back at smart-alecky book reviewers, the literary punch-up is a good chance to demonstrate your virility. Ironically, these fights validate Eastman’s original critique of Hemingway and his followers.