Sam Clemens, John Gardner, Marshall Mathers, and the Artistic Impulse to Polemical Speech

When you’re hot enough to melt hell, and burn Satan, too, it’s tempting to play with fire all the time. Sometimes pyromaniacs set a brushfire that clears the artistic wilderness—and sometimes they get burned.

“It seems to me,” Mark Twain wrote, “that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature in Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on [James Fenimore] Cooper’s literature without having read some of it.”

Thus begins Samuel Clemens’s incendiary essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” From the moment he opens, a reader can hear Twain’s implied author cackling as he systematically and mercilessly burns Cooper to the ground. He makes short work of it. The attack is no dismissal, despite the bitter and condescending tone: Twain wades deep into the texts of Cooper’s novels and carves out their hearts. When the bloodbath is over, Twain delivers his coup de grâce: “Now I feel sure, deep down in my heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language, and that the English in Deerslayer is the very worst that even Cooper ever wrote.”

As Jane Smiley observes in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Clemens “killed” his literary ancestor outright. The essay crippled Cooper’s popular legacy.

Is this assessment too dramatic? Consider the following: Although The Last of the Mohicans is still in print, and although some academics have since rallied to protect Cooper’s reputation, a quick Google search for “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Defenses”—the name of an article by Lance Schachterle and Kent Ljungquist defending the romanticist—prompts a did you mean? listing the title of Twain’s 1894 polemic. Even when you only type “Fenimore Cooper” into the search box, Mark Twain’s essay is the third hit.

But haters sometimes burn themselves in the process of crusading. Some, in fact, have burned themselves so badly that their reputations never recovered, and instead of making extra room in the canon—as Mark Twain did when he reduced Fenimore Cooper to ashes—these firebrands have consumed their own inheritance. So why, if the danger is so great, do artists lash out at their fellows? Surely a quick glance at the history books would show the risks outweigh the benefits?

A case study: John Gardner was no intellectual lightweight. A talented writer, he published several novels to popular acclaim, including Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, and October Light, which won the National Book Award. He was beloved by his students, and respected, for the most part, by his peers. Gardner never let himself be confined by genre, and he worked widely in the fields of translation, criticism, and even opera.

He also published three books of nonfiction. This is when the trouble began. In his The Art of Fiction and in On Becoming a Novelist, Gardner advocates fiercely for fiction that tests society's deepest convictions. He also touches, briefly, on what it is that infuriates writers when they see poppy fiction on the bestseller lists. It isn't jealousy, he wrote. Feelings of rage regarding these fakers has only partly to do with professional envy. The majority of a writer's anger, Gardner says, is aimed at the devaluing process that popular fiction inflicts on true, moral fiction. If a writer writes well, and people love it, that's wonderful... But if another writer writes badly, and people love that, too, then what's the point? If a reader can't tell trash from treasure, why try to find treasure when you can knock off trash and get rich? This is a sort of interesting argument, but to many people, including to some very intelligent people, it sounds like an excuse for snobbery. Despite the danger, in On Moral Fiction, John Gardner unleashed his rage (and his contempt).

“His own publisher, Knopf, would not touch the book,” Liz Rosenberg, his second wife, wrote of On Moral Fiction in the Boston Globe. “The book was wildly misunderstood on every side… Fellow writers attacked him on the cover of The New York Times as a hatchet man out to get them. Right-wing spokespeople welcomed him, and he was invited to join the American Nazi Party, which so enraged him that he instantly sent back a telegram with expletives he somehow convinced the operator to include.”

As David Stanton recounts in The Washington Post, the literary world retaliated with good reason. “[In On Moral Fiction, Gardner] calls Philip Roth ‘creepy’ and dismisses Saul Bellow as ‘an essayist disguised as a writer of fiction,’” Stanton wrote. “Mailer, Albee, Vonnegut and many others come in for similar drubbings. Their work was not just bad, in Gardner’s view, but dangerous. Is it any wonder that some in the publishing world came to want Gardner’s blood?”

Other authors Gardner attacked by name included John Updike, John Barth, and Norman Mailer. And On Moral Fiction was not a one-off. Gardner had a history of polemical speech in public and private. He once told The Paris Review that he was writing the best fiction being written in his time. His hubris and erratic behavior are now the stuff of writerly legend (for one of the only complete biographies on Gardner, see Barry Silesky's John Gardner: Literary Outlaw).

In her article, Liz Rosenberg wrote that she believes Gardner wanted to do the right thing regardless of the backlash. He named names in On Moral Fiction because he needed to prove to himself that he was not afraid of retaliation.“Perhaps he should have been,” she wrote. “Even now, his reputation as a writer is overcast by resentment, and it may take twenty or thirty years to get the grudge-bearers off his back.”

Gardner later repented, admitting he had written some of On Moral Fiction in jealousy, that he had gotten some things wrong, especially about Updike. But it was too late—the damage was done.

Why did Gardner’s polemic backfire? After all, Leo Tolstoy wrote a similar book (What is Art?) and Mark Twain survived his own destruction of Fenimore Cooper. He survived, in fact, despite a systematic campaign of vicious speech. Is it because John Gardner wasn’t as good a writer as these two men? At first it’s a compelling argument, and works well with the mystification of these other writers, but on closer inspection this seems unlikely. A quick glance at a novel like Mickelsson’s Ghosts reveals Gardner’s talent. To point to his bitterness doesn’t explain it either. No one is more bitter than Twain in his old age. But Twain, at least, is funny. Tolstoy and Twain (and Hemingway for that matter) have survived their outbursts and continue to be read.

Some artists, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, have survived attacks and held their place in the canon. John Updike also survives, and not just from Gardner’s attack (see David Foster Wallace’s “John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One: Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?”).

In an effort to see how far this kind of behavior can go—that is, to find the limits of an artist’s polemical sensibilities—it’s interesting to close this article with a look at someone outside the realm of literature. Feuds do not confine themselves to the world of prose, and maybe no industry is more riddled with hurt feelings than pop music. For that matter, hip-hop specializes in feuds, and in the rap game, no one has perfected the polemical tirade more thoroughly than Marshall Mathers, aka Eminem, aka Fire Marshall, aka Slim Shady.

“I’m sick of you little girl and boy groups,” Mathers spewed at the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards. “All you do is annoy me, so I have been sent here to destroy you.” He’s hardly slowed down since. The hit list (no pun intended) encompasses too many celebrities to count, but some notables include Michael Jackson, Michael J. Fox, and Christopher Reeve. Gems from his albums include “By the way, N’Sync, why do they sing—am I the only one who realizes they stink?” and “Damn, I think Kim Kardashian’s a man.”

Many of his assaults are as merciless as he claims. Like Twain, they usually stay funny, despite their obvious venom. They are also enmeshed in detailed, complicated, and admittedly dazzling lyrics. Almost all of these tirades aren’t fit to repeat to your grandmother. But even rap’s most feared MC has limits.

On his album Recovery, Mathers confesses he almost went too far, which is remarkable for a man who made it his specialty to blast pop icons. When he details his hiatus from hip-hop, Mathers writes of his drug-fuelled depression, his intense jealousy, and his self-destructive behavior. “On the verge of goin’ insane,” he admits, “I almost made a song dissin’ Lil Wayne… Are you stupid? You gon’ start dissin’ people for no reason? ‘Specially when you can’t even write a decent punchline even?”

Mathers may be glad he spared Lil Wayne and Kanye West, two other popular rappers, but it’s hard to imagine him turning down his caustic wit in the future: “Shady ease up! Man chill!” a voice calls to him on the first track of Recovery. “No I can’t, goddamnit,” he snaps. “Rap is a landfill.”

The world of artistic feuds is much wider and deeper than this short article can explore correctly. For example, many of the artists mentioned above are writers, specifically novelists, since that is the art I am most familiar with. And although they are very different, they are all white men, even Tolstoy and Updike and Hemingway, who are only mentioned briefly. Whole books could be written—and some have been—on the wrath and polemics of, say, Ayn Rand. The question of polemical speech in artistic situations, which might include composers or painters, is a tricky one. I would invite anyone who wishes to further explore this subject to comment on this article with their own observations.

What does seem clear from the limited examples above is that a polemic can backfire on an artist. So it’s safe to say, if you’re going to be a hater, watch your back, because if you play with fire you might get burned.

Or, as Eminem might put it, “Instead of gettin’ crowned you’re gettin’ capped.”