Afternoon:
10°c
Writers are getting it in the neck - literally, not figuratively. Over the weekend it emerged the Pride and Prejudice screenwriter Andrew Davies was headbutted and punched while out walking his dog.
Last Friday I found myself in the headlines when a bag full of horse manure was tipped over my head by a cream-faced loon who had taken exception to a story I'd allegedly written in the Standard. Revenge, they say, is a dish best served cold. In my case it was warm and fragrant, though happily not liquid. You have to be grateful for small mercies.
If writs are the Oscars of the journalistic trade then buckets of ordure are the Baftas. There is something quaintly English about being anointed with dung.
It is usually politicians who are on the receiving end of projectiles. John Prescott was drenched with a bucket of water at the Brit Awards by Chumbawamba and he later thumped a protester who hit him with an egg. Writers are usually more civilised when it comes to disagreements - the pen is mightier than the sword - but sometimes even words fail them. Witness the fine tradition of literary pugilism.
In 1971, Norman Mailer headbutted Gore Vidal in the green room before The Dick Cavett Show, having taken exception to the novelist's review of one of his books. Seven years later, at a party, Mailer threw a glass at him and, by some accounts, including Vidal's ("I saw this tiny fist coming at me''), punched him. Still on the floor, Vidal announced: "Words fail Norman Mailer. Yet again.''
Ernest Hemingway, who also had boxing skills, once attacked writer Max Eastman. The chosen weapon was a book in which Eastman had written a parody of Hemingway, demanding: "Take the false hair off your chest, Ernest." Hemingway unbuttoned his shirt to establish the authenticity of his chest hair, then picked up the book and thwacked Eastman in the face with it.
One of the great Latin American literary feuds of recent times has been between Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia M·rquez. The pair didn't talk to each other for 30 years after brawling in a Mexican cinema. The casus belli is still shrouded in mystery; however it is believed to relate to a woman.
The great Russian writers were always at each other's throats. Tolstoy challenged his fellow author Turgenev to a duel, afterwards apologising. The problem with pistols at dawn is one of you invariably ends up dead. Pushkin was mortally wounded after a duel with his wife's alleged lover.
Better to live to tell the argumentative tale than end up on the mortuary slab. Shit happens. I am happy to report I am now smelling of roses.
