Warring Wordsmiths

When Aatish Taseer recently counselled William Dalrymple to "go away and read my book", he was only keeping up the glorious literary tradition of joust and parry
Artistic egotism can make the theatre of the absurd seem cinéma vérité real.
Especially when two accomplished artists get into a public fight. Compared to that, Mohammad Ali's bluster seems like the whimpering of a school yard boy scout.
"Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask my self, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí." That is an example from Salvador Dalí, nicknamed "Avida Dollars", an anagram of the painter's name, by the founder of the surrealist school of painting, André Breton.
Dalí was an exceptionally gifted painter and a showman to boot. Many aver that this gift chipped away at his more formidable and lasting strength as a painter of unusual imagination and supreme draftsmanship. A bit of artistic egotism was available last week to the Indian audience via a series of leaked emails between two writers, Aatish Taseer and William Dalrymple.
Taseer is the son of Indian journalist Tavleen Singh and slain Pakistani politician Salman Taseer. After a translation of Manto's short stories from Urdu, his literary debut was the affecting 2009 book Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands . Since then, he has written three novels.
Dalrymple is an established historian with a string of popular history titles as well as a record of being one of the more avid reporters of South Asian arts, culture and the plurality of the subcontinent.
Bad blood was already lying in a pool between the two writers. Taseer has had textual swings at him and another writer, Arundhati Roy. However, Dalrymple, who is old er to Taseer by a clean 15 years, attempted to reach out to the younger writer via email in of ficiously conciliatory prose.
He acknowledged that he was aware of Taseer's swings at him, but seemed to be ready to repair it with a gracious invite to the 2016 Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF), India's "Woodstock of the mind", as Bill Clinton once described the Hay Festival.
A history of sorts
Back in 2011, Taseer had taken a swipe at Dalrymple, without naming him but playing up the latter's penchant for setting up an exotic and theatrical display of Indian folk culture at one of his book launches. "He lay on a stage, this great whale of a man, dressed in a mirrorwork kaftan, if you please, his dirty feet hanging off.And all about him, like little pixies, Baul singers skittered around..."
Dalrymple is the chief impresario of JLF. And, though many writers in the Indian media have ripped into him for using a dilapidated colonial stereotype, it has not been entirely fair. That said, Dalrymple has immersed himself in post-Independence India's skills of patronisation to buy off rivals. That does give a sliver of credence to his critics.
After having had a running feud with Rajiv Malhotra, who has been at the forefront of an effort to cleanse Hindu texts of western bias, Dalrymple sent him an invite to JLF. Malhotra was an esteemed guest this year and his presence was generally seen as a triumph of new-fangled nativism, riding on NRI angst and a resurgence of Hindu nationalism at home.
A similar effort at wooing Taseer, however, backfired badly on the JLF impresario. Taseer's leaked email had some breathtaking bluster to counter Dalrymple's discreet reaching out.
"Willy, even you must know that you don't write to a writer in the week that he has published his most important work yet, and not so much as mention it. Manto?! What is Manto compared with what I have achieved in The Way Things Were?
Do you really believe I don't know the worth of my own work?" If that was not enough, Taseer set an improbable, temple-going tradeoff for accepting the invitation to JLF.
"Let me make this simple for you: go away and read my book. Then sit down and put in words your own admiration of it. After that I will gladly take seriously your invitation."
This exchange is more crass and opportunistic than witty; but literary feuds have entertained readers for years.
When words fail
One of the most famous literary feuds was between American writers Gore Vidal and the pugnacious and misogynistic Norman Mailer. After Vidal's scathing review of Mailer's The Prisoner of Sex, the two writers were constantly at loggerheads. Once, Mailer spoke with his fists and knocked Vidal to the ground. Dusting himself up Vidal delivered the literary world's most famous putdown: "Words fail Norman Mailer yet again."
Such was Mailer's rough-and-tumble take-no-prisoners style of responding to unfavourable reviews and comments that he almost became a type. When Camille Paglia, feminist and academic, went public with her pique for Susan Sontag, whom she never forgave for a 1973 snub about being forever under Son tag's formidable intellectual reputation, by saying "I've been chasing that bitch for 25 years and at last I've caught her," Sontag riposted typically, using Mailer as the type he had become.
"We used to think Norman Mailer was bad, but she [Paglia] makes Norman Mailer look like Jane Austen."
While these jousts and fights between writers brought out brilliant ripostes, great writers are known for being able to use silence as viscerally as their words. Last April, Peruvian writer and Nobel prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa vowed to seal one of the writing world's most enigmatic and dramatic literary feuds with silence.
Columbian writer Gabriel García Márquez and Llosa were friends till the latter socked him hard enough to give Márquez a black eye. They never spoke since. Márquez got his Nobel in 1982, while Llosa received his in 2010. The Peruvian was junior to Márquez by nearly a decade.
The two friends had diverged politically, with Márquez being a staunch leftist while Llosa moved to the Right. However, in 1976, after a documentary film show in Mexico, when Gabo excitedly greeted Llosa, the Peruvian writer landed a sucker punch on the Colombian's left eye.
Speculations are rife whether that violent literary parting had to do with their political differences or with Llosa's second wife, Patricia.
Though the two never spoke to each other since then, neither did they to anybody else about it.Márquez died on April 17 last year.
A Reuters report from Caracas, Venezuela, quoted Llosa's response to reporters regarding the famous feud. Llosa, an admirer of Márquez despite their eventual falling out, said: "There's a pact between García Márquez and myself [not to talk about it]. He respected it until his death, and I will do the same.Let's leave it to our biographers, if we deserve them, to investigate that issue."
Llosa's gracious words are a throwback to George Bernard Shaw's more bravura line that underscores that if a writer was not a genius he was not worth a biography. Writerly feuds work within the invisible ambit of the history of the world of letters, too.
In the wake of the Iranian fatwa on The Satanic Verses, The Guardian carried a series of letters of a spat between Salman Rushdie and John Le Carré in November 1997. The two writers traded genteel insults in a public forum. And tickled the synapses of readers.
The best of performance art
India's literary scene is still in its awkward stage, with reviews being either unrelieving paeans or nasty, small-minded and often childish analysis of the best work produced by Indians. There are but a handful of good book reviewers in India.
So India hasn't seen enough robust discussion in public among artists and writers or other public intellectuals. The closest is the Jagdish Bhagwati-Amartya Sen one two cha cha cha. Though not mean writers, both are practitioners of the dismal science of economics.
The wickedness of writers and the use of words to argue well-known or predictable positions get a special frisson when writers fight in public for their own respective shreds of truth. It becomes the best form of performance art.
Sometimes, writers known for their antipathy also come up with brilliant and pithy formulations of what is considered by a wider world in the binaries of tragedy or comedy. Irony, sarcasm, wit and paradox are all brought out in memorable phrases that enthrall the reader. It does not need to be bad television in words, as many see it.
When VS Naipaul was asked to react on the fatwa on Rushdie he wryly remarked that it was an extreme form of literary criticism. Similarly, Rushdie himself reacted with customary wit, but also customary sense, when Pankaj Mishra dismantled The Ground Beneath Her Feet in a finely measured review. The old cowboy's sense of wordplay peaked when he reacted to it with how there's always some new punk in the bar. Notice how Rushdie, not famous for being kind to his critics, doffed his hat at Mishra's well argued takedown of not only Rusdhdie's latest book in 1999 but his entire oeuvre.
And yet, The Satanic Verses controversy also left one of the most memorable descriptions of a famous and free man disappearing from the company of his intimates when Martin Amis said Rushdie "had vanished into the front page". What can be a greater description of a modern ghost.
The closest to a public argument in the Indian scene happened when Ramachandra Guha wrote an essay to counter Arundhati Roy's piece about the Narmada Bachao Andolan. But those exchanges did little credit to either writer's wordsmithery.
India is now the major publishing hub of the world weighed down by assembly-line editors. Ashok Shahane, the legendary publisher of Arun Kolatkar's poems, made a cutting remark about recent publishing at a PEN meeting at Mumbai's Prithvi theatre last week to discuss Independent Publishing, once the lodestar of unearthing original writing talent.
Shahane said Penguin is not a publisher anymore. It is merely a clearinghouse for Pearson.
In the incestuous world of Indian publishing, run entirely on networking and groaning under the epidemic of Facebook likes, a DalrympleTaseer form of exchange will not be seen by many as anything but normal. But, maybe in another couple of decades, we'll also publish writers with character and wit and fierce independence of spirit. That way, some of the colour of Jaipur will move to literary fiction. As Gabo would have said, that would return the soul to the body.