Twin Stars: The Anxiety of Sibling Rivalry between Literary Titans

The former, the binary dividers, have a point. It is often the case that an issue has at bottom only two sides to it: one connected with something "ideal," however that is interpreted, and the other with something "real" or pragmatic or quotidian or unsavory. Certainly if one is looking for an overarching principle or a common denominator, one can speak of one member of each of the above pairs-Euripides, Gottfried, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Fielding, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner-being politically or morally or esthetically exotic, imaginative, experimental, or romantic, and of the other member-Sophocles, Wolfram, Jonson, Voltaire, Richardson, Tolstoy, Hemingway-being disciplined, conservative, cautious, or classical. Counter arguments, to be sure, come immediately to mind, and even more arguable is how the terms "ideal" and "real" are to be defined and applied. But that either/or designation, that sense of "difference," that great divide in temperament is perennial and unavoidable.

On the other hand (if one may talk in either/or terms!), these twin stars were exact opposites of each other only from certain points of view. The degree of their differences varied; sometimes they even resembled each other. (By definition, writers cannot in any case be too much alike, for then they will be merely clones or copies of each other. Every generalization has, furthermore, its exception: averyfewmajorwriters-like Boccaccio and Petrarch or like Melville and Hawthorne during a brief period in the Berkshires when their orbits crossed-achieved, despite vast differences in their masterpieces, a rare communion.) Nor did the ideal-real dichotomy always come into play overtly. Something other than Sophocles's formulation was also at work in these rivalries.

One must take into account the fact that people are not made for protracted cooperation. (The punishment administered to the adulterous lovers in Dante's Inferno is to have them in each other's arms forever.) Put even two saints in a room and soon they will be squabbling over the minutiae of saintliness. And writers are far from being saints. These rivalries are, then, due to the propensity of all people, signally artists, to define themselves in part by who they are not. If one does not have rivals or enemies, it may well be psychologically necessary to invent them. In the ensuing strife, philosophical and personal elements will be hopelessly entangled.

Perhaps no one has described that syndrome so precisely as has La Bruyere in 1688:

Men find it difficult to appreciate one another, and are little inclined to mutual approval; nothing can please or satisfy them about another man's deeds, behavior, thoughts and expression; they are less concerned with what is being told them or read to them than with what they would have done themselves in like circumstances, or what they would think or write on such a subject, and they are so full of their own ideas that there is no further room for anyone else's.... It is common and quite natural to judge another man's work in relation to one's own. (218-19, 232)