Reports From the World of Books

In Sunday’s Week in Review, I wrote about the death of the old-school literary feud now that Paul Theroux has shaken hands with V.S. Naipaul, Rick Moody has thrown a friendly pie at Dale Peck and Twitter has supplanted the White Horse Tavern (or “The Dick Cavett Show”) as the best place to throw a bookish punch.

But according to some famous combatants, the death of the literary feud has been greatly exaggerated: the fighting will go on as long as there are writers willing to defend high principles, or at least able to pull off some devastating lines.

Perhaps no one has distinguished himself as a feudist in the past few decades more than Christopher Hitchens, who in an e-mail gave some helpful hints on how to start a feud — and, more important, how to keep it going.

A proper feud, Mr. Hitchens wrote, requires one of at least two things: a clash of strong and recognizable personalities, and a true clash of important principle. “A really first-rate bust-up must transcend the limits of ‘an entertaining side show’ and involve playing for high moral and intellectual stakes,” he said.

The battles between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine (who said that Burke’s nostalgia for monarchy “mourns the plumage and neglects the dying bird”) and between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy (who blasted Hellman for soft-pedaling her past Stalinist sympathies) are “imperishable,” Mr. Hitchens said, because “they symbolize a clash of worldviews and even help define them for the witnesses and for later generations.”

The confrontation between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, Mr. Hitchens added, was in some ways “a full-dress literary feud,” in that it embroiled other figures from the literary world — “another good sign of a literary row.”

Twitter, he added, is a fine place for a feud, as long as one can commit “time and patience and a proper attention span.” And when feuding, it may also help to be British.

“In our culture, a ‘presidential debate’ is one where the candidates are not even allowed to speak directly to one another,” said Mr. Hitchens, who became an American citizen in 2007. In British journalism and book reviewing, he added, “far less attention is paid to the ‘avoidance of the appearance of conflict of interest,’ ” and much more to “the prospect that ‘there will be blood.’ ”

Mr. Hitchens himself has played wingman in his friend Salman Rushdie’s two-decade feud with John le Carré, which stems from Mr. le Carré’s criticism of “The Satanic Verses” as unreasonably insulting to Islam. (Mr. Hitchens once compared Mr. le Carré to “a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head” — which is a great line, if not quite great enough to make it into “The Quotable Hitchens,” published in May.)

Last week’s rapprochement between Mr. Naipaul and Mr. Theroux during a chance encounter at the Hay book festival in Wales came at the urging of Ian McEwan, who reportedly told Mr. Theroux that “life is short.” Will Mr. Hitchens, who is battling terminal esophageal cancer, help patch things up between Mr. Rushdie and Mr. le Carré? Don’t hold your breath.

“The le Carré-Rushdie quarrel was (and is) between those who think that religion should be protected from ‘offensive’ critiques, and those who do not,” Hitchens said. “This is the original confrontation over free speech, which goes back to the trial of Socrates. I therefore did my best to make sure that no compromise or kiss-and-make-up was thinkable. One’s job on such occasions, when seeing the embers begin to cool, is to blow on them as hard as possible.”