My Literary Feud with Dan Chaon
Oh yes indeed, we are a-feudin'
When was the last time you witnessed a bona fide literary feud, subscriber?
Outside of Bad Art Friend and the pettily depraved halls of academe, one doesn’t hear much anymore about writers throwing down the gauntlet at other writers. Gone are the days of Gore Vidal and Philip Roth going on the Tonight Show to eviscerate their intellectual enemies. Nowadays, we writers mostly just keep to ourselves, worry about sales numbers, and compulsively refresh email (or, more horribly, Bluesky).
At least that’s what I thought, until I found myself in a feud of my own!1 This feud, like its great counterparts of yesteryear, played out in the pages of an East Coast literary magazine of national renown. Immense threat though this heated exchange posed to my sanity and sterling reputation, I like to think I emerged from it much stronger.
Below is the epistolary sparring match undertaken by myself and novelist Dan Chaon within the pages of Tall Sons magazine. I include these letters here not to goad or scorn, but to edify future generations of feuders should they require examples of what a superb verbal serve looks like.
To the editors of Tall Sons –
I’m writing at the suggestion of a loyal coterie of close and admiring friends, any of whom will, when called upon and without the slightest hint of hesitation, vouch for my credibility. (As if my three bestsellers and two Pulitzers weren’t enough! But I digress…)
Though social decorum may dictate against it, I must heed my better judgment and declare the following in a public forum: author and Nebraskan Dan(iel) Chaon has not one but two personal websites attributed to his name. I ask you, esteemed Tall Sons reader: Are we to trust this man?
No doubt you’re thinking, But Rafael, this is surely a forgivable offense when weighed against Mr. Chaon’s impressive contributions to American letters! And reader, I certainly don’t deny that Dan Chaon is a superb spinner of yarns, a writer of deserved renown – indeed, I positively reviewed his masterpiece, Bill’s Will, in the paper of record just last year. And I’ve quite enjoyed his subsequent output, especially the book about the bear who drives a van and has fathered children.
Indeed, my “beef” with Mr. Chaon concerns not his novels but his websites, and I would be neglecting my duties both as belletrist and citizen in good standing of the literary commons if I didn’t bring this to the attention of the Tall Sons readership. What sort of man maintains two websites? Furthermore, why would one go to such lengths to insist that he doesn’t maintain two websites?
Perhaps Mr. Chaon would like to respond to my enquiry with an explanation, which I would be happy to read with a fair-minded mien. Until then, I shall remain dubious of his sincerity.
Yours truly,
Rafael Frumkin
Noble and blameless author of Hip-Hip Hooray for the Balloon Brigade
Now, listen here, Frumkin,
I have no "beef" with you, nor with the rest of your entourage and hangers-on. The only beef I care about is the 134 head of cattle out in the back acre.
I try to live a peaceful life out here on my ranch with my twelve sturdy adopted sons. We don't have much truck with the nattering elite nabobery and East Coast literati. I frankly didn't have any idea what you were going on about with your talk of "Web Sites" and so forth. For my part, I still write with a pencil that I sharpen with my pocketknife, and I hand a sheaf of pages to my assistant and she types it up on the "Word Processor" or whatever they call it. What they call the "Inter Net" is as foreign to me as the Salons where I've heard that you folks do your gossiping in, a-sipping your Absinthe and puffing on your "Grass" (or worse) from fancy glass pipes.
Anyway, I went down to the barn where some of my boys were gathered butchering a elk and the youngest one--who has dabbled a bit in the witchery of the so-called "World Wide Web"--he looked up from sawing the antlers and skull cap off and explained to me the astonishing concept of a "Personal Web Site."
I shook my head in wonder and disgust, to imagine human beings so vain and self-involved that they would set up a digital shrine to their own self, and decorate it like a glossy fashion magazine with "Photo Shoots" such as might appear in the pages of Men's Vogue. I once had a photographer out here at the ranch from Men's Vogue and they took some pictures of me in a shirt and some jeans that they wanted me to put on and also some pictures of the boys slopping the hogs and riding horses in their underwear, and then a frizzly-haired New York lady reporter interviewed me and though I was a bit irascible I found myself secretly admiring her sass! And I would venture to say that she came to respect my integrity. As a matter of fact, the title of her article in Men's Vogue was "Is Dan Chaon the Last American Novelist of Integrity?"
All of this is to say that I don't know anything about these "Web Sites" you're raising a fuss about. My youngest son, after I showed him your letter, he says to me, "Papa, I think maybe there's imposters posing as you on the Inter Net!" Which may be so. I suspect you haven't experienced this yourself, but sometimes my readers will become so deeply impressed by my work that they begin to hallucinate. No doubt this nonsense that you're so up in arms about is the sad result of a weak-minded fan, driven to madness by the uncanny and nihilistic moods that my novels impart.
I hope that this response will satisfy your concerns.
Sincerely yours,
Dan Chaon
Man, Father to Men
Dear Mr. Chaon,
I am obliged to address you directly, not least because of the frank and somewhat folksy manner of address in your response to me. (I felt less as if I was reading the Tall Sons editorial section than as if I had walked into a “sa-loon” and made the fatal mistake of upending a Prospectin’ Gentleman’s tall glass of sarsaparilla.) Furthermore, I am a principled individual, and one of my core principles is that whenever a letter is addressed directly to me, I must respond in kind. So, here we are.
You claim no knowledge of these duplicate Web Sites, and that you are far too busy raising your fleet of burly adoptive sons, riding horses, and shaping our country’s literary consciousness to so much as bother with a Word Processor. These things, Mr. Chaon, I was almost inclined to believe, and may very well be in the midst of believing this very moment had I not just last evening received by post an advance copy of your latest novel, Circus Book, for review.
Call it kismet, or call it a consequence of the heightened cognitive powers bestowed upon me by the very small and very fashionable top hat I wore as I read your novel – out this fall from Harvey Huppert & Sons – but I couldn’t help but think that Circus Book had entered my purview at a most opportune time. For just as I was beginning to doubt my own carefully leveled accusations, I came upon this whimsical description of a layabout character named “Uncle Charlie”:
They watched from the window as he dismounted heavily, cowboy hat and black beard, long leather coat flapping in the wind, worn heavy boots with rusty spurs that tinkled as he walked up the cobblestone path that led to Old Lady Synott’s door. He gave them a wide smile and two of his top teeth were missing and another was black along the edge with rot.
“Childern!” he said and opened his arms as if they would come running to hug him, crying out joyfully.
You are certainly a wordsmith, Mr. Chaon, but not even the most well-buffed sentence can elude my literary detective work. For when I read that passage, my jaw dropped with such velocity that its sudden contact with the floor roused nearly every member of my Anarcho-Syndicalist House-Casa And Nook (ASHCAN) cooperative living collective for young geniuses. The other young geniuses, sensitive and brilliant creatures all, courageously canceled their party-bound rideshares and/or set aside their evening Hegel so that they might better understand the plight of their stricken friend.
I will tell you what I told them, Mr. Chaon: this “Uncle Charlie” is no fictional creation. He is my own great-uncle Eustace, a man with such a fondness for absinthe that he’d often greet me as “childern” despite there being only one of me. A man who stopped brushing his teeth on a dare when he was ten and never resumed; a man who, despite the protestations of the rest of his family, once insisted on wearing a ten-gallon hat and spurs into an H&R Block in suburban Cleveland. Eustace was a strange man, and I’m not sure how you knew him, but I have no doubt that you did, for I have never seen a more loyal rendering of him on the page than in the person of your supposedly fictional “Uncle Charlie.”
Which brings me back to my original line of questioning. If you can successfully obfuscate the real identity of “Uncle Charlie,” then what else are you hiding from us? Are we to believe that you are who you say you are, a man of the people who disdains Word Processors and raises his many sons to butcher elk in a barn? A man who has never heard of a Web Site, or the strange sartorial habits of my great-uncle Eustace? Or are you someone else entirely?
I await your reply.
Truly and sincerely,
Rafael Frumkin, author of Bimpo the Frog Spurns the Magical Num-Num Tree, a finalist for the 2023 Critics Wept in Awe Award
My Dear Frumkin,
Eustace, is it? If ever there was such a man, I pity him to have a blood relation of such low moral character.
Had he not passed away recently, my dear friend Cormac McCarthy could confirm the origins of my "Uncle Charlie" are in no way related to your so-called "Relative."
One night, Cormac and I were watching Space Jam2 together and smoking some marijuana spliffs. I said to him, "What if Yosemite Sam and Anton Chigurgh had a child together?!?" And McCarthy looked at me, astonished, and then a slow smile spread across his face.
"Danny," Cormac said. "You should write that novel! With my Blessings!"
Anyone who had read beyond the current "Fashionable" and "Trendy" novels that the critics are praising these days would be able to see the obvious references in my newest work to BLOOD MERIDIAN!
But please, you go on and feel free to focus on your "Auto-Biographical Fiction." There's surely enough room for a sensitive, plotless novel about your Great-Uncle Eustice, filled with gorgeous sentences and astonishingly vivid observations about life's mundanities.
Meanwhile, others of us will continue to make up our characters out of the fresh, buttery cloth of our Imaginations!
I wish you well with your endeavors.
Yours truly,
Dan Chaon
Man, Close Personal Friend of Cormac McCarthy (Dead, But No Less a Man)
PS: Here is this snapshot taken of me as a rural, working class youth with my Father, for proof of my authenticity!
Don’t believe that the two-website scoundrel Dan Chaon stole my great-uncle’s likeness for his Circus Book? Then maybe you ought to find out for yourself and pre-order a copy.
Disclaimer: Not a real feud. This is a collaborative humor post written with Dan in good fun.
Fun fact: Cormac McCarthy so loved this movie that the original title of The Road was actually Come on and Slam: Welcome to the Jam. In a rare lapse of good judgment, editor Gary Fisketjon talked him out of it.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read all year, I almost woke up the toddler from naptime because I snorted too loud
Love it!