Bellow's attack was indirect yet vituperative. His invective against things and attitudes he didn't agree with was far removed from what he held as beliefs in his younger The Victim-writing days. The American-Jewish novelist also had developed a late friendship with philosopher Alan Bloom and celebrated it in his fictional paean Ravelstein. Bloom was unabashedly right and constantly bemoaned the fall in American standards and his call to change was, some say, deeply conservative.

Across the Atlantic, Camus was pelted with abuse from leftists for his stand on Algeria. Sartre, who was thick with the writer of The Fall, had a falling out with Camus and castigated him for his silences to which Camus was anyway prone. Many years later, the same acrimony played out in the lives of Truffaut and Godard, the French filmmakers.

Godard swerved left with a vengeance and tore into Truffaut for making middle-class melodramatic and bourgeois films. Both remained distant until Truffaut's death of a brain tumour in 1984, when Godard wrote an eulogy. Sartre too, when Camus died tragically young in a car accident, wrote in praise, burying even the whiff of their celebrated fight.

In recent times, the British novelist Martin Amis wrote a long lamenting letter to his friend Christopher Hitchens deriding his Trostkyist past. Hitchens, of course, had crossed the pond by then and buried all his leftist leanings and, in his views, sounded more like a newly minted neocon.

The history of artistic discords also has its fair share of inter-war chapters. The American critic Edmund Wilson, in between wars, had gone deep into Soviet land and failed to see Stalinist excesses, and fell into an almost friendship-ending debate with Russian emigre novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who with his family had escaped the Reds and did not think much of Lenin's revolution.