So when a letter purporting to be written by Sir John to Eve de Harben, an unknown mistress, was sent to Mr Wilson he was naturally delighted to publish it. He failed to notice the anagram (“ever been had”) or the fact that the opening letter of each sentence spelt out an insulting message. When confronted, Mr Hillier at first denied culpability, but now he has admitted the hoax with the time-honoured words, “It’s a fair cop.” Betjeman would have loved this feud. It was the kind of trick you can half imagine him playing himself. He might even have penned a few lines:
“Mr A N Wilson, Mr A N Wilson, Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun You had a letter, said to be from me, It was a hoax; oh what joy, what glee.”
We should be grateful to Messrs Hillier and Wilson. The literary feud has in recent years been better preserved in America than over here. Tom Wolfe, the enfant terrible of American letters, called his rivals Norman Mailer, John Irving and John Updike “the Three Stooges”. Mr Irving had called his writing “journalistic hyperbole described as fiction”. Deliciously, Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”
It is in the nature of these disputes that they are prolonged. Mr Wilson may well take his revenge in his own time. At the very least, Mr Hillier should check his post carefully.