WRITERS LIVE LIVES OF CURIOUS CONTRADICTION. THEIR work succeeds only by means of a monastic interiority and lonesomeness, and yet they yearn for that work to deliver them the very things most likely to murder it: fame, whole continents of fans, invitations to proclaim and cash enormous checks. They’ve heard the warning that says celebrity is one of the toxins which contribute to a writer’s artistic contamination, but they can’t help themselves.
Writers spend lots of time being ignored, and thus lots of time fantasizing about the reversal of that fact. In public, they know to summon modesty, to feign indifference to the possibility of celebrity, to float the at-hand banalities about love of craft and being born to write. In private, they know that their first aim is attention. There’s no such thing as a writer who yearns to be ignored. Even the Pynchonian exile from attention is itself a kind of attention. Even those who committedly scratch out private diaries have a private wish for those diaries to be read and lauded after their deaths.
America’s celebrity scourge has forced many among us to suspect that without fame we’re barely American and hardly matter. Poets and novelists best not be susceptible to this ruse. Look what that breed of living helped to do to the prose of Truman Capote and, in our own day, to Brett Easton Ellis, whose literary standing has been amputated to the hurling of rancor from behind hashtags. Writers thrive only in a hushed vassalage to their own imaginations, shackled to their desks, trying to hear hints of that ancient inward thrum. It helps to be unmarred by fame and its outrageous stipulations, its unmanageable pomp and promptings. Monsieur Montaigne proposes “an unimportant life without luster”; Ms. Dickinson says: “How dreary to be somebody.” Here’s Goethe: “A talent is formed in stillness.” It’s called the limelight for a reason: sooner or later you get limed by the light—burned, smeared, blinded.
Gore Vidal, for one, believed it was romantic, puritanical bunk to detect any link between the sheen of celebrity and the decay of talent (excessively famous from the age of twenty-three, he would think that). But look at Ernest Hemingway. No other important American writer, not even Twain, has ever experienced that particular pitch of celebrity, that imperious grandeur of renown, and the graph of his accomplishments is easily drawn: his sentences and dignity sank as his wealth and fame soared. After A Farewell to Arms in 1929, when his colossal celebrity became unkillable, most of Hemingway’s best work was already at his back. (And he continued writing until he sucked from a shotgun barrel in 1961.)
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Hemingway guiltily conceded that as a writer grows in “public stature” his work “deteriorates” because “writing, at its best, is a lonely life.” By the time he uttered that truth in 1954 he was, he knew, two decades past being able to brook the necessary lonesomeness or go without the dopamine surge of celebrity. Self-fooling about much, he wasn’t able to fool himself about that. He knew that a Nobel Prize didn’t mean that the quality of his work hadn’t been strafed by fame.
From Hemingway’s letters it’s clear that the real fame he was gunning for was perhaps the only fame that should matter to writers: the fame that descends after their deaths. It’s a dishonest novelist or poet who tries to tell you that he doesn’t bother with posterity. If yearning to write but not publish is like yearning to be pregnant but not give birth—the metaphor is Updike’s—then yearning to publish but not be famous is like yearning to give birth but not keep the kid. The English critic Desmond MacCarthy maintained that vanity provides the engine for every writer, but for some that’s perhaps a touch too kind. Vanity is needing to be looked at. Narcissism, on the other hand, is needing to be worshipped. It should come as no surprise to know that many writers have their defaults set to narcissism and would love to be sprinkled with some godliness. Gods, after all, are immortal. Normal people have children; writers write books. The bad news is that it’s not possible to find your own boulevard to literary immortality. If you have talent and luck enough, others will find it for you, and even then it’s a rock-choked path through crags with many a deceptive turn. Among American dreadnoughts, both Melville and Faulkner had bumpy, uncertain rides into their posthumous glow.
The Vidal-Mailer-Capote contingent was unabashed in its ambitions, its bloody clawing after immortality. Mailer once wrote to Vidal saying that in the future they’d both become cults, and Vidal, with typically Vidalian panache, replied that a cult might be suitable for Mailer but he himself wanted a religion. When Vidal suggested that Capote’s premature death was a smart career move, he was hijacking the prominent Hollywood cliché that deified James Dean, a cliché that owed much to the myths of Byron and Keats. Sodden with celebrity and the booze that killed him, Capote had already made all the right career moves, in an era when they remained capable of being made, but he couldn’t possibly have been certain that three decades after his death we’d be glamorizing him still, or that Philip Seymour Hoffman would somehow manage to make him look even more ridiculous than he actually was.
In Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame, H. L. Jackson commands a lifetime of reading in a fluid, relentlessly compelling history of the literary afterlife, of how over the centuries our concepts of a writer’s immortality have morphed, mutated, double-backed. Unpolluted by the proud babble of academic theory, her analysis swaggers between Cicero and Horace, Dr. Johnson and Wordsworth. (Her title is annexed from Johnson.) She asks a question so outright interesting that you’re baffled it’s not asked more often: How do we know all about John Dryden but not Elkanah Settle, William Wordsworth but not George Crabbe, Jane Austen but not Mary Brunton, John Keats but not Barry Cornwall, when those unknowns were once considered formidable rivals to the knowns?
If that question is not more widely asked it might be because the answer seems straightforward enough: originality of execution, facility with language, potency of vision, quality of mind—talent, in a word—are the mandatory elements responsible for raising the names we know, their absence responsible for sinking the names we don’t. Dearth of talent might be the first reason most of the world’s writers will remain forever unsung, but Jackson makes clear that for the crafting of an immortal reputation, talent alone won’t cut it. The immortality-making contraption has a multitude of moving parts, each of which must be perfectly greased and tuned or else the whole thing stalls.
“The moment came in Rome,” writes Jackson, “in the first century BCE, when writers were elevated to a place among the immortals, notably in works by Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid,” and litterateurs have been dazzled and seduced by that elevating moment ever since. Plutarch believed that writers could never occupy an identical league as military men who earned their immortality in grit and blood—soldiers gave writers something to scribble about—but Horace knew otherwise and formulated the first influential theory of a writer’s afterlife. The pith of his theory is instinctual, and mightily attractive to writers of a certain caliber who are irked by their present lack of recognition: quality endures of its own inspired volition, while crap flounders and is forgotten.
Horace’s criteria put the simple questions to a work of literature: Is it well made, inventive, memorable? Is it lovely and wise? His criteria for deathless literature shovels heaps of faith onto the notion that the beautiful and intelligent are intrinsically better than the ugly and dumb. A flaunting elitist unafraid of the slur, Horace posited that writers must address their work only to the wise and literary-minded, and were damned, now and forever, if they attempted to appeal to the know-nothing plebs. He believed that “only the best poets are worth reading, and only the best readers are trustworthy judges,” and who, pray tell, could argue with that? Nobody could and so nobody did.
Jackson demonstrates that fifteen hundred years later, in eighteenth century England, not much had changed: “The Horatian theory addressed the peculiar condition of writers directly and eloquently, and so the Horatian tradition prevailed,” which is proof, in case you needed it, that there’s lots to be said for directness and eloquence. But the Horatian program succeeded also because “people wanted to believe in it,” to be comforted by the eventual triumph of merit, much as certain Christians get through the soul’s dark nights by believing in the eventual triumph of good over evil. Jackson argues that “by the emergence of the four [English] writers accepted as titans”—she means Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton—“literary history tended to confirm the pattern Horace had predicted, according to which the best rise slowly but inevitably to the top.”
Then along came Dr. Johnson, throwing his brassy quill into the belts and cogs of literary fame-making. Everywhere in Johnson you find the sobering cynic, the bruising skeptic himself invulnerable to bruises, so it comes as no shock to see him buck against Horace’s poetical idealism, his poet-as-god propaganda. He wasn’t having any of that silliness and instead underscored the essential agency of other people—readers, publishers, critics, scholars, teachers—in shepherding a worthy writer into immortality. If a poet’s verses thrive forever it has nothing to do with the demi-divine status of the poet and everything to do with other people who labored to keep those verses alive.
Johnson’s famous championing of the “common reader” was an odd bit of populism by a castellated mind which otherwise would seem to have had scant patience for anything at all that smacked of the common. But his trust in “the collective judgment of the aggregate of readers,” in Jackson’s words, must be taken as genuine. He acknowledged, says Jackson, “the practical importance of being able to reach a lot of readers”: practical because a large readership can whip up fame when you’re alive and immortality when you’re dead, even though Johnson understood that there was no certain umbilical from one to the other. “For Johnson, numbers count because they demonstrate wide appeal, and wide appeal matters as confirmation of truth to nature, or universal validity,” and you can’t help but see that the bestsellers in Johnson’s day were considerably more literate than the bestsellers in our own. The good doctor would no doubt revise his notion of numbers if he could behold the sales figures and purulent prose of Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey.
Johnson had no quarrel with Horace’s contention that quality always trumps crap; the question for Johnson was how much quality could be accommodated by immortality. Time is crimped, people are busy, writers are many. In one of Johnson’s most famous quips, he noticed that “no place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library”: those alps of unread books, mountains of magnets for dust, untold tomes, many of them first-rate, penned by women and men who once dreamed of being read and known always. “It seems not to be sufficiently considered how little renown can be admitted in the world,” Johnson wrote, and if that was true then, just look how much truer it is now. “The lesson of history is that most writers, however celebrated they might have been in their own time, are quickly forgotten.” If you’re an ambitious writer listening to Jackson ring that undeniable and discordant alarm, now is the time you might want to regret not choosing a different ambition.
Jane Austen and her contemporary Mary Brunton are an illustrative case of how Johnson’s theory plays out, and Jackson offers an irresistible gloss of their circumstances. Only three years older than Austen, Brunton was a Scot, the wife of a preacher, and her debut novel, limply titled Self-Control, appeared in 1811 (the same year as Sense and Sensibility) and gained widespread ovations. Get your hands on a copy of Brunton’s novel, as I recently did, and you’ll see that the reading throngs must have had a big appetite for melodrama and moralizing, because Self-Control is a banquet of both.
It is also tremendous fun to read, and for a few stretches sputteringly insightful, despite one critic at the time calling it, in what must be the best two-word abuse in all of criticism, “methodistical palavering.” Doomed love, fire-of-my-loins male obsession, an incorruptible maiden, girl-napping, self-destruction, one ludicrous scene with a waterfall—Self-Control could use some self-control. It’s four hundred pages of Romeo and Juliet without Shakespeare or Juliet, but the public feasted on it, as it did on her follow-up in 1814, called Discipline, another limply titled masterpiece of proselytizing. Still, Brunton made Austen nervous. Four years later, Brunton died in childbirth, only two completed books to her name. Her husband chaperoned a volume of Brunton’s letters and fragments a year after she died, and, as Jackson tells it, “for forty years after the death of the author, through roughly the first half of the Victorian period, Brunton’s works maintained a respectable place—higher than Austen’s—in the ranks of fiction.”
Then something happened by the end of those forty years. Brunton’s husband died in 1854; she had no children or cheering family members, “no homegrown champions” to cherish their relation to her. Unlike Wordsworth, Brunton was not linked to any “picturesque spots” and so could not encourage pilgrims who spend money and keep an author’s name in the air. Unlike Walter Scott, she did not “command a publishing empire” to do her immortal bidding. Unlike Austen’s, her novels were not deemed congenial to children or classrooms at any level. Brunton might have been a moralizer but in her fiction she was much naughtier than Sweet Jane (the vociferously clean are normally filthy underneath). The only font of information about Brunton’s life was an antiseptic memoir confected by her husband—“biographically,” says Jackson, “she is practically a cipher”—and with no easily traded data about a life, there’s nothing to mythologize. Most important: any novelist who soapboxes for an ideology, either secular or religious, isn’t writing novels but agitprop, and before long all agitprop lands in the gutter.
Jackson reports that “up to 1860, the career paths of Jane Austen and Mary Brunton were strikingly similar.” Their books, too, were thought so similar that some readers couldn’t tell one author from the other (which testifies against the literary acumen of those readers). The Austen phenomenon currently upon us, familiar to anyone who hasn’t been comatose these last two decades—Jackson pegs the takeoff of the “Austen adaptation industry” at 1995—might not be entirely explicable, but it is due in part to a litany of factors that bypassed Brunton. An enthusiastic American reception of Austen’s novels. A dynamic readership, what Jackson dubs “the coexistence of multiple audiences.” A bolstering by esteemed critics, including Woolf, Forster, and Henry James. An embrace by children and schools. Academic acceptance. Numerous editions, many of which contained illustrations. And, crucially, the support of Austen’s family in producing a hagiographic account of her life, one that conflated Austen with her creations, which is always good for the fame business, as Hemingway and Mailer were to find.
Jackson’s informed speculation has Brunton and Austen in a kind of taciturn competition, “lockstep,” each altering her own work in response to the other’s. But despite some readers’ lamentable inability to tell them apart, Mrs. Brunton is no Ms. Austen. A steady, junkie-like infusion of melodrama can be expected in many novels of the early nineteenth century, but in Brunton the infusion becomes a cataract, a trial of soaking superfluity. Austen’s basal flaw, one that her novels manage miraculously to surmount—the claustrophobic apprehension, her unpreparedness to criticize the function of society within her era—is in Brunton’s novels steroided to grotesque effect. While Austen mobilizes a memorable nuance of observation, Brunton is a career stranger to nuance. Her narrative plan is all bluster and bludgeon, which is not to say that at key instances she fails to be psychologically and emotionally correct, only that she often mistakes the breathless for breadth. Add to that her undisguised evangelizing for Christian opinions and you have a novelist whose current standing is exactly where it belongs.
Pleasurable as Brunton can be to read, Austen is, overall and in the end, a much more dignified teller than Brunton. In literature, the dignity of telling counts above all else. So while it’s true that Brunton’s case affirms Johnson’s theory—without the requisite human agency, a long-standing and multiform cadre of dedicated admirers, there’s no hope for immortality—it also affirms Horace’s: Brunton simply wasn’t touched by the gods. She simply wasn’t as talented as Austen. Hers, says Jackson, was “a popularity based on novelty.” What’s maddening is that Jackson shows how Walter Scott—perhaps no other writer in history experienced more fame in his lifetime than Scott—had all the obligatory elements, including a mammoth talent and a legion of posthumous abettors, and yet still he has dropped into almost total anonymity. Ivanhoe is a pretty thrilling novel, but when’s the last time you saw someone reading it? Literary immortalizing is a fickle, fickle business, folks.
Of course, a literal immortality is not possible, and so for writers a literary immortality would be nice. But the potent brand of immortality that was possible for Wordsworth, Keats, and Austen is no longer possible, and for myriad reasons, chief of which is the basement-level regard we now have for serious writers. The world doesn’t care about literature the way it did when those three were undergoing their immortalization. Our new Keats is Steve Jobs or someone like him. Writers need readers, and therein lies the problem: Where have all the readers gone?
World population has mushroomed sevenfold since Wordsworth composed, and we are now overrun by a mind-warping number of writers, many of them fresh from the American MFA mill. More than a century ago Nietzsche could say: “A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book,” and you see how that rule has become codified. Combine an avalanche of writers with a paucity of readers and you have an unsustainable economic system and, no matter your talent, comically minuscule chances of ever becoming famous, never mind immortal.
Dr. Johnson could assess talent from a place of common cultural purview; today our fissional culture has obliterated consensus. Most readers now appear bewildered by what genuinely constitutes a good book, and so they fall back upon that least accurate mode of assessment: personal taste, relatability, the worthlessness of identity confirmation. They seem barely capable of realizing that there are good and bad writers, never mind that there are good and bad readers. The first criterion by which to judge any book must be the sentences: Do they work, are they imbued with torque and verve, do they have something lasting to say about a human circus both shining and absurd? Publishing is a business in which writers of ironclad intelligence and integrity must watch in paralysis as second-rate crowd-pleasers are lavishly lauded and feted, and so those writers cheer themselves up by imagining that their laurels will arrive after their deaths, when society finally gets wise and realizes the injustices it heaped upon genius.
Jackson puts it plainly enough: “Writing for immortality is not a good idea.” Not a good idea because there’s absolutely nothing you can do to effect a winning ticket in that preposterous lottery, no path to making sure your work will adapt and remain relevant to the uncaring vicissitudes of the future. Still, Sontag believed that “a serious person should try to write posthumously,” by which she meant aim for the greats: entrust them as your gold-standard guides on the path to your own quality. It’s the best writing advice ever given.
All living writers of some gravity secretly hope they will be the exception to the new impossibility of literary immortality. That intolerable itch in us won’t soon abate, but while we’re attempting to scratch it, we’d do well to remember a priceless limerick Jackson includes in her notes, the last word on the literary afterlife jotted down by a now-unremembered bard: “A goddess capricious is Fame. / You may strive to make noted your name. / But she either neglects you / Or coolly selects you / For laurels distinct from your aim.”
—The New Republic, MARCH/APRIL 2015