Looking through the catalogs from auction houses like Christie’s or Sotheby’s, apart from artworks, antique books, autographs, and assorted relics, you come across what are called memorabilia: the shoes worn by a diva in a particular film, a fountain pen that belonged to Ronald Reagan, and so on. A distinction has to be made here between collecting bizarre objects and hunting for fetishistic souvenirs. The collector is invariably slightly mad, even when he spends his last cent buying incunabula of The Divine Comedy, but his passion is legitimate. In collectors’ magazines you discover people who collect sugar packets, Coca-Cola bottle tops, and phone cards. It’s more noble, I think, to collect postage stamps than beer caps, but there’s no accounting for taste.
It’s a different matter wanting at all costs to own the shoes worn by that diva in that film. If you collect all the shoes worn by film stars, from Georges Méliès on, then you’re a collector, and your folly makes sense, but what are you going to do with a single pair?
Recently I found two curious news items in La Repubblica. The first reports that the Italian government is auctioning off its official cars on eBay. I can understand that someone might take a fancy to a Maserati and decide to buy one at a bargain price, even one with high mileage and the knowledge that he’ll have to spend a great deal of money looking after it. But what’s the point of competing with thousands to buy a car purchased with public money to ferry government ministers about, at a price two or three times that listed in used-car magazines? Yet that’s exactly what is happening. This is outright fetishism, and it’s difficult to understand what satisfaction is to be gained from sitting on a leather seat previously warmed by some illustrious figure—not to mention those who offer exorbitant sums to luxuriate where the buttocks of a mere undersecretary or political aide have sat.
But let’s move on to something different, which I found in the same newspaper, on a double-page spread. Love letters written by Ian Fleming at the age of twenty-six have been put up for auction, and are expected to fetch up to 66,000 euros. In them, the young agent, not yet so secret, wrote, “I want to kiss you on the mouth, on the breasts, lower down.” Now, there’s nothing wrong with collecting personal letters, and as letters go, one that’s prurient might be considered more entertaining than one that’s not. Even a noncollector would be happy to own the letter in which James Joyce writes to Nora: “I am your child as I told you and you must be severe with me . . . I wish you would smack me or flog me even. Not in play, dear, in earnest and on my naked flesh.” Or what Oscar Wilde wrote to his beloved Lord Alfred Douglas: “It is a marvel that those red-roseleaf lips of yours should have been made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kisses.” They would be excellent conversation pieces about the weaknesses of great men.
What’s unreasonable is the value that literary history and literary criticism often place on such artifacts. Does our knowledge that the twenty-six-year-old Fleming was writing letters typical of a randy adolescent make any difference to our enjoyment of the James Bond stories, or to our critical assessment of the author’s style? To understand Joyce’s eroticism as a literary fact, read Ulysses, especially the final chapter, even if the person who wrote it lived a chaste life. With some great men, it was their writing that was salacious and their lives virtuous, but with others their writing was virtuous and their lives salacious. Would our view of Manzoni’s The Betrothed change if it came to light that the author was a naughty boy in bed and that his two wives died as a result of his sexual excesses?
2014