My fascination with these details, none particularly juicy or shocking, surprised me. Embarrassed me really. I knew it wasn’t the charms of the book itself that had spurred me to this dubious and obsessional activity (I enjoyed the read, loved some of it, some of it left me cold), it was the Franzen phenomenon—his sudden catapulting from ordinary writer to celebrity writer, which has included, among other things, his picture being featured on the cover of Time Magazine. I’d always thought I was immune to the allure of celebrities—excepting Meryl Streep :-)–but now I saw so clearly that I am disappointingly susceptible to the fame of another writer. Am I jealous? It feels more like fascination, but I suppose its underpinning might be jealousy. I’d love to have so many people reading my work and talking about it. The money wouldn’t be bad either.
I have always thought it was unseemly to want to be famous, that fame is a crass and suspect desire. So I was surprised when the newest issue of The Writer’s Chronicle (a publication of AWP) came in yesterday’s mail and I discovered an interview with Patricia Hampl, an accomplished memoirist, in which she addressed this very issue.
“It’s very difficult for a young person to understand that it’s a good thing to have a feeling of wanting fame or greatness. It isn’t simply ambition in some kind of rapacious way. Keats talked about it, and he, of course, never got to be more than young. It’s all about having the imagination to want to do the best, to want to achieve. In a way, a writer has to want to be famous, has to want that because it’s the only way to say you want to do the best work possible. If there isn’t a reader on the other end, it is rather solipsistic, the whole relationship with art or words.”
What a bold notion. And of course it’s true that writing is somewhat self-centered without a readership to receive the work, but I am still absorbing her statement, wondering if I can fully inhabit—admit to—wanting fame. Well, perhaps. But maybe I’d settle for a somewhat smaller readership if it means I can keep my glasses.
8 Comments
I agree. Is it celebrity worship, or an inquiry that is more laudable?
Cai,
I get mini-bouts of stalker-idis for artists whom I really admire (recent examples, Sherman Alexie and Chris Rock). I think there's a fascination with what makes a really talented person "tick," per se. Are they human? Are they always magnificent or are they sometimes normal? What is their history. Love the blog.
Read The Corrections and didn't get it, didn't like it. Don't think I'll even crack the cover on this one.
Fame seems to be a costly concept–in many ways. I'd settle for a little recognition.
Hah! Is this the James I think it is?
Cai: Fame, so fleeting, yet so delectable. Chris Connery emailed from China last week to say that he appears, under his real name, on pps. 492-493 of Freedom. Immortalized already, though he still walks the earth! And yet, living in seclusion in the French Colony in Shanghai, he is as little able to cash in on his fame as that imprisoned Chinese dissident who just won the Nobel Prize. What price glory? a free meal and drinks at the Szechuan place on the corner? an intrigued look from a female tourist visiting from the States? And what's the distinction of being a "wild-haired Marxist and China scholar" in China? The hair? Please address these conundrums in your next blog posting.
Yes, I agree completely. How in the current climate can people simply engage with the work? Could the work ever get out there widely without the writer having to blab about it and herself?
And YES–shoot me if I even become disdainful. Writing, in my book, is all about taking a compassionate look at people.
I wonder, too, if it isn't perhaps how we define fame? Yes, I crave fame–if the definition is having my work widely read, admired, taught: it means I have readers; it means I've moved people in some ways. Which is that wanting "to do the best, wanting to achieve" that Hampl is talking about.
But I don't want the kind of fame that Franzen has, the kind that he has created/fostered through is personality and actions (the disdainfulness for one thing; the arrogance for another–shoot me if I ever become that kind of writer). And I don't want the kind of fame where I can't have my own private life.
I would rather be a good writer who is also kind and compassionate and humble.
Laurie (because I can't figure out how to post without some kind of account!)
I remember craving fame and greatness as a child. As an adult I figured that craving was the result of being raised in a culture that prizes fame above almost all other virtues. What Hampl says is reassuring. As a kid, I probably wasn't thinking about wanting to do the best work possible. But now I think about it a lot. And if fame never comes, it's okay. The priorities are clear.
Add Comment