Celebrity Culture
Joseph Epstein
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SPRING 05
Perhaps the best way to begin is briefly to examine the words “celebrity” and“culture,” each on its own first, and then to see if the two slide together andclick, making a decent fit.In
The Nature of Culture
, his book of 1952, the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber offeredmore than one hundred ways in which the word “culture” was then used. By now,more than fifty years later, the number of its uses has doubtless more than doubled.“The Culture of…,” like “The Death of…” and “The Politics of…,” has become afairly common prefix for book and article titles, usually ones of extravagant intellectualpretensions, from Christopher Lasch’s
The Culture of Narcissism
on down.
1
The word “culture” no longer, I suspect, stands in most people’s minds for that wholecongeries of institutions, relations, kinship patterns, linguistic forms, and the rest for which the early anthropologists meant it to stand. Words, unlike good soldiers underthe Austro-Hapsburg empire, don’t remain in place and take commands. Instead theyinsist on being unruly, and slither and slide around, picking up all sorts of slippery andeven goofy meanings. An icon, as we shall see, doesn’t stay a small picture of a religiouspersonage but usually turns out nowadays to be someone with spectacular grosses.“The language,” as Flaubert once protested in his attempt to tell his mistress LouiseColet how much he loved her, “is inept.”
Today, when we glibly refer to “the corporate culture,” “the culture of poverty,” “the cul-ture of the intelligence community”—and “community” has, of course, become anoth-er of those hopelessly baggy-pants words so that one hears talk even of “the homelesscommunity”—what I think we mean by “culture” is the general emotional atmosphereand institutional ethos surrounding the word to which “culture” is attached. In thisnewer context, culture also implies that the general atmosphere pervading any discreteaspect of life determines a great deal else. Thus, corporate culture is thought to breedself-protectiveness practiced at the Machiavellian level; the culture of poverty, hopeless-ness and despair; the culture of the intelligence community, viperishness; the cultureof journalism, a short attention span; and so on. Or, to cite an everyday example Irecently heard, “the culture of NASA has to be changed.” The comedian Flip Wilson,after saying something outrageous, would use the refrain line, “the devil made me doit.” So today, when spotting dreary or otherwise wretched behavior, people often say,“the culture made them do it.” As for “celebrity,” the standard definition is no longer the dictionary one but rathercloser to the one that Daniel Boorstin gave in his book
The Image: Or, What Happenedto the American Dream
:
“The celebrity,” Boorstin wrote, “is a person who is well-knownfor his well-knownness,” which is improved in its frequently misquoted form as “acelebrity is someone famous for being famous.”
2
(The other well-known quotation onthis subject is Andy Warhol’s “in the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteenminutes,” which is also frequently misquoted as “everyone will have his fifteen minutesof fame.”)To be sure, there are people well-known merely for being well-known: What the helldo a couple named Sid and Mercedes Bass do, except appear in bold-face in
The NewYork Times
“Sunday Styles” section and other such venues (as we now say) of equallyshimmering insignificance, often standing next to Ahmet and Mica Ertegun, also well-known for being well-known? Many moons ago, journalists used to refer to royalty as“face cards”; today celebrities are perhaps best thought of as bold-faces, for as such dotheir names often appear in the press.But to say that a celebrity is someone well-known for being well-known, though cleverenough, is not, I think, sufficient. The first semantic problem our fetching subjectpresents is the need for a distinction between celebrity and fame—a distinction moreeasily required than produced.I suspect everyone has, or would rather make, his own. The distinction I prefer derivesnot from Aristotle, who didn’t have to trouble with celebrities, but from the baseballplayer Ted Williams, of whom a sportswriter once said that he, Williams, wished to
2
Daniel Boorstin,
The Image: Or, What Happened to the American Dream
(New York: Atheneum, 1962).
9
be famous but not a celebrity. What Ted Williams wanted to be famous for was hishitting. He wanted everyone who cared about baseball to know that he was—as hebelieved and may well have been—the greatest hitter who ever lived; what he didn’t want to do was to take on any of the effort off the baseball field involved in makingthis known. As an active player, Williams gave no interviews, signed no baseballs orphotographs, chose not to be obliging in any way to journalists or fans. A rebarbativecharacter, not to mention a slightly menacing s.o.b., Williams, if you had asked him, would have said that it was enough that he was the last man to hit .400; he did it onthe field, and therefore didn’t have to sell himself off the field. As for his duty to hisfans, he would have said, in the spirit of the alleged deathbed words of W. C. Fields,“on second thought, screw ‘em,” though in Williams’s case, it would probably havebeen on first thought. Whether Ted Williams was right or wrong to feel as he did is of less interest than thedistinction his example provides, which suggests that fame is something one earns—through talent or achievement of one kind or another—while celebrity is somethingone cultivates or, possibly, has thrust upon one. The two are not, of course, entirelyexclusive. One can be immensely talented and full of achievement and yet wish tobroadcast one’s fame further through the careful cultivation of celebrity; and one canhave the thinnest of achievements and be less than immensely talented and yet be madeto seem so through the mechanics and dynamics of celebrity-creation, in our day a whole mini- (or maybe not so mini-) industry of its own.Or, yet again, one can become a celebrity with scarcely any pretense to talent orachievement whatsoever. Much modern celebrity seems the result of careful promo-tion or great good luck or something besides talent and achievement: Mr. DonaldTrump, Ms. Paris Hilton, Mr. Regis Philbin, take a bow. The ultimate celebrity ofour time may have been John F. Kennedy, Jr., notable only for being his parents’ veryhandsome son—both his birth and good looks in any case beyond his control—and,alas, known for nothing else whatsoever now, except for the sad, dying-young, Adonisend to his life.Fame, then, as I prefer to think of it, is based on true achievement; celebrity on broad-casting that achievement, or inventing something that, if not scrutinized too closely,might pass for achievement. Celebrity suggests ephemerality, while fame has a shot atreaching the happy shores of posterity.There are, of course, divisions of fame to consider. Oliver Goldsmith, in his poem “TheDeserted Villages,” refers to “good fame,” which implies that there is also a bad or falsefame. Bad fame is sometimes thought to be fame in the present, or fame on earth, whilegood fame is that bestowed by posterity—those happy shores again. (Which doesn’teliminate the desire of most of us, at least nowadays, to have our fame here and here-after, too.) Not false but wretched fame is covered by the word “infamy”—“Infamy,infamy, infamy,” remarked the English wit Frank Muir, who had an attractive lisp,
“they all have it in for me”—while the lower, or pejorative, order of celebrity is coveredby the word “notoriety,” also frequently misused to mean notable. We know from Leo Braudy’s magnificent book on the history of fame,
The Frenzy ofRenown
, that the means of broadcasting fame have changed over the centuries: fromhaving one’s head engraved on coins, to purchasing statuary of oneself, to (for the reallyhigh rollers—Alexander the Great, the Caesar boys) naming cities or even months afteroneself, to commissioning painted portraits, to writing books or having books writtenabout one, and so on into our day of the publicity or press agent, the media blitz, andthe public relations expert. One of the most successful of public-relations experts, BenSonnenberg, Sr., used to say that he saw it as his job toconstruct very high pedestals for very small men. Which leads one to a very proper suspicion of celebrity. As George Orwell said about saints, so it seems to mesensible to say about celebrities: they should all be judgedguilty until proven innocent. Guilty of what, precisely?I’d say of fraudulence (however minor); of inflating their brilliance, accomplishments, worth; of passing themselves off as something they aren’t, or at least are not quite. Iffraudulence is the crime, publicity is the means by which the caper has been broughtoff.Celebrity, then, does indeed exist, but is the current heightened interest in the celebrat-ed sufficient to form a culture—a culture of a kind worthy of study? Alfred Kroeberdefines culture, in part, as embodying “values which may be formulated (overtly asmores) or felt (implicitly as in folkways) by the society carrying the culture, and whichit is part of the business of the anthropologist to characterize and define.”
3
What arethe values of celebrity culture? They are the values, largely, of publicity. Did they spellone’s name right? What was the size and composition of the audience? Did you checkthe receipts? Was the timing right? Publicity is concerned solely with effects and doesnot investigate causes or intrinsic value too closely. For example, a review of a bookof mine called
Snobbery: The American Version
received what I thought was a muddledand too greatly mixed review in
The New York Times Book Review
. I remarked on mydisappointment to the publicity man at my publisher’s, who promptly told me not to worry: it was a full-page review, on page 11, right-hand side. That, he said, “is verygood real estate,” which was quite as important, perhaps more important, than thereviewer’s actual words and final judgment. Better to be confusedly attacked on page11, in other words, than extravagantly praised on page 27, left-hand side. Real estate,man, it’s the name of the game.
3
Alfred Kroeber, abstract of “Culture, Events, and Individuals,” manuscript “not for publication,” Supper-Conference for Anthropologists, Viking fund.
What are the values ofcelebrity culture? They are thevalues, largely, of publicity.
We must have new names, Marcel Proust presciently noted—in fashion, in medicine,in art, there must always be new names. It’s a very smart remark, and the fields Proustchose seem smart, too, at least for his time. (Now there must also be new names amongmovie stars and athletes and politicians.) Implicit in Proust’s remark is the notion thatif the names don’t really exist, if the quality isn’t there to sustain them, it doesn’t mat-ter; new names we shall have in any case. And every society somehow, more or lessimplicitly, contrives to supply them. I happen to think that we haven’t had a majorpoet writing in English since perhaps the death of W. H. Auden, or, to lower the bara little, Philip Larkin. But new names are put forth nevertheless—high among themhas been that of Seamus Heaney—because, after all, what kind of a time could we beliving in if we didn’t have a major poet? And besides there are all those prizes that,year after year, must be given out, even if so many of the recipients don’t seem quite worthy of them.Considered as a culture, celebrity does have its institutions. We now have an elabo-rate celebrity-creating machinery well in place—all those short-attention-span televi-sion shows (Entertainment Weekly Hollywood Access
[Excess ?], Lifestyles of the Rich andFamous); all those magazines (beginning with People
and far from ending with
TheNational Enquirer
). We have high-priced celebrity-mongers—Barbara Walters, DianeSawyer, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Oprah—who not only live off others’ celebritybut also through their publicity-making power, confer it and have in time become veryconsiderable celebrities each in his or her own right. Without the taste for celebrity, they would have to close down whole sections of
TheNew York Times
and
The Washington Post
and the “Style” sections of every other news-paper in the country. Then there is the celebrity—usually movie star—magazine profile(in
Vanity Fair
,
Esquire
,
Gentlemen’s Quarterly
; these are nowadays usually orchestratedby a press agent, with all touchy questions declared out-of-bounds) and the televisiontalk show interview with a star, which is beyond parody. Well,
almost
beyond: MartinShort in his brilliant impersonation as talk-show host Jimmy Glick remarks to actorKiefer Sutherland: “You’re Canadian, aren’t you? What’s that all about?”Despite all this, we still seem never to have enough celebrities, so we drag in so-called“It Girls” (Paris Hilton, Cindy Crawford, other supermodels), tired television hacks(Regis Philbin, Ed McMahon), back-achingly boring yet somehow sacrosanct newsanchors (Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw). Toss in what I think of as the lower-classpunditi, who await calls from various television news and chat shows to demonstratetheir locked-in political views and meager expertise on network and cable stations alike:Pat Buchanan, Eleanor Clift, Mark Shields, Robert Novak, Michael Beschloss, and therest. Ah, if only Lenny Bruce were alive today, he could do a scorchingly cruel bit aboutDr. Joyce Brothers sitting by the phone wondering why Jerry Springer never calls.
Many of our current-day celebrities float upon “hype,” which is really a publicist’s gasused to pump up and set floating something that doesn’t quite exist. Hype has also givenus a new breakdown, or hierarchical categorization, of celebrities. Until twenty-fiveor so years ago great celebrities were called “stars,” a term first used in the movies andentertainment and then taken up by sports, politics, and other fields. Stars proving a bitdrab, “superstars” were called into play, this term beginning in sports but fairly quick-ly branching outward. Apparently too many superstars were about, so the trope wasswitched from astronomy to religion, and we now have “icons.” All this takes Proust’soriginal observation a step further: the need for new names to call the new names.This new ranking—stars, superstars, icons—helps us believe that we live in interestingtimes. One of the things celebrities do for us is suggest that in their lives they are ful-filling our fantasies. Modern celebrities, along with their fame, tend to be wealthy or,if not themselves beautiful, able to acquire beautiful lovers. “So long as man remainsfree,” Dostoyevsky writes in the Grand Inquisitor section of
The Brothers Karamazov
,“he strives for nothing so incessantly and painfully as to find someone to worship.”
4
Are contemporary celebrities the best thing on offer as living gods for us to worship? Ifso, this is not good news.But the worshipping of celebrities by the public tends to be thin, and not uncom-monly the worship is nicely admixed with loathing. We also, after all, at least partially,like to see celebrities as frail. Cary Grant once warned the then-young director PeterBogdanovich, who was at the time living with Cybil Sheppard: “Will you stop tellingpeople you’re happy? Will you stop telling them you’re in love?” When Bogdanovicasked why, Cary Grant answered, “Because they’re not happy and they’re not in love….Let me tell you something, Peter, people do not like beautiful people.”
5
Grant’s assertion is borne out by our grocery press,
The National Enquirer
,
The Star
,
TheGlobe
, and other variants of the English gutter press. All these tabloids could as easilytravel under the generic title of
The National Schadenfreude
, for more than half the sto-ries they contain come under the category of “See How the Mighty Have Fallen”: Oh,my, I see where that bright young television sit-com star, on a drug binge again, had tobe taken to a hospital in an ambulance! To think that the handsome movie star has beencheating on his wife all these years—snakes loose in the Garden of Eden, evidently! Didyou note that the powerful senator’s drinking has caused him to embarrass himself onany number of public occasions? Dear me, the outwardly successful Hollywood coupleturn out to have had a child who died of anorexia! Who’d’ve thought?
4
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
The Brothers Karamazov,
trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Norton, 1976) 234.
5
See Gavin Esler, “Peter Bogdanovich—Hollywood Survivor,” interview, BBC News, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/hardtalk/4149215.stm>.
How pleasing to learn that our own simpler, less moneyed and glamour-laden lives are,in the end, much to be preferred to those of these frightfully beautiful and powerfulpeople, whose vast publicity has diverted us for so long and whose fall proves evenmore diverting now. In a recent short story called “Ice” in
The New Yorker
, ThomasMcGuane writes: “As would become a lifelong habit for most of us, we longed to wit-ness spectacular achievement and mortifying failure. Neither of these things, we werediscreetly certain, would ever come to us; we would instead be granted the frictionlesslives of the meek.”
6
Along with trying to avoid falling victim to schadenfreude, celebrities have to be care-ful to regulate the amount of publicity they allow to cluster around them. And notcelebrities alone. Edith Wharton, having published too many stories and essays in agreat single rush in various magazines during a concentrated period, feared, as she putit, the danger of becoming “a magazine bore.” Celebrities, in the same way, are in dan-ger of becoming publicity bores, though few among them seem to sense it. Because ofimproperly rationed publicity, along with a substantial helping of self-importance, thecomedian Bill Cosby will never again be funny. The actress Elizabeth McGovern saidof Sean Penn that he “is brilliant,
brilliant
at being the kind of reluctant celebrity.”
7
Atthe level of high culture, Saul Bellow used to work this bit quite well on the literaryfront, making every interview (and there have been hundreds of them) feel as if it weregiven only with the greatest reluctance, if not under actual duress. Others are brilliantat regulating their publicity. Johnny Carson was very clever about carefully husbandinghis celebrity, choosing not to come out of retirement, until exactly the right time or when the perfect occasion presented itself. It apparently never did. Given the univer-sally generous obituary tributes he received, dying now looks, for him, to have beenan excellent career move.Close readers will have noticed above that I referred to “the actress Elizabeth McGovern”and felt no need to write anything before or after the name Sean Penn. True celebri-ties need nothing said of them in apposition, fore or aft. The greatest celebrities arethose who don’t even require their full names mentioned: Marilyn, Winston, Johnny,Liz, Liza, Oprah, Michael (could be Jordan or Jackson—context usually clears this upfairly quickly), Kobe, Martha (Stewart, not Washington), Britney, Shaq, JLo, Frank(Sinatra, not Perdue), O. J., and, with the quickest recognition and shortest name ofall—trumpets here, please—W.One has the impression that being a celebrity was easier at any earlier time than itis now, when celebrity-creating institutions, from paparazzi to gutter-press exposé totelevision talk-shows, weren’t as intense, as full-court press, as they are today. In the
Times Literary Supplement,
a reviewer of a biography of Margot Fonteyn noted that she
6
Thomas McGuane, “Ice,”
The New Yorker
(24 January 2005): 78–83.
“was a star from a more respectful age of celebrity, when keeping one’s distance was stillpossible.”
8
My own candidate for the perfect celebrity in the twentieth century wouldbe Noel Coward, a man in whom talent combined with elegance to give off the glowof glamour—and also a man who would have known how to fend off anyone wishingto investigate his private life. Today, instead of elegant celebrities, we have celebritycriminal trials: Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, Martha Stewart, Robert Blake, WinonaRyder, and O. J. Simpson. Schadenfreude rides again. A received opinion about America in the early twenty-first century is that our culturevalues only two things: money and celebrity. Whether or not this is true, vast quantities
7
Manohla Dargis, “The Authorized Sean Penn,”
The New York Times Book Review
(23 January 2005): 7.
8
Zoë Anderson, “She Was Groomed to Conquer,”
Times Literary Supplement
(21 January 2005): 18.
15
of money, we know, will buy celebrity. The very rich—John D. Rockefeller, et alia—used to pay press agents to keep their names out of the papers. But today one of thethings money buys is a place at the table beside the celebrated, with the celebrities gen-erally delighted to accommodate, there to share some of the glaring light. An example isMort Zuckerman, who made an early fortune in real estate, has bought magazines andnewspapers, and is now himself among the punditi, offering his largely unexceptionalpolitical views on
The McLaughlin Group
and other television chat shows. Whetheror not celebrity in and of itself constitutes a culture, it has certainly penetrated andpermeated much of American (and I suspect English) culture generally.Such has been the reach of celebrity culture in our time that it has long ago enteredinto academic life. The celebrity professor has been on the scene for more than threedecades. As long ago as 1962, in fact, I recall hearing that Oscar Cargill, in thosedays a name of some note in the English Department of NYU, had tried to lure thethen-young Robert Brustein, a professor of theater and the drama critic for
The NewRepublic
, away from Columbia. Cargill had said to Brustein, “I’m not going to bullshityou, Bob, we’re looking for a star, and you’re it.” Brustein apparently wasn’t looking tobe placed in a new constellation, and remained at Columbia, at least for a while longer,before moving on to Yale and thence to Harvard.The academic star, who is really the academic celebrity, is now a fairly common figure in what the world, that ignorant ninny, reckons the Great American Universities. RichardRorty is such a star; so is Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (who as “Skip” even has some nick-name celebrity recognition); and, at a slightly lower level, there are Marjorie Garber,Eve Sedgwick, Stanley Fish, and perhaps now Stephen Greenblatt. Stanley Fish doesn’teven seem to mind that much of his celebrity is owed to his being portrayed in novelsby David Lodge as an indefatigable, grubby little operator (though Lodge claims toadmire Fish’s happy vulgarity). Professors Garber and Sedgwick seem to have acquiredtheir celebrity through the
outreisme
of the topics they’ve chosen to write about.By measure of pure celebrity, Cornel West is, at the moment, the star of all academicstars, a man called by
Newsweek
“an eloquent prophet with attitude.” (A bit diffi-cult, I think, to imagine
Newsweek
or any other publication writing something simi-lar of Lionel Trilling, Walter Jackson Bate, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, or John HopeFranklin.) He records rap CDs and appears at benefits with movie stars and famousathletes. When the president of Harvard spoke critically to West about his work notconstituting serious scholarship (as if that had anything to do with anything), it madefront-page news in
The New York Times
. West left, as we now know, and was instantly welcomed by Princeton. If West had been a few kilowatts more the celebrity than heis, he might have been able to arrange for the firing of the president of the university,the way certain superstars in the National Basketball Association—Magic Johnson,Isaiah Thomas, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan—were able, if it pleased them, to havetheir coaches fired.
Pure scholarship, sheer power of intelligence glowing brightly in the classroom, is dis-tinctly not what makes an academic celebrity or, if you prefer, superstar. What makesan academic celebrity, for the most part, is exposure, which is ultimately publicity.Exposure can mean appearing in the right extra-academic magazines or journals:
TheNew York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly
;
Harper’s
and
The New Republic
possibly qualify, as do occasional cameo performances on theop-ed pages of
The New York Times
or
The Washington Post.
Having one’s face pop upon the right television and radio programs—PBS and NPR certainly, and enough ofthe right kinds of appearances on C-Span—does not hurt. A commercially successful,much discussed book represents good exposure. So does strong public alignment withthe correct political causes.Harvey Mansfield, the neo-conservative political phi-losopher at Harvard, is a secondary academic celebrityof sorts, but not much in demand; Shelby Steele, a blackprofessor of English who has been critical of variousaspects of African-American politics, was always over-looked during the days when universities knocked them-selves out to get black professors. Both men have been judged politically incorrect. The “renowned feminist” (inthe words of princetoninfo.com) Elaine Showalter wrote television reviews for
People
,but it didn’t help: a bit too vulgar, I suspect. Nor did the fact (also learned from princ-etoninfo.com) that she has been called “Camille Paglia with balls,” which is itself athought one doesn’t wish to contemplate overlong. The underlying and over-archingpoint is, to become an academic celebrity you have to promote yourself outside theacademy, but in careful and subtle ways.One might once have assumed that the culture of celebrity was chiefly about showbusiness and the outer edges of the arts, occasionally touching on the academy (therecannot be more than twenty or so academic superstars). But it has also much alteredintellectual life generally. The past ten years or so have seen the advent of the “publicintellectual.” I have always felt uncomfortable with that adjective “public,” which, whenfirst I saw it, I thought drained away much of the traditional meaning of intellectual.The root sense of an intellectual, I believe, is someone who is excited by and lives offand in ideas. An intellectual has traditionally been a person unaffiliated, which is to saysomeone unbeholden to anything but the power of his or her ideas. Intellectuals usedto free-lance, until fifty or so years ago, when jobs in the universities and in journalismbegan to open up to some among them. (Philip Rahv, the editor of
Partisan Review
, andIrving Howe, the editor of
Dissent
, broke the barrier when, without doctorates, they were accepted into the English Department at Brandeis University.)
Time
magazineused to be a safe if usually unhappy harbor for intellectuals with alimony problems ora taste for the expensive life.
What makes an academiccelebrity, for the most part,is exposure, which isultimately publicity.
17
Far from being devoted to ideas for their own sake, the intellectual equivalent of art forart’s sake—and let us not pause to ask what art’s sake is—the so-called public intellectualis usually someone who comments on what is in the news, in the hope of affecting pol-icy, or events, or opinion in line with his own political position, or orientation. He isn’tnecessarily an intellectual at all, but merely someone who has read a few books, mastereda style, a jargon, and a maven’s tone, and has a clearly demarcated political line.But even when the public intellectual isn’t purely tied to the news, or isn’t thoroughlypolitical, what he or she really is, or ought to be called, is a “publicity intellectual.” InRichard A. Posner’s interesting book,
Public Intellectuals
, intellectuals are ranked by thenumber of media mentions they or their work have garnered, which, if I am correctabout publicity being at the heart of the enterprise of the public intellectual, may becrude but is not foolish.
9
Not knowledge, it turns out, but publicity is power.The most celebrated intellectuals of our day have been those most skillful at gainingpublicity for their writing and their pronouncements. Take, as a case very much in point,Susan Sontag. When Susan Sontag died at the end of last year, her obituary was frontpage news in
The New York Times
, and on the inside of the paper, it ran to a full page with five photographs, most of them carefully posed—a variety, it does not seem unfairto call it, of intellectual cheesecake. Will the current prime ministers of England orFrance receive equal space or pictorial coverage? Unlikely, I think. Why did Ms. Sontag, who was, let it be said, in many ways the pure type of the old intellectual—unattachedto any institution, earning her living (apart from MacArthur Foundation and othergrants) entirely from her ideas as she put them in writing—why, it seems worth askingin the context of the subject of celebrity, did she attract the attention she did?I don’t believe Susan Sontag’s celebrity finally had much to do with the power or cogen-cy of her ideas. Her most noteworthy idea was not so much an idea at all but a descrip-tion of a style, a kind of reverse or anti-style, that went by the name of Camp and that was gay in its impulse. Might it have been her politics? Yes, I think politics had a lot todo with it, even though when she expressed herself on political subjects, she frequentlygot things mightily askew: During the Vietnam War she said that “the white race isthe cancer of human history.”
10
As late as the 1980s, much too late for anyone in theknow, she called Communism “Fascism with a friendly face” (what do you suppose shefound so friendly about it?). To cheer up the besieged people of Sarajevo, she broughtthem a production of Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
. She announced in
The NewYorker
that the killing of 3,000 innocent people on 9/11 was an act that America hadbrought on itself.
11
As for the writing that originally brought her celebrity, she later
9
Richard Posner,
Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,2002).
10
Susan Sontag “What’s Happening in America,”
The Partisan Review
(Winter 1967): 57.
came to apologize for
Against Interpretation
, her most influential single book. I do notknow any people who claim to have derived keen pleasure from her fiction. If all thisis roughly so, why, then, do you suppose that Susan Sontag was easily the single mostcelebrated—the greatest celebrity—intellectual of our time? With Cynthia Ozick’s face and body, with Camille Paglia’s face and body, yes, even withmy stunning face and body, I don’t think Ms. Sontag would quite have achieved thesame celebrity. I think, that is, that her attractiveness as a young woman had a greatdeal to do with the extent of her celebrity; and she and her publisher took that (early)physical attractiveness all the way out. From reading Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock’sbiography
Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon
, one gets a sense of how carefully andrelentlessly she was promoted, especially by her publisher, Roger Straus.
12
I do notmean to say that Sontag was unintelligent, or talentless, but Straus, by having her alwaysdramatically photographed, by sending angry letters to the editors of journals whereshe was ill-reviewed, by bringing out her books with the most careful accompanyingorchestration, promoted this often difficult and unrewarding writer into somethingclose to a household name with a face that was ready, so to say, to be Warholed. ThatSontag spent her last years with Annie Leibowitz, herself the most successful magazinephotographer of our day, seems somehow the most natural thing in the world. Even inthe realm of the intellect, celebrities are not born but made, usually very carefully—as was, I think, Susan Sontag.One of the richest themes in Leo Braudy’s
The Frenzy of Renown
is that of the fameand celebrity of artists and, above all, writers. To sketch in a few bare strokes the richlycomplex story Braudy tells, writers went from serving power (in Rome) to servingGod (in early Christendom) to serving patrons (in the eighteenth century) to servingthemselves, with a careful eye cocked toward both the public and posterity (underRomanticism), to serving mammon, to a state of interesting confusion, which is where we are today, with celebrity affecting contemporary literature in what strikes me as amore and more significant way. Writers are supposed to be aristocrats of the spirit, not promoters, hustlers, salesmen fortheir own work. Securing a larger audience for their work was not thought to be theirproblem. “Fit audience, though few,” in John Milton’s phrase, was all right, so long asthe few were the most artistically alert, or aesthetically fit, few. Picture, I ask you, LordByron, Count Tolstoy, Charles Baudelaire at a lecturn at Barnes & Noble, C-Span cam-era turned on, flogging (wonderful word!) their own books. Impossible!
11
Susan Sontag, “The Talk of the Town: Comment: Tuesday, and After,”
The New Yorker
(24 September2001): 32.
12
Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock,
Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon
(New York: Norton, 2000).
19
Some superior writers have been very careful caretakers of their careers. In a letter toone of his philosophy professors at Harvard, T. S. Eliot wrote that there were two waysto achieve literary celebrity in London: one was to appear often in a variety of publica-tions; the other to appear seldom but always to make certain to dazzle when one did.
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Eliot, of course, chose the latter, and it worked smashingly. But he was still counting ongaining his reputation through his actual writing. Now good work alone doesn’t quiteseem to make it; the publicity catapults need to be hauled into place, the walls of indif-ference stormed. Some writers have been able to steer shy from publicity altogether:Thomas Pynchon for one, J. D. Salinger for another (if he is actually still writing oryet considers himself a writer). But actively seeking publicity was thought for a writer,somehow, vulgar—at least it did when I began publishing.Edmund Wilson, the great American literary critic, used to answer requests with apostcard that read:Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to: Read manuscripts, Write articles or books to order, Make statements for publicity purposes, Doany kind of editorial work, Judge literary contests, Give interviews, Conducteducational courses, Deliver lectures, Give talks or make speeches, Take part in writers’ congresses, Answer questionnaires, Contribute or take part in sympo-siums or “panels” of any kind, Contribute manuscripts for sale, Donate copies ofhis books to Libraries, Autograph books for strangers, Allow his name to be usedon letterheads, Supply personal information about himself, Supply photographsof himself, Supply opinions on literary or other subjects. A fairly impressive list, I’d say. I have long admired Edmund Wilson for his range ofintellectual interests and his work habits. When I was a young man, he supplied themodel for me of how a literary man ought to carry himself. One of the things I person-ally find most impressive about his list is that everything Edmund Wilson clearly stateshe will not do, Joseph Epstein has now done, and more than once, and, like the young woman in the Häagen-Dazs commercial sitting on her couch with an empty carton ofice cream, I will do them all again.I tell myself that I do these various things in the effort to acquire more readers. Afterall, one of the reasons I write, apart from pleasure in working out the aesthetic problemsand moral questions presented by my subjects and in my stories, is to find the best read-ers. I also want to sell books, to make a few shekels, to please my publisher, to continueto be published in the future in a proper way. Having a high threshold for praise, Ialso don’t in the least mind meeting strangers who tell me that they take some delightin my writing. But, more than all this, I have now come to think that writing away
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T. S. Eliot,
Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 1: 1898–1922,
ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1989).
quietly, producing (the hope is) solid work, isn’t any longer quite sufficient in a culturedominated by the boisterous spirit of celebrity. In an increasingly noisy cultural scene, with many voices and media competing for attention, one feels—perhaps incorrectlybut nonetheless insistently—the need to make one’s own small stir, however pathetic.So, on occasion, I have gone about tooting my own little paper horn, doing book tours,submitting to the comically pompous self-importance of interviews, and doing so manyof the other things that Edmund Wilson didn’t think twice about refusing to do.“You’re slightly famous, aren’t you, Grandpa?” my then eight-year-old granddaughteronce said to me. “I am slightly famous, Annabelle,” I replied, “except no one knows who I am.” This hasn’t changed much over the years. But of course seeking celebrity inour culture is a mug’s game, one you cannot hope to win. The only large, lumpy kindof big-time celebrity available, outside movie celebrity, is to be had through appearingfairly regularly on television. I once had the merest inkling of this fame when, walkingalong one sunny morning in downtown Baltimore, a red Mazda convertible screechedto a halt, the driver lowered his window, pointed a long finger at me, hesitated, andfinally, the shock of recognition lighting up his face, yelled, “C-Span!”I was recently asked, through e-mail, to write a short piece for a high price for a volumeabout the city of Chicago. When I agreed to do it, the editor of the volume, who is (Itake it) young, told me how very pleased she was to have me among the volume’s con-tributors. But she did have just one request. Before making things final, she wondered ifshe might see a sample of my writing. More than forty years in the business, I thought,echoing the character played by Zero Mostel in
The Producers
, and I’m still wearing thecelebrity equivalent of a cardboard belt.“Every time I think I am famous,” Virgil Thomson said, “I have only to go out intothe world.”
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So it is, and so ought it probably to remain for writers, musicians, andvisual artists who prefer to consider themselves, to put it as pretentiously as possible,
sérieux
. The comedian Richard Pryor once said that he would consider himself famous when people recognized him, as they recognized Bob Hope and Muhammed Ali, byhis captionless caricature. That is certainly one clear criterion for celebrity. But the bestcriterion I’ve yet come across holds that you are celebrated, indeed famous, only whena crazy person imagines he is you. I especially like the fact that the penetrating andprolific author of this remark happens to go by the name of Anonymous
