Despising fame

This morning over breakfast I was reading more of Anne Roiphe's Art & Madness. ("More" is a reference to the selection that I quoted here.) The book is a memoir of her time as a young woman in her twenties, when she was married to Jack Richardson, also a writer. (Actually at the time he was the writer and she was "just a wife.") The memoir explores all the things that people believed back then about being a writer and living with a writer. For example, Jack -- but also all the other (male) writers he hung out with -- drank huge amounts of alcohol, slept with his friends' wives, visited prostitutes, and generally carried on like he wanted to be Ernest Hemingway when he grew up. The crazy part is that in the late 1950's and early 1960's, everyone accepted it. Anne herself said she didn't mind Jack's horribly irresponsible behavior because she assumed that one day he would achieve literary immortality, undying fame, and this would make it all worth it.

All this was fine until Jack actually got a play produced in New York. (It seems unlikely that the play was on Broadway, but I forget at this point if it was off-Broadway … or off-off-Broadway.) The audience applauded politely but the critics hated it. Jack disappeared into a world of bars and brothels for a week. And it is with reference to that time that Anne writes:

That is the moment I began to despise the idea of fame. What does it do for the bearer of the laurel? Who cares if your name is in the paper? Who cares if you are mentioned as one of the top-ten cyclists, boxers, batters, painters, poets, artists, fly fishermen in the world? Who cares if your name is written in history books? When you have died you can't read those history books. When you have died the small trace you have left behind, even if you win a Tony, an Emmy, an Oscar, an election, will lose its vibrancy, fade into an outline. Oh yes, him, I heard of him, I knew someone who read him once. What difference does it make to the corpse if his books are in libraries or not in libraries? Who cares if his plays are revived on the summer-stock circuit for one hundred years? Isn't the simplest touch of a child's arm on the face more important, isn't the good meal, the brush against a thigh, a hand held during a movie, a swim in the sea, aren't those things of equal importance as the sands of time come rushing down on our heads burying ambition and love, good and evil, breath, blood, brains, waste, memory, alike in oblivion?

Jack wanted to be Michelangelo painting on the ceiling, lying on his back on the scaffolding. Good old Michelangelo. Good for us who stare up at the hand of God reaching toward Adam. But actually Michelangelo doesn't know that crowds line up and pay good money to enter the room to see his masterpiece, and if he had known, would his breakfast have tasted any better, his loves been any stronger, his life any longer? Would he have dined on a happiness of greater portion than the man who made a cabinet and sent it on to his patron's villa or the man who made puddings he sold from his cart? Fame is the snake in the garden, the great seducer. Perhaps Jack thought that if he were famous enough, enough like Keats, he could beat the hurt that chased him down dark streets or he might just sleep better at night.

The night of the bad reviews for his play was the night of a small assassination. I knew that each word cut his spirit, that no matter how hard he drank, how many packs of cigarettes he smoked, no matter what other drugs of highs or lows he found, these words seeped into his bloodstream, the pain would not lessen. No matter how many whores let him do this or that (and what did they do?), in the end he would be crushed, beyond repair. And so I grieved and began to hate the pursuit of fame and view it as a poison that withered my love and made me turn my face away from him in fear of his failure, which another man might have seen as a stumble on the path but I knew this man would see as a crash, as a cosmic condemnation, as a license to lie in bed all day and drink all night.

-- Anne Roiphe, Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason, pp. 174-175

Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill 1628 by Pieter Claesz