People of the Book
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Orhan Pamuk visited Dartmouth last Thursday on the one-year anniversary of his winning the Nobel Prize for literature. He’s a tall man, reserved yet polite, and his accent is thicker than his proficiency with English might have you expect. At a luncheon at the Haldeman Center, he was mostly gracious as he answered student questions. As is often the case with students, their questions had more to do with themselves than the object of their interrogation, but Pamuk apparently did his best to offer good answers.
But there were the inevitable odd moments. For example, at one point he observed that New York is less crowded than Istanbul because it has subways. The people are all underground, on the subways, he said. At this he gave a long paroxysm of a laugh, and his eyebrows shifted to what looked like forty-five degrees. No one else quite got the thrust of the joke judging by the fact that Pamuk laughed alone.
At another point, a student asked what could be called a standard Model UN question. In this case, it was, “What is the connection between literacy and Turkish fundamentalism?” although couched in a way to suggest an eventual policy initiative, teaching those religious crazies to read. It would be too strong to say that Pamuk flew into a rage at this, but he certainly did not let the premises of the question go untrammeled. The fundamentalists are not less educated, America has its own fundamentalists, and so forth—all true, but Pamuk’s answer and tone were quite out of the proportion to the force of the question, which was put in a lackadaisical way. I suspected that Pamuk, who had built such a sturdy inner life over so many decades, had dragged an entire universe into his answer to a throwaway question.
Pamuk is an introvert, as are many writers. Yet, when we invite them to speak on campus, we invite them in their capacities as speakers. They did not become famous as social people, but somehow we expect them to be. I hope I don’t impute too much to the rest of campus when I say we expect them to be walking, talking books. Before Pamuk became famous, though, it is doubtful that roomfuls of strangers longed to pick his brain.
Matthew Pearl has cornered the market in historical mysteries about literary writers—he wrote a novel called The Dante Club, another called The Poe Shadow, and one forthcoming about Dickens. At his Dartmouth luncheon, he talked for a little while about writing in general, but very soon the small audience became bored. A shock: this was not a thriller that had sprouted arms and legs and come to lunch but a slow-talking wet blanket. At his own luncheon, he became marginalized. A grad student talked about her plans to write a campus novel. An undergraduate described her dream: a coffee table book of photographs of graffiti. After a while Pearl just sat and listened to the chatter.
I once heard a hilarious (or sad) story about a renowned American playwright who visited an English class at Dartmouth at few years ago. During the question period, the professor led the charge, and his faith in his own interpretation was astounding. Your play is actually about such and such a phenomenon, right? he asked. No, said the playwright, that’s totally wrong. A few more tries, and, according to some in the class, the playwright guarded his art with increasing jealousy, swatting each attempt down with increasing glee. I can’t decide who comes off looking worse in this episode: the professor who seems oblivious to the narrowness of his interpretation or the playwright who assumes scorn for his readers in public.
A radio host interviewed Philip Roth about his novella Everyman. Roth read a passage describing a man’s death, which implied with hardly any ambiguity that the soul dies with the body. “So beautiful. Is it a redemptive ending or not?” smarmed the host. Roth quipped that he doesn’t use that adjective except regarding grocery store coupons. But the interviewer was undaunted. He pressed again that, surely, there must be some sort of salvation here? No, Roth said patiently, I mean that death is extinction. But I whiffed that Roth’s interrogator couldn’t wait for the bothersome old novelist to leave so he could bask in the redemption of it all. Writers: such inexorable killjoys.
Why do people want to impress writers so much? It’s not just a collegiate phenomenon. In one of my favorite flicks, The Third Man, Holly Martins arrives in postwar Vienna, where even the British officers want to fete him, though he is only a pulp novelist in the style of Louis L’Amour. The officer Crabbin invites him to deliver a lecture to their local Cultural Reeducation Society.
Crabbin: We do a little show each week. Last week we had “Hamlet.” The week before we had... something.
Sgt. Paine: The striptease, sir.
Crabbin: Yes, the Hindu dancers. Thank you, sergeant.
I don’t mean to pile blame onto others. I’ve met a few famous writers, and in each instance I did my part to increase the total amount of discomfort in the world. Usually, I had nothing to say; I just wanted to say something to someone well-known. Back then, I took their physiognomies as signifying arrogance, but now I realize they were the perfectly natural reactions of “Oh, not again...” you’d get when approached by earnest young men with nothing on their minds other than, “This man’s famous.” No one could sustain a conversation on that.
The British actor Stephen Fry wrote an essay recently on fame, and it really gets to core of what makes these shoulder-rubbings with the famous so thorny. My favorite favorite was this:
A very, very, very popular strategy used by the approacher is to cast themselves in the role of the non-typical fan. This of course is the most popular method and casts them therefore as utterly typical. They will say something like ‘I expect you get really annoyed by people coming up to you...’ as if they are not doing exactly that.
This makes fame sound maddening, so why do the writers consent to these academic triumphs? One unnerving thing I always notice at these talks by writers occurs right after the laudatory speech. The visiting intellectual celebrity is always assigned a handler from the faculty, and the handler usually delivers the introduction. Inevitably the speech is stupendously overblown, calling the soon-to-be-speaking the greatest, kindest, most handsome man who ever wrote a smutty novella set in South America. Then, as the applause dies down, the author waddles to the podium looking embarrassed. The goal in that look is to evince humility, it would seem, but what really jumps out at me is a faintest flicker of—contempt. “Damn you for putting me in this situation” is often noticeably there when writers speak. Yet we keep asking them to give speeches, and they keep accepting. Thank God Shakespeare’s dead so we won’t ever have to meet him. n
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