No Little People

As a reporter, I have often interviewed and written about people who had never before spoken with a journalist and who probably never would again. Their names will not appear a second time in the newspaper, except if someone cares to write their obituary. If you were to “Google” their names, you would find no matches. They have done nothing deemed noteworthy, for good or ill, and most greet their brief intersection with “fame” in a manner that mingles suspicion, mock humility and a flattered sense of pride. In an age of celebrity-worship, when otherwise negligible human beings become famous for being famous, the people I interview generally lead obscure, anonymous lives and thus, in the marketplace of fame, being neither movie stars nor serial killers, will remain forever losers. I thought about such things while reading some poems by Irving Feldman, particularly “The Biographies of Solitude” (in Collected Poems: 1954-2004). It’s not a great poem but it has several good lines:

“And who will say these lives have been?
“Solitude has no biographers.”

Feldman concludes the poem like this: “How America is immense and filled with solitudes!”

Melville recognized this truth. In chapter 27 of Moby Dick, “Knights and Squires,” he writes: “They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.”

Self-reliance and stoically keeping one’s own counsel were once judged characteristically American virtues, not social diseases. Today, one is expected to be a “team player” (beware of those who use sports metaphors unironically) and to radiate “school spirit.” As a writer, I have tended to sympathize with genuine outsiders, cranks, misfits and eccentrics, usually benign, sometimes nasty, who will never be romanticized or championed by partisans of bohemian chic. Most of them go to work, pay their taxes and walk an invisible line parallel to our own. We don’t often intersect. They want to be left alone – a fundamental human right.

Take the final paragraph of Middlemarch, in which George Eliot writes of Dorothea Brooke’s "full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffuse: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Most of us lead “hidden lives” and are fated to “rest in unvisited tombs.” If not noble, such a life can at least be honorable. What’s the alternative? To be embalmed and put on display like Lenin’s corpse? In an author’s note to McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Joseph Mitchell, the nonfiction writer for The New Yorker, complained about journalists referring to “the little people”:

“I regard this phrase as patronizing and repulsive. There are no little people in this book. They are as big as you are, whoever you are.”