'Commonly Lost Because It Never Was Deserved'

Often, I hardly recognize my younger self. I did foolish things I would never contemplate today. My self-centeredness was appalling, my taste frequently shameful, even in books. I read critics uncritically and was cowed by their fame and influence. Taste doesn’t arrive congenitally. You have to work at it and learn to know yourself, capacities rare among the young. Dr. Johnson understood:

“Of many writers who filled their age with wonder, and whose names we find celebrated in the books of their contemporaries, the works are now no longer to be seen, or are seen only amidst the lumber of libraries which are seldom visited, where they lie only to show the deceitfulness of hope, and the uncertainty of honour.”

 

As a teenager and beyond I read too many contemporary writers, so my larger literary education suffered. I often mistook fashion for brilliance. Admittedly, some of our best writers were at work back then – Nabokov, Auden, Singer – and I dutifully read them as they published new work, but my lack of taste was best exemplified by my devotion to Norman Mailer. His egotism was as dense and unpalatable as last year’s fruitcake. To read him today is to confront a writer whose pretentiousness makes him almost literally impossible to read. Usually, that description is a metaphor, a measured dose of satirical exaggeration. Try reading him today, with a post-adolescent’s sensibility.

 

Consider Mailer’s 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam?, written in a hipster’s pidgin English borrowed from William Burroughs, another crime against literature. I remember taking the novel with me on a family camping trip shortly after its publication and convincing myself that I enjoyed it. I was a bookish poseur, dim and dishonest enough to blatantly lie to myself with a straight face. My behavior was not atypical. Much of the literary world – writers, readers, critics -- remains an elaborate masquerade, people signaling their hipness and sophistication by endorsing an approved brand. I still encounter the occasional advocacy of Mailer’s work, including a critic who not long ago launched a defense of his Apollo 11 book, Of a Fire on the Moon (1970). Johnson on Mailer and others:

 

“Of the decline of reputation many causes may be assigned. It is commonly lost because it never was deserved; and was conferred at first, not by the suffrage of criticism, but by the fondness of friendship, or servility of flattery. The great and popular are very freely applauded; but all soon grow weary of echoing to each other a name which has no other claim to notice, but that many mouths are pronouncing it at once.”    

 

[The passages from Johnson are taken from The Idler essay published June 2, 1759.]