(Ed note: This is the final post in a series of five by Jeffrey Meyers. Here are links to the previous four posts: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.)
Many external
factors enhance a literary reputation.
It always helps to belong to a group: Bloomsbury, Lost Generation,
Algonquin Round Table, Auden-Spender-MacNeice, Angry Young Men. It’s also quite useful to have your work
censored and suppressed, oppose tyrannical regimes, serve time in a psychiatric
hospital or prison, suffer a mental breakdown, commit suicide or die
young. Physical appearance also has a
powerful influence on literary reputations.
In “A Prayer for
My Daughter” (1921) W. B. Yeats, knowing that handsome people have distinct
advantages, still warned about the dangers of vanity and egoism of comeliness:
May she be granted
beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a
stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a
looking glass, for such,
Being made beautiful
overmuch,
Consider beauty a
sufficient end.
I would argue that homely authors
would have a greater reputation and handsome writers a lesser, if they had not
been cursed or blessed by their appearance.
Readers are naturally drawn to works by attractive writers. In Advertisements
for Myself, Norman Mailer insisted that the appearance and character of the
author must match the work: “how silly it would be if A Farewell to Arms,
or better, Death in the Afternoon, had been written by a man who was
five-four, had acne, wore glasses, spoke in a shrill voice, and was a physical
coward.”
The appearance of
authors—often on a dust wrapper photograph or even an indelible snapshot on the
back of an old Penguin paperback—suggests the quality of their work. The tallest writer was Wolfe; the shortest,
Pope; the fattest, Chesterton; the thinnest, Emily Dickinson (I once saw, at a
conference in Amherst, Massachusetts, a Mormon bishop taking one of her dresses
off a mannequin and secretly struggling to get into it). My admittedly subjective judgment would
include, among the homeliest, obese and sometimes even disfigured writers:
George Eliot, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Lillian
Hellman, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor; Johnson,
Goldsmith, Gibbon, Swinburne, Verlaine, Dreiser, Maugham, Forster, Strachey,
Sinclair Lewis, Babel, Brecht, Connolly, Sartre, Larkin, Baldwin and Ginsberg.
The handsomest
list would include: Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle, Katherine Mansfield, Edna
Millay, Anaïs Nin, Martha Gellhorn, Mary McCarthy, Iris Murdoch, Anne Sexton,
Caroline Blackwood, Sylvia Plath, Edna O’Brien, Susan Sontag and Gjertrud
Schnackenberg (Millay, Nin, Gellhorn, Sexton and Sontag used sex to advance
their careers); Byron, Ruskin, Jack London, Wyndham Lewis, Brooke, O’Neill,
Fitzgerald, Joe Ackerley, Hemingway, Nabokov, Isherwood, Spender, Bellow,
Arthur Miller, Kingsley Amis, Merwin, Gunn, Hughes and Chatwin. But Hemingway, in a caustic comparison, wrote
that “Scott looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. . . .
The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.”
Though
unattractive women are taken more seriously than great beauties, neo-Platonic
authors believed that beauty reveals inner goodness and ugliness suggests
evil. (This idea still prevails in
popular movies where narcissists oppose outcasts, and villains are marked by
fat flesh and bad skin.) Film stars and
models graced with beauty seem like higher beings who symbolize the perfection
of the human race. They arouse our
sympathy, focus our attention and animate our minds. We idealize them, and their godlike qualities
suggest a kind of immortality. Beauty is
fragile and vulnerable, and needs to be nourished and protected. But it is also associated with youth,
happiness and the promise of life. It
gives aesthetic pleasure and is sexually exciting. Physically attractive authors make their work
seem more appealing. Their lovely faces
provide tangible evidence—beyond their creative talent—that they are superior
beings, have become sacred icons and are themselves a work of art. As Keats
wrote in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’–that is all
/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Jeffrey Meyers, a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature, has recently published Samuel Johnson: The
Struggle (2008), The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn
Monroe (2009), George Orwell: Life and Art (2010)—his fifth work on
Orwell—and John Huston: Courage and Art (2011). Thirty of his books have been
translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six
continents. In 2012 he gave the Seymour
lectures on biography, sponsored by the National Library of Australia, in
Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney. A new post will appear every day this week.