A Case of Identity
In 1954 the book A Woman in Berlin was published in America. Its author, a rape victim at the hands of marauding Russian soldiers, chose to remain anonymous. Her wishes were respected and her identity was kept under wraps for the rest of her life. Then in 2003, two years after her death, she was finally identified in the Süddeutsche Zeitung by Jens Bisky, one of Germany’s leading literary editors. She was Marta Hillers, a journalist, and the book was her diary account of the atrocities committed in the last days of the war. Her secret was now out. Facing opprobrium and charges of malicious ‘snooping’, Bisky defended his decision to unveil her by declaring “it is important we judge it [the book] as history and not as a novel”. In his eyes, the diary could only be considered an accurate historical document if the identity of its author were known.
The same appears to be true for literature in general. Every writer needs a face. It would seem we cannot fully get a handle on a literary work without knowing something, or indeed anything about its creator. Artists need pigeon-holed but the writer more than anyone. The hardback without the photo of the writer on the flyleaf is unthinkable; the paperback without the ‘About the author’ churlish. Both are necessary, in particular for the first-time author, to enable us to duly build a picture which in turn helps us digest the book, or at least take it seriously. The writer thus becomes a knowable entity and God forbid that it should be otherwise.
Zadie Smith was once upon a time a first-time author. When White Teeth arrived, much was made of the hot new author on the block with her vibrant voice, comic turns and original – and authentic – take on multicultural London. But the interviews were necessary, almost as much as the publicity pictures. She was new to the game so we needed vital statistics: age, education, social background. Smith had earned her advance and publishing contract but to earn her spurs with the critics she needed to be reviewed along with the book. Who was she? Were we dealing with a parvenue or a prodigy? How ‘qualified’ was she to write this? There are certain critics who suffer from selective amnesia and forget that creativity and imagination realise results, and instead prefer to dwell entirely on the writer’s CV. Had White Teeth been submitted as the debut of a young millionaire male from Tunbridge Wells we may well have seen decidedly sniffier praise in amongst the genuine plaudits. Smith’s talent was called ‘precocious’ in some circles – her reward for being young and spot on. (‘Precocious’, incidentally, is a backhanded compliment. On that scale of praise it appears a degree to the right of the positive centre; a degree the other way is ‘getting above your station’.) Write what you know, goes the dictum, often a diktat for the newies: don’t dare deviate. Many authors play safe and defend their decision, saying that young writers have to write what they know because they haven’t lived enough. This is too limiting, and certainly doesn’t account for the fact that many a debut is clearly the result of a writer distancing themselves from their own lived experience. Also it puts one in mind of the (perhaps spurious) anecdote from Marathon Man, where Dustin Hoffman arrived sleep-deprived on set because in the next scene his character was to suffer the same, only to be told witheringly by Lawrence Olivier, “Why don’t you try acting?” Martin Amis’ The Rachel Papers is an exuberant and hilarious debut but Amis needn’t have felt inhibited and impelled to stick hard and fast to those scant biographical details: he could have tried imagining more. Charles Highway may have “a rangy, well-travelled, big-cocked name and, to look at, I am none of these”, but fictional flourishes don’t stop the novel being a summation of its creator’s to-date career trajectory. White Teeth, on the other hand, happens in places to be the “baggy monster” Smith herself has proclaimed it, but she wins more respect for insisting on a wider scope, for projecting the light on herself and beyond.
So much for writers at the beginning of their careers. In John Updike’s twilight years he produced a respectable output, but his penultimate novel, Terrorist, received a critical mauling. The book is a drastic misfire from an author who was usually so dependably in control – proof, if it were needed, that in literature practice does not always make perfect. For reasons not relevant to go into here it was right for the book to take a drubbing, but wrong of its denouncers to take umbrage at Updike’s motives. For in the eyes of many critics the transformation of a young Muslim boy into a jihadist suicide-bomber was a step too far, even for a writer of Updike’s calibre. The book fails but not because Updike wasn’t “equipped” to tackle this theme. “John Updike should have run a thousand miles away from this subject,” said James Wood in the New Republic. Once again we are dealing with who the writer is and his qualifications for his particular undertaking. Why wasn’t Updike equipped? How could he have been more ably equipped? By attending a radical madrassa? By becoming a terrorist? Memories of the Ford Administration, Brazil and Gertrude and Claudius demonstrate that once in a while he liked to get away from Pennsylvanian suburbs and fairways, but the message seems to be that he is on safer ground when he sticks to what he knows.
So to determine what is safer ground we need to know who the writer is. This makes evaluation easier. The book can never stand alone as the product of someone’s vivid creative powers. He too is a commodity to be weighed. But why should this be so? Is it a by-product of our voracious appetite for celebrity culture – the human stripped bare? Or merely an inevitable knock-on effect in these Wiki-Google times: for in order to exist, to be real, we need to be connected, clickable, out there in some cyber-domain or another in this shrinking universe. Is it because we feel cheated when presented with non-identity? We would certainly ask for a refund if the whodunit didn’t stay true to its remit and the detective couldn’t unveil his culprit. Those al-Qaeda videos and ETA press conferences are sinister, signalling the aftermath or precursor to violence, but those masks and balaclavas help aid and abet the threats. Dubbed films or Sinn Fein politicians simply sound wrong and leave us wanting to hear the real versions. We need to know our enemy in the same way we need to know our writer. It arguably doesn’t exist in any other artistic field. Banksy’s SAS-type anonymity is all part of the fun, and indeed the only way for an art terrorist to convincingly operate; seeing him take a bow or, worse, accept a prize would be akin to a magician explaining his tricks. The virtual band Gorillaz succeed by producing consistently innovative music behind equally original animated characters. But for writers it is different. Is this need-to-know chiefly a British preoccupation? Though writers lack celebrity status, one wonders whether Salinger could have enjoyed his solitude had he lived over here; whether Pynchon would remain faceless, or Harper Lee bugged by tabloid long-range lenses and hounded into emigration, or worse, productivity.
Keeping a low profile is one thing but we don’t always have the luxury of knowing the author’s identity. Some lives are too closely guarded, some secrets too well kept. Not every nom de plume gets decoded. Anonymity is that frustrating beast: identity veiled. Mary Anne Evans used a male pen name so that her books would be taken more seriously. The Brontës hedged their bets with androgynous names. Just how flippantly would we have viewed Middlemarch had Evans kept her original name? (Amazingly, this persists today, with JK Rowling allegedly being told by her publisher that young boys might not buy her books if they knew they were written by a woman.) Walter Scott didn’t have this problem and Waverley didn’t even have the ‘Anonymous’ tag that Marta Hillers hid behind – the frontispiece showed only the title, and Scott was able to stay incognito for the succession of novels over the next five years. This would scarcely be tolerated today. The book could be a masterpiece but the very act of the writer not showing his face would be regarded as meretricious, and consequently we would see the novel in a paler light. Pseudonyms have to be declared at publishing-house customs so as not to jeopardise sales: hence we have ‘Ian Rankin writing as Jack Harvey’ and ‘Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming’: the established author or the living author gets top-billing over the imaginary or dead one. Today this is peculiarly rife in the crime or spy genres. The sanctity that is the identity of the author must be protected. At the literary, Booker Prize-winning end, John Banville feels the need to write his thrillers as Benjamin Black. This is interesting: it is a man who suffers from the same paranoia as Mary Anne Evans, only it is a man living and writing almost one hundred and fifty years later. He has said that Black is a craftsman but Banville is an artist, but would we think less of him if all his books came out under the same name?
Unknown authorship is different from absence of identity of a proven writer, but both can be discussed simultaneously for both relate to the knowability of the writer when it comes to evaluating the work. We know that Shakespeare contributed to The Two Noble Kinsmen (authorship) but are still not fully clear how much of the play is his and how much is Fletcher’s. Added to this is the fact we famously know very little about Shakespeare’s life (absence of identity). Could we appreciate his plays more if we knew more than the scant facts and conjecture about his life, and if we knew which parts were truly his in the collaborative efforts? Shakespeare scholars still wrestle with the problem of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, but what is their main motivation for ascribing these anonymous plays to him? It is tempting to think that it is not because of a desire to attribute the better ones to Shakespeare but more to tie up loose ends: a literary equivalent of finding homes for unwanted dogs.
But this need to know the author hasn’t always been the case and we can find examples of this in that rarefied world of theory. Between the 1940s and 1960s New Criticism sought to break the content expressed in literary works from the intention of the author. This ‘international fallacy’ avows that the narrator in a novel or the speaker in a poem is always a ‘persona’, and never the author. The poem belongs to the public! runs the tagline. Roland Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ essay later reinforced this, nullifying the author’s original thoughts and remit. If the author’s opinion is of no importance then it is safe to say his identity is even more worthless. But then from the sixties on we saw a marked sea-change. With the emergence of Cultural Studies came an attempt to view a literary work as a product or symptom of its culture or of its author’s identity and not simply as a self-contained aesthetic package. The emphasis was no longer on text but context. In a way, we’re still there today. We read interviews from the author, the creator, and are told why they chose this topic and how the idea came to them. More often than not there is personal experience in there: a friend inspired this character, a holiday suggested this setting, or even the whole plot appeared to them in a dream.
We need identity in able to identify. Interpretation – indeed appraisal – can only go so far and so deep if writers cover their tracks. The identity of the writer is everything as it not only helps assess their work, it authenticates it.
Malcolm Forbes is a teacher and freelance essayist and reviewer. He was born in Edinburgh and currently lives in Berlin.
He may be contacted at: m_d_forbes@hotmail.com.
