THE OSCHOLARS
___________
Vol. IV No. 3
issue no 34 : March 2007
The Critic as Critic
A
Monthly Page of Reviews
All
authors whose books are reviewed are invited to respond.
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1.
The Invention of Celebrity
David Haven Blake: Walt Whitman and the Culture of
American Celebrity. New Haven: Yale University Press 2007. pp. 251.
Reviewed by Neil Sammells, Bath Spa
University..
Having turned down a number of invitations to meet Wilde at parties on
his tour of the United States, Whitman finally deigned to meet his young
admirer on 18th January 1882, allotting him an hour and a half: he would, his
card read, be at home between 2 and 3.30. David Haven Blake’s book is
considerably less hospitable to Wilde: he merits barely a walk-on role in the
proceedings and receives just three glancing mentions in the course of its
otherwise detailed and informative discussion of the rise of celebrity culture
in nineteenth century America (‘celebrity’ and ‘star’ were, Blake says, in
common use from the 1820s and 1830s respectively). It would be a queer sort of
review that began by criticising a book on Whitman for not being about Wilde,
but there is no doubt that admirers and scholars of the latter will feel that
here is an opportunity missed.
Blake makes little of the meeting; though it would seem to offer as much
to the cultural critic as it might to the dramatist or the novelist. Wilde
opened the exchange in characteristically flamboyant style by declaring that he
came as a poet to call upon a poet (Wilde had previously announced to the
American press that Whitman was universal, and compared him in his pantheism to
Goethe and Schiller). Whitman responded with North American laconic, something
close to our own notion of cool: ‘Go ahead’. Over elderberry wine, and milk
punch, the conversation ranged across matters poetical and aesthetic, taking in
Swinburne, Tennyson, and the superiority of the American masses over the
European. An exchange of photographs was promised. The Philadelphia Press noted, archly, that although Whitman found
Oscar ‘a fine handsome youngster’, he was too big to take on his lap, as was
sometimes Whitman’s wont. Afterwards, Wilde was to tell a reporter that the
older man (Whitman was 63) was the modern embodiment of the Greek ideal and
‘the simplest, most natural, and strongest character’ he had ever met in his
life.
Wilde should have known better, especially as he was aware that being
natural is the most difficult pose of all. At the centre of Blake’s book is his
conviction that Whitman’s simplicity and naturalness were anything but – that
he lived his life as a cultural performance, deliberately and self-consciously
fashioning a version of himself for public consumption and approval, even if he
did so at several removes from the public limelight itself. Blake’s Whitman
recognised the power of the emerging publicity machines developed by the likes
of P. T. Barnum and the new advertising industry, and set out to create an
audience for whom he could star. Central to this performance was the butterfly
signature, and the famous photograph of Whitman – in artful slouch-hat – posing
with what turns out to be a cardboard butterfly on the index finger of his
right hand. ‘Before Wilde adopted his velvet breeches and Twain his white
suit,’ Blake tells us, ‘Whitman had begun to experiment with a signature symbol
of himself.’ Later in his career, Blake points out, Whitman skilfully created
controversies about his poetic reputation in order to increase his public
profile. He may not have walked down Piccadilly, or Fifth Avenue, with a lily,
or indeed a butterfly, in his hand, but Whitman, like Wilde, knew the price of
not being talked about.
However, Blake also argues that Whitman’s espousal of celebrity culture
was not so much commercial (he was relatively poor for much of his life) as
political and that his ultimate aim was not self-advancement but the redemption
of the nation by republican ideals. By cultivating celebrity, Whitman believed
the poet could most effectively represent the people in a democratic society
and he was influenced both by Thomas
Paine’s conception of the political configuration of personality in The Rights of Man and Nathaniel Willis’s ideas about the ‘Upper Ten Thousand’: a
new democratic aristocracy of fashion made up of celebrities, created by the public
whose values they represented. (I am reminded here of Wilde in An Ideal Husband, where Lord Caversham remarks dolefully on the likelihood of finding
himself being sent down to dinner with his wife’s milliner: an example of the fashionistas beginning to act as social solvents on
previously impermeable class barriers.)
Blake argues that, for Whitman, fame and celebrity were the embodiments
of democracy’s ‘strong horizontal bonds’; they demonstrated the power of the
people to choose representatives both for and of themselves. Emerson also
argued for the political impact of celebrity, contrasting it with the idleness
of the British nobility: his ‘celebrities of wealth and fashion’ represented a
levelling influence that threatened the British aristocracy, just as Wilde’s
milliner was evidence of a potentially
disruptive social mobility as the charmed circle of the aristocratic elite
found itself infiltrated by the members of a class it depended upon for the
‘delicate fopperies of fashion’ by which it identified, sustained, and
attempted to seal itself.
So, Wilde arrived in a culture avidly theorising and generating the
celebrity he intended to practice and to exploit. Blake reminds us of the
surprisingly transatlantic nature of that celebrity. Wilde had been preceded,
of course, by Dickens 40 years earlier; the singer Jenny Lind toured the States
in the 1850s, grossing some seven hundred thousand dollars over two years. Her
example was followed by that of another singer, Henrietta Sontag.
American celebrities travelled in the other direction: Barnum toured England
and France with Tom Thumb; Harriet Beecher Stowe attracted hysterical crowds
when she arrived for a lecture tour at Liverpool docks in 1853. However, unlike
Whitman, Wilde was not – as Blake argues of the former – content merely to
observe and theorise celebrity with a degree of detachment. He was intent on
immersing himself in it, and of enjoying as much of its material trappings as
he could garner unto himself: its principal attraction to him was clearly
economic self-interest rather than its theoretically democratic esprit. He may have shared Whitman’s
republican (and other) leanings, but he did not share the sage of Camden’s
indifference to red gold.
(Interestingly, and ironically, Blake details the way Camden has tried
to commodify Whitman , and his butterfly signature,
as part of a heritage industry in the way that Dublin is now prepared to do
with Wilde). In this sense, Wilde’s understanding and enjoyment of celebrity
seems much more modern than Whitman’s with its quaint notions of political
efficacy, and, as we know, he lived out a paradigm of self-destruction through
excess which we now recognise as symptomatic of the modern celebrity in extremis. (Michael Bracewell
has described Wilde as the first rock star, and, like all rock stars, he tried
to break America). Perhaps we should reimagine the
meeting between the two men over elderberry wine and milk punch as a version of
that between Lord Henry and Dorian, with Wilde about to embark upon a career in
which he pursues Whitman’s ideas about celebrity to what he called in The Decay of Lying ‘the bitter end of
action, the reductio ad absurdum of practice’.
Blake strains hard in this fascinating and thoroughly researched anatomy
of an emerging popular culture and the forces of advertising to make Whitman
sound our contemporary, calling him the ‘Muhammed Ali
of American literature’ and describing his ‘poetics of hype’. But these
parallels fail to convince; instead he seems frozen in an historical moment.
Against Wilde, Whitman looks like a figure from another age, and not our own.
Another re-imagining: Whitman passing over, with a glass of milk punch, the
baton of celebrity to Wilde and to ourselves, as we, and he, put aside Leaves
of Grass for the most recent copy of Hello!.
v
Neil
Sammells’ Wilde Style: The Plays and Prose of Oscar Wilde was published by
Longman’s in their series Studies in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century
Literature, in 2000.
2. Teaching the fin-de-siècle.
Talia Schaffer: Literature and Culture at the Fin de
Siècle. 2007
Review by Grace Brockington.
The British Millenium was an anticlimax. The Dome,
the Thames ‘river of fire’, Blair’s ‘real sense of confidence and optimism’,
all failed to live up to expectation. Bad planning and mechanical breakdown
played their part, but so too did the sheer arbitrariness of the occasion. The
Millennium was meaningless, a date waiting to be made memorable. The digital
Apocalypse never materialized. An unmarked day (9/11), rather than a
preordained year, became symbolic of the new era. Yet however gratuitous they
are, we need anniversaries to regulate the historical flux. They are also
useful as an excuse for publishing on a given topic, hence the cluster of fin-de-siècle readers and critical
monographs which appeared eight or ten years ago: The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion
from Fin-de-siecle France (Hustvedt, 1998); Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial
Literature 1870-1918 (Boehmer, 1998); 1900:
A Fin-de-Siècle Reader (Jay and Neve, 1999); and The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural
History c. 1880-1900 (Ledger and Luckhurst,
2000), to name but a few.
Talia Schaffer’s claim to have produced ‘the first reader to make the fascinating texts
of the period from 1880 to 1910 available for classroom use’ is therefore an
exaggeration. Literature and Culture at
the Fin de Siècle is different from previous anthologies, and in some ways
better, but the opening bid for originality weakens its case, as does the
tendency to over-sell the period, with its ‘famous poems, controversial
journalism, and moving short stories’. Despite her claims to the contrary,
Schaffer is not the first to mingle canonical authors with those more obscure,
but equally interesting. Many (though not all) of her selected texts are
collected here for the first time, but then again, she also leaves out much
that appears in the anthologies listed above. The book is useful and sometimes
unexpected, by no means comprehensive. The sheer quantity and variety of
writing at the fin de siècle demands
a much weightier volume to demonstrate ‘the full range of the era’s writing in
a way that has never before been possible’ (as this book claims to do). Surely
a web archive would be the best way of compiling such a collection – possibly a
project for Oscholars?
Literature and Culture at the Fin
de Siècle works hard to
accommodate a student readership. Like other collections, it arranges its
material thematically, but unlike them it provides an extensive apparatus,
including an alphabetical list of authors, a date-line of literary and
political events, separate introductions for each section and biographical
notes on individual authors. It’s thematic range is similar to that found in
Jay and Neve (1999) and Ledger and Luckhurst (2000). Between them, they cover the familiar
motifs of the period: the New Woman, aestheticism, fears of degeneration,
sexology, new political movements, scientific advances, urban expansion,
psychology, religion, war and empire. Schaffer’s central section on ‘Mind and
Body’ is too baggy, encompassing socialism and the city, as well as sex and
spiritualism. However, her focus on New Woman poetry, women writing on empire,
and the Celtic Revival is refreshing. Lacking from any of these collections is
an awareness of internationalism (as distinct from imperialism), which
developed as a countercurrent to rising nationalism
after c. 1880. The First World War now overshadows the cosmopolitan cultural
community which developed before 1914, yet the fertile processes of
Anglo-European cultural exchange deserve a place in canon-building collections
like these. Two ongoing research projects have yielded useful material on the
subject: the first is the British Academy publications on ‘The reception of
British authors in Europe’. The second is the interdisciplinary Oxford-based
seminar series ‘Fin de Siècle’, which makes useful links between Modern
Languages, History and English Literature.
Fins de
siècle
are useful because they suggest endings and beginnings – hence the rumours of
decadence and renaissance circulating around 1900. The temptation to treat the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries as two separate entities has created
problems for the study of both periods, which the concept of a long fin de
siècle circumvents. Yet the parameters of this intermediate era remain
undetermined. While Ledger and Luckhurst limit themselves to 1880-1900 (a
literal but arbitrary cut-off point), Jay and Neve extend from the 1850s to the
1930s, but with most of their texts clustered around the turn of the century.
Shaffer chooses the death of George Eliot in 1880, and the First
Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1910, to demarcate the period. I prefer Jay
and Neve’s scattergraph approach. Its very looseness makes allowance for
historical inconsistencies. Periods never begin and end abruptly, no matter how
particular events may seem to circumscribe them. In all, Literature and Culture is a useful but not
ground-breaking collection, helpful for students new to the period, although it
depends on familiar categories which some may wish to question.
v
Grace
Brockington is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. In
October 2007, she will take up a Lectureship in History of Art at the
University of Bristol. Her edited book, Internationalism and the Arts at the
Fin de Siècle, will appear with Peter Lang in 2008.
v
For Talia
Schaffer’s response in our section ‘And I? May I Say Nothing?, click 
v
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