‘As you get older you realise that all these things – prizes, reviews, advances, readers – it’s all showbiz, and the real action starts with your obituary.”
Martin Amis first started spinning in favour of his future obituarists in 2003 – at the juncture, post Yellow Dog, at which prizes, reviews, advances and readers began to turn against him. He knew how things would play out. After two decades of the literary world quiet quitting Martin Amis, there has been a sudden rehabilitation. In the past week the pages of obituary sections have exploded with a strangely pre-2003 phenomenon – a semi-tolerant fascination with Amis’s personal life, and the way it may have bled into his work, and vice versa.
There is a nostalgia to these pieces: they strike the reader as missives from another age. What used to be a staple of literary culture – a sort of relaxed curiosity towards the proclivities of writers, their outrageous love affairs, their bad political opinions – is now really only to be found in obituaries sections. Before 2003, or thereabouts, was a long era in which flawed personalities were routinely sold as part of the package: writers and artists and rock stars shored up their place in the firmament by revealing or cultivating a complicated life. Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Philip Larkin: the lothario, the drunken raconteur, the recluse. The image fed the fame, which fed the sales. Gossip-informed readers enjoyed speculating about the points at which fact met fiction – who had inspired what? Were you really a writer if you didn’t live like one? But things have changed.
We still obsess over difficult artists in prestige films – from a minimum distance of 50 years or so. But for our current crop of writers, painters, musicians and the rest, personality is out of fashion. In fact, those we hold up as cultural icons must now live the blameless apolitical lives of minor royals. Any hint of deviation from the head boy or girl act can inflict terrible harm – once you have been shunned by a small group on Twitter, you should start worrying your publishers will be next.
Few writers with messy lives or offbeat opinions now top bestseller lists. There are no Ernest Hemingways or Ted Hugheses. The “imperfect” and the “complex” are celebrated more loudly than ever, but only in promotional press releases for the novels. Under the many watchful eyes on social media, the swaggeringly counter-cultural life is entirely off limits – in fact most so-called scandals now involve a slip-up, or a crack in a careful persona. Sally Rooney, who lives quietly, once said something political, which was a mistake, and has complained about fame, which didn’t go down well either. Lena Dunham, celebrated for her flawed characters, was deserted by fans for revealing various (rather similar) flaws herself. They had never liked her work after all, former devotees started saying – in fact she was a bad writer. And her characters were unlikeable too.
There is Taylor Swift, who is currently suffering a sort of sexually transmitted blow-back: her crime is to date a controversial singer. And there is the celebrity philosopher Agnes Callard, who was recently revealed not only to have left her husband for a student, but to now be living with both of them. In the course of a long profile in the New Yorker, she theorised about the philosophical implications of the love triangle – as a three, “they would all keep talking about philosophy, but with fresh ideas in the mix”. What will one day delight obituarists disgusted New Yorker readers: she was universally condemned.
It is probably worth asking if the gender of today’s cultural stars has something to do with it. They are no longer overwhelmingly male, particularly in the literary world (on Granta’s list of best young British novelists last month just one in five were men).
Are we witnessing sexism: the expectation that women, however talented, must always be on their best behaviour? This is probably part of it, although men are treated the same way these days: Will Self, who is alleged to have treated his ex-wife appallingly, has suffered a tarnishing of his literary brand. And there are counter examples. You think of Iris Murdoch’s adulterous bed hopping, or Doris Lessing abandoning her two children, or Joni Mitchell putting her child up for adoption, and wonder if this would be tolerated among new authors and celebrities in 2023. (Lena Dunham, after all, was cancelled for adopting a rescue dog then changing her mind.)
There seems to be something broader going on. Where once the talented artist was forgiven almost anything, we are now in a period of overcorrection. “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being,” Martha Gellhorn once said. We no longer accept the trade-off. In fact, in a surfeit of egalitarianism, we now seem to require geniuses to behave better than the rest of us.
It is good news, of course, that talented monsters aren’t given the free pass they once were. The period of history in which someone could dodge prison if they were a dab hand with a paintbrush is thankfully over. But I worry we have swung into an era in which likeability comes first and talent later. It is not a coincidence that original thinkers have often dodged conformity – moral or otherwise. Not every prodigy is also a prefect.