Fame is not anything like we expect. Fame is an ‘outside’ experience which has no correlation with our ‘inside’ experience—with ourselves, with who we are. This is why fame so often leads to madness. It splits the person. But what if the ‘inner self’ wishes for fame and does not get it, that could ‘split us’ and lead to madness, as well. “Sweet fame” is how the Romantic poets referred to it—it was considered a worthy ambition for the poet. Perhaps fame is a comfort to some, a vindication, a desire to spread goodness and beauty. We are not here to simply disparage it.
But we suspect fame is often misunderstood.
How is it…hollow?
Let’s see…the first myth about fame which needs busting: fame is not adoration; it is, in fact, its opposite.
To be “talked about” is the last thing a good moral reputation needs.
And, as the famous Poe once quoted, “No Indian prince to his palace has more followers than a thief to the gallows.”
A hanging draws great crowds, and disgusting curiosity is enough, in itself, to crown with fame upon almost anyone.
We hear that some writer is famous, and we often don’t how they came by that fame.
We assume their fame is because they write well.
This is mostly naive.
There are millions of beautiful women. Why do only some—for their “beauty”—become famous?
Think about it.
Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, James Joyce and his Ulysses, Charles Baudelaire and his Fleur du Mal, Allen Ginsberg, and his Howl, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence, just to name six famous modern examples, all owe their fame to law courts and cases of public morality.
These are not just six ‘juicy’ works—these are icons in the top ten of Modern Literature, period.
Fame by cheating?
Poe—mentioned above—was chaste in manner, but his fame exists for another dubious reason: parody.
The Raven, Poe’s famous poem, was immediately parodied when it was first published. Poe was reviled, as a harsh critic, in certain circles: parody and dislike often leads to fame, as well.
Another example which quickly springs to mind is the ridicule which greeted works of modern art—Marcel Duchamp and his museum-placed urinal—or the indignation elicited by new works of music.
The Beatles, in a sense, were parodied by The Monkees, a “manufactured” Beatles-type band for TV, and this leads to the question: is fame always a formula?
Those who worship the Beatles as sophisticated musicians often forget that children made up most of their audience when they first attained fame, and later, too, with their film and album, Yellow Submarine.
But is this such a bad thing?
We can almost say that fame is produced in two ways:
1. Sexually, offending child-like innocence—Flaubert, Joyce, Baudelaire, Ginsberg, Nabokov, and Lawrence.
2. Naively, offering up child-like innocence for sophisticated adult disapproval—Poe (“Once upon a midnight dreary”) The Beatles (“Yea, yea, yea”).
We could simplify the two types above by calling them the 1. Tragic and 2. Comic routes to fame.
The really famous will often feature a hybrid of the two:
For instance, when people found drug references (not innocent) in Beatle John’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” song, inspired by a drawing done by his kid (innocent).
Poe was ridiculed for “childish” poem, “The Raven,” but was attacked for depraved habits, as well.
We think our interpretation of fame is more accurate than the commonly used: Offends middle class, or bourgeois, taste.
Flaubert and Baudelaire date from 1857, and “Howl” went to trial in 1957, so we are looking at a 100 year window of sex, fame, and modernity, the so-called Tragic path.
T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, W.C. Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath have had some success, but since Plath’s “Daddy” was published in the wake of her suicide in 1962, not one poem has become famous, not like “The Raven,” anyway, or one of Frost’s little gems; that’s a drought of 50 years, and we now live in a ‘social media’ age where things “go viral” all the time.
Recently, thanks to Twitter and Facebook, a poem by Patricia Lockwood called “Rape Joke” made a stir. The numbers were not phenomenal, but they were pretty good for the ‘poetry world.’
The raw content of “Rape Joke” could easily be filed under Tragic, and yet in a gesture to the “hybrid” characterization mentioned above, the poem “jokes,” also—if grimly.
We published a response to “Rape Joke” on Scarriet. One reader reacted to it angrily, which we—writing about our experience as an innocent child—never saw coming.
Perhaps we have entered a Post-Famous-Poem Age.
Maya Angelou asks in her 1978 poem, “Still I Rise:” “Does my sexiness upset you?”
Patricia Lockwood makes this rueful comment in her poem, “Rape Joke:”
“The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.”
