“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Dr. Johnson told Boswell; quoted less often is Boswell’s immediate and uncharacteristically prim observation: “Numerous instances to refute this will occur to all who are versed in the history of literature.” Hello!—you need to be only medium-versed to come up with dozens; writing makes but few of us rich, after all. There are so many other good reasons to write: revenge, passion, the purging of grief or despair. The love of beauty, the exposure of villainy. The recording of a life (one’s own, or someone else’s) for preservation. Or one might hope to inform later deliberations about history, as Thucydides did: “[If my work] be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content.” And then there is the matter of fame, in the present or in the future. How many do not write in hopes of attracting the admiration of a distant posterity? With what awe does the ordinary scribbler contemplate the glorious achievements of Chaucer, Cervantes, or Fielding! In silence, in secret, perhaps he dares to imagine himself in their company, in ages yet to come.
One kind of writer, at least, is immune to the lure of fame: the anonymous writer. No name, no literary glory. What would possess someone to go to all the trouble of writing a book and then take no credit for having done so? What compulsion drives this strangest of artists?
Anonymous is more than a pseudonym. It is a stark declaration of intent: a wall explicitly thrown up, not only between writer and reader, but between the writer’s work and his life. His book is one thing and his “real” life another, and the latter is entirely off limits, not only to you, the reader, but presumably to almost everybody. Sometimes he has written about something too intimate, too scary, too real, for him to bear public scrutiny. Once the connection is known, what he has written will mark his ordinary life ineradicably.
I first became interested in works by Anon. at Acres of Books, the legendary used- and rare-book store in Long Beach, California: a dense, shadowy forest of rickety wooden bookshelves, their jam-packed contents haphazardly displayed. The shop is long gone now, but I could still draw you a map of it. Each section was arranged alphabetically by author. And at the beginning of each, before the alphabet proper, the wanderer might encounter a very few books by Anonymous. These piqued my curiosity, and I began to collect them in a desultory way. Many of these chance acquisitions turned out to be faux-Regency smut, and pretty boring even to a teen-ager. But there were gems, like “Ex-Wife,” a corking 1929 melodrama later made into a film (“The Divorcee”) starring Norma Shearer. And one real treasure, a book for a lifetime’s reading: a 1955 English reprint of “A Woman In Berlin,” a masterpiece of memoir; decades on, this book would be republished, and it, too, was made into a film. Here is our first clue as to the possible motivations of Anon.: in an unsigned book, a woman might find a way to discuss sexuality frankly, without having to be judged in public or by her family or friends.
“Ex-Wife” is the chronicle of a divorced career girl’s jaded search for true love. The author, who was eventually revealed to be one Ursula Parrott, gives a sad, frank account of Jazz Age hookup culture, which was identical to that of today, minus the smartphones. The unfairness of the double standards for men and women regarding sexual permissiveness (what nowadays would be derided as “slut-shaming”), figures largely in the boozy, weirdly tender story of Patricia, aimlessly drifting through a life of pleasure after her divorce at age twenty-four, only it’s not really so pleasant as all that.
Parrott revealed her identity after the book had gone into multiple printings (my copy, still an anonymous one, is a fourth printing of the first edition, dated August, 1929). In a 1931 Los Angeles Times profile titled “Anonymity Embarrasses,” she insisted that her story was a fiction: “My former husband (whom I see frequently) read the story in manuscript form and liked it. He didn’t associate it for a moment with me … Its publication anonymously was one of those last-minute decisions and a mistake, because so many people knew of it that the identity of the writer could not be kept a secret. On the second and third editions, the book carried my own name. But for a year or more I was God’s gift to the columnists.”
These protestations are not too credible. Parrott’s physical appearance, her job as a fashion copywriter, her love of fine clothes and fast living, the age at which she married and divorced, her self-consciously smart banter, her romanticism—they all match those of her heroine pretty exactly. The attempt to hide the experiences of Ursula behind those of the lightly fictionalized Patricia was an attempt at anonymity as fragile as her first, authorial anonymity, which lasted only a year or two. According to the writer and scholar Robert Darnton, whose father moved in the same circles, Parrott’s life turned out very sadly. “She married three more times, wrote thirteen more books and various screenplays,” he writes, “but spiraled downward, dying a penniless alcoholic in 1957. One of the last articles written about her said that she was accused of stealing silverware from a couple who had befriended her.”
In the case of “A Woman in Berlin,” an anonymous woman’s clear-eyed, dispassionate account of having been half-starved and raped multiple times during the occupation of Berlin in 1945 posed a threat to her in about a thousand different ways. In addition to the risk of being branded a “tainted” woman because she had been raped—an issue discussed in detail in the book—it was very dangerous to keep a diary in that precarious time and place (she wrote in a combination of shorthand, longhand, and code). That she was able to describe so many horrors with such calm precision and authority is a testament to her fierce will. She chose to tell it all, despite how much danger she was in. Anyone who read her book would know much more about this brave and wise author than all but her closest friends, colleagues, or acquaintances could possibly know. But when she showed the diary to her boyfriend on his return from the war, as she writes in the memoir, he was horrorstruck. He turned her away; he left her.
The manuscript of “A Woman in Berlin” was placed in the hands of Kurt Marek, a fellow-journalist and friend who saw the book through to its publication in the United States, in 1954. The author shared with him her own rationale for having taken the risk of writing: the expiation of her personal complicity, however passive, however ignorant, in the Nazi atrocities. “None of the victims will be able to wear their suffering like a crown of thorns. I for one am convinced that what happened to me balanced an account.”
There are a lot of different reasons for preferring one’s life to remain separate from one’s work, but it’s not at all clear that such a separation can finally be made. And if it were possible to remain Anonymous, as the author of “A Woman In Berlin” did throughout her lifetime, would one’s “real” life come to seem less so? That is to say, did she feel that she was playing a part, with all those who did not know about her experiences, or about her authorship of this famous book? How heavily did her secrets weigh on her? Would her memories have weighed more, or less, had she never kept a diary?
* * *
The extent to which a writer’s public association with his work can come at a major cost is aptly illustrated by the case of Karl Ove Knausgaard, the Norwegian author of “Min Kamp” (Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” in Norwegian), a series of six very dark autobiographical novels that depict the author and his family—their depressions, rages, incontinence, alcoholism, dementia, all of it—in excruciatingly banal yet weirdly absorbing detail. (The first volume, translated by Don Bartlett and published by Archipelago as “My Struggle,” was reviewed by James Wood in the magazine last year.) The book has already sold half a million copies in Norway alone; Knausgaard’s father’s family have broken with him, his brother won’t speak to him, and his marriage suffered an almost complete breakdown as the result of his having written it.
In a recent interview in The Paris Review, Knausgaard mentioned that he had kept diaries as a youth but burned them when he was twenty-five or twenty-six:> It’s one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It’s another to have it captured in writing. When I started to write more systematically, I just couldn’t stand that bastard diarist-self, and I had to get rid of it. So I did, alone in my student apartment, page after page.
That feeling of danger, the experience of real shame, the risk of disgrace, that reading a confessional artist like Knausgaard gives us is something like watching a trapeze artist flying around without a net. It’s as terrible as it is exciting, even more so for the author, presumably, than for the reader. The state of general concealment in which ordinary society is conducted is thereby thrown into the sharpest relief; it’s as if a naked guy were to amble into a suburban shopping mall. Maybe you would just freak out, or maybe you would think, After all, we are all naked under these clothes, what is everyone so upset about?
* * *
The Paris Review interviewer asked Knausgaard, Do you Google yourself?
You know what? I doubt he could stop if he wanted to, and imagine he is probably Googling himself this very minute. That is, I wish Mr. Knausgaard all the peace of mind and happiness in the world, but I can’t help but think that a guy like that just isn’t constituted to leave the door closed; it’s not in his nature.
No book is dangerous in and of itself. A book is only a collection of words in a certain order, pages, screens, a sequence of ideas. Ideas alone can never hurt us. People only make ideas dangerous by fearing and hating them, and by vilifying and persecuting those who disagree with them. In this way, the association of a writer with his ideas can be very dangerous, even deadly. You stand a reasonably good chance of denying ever having read a book, but it’s a great deal harder to hide from having written one.
Beyond this, though, lies the deeper problem for those who imagine that they can write, and yet escape a reckoning. Writers are generally fated to commit the truest parts of themselves to the page, whether they choose to own their work in public or not. That is the ultimate vulnerability, and it is inescapable.
Maria Bustillos is a writer living in Los Angeles and a frequent contributor to Page-Turner.
Illustration by Victor Kerlow.
