Fame v. Marginality

The recent piece below on Tennessee Williams, especially its commentary on the end of his career, reminds me how fickle "fame" can be. The most blatant personal example I know is the case of Robert Sheckley. While he was still alive, I had the pleasure of spending time with him over coffee a couple times as he lamented about how difficult his professional and personal lives had become. Indeed, the last time he asked me out for coffee, he wanted to know if I knew of any inexpensive places to live in Portland. Not any more.

Now here is a giant science-fiction writer, one of the top writers in the Golden Age of Scifi. He was one of my favorite writers when I was in high school, so meeting him many years later was like meeting a hero. I couldn't believe it when he told me how he couldn't get published any more, had resorted to publishing himself on the Internet, even though he still was welcome in scifi conferences around the world. His work hadn't deteriorated. The marketplace had changed.

Robert Sheckley is one of the great science fiction writers of the last fifty years. His satiric wit and graceful prose are as refreshing today as ever. From humorous Science Fiction to off-beat, soft-boiled crime, much of his work has a meaningful playfulness which has thus far gone unmatched.

---

You are enchiladas with salsa.
Bad jokes and too many cigarettes.
Old stories retold with relish
A wrinkled smile
and crinkled eyes.

Half remembered plot twists
Naughty thoughts about this or that
Joy and broken hearts
Friends who are strangers
And stranger friends.

We talk about family
Lost and estranged
We talk about Europe
Days in the sun
Days in the rain.

There's not much science in illness
Nor compassion in pain
One leads to another back and forth
By some twisted route
Toward happiness fictional and real.

If only the stories
Could come true as we wrote them
If only we could craft those ironic endings
With that twinge of harsh recognition
Wrapped in a giggle.

For you, I think,
I'll remember the enchiladas
And remember the laughs
And remember the crinkled eyes
And perceive the tears as rain to make things grow.

Edward Summer
Dec 10, 2005
New York, NY

To a lesser degree, I experienced the same thing myself, as I'm reminded as I scan items in my literary scrapbooks, most of which are from the 1980s. There was a time when columnists contacted me just to know what I was working on. How extraordinary! I don't know a columnist who would give me the time of day today. Many writers, of course, get no taste of "fame" at all, however small, so what you get, you have to be thankful for. But it's a curious phenomenon in this star-driven culture.

None of this would matter except for the fact that fame inevitably increases a writer's audience, and the name of the game is communication, at least for most writers. Sometimes the audience is abstract: those who like x will like my work, eventually. The work has to be visible, it has to be accessible, to be appreciated. The revolution of the Internet surely will reveal startling accomplishments in the future, things written today and lost in cyberspace, discovered decades later. The private drawer of Emily Dickinson today might be some obscure website somewhere.

Of course, fame also has disadvantages, most severely the more famous you get, I think. Few writers ever reach this plateau (compared to movie stars or politicians). You lose privacy.

Well, writers surely know about privacy. Privacy and isolation are their bedfellows much of the time. Fame is the exception, not the rule, for most of us.

But it makes no more actual sense how you got it than how you lost it. A writer keeps writing, and how the chips fall is how the chips fall. A mystery.