Life Writing and Celebrity

Exploring Intersections

Sandra Mayer, Julia Novak, Sandra Mayer, Julia Novak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000682366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

This book examines the relationship between life writing and celebrity in English-language and comparative literary and cultural contexts, focusing on historical as well as contemporary auto/biographical subjects.

With contributions on the 18th-century actress Peg Woffington, Charles Dickens, Mary Pickford, Sergei Eisenstein, W.H. Auden, Marilyn Monroe, and Michael Jackson, amongst others, the book encompasses a wide range of disciplines and approaches. It explores the representation of famous lives in genres as varied as TV documentary, biopic, biofiction, journalism, (authorized) biography, and painting. The contributors address broad themes including authenticity, self-fashioning, identity politics, and ethics; and reflect on the ways in which these affect the reading and writing of celebrity lives.

This volume is the first to bring together life writing and celebrity studies—two vibrant and innovative areas of research which are closely connected through their shared concerns with authenticity and intimacy, public and private selves, myth-making and revelation. As such it will be of interest to a wide range of scholars from across the humanities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

An Austrian Auden: A Media Construction Story

Timo Frühwirth

ABSTRACT

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) was one of the most acclaimed writers in the English language in the twentieth century. When he divided his final fifteen years between the United States and Austria, in between foreign fame and local unknownness the poet materialised as a celebrity in Austrian television: it is a peripheral, small-nation media audience which the September-1967 episode of the documentary feature series Das österreichische Porträt [The Austrian Portrait] addresses and projects.

This paper investigates that televised biographical representation in terms of Stuart Hall’s conceptualisation of the narrative construction of identity, with the help of tools from British Cultural Studies and film studies. The case study especially considers how – through audio-visual strategies that add up to a metaphorical manoeuvre – the Anglo-American poet’s life and work in Austria are storied along those of Austrian poet Josef Weinheber, whose entanglement with National Socialism gets blanked out in the film.

It is in the specific context of a peripheral celebrity culture, and peripheral celebrity life writing, that the foreign identity is thus metaphorically translated into local frames of reference. The case study also has implications for TV documentary as a life-writing (or life-depiction) genre as regards its audio-visual rhetoric in the context of a discursive truth effect and the naturalised codes of televisual representation.

Auden in Austria

In her review of studies of the Anglo-American writer W. H. Auden (1907–1973), Nadia Herman Colburn (2004) outlines the biographical logic that structures most Auden criticism along the distinction between Auden’s American and English periods (242). Studies of the ‘English Auden’ (which is the title of Edward Mendelson’s anthology of W. H. Auden’s [1977] literary texts from 1927 to 1939) tend to examine the political dimension of his work, which builds upon the politically-oriented interwar reception of Auden’s work. Two anthologies from the thirties – New Signatures from 1932 and New Country from 1933 – are the first to place Auden at the centre of a new group of politically engaged writers (Colburn 2004, 241). Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis salute W. H. Auden in a special issue of New Verse in 1937; in 1938, New Verse proclaims the thirties and the thirties poets ‘the Auden Age and the Auden Circle’ (Carpenter 1981, 230; Firchow 2002, 74).

Auden’s move to the United States in 1939 constitutes a biographical caesura. Auden received the Pulitzer Prize for his book-length poem The Age of Anxiety in 1948; in 1956, The Shield of Achilles won the National Book Award (Carpenter 1981, 347; Levy 1983, 146). It is especially the moral aspects of his work in this period that studies of the ‘American Auden’ address (Colburn 2004, 242). In fact, however, Auden’s American period is largely an American-European period: Auden summered on Ischia from 1948, and from 1958 in the Austrian village of Kirchstetten (Carpenter 1981, 360–361, 387–388).

Colburn’s review concludes The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden, edited by Stan Smith, whose introduction challenges the England-America binary: ‘Auden in later life deconstructed such binaries by adopting a third provisional location, reinventing himself as a European’ (Smith 2004, 10). ‘The European Auden’ – the title of Edward Mendelson’s contribution – implies a notion of continental Europe that excludes the British Isles but includes the Italian island of Ischia, highlighting Auden’s poetic activity in Italy and Austria: the second half of the study indicates the specific relevance of Auden’s Austrian period (Mendelson 2004, 66–67). A similar spatial logic structures the 2013 collection of essays W. H. Auden in Context, edited by Tony Sharpe. Justin Quinn, in his chapter ‘At Home in Italy and Austria, 1948–1973’ – as well as in his essay ‘Auden’s Cold War Fame’ in the 2015 collection Auden at Work, edited by Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin – highlights how, in that period, Auden’s summer homes afforded him greater opportunities to write poetry than his life in the United States (Quinn 2013, 56; 2015, 243). Indeed, in the mid-1960s, it was during the Austrian summers that Auden did most of his writing (Burstall 1965b, 24).

The 1960s also mark a new turn in Auden criticism with a marked focus on the private and psychological; John Updike’s (1966) review of Auden’s (1966) collection of poems About the House is emblematic of this reception (Seidl 2014, 406): ‘As a young man, his concern was more with “public space,” and he remains the poet of the foreboding that preceded World War II, the lucid exhausted voice of ‘“September 1, 1939.” … As an aging post-war man, he has turned more toward the “inner space,” the landscape of his will and need’ (Updike 1966, 235–236).

In her 2014 study of the sequence of poems Thanksgiving for a Habitat, which is included in Auden’s About the House, Monika Seidl reviews the press, radio, and television coverage of Auden during his Austrian period, and highlights how contemporary media images of the author, such as TV producer Christopher Burstall’s leading article in The Sunday Times (1965b), incline toward the anecdotal (Seidl 2014, 394–395). In 1965, Burstall visited Auden in Kirchstetten to prepare a documentary for BBC One. Before the film was aired, he wrote in The Sunday Times,

We whizzed on in the Volkswagen through the heavy, rich, unspectacular countryside, for Auden likes to drive hard and fast. … Auden bounded from the car and impetuously shuffled, in his broken-down woolly carpet slippers, up the long narrow track. (Burstall 1965b, 24)

While that may be how Kirchstetteners first encountered the foreign poet, unlike Burstall they had not ‘been reading his poems for as long as I can remember’ (Burstall 1965b, 24); nor, for that matter, were they the readers implied by Burstall’s report, which presupposed cultural knowledge of Auden as ‘the enfant terrible of the thirties’ (21). Yet in between foreign fame and local unknownness, Auden materialises as a celebrity in the Austrian media. An Austrian TV documentary on Auden from 1967 features interviews with the Kirchstetten mayor, the schoolmaster, and the priest:

One Sunday morning, he stood in front of the church door and introduced himself as Winston [sic] Auden. … Afterwards, I looked him up in the encyclopaedia and learned some facts about him: that he is an English poet, who moved to America in 1939; notably, I also encountered his important work, The Age of Anxiety.¹, 00:09:25–00:10:03)

It is the cultural authority of the encyclopaedia that endows the foreigner with significance. However, it is a specifically local significance which the schoolmaster highlights: ‘In Professor Auden we again have a poet and professor in Kirchstetten, as Josef Weinheber was until 1945’ (00:16:59–00:17:07).² After quickly enumerating Auden’s international awards, the voice-over commentary concludes, ‘It is understandable, therefore, that the Kirchstetteners have been proud of their poet since they learned of his fame’ (00:18:48–00:18:53).³ The Mayor of Kirchstetten expands:

When he first came to Kirchstetten in 1958, one would not think much about him dangling through the village. And it was said that he was an American poet, and not much attention was paid to him. … Now word has spread in the press, on the radio and television that we have a very famous poet in our village, and now he is revered and esteemed. … We are very proud that yet again we have such a famous poet in Kirchstetten.⁴ (00:19:00–00:19:37)

In the Kirchstetten of the 1960s, Auden was famous for being famous elsewhere. The meanings that make the unknown foreigner famous are made ‘in the press, on the radio and television’: it is the media phenomenon of celebrity that bridges the gap between unknownness and fame. Relevant here is Daniel J. Boorstin’s definition of the celebrity as a person made meaningful through media representation:

The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.

His qualities—or rather his lack of qualities—illustrate our peculiar problems. He is neither good nor bad, great nor petty. He is the human pseudo-event. … The product of no conspiracy, of no group promoting vice or emptiness, he is made by honest, industrious men of high professional ethics doing their job, ‘informing’ and educating us. He is made by all of us who willingly read about him, who like to see him on television. (1962, 57–58)

Boorstin concludes, ‘the celebrity is created by the media’ (61). Inasmuch as Boorstin conceives of celebrity in terms of media circulation, and explicitly not of ‘achievement’ (61), his concept precludes the accomplishments of ‘literary art’ (153). In relation to W. H. Auden’s entry into the ‘peripheral’ small-nation celebrity culture of Austria, the Boorstinian concept of ‘celebrity’ can help shed light on the disconnection between the poet’s foreign (from the point of view of 1960s Austria) ‘qualities’ and his local significance.⁵

While Boorstin’s study of celebrity explicitly engages with American media systems in the early 1960s, celebrity studies has more recently turned its attention to peripheral celebrity culture in small nations (Williams 2016, 154–155). The dynamics of small-nation celebrity touch on themes at the interface between the foreign and the local: conditions of in-betwe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Life Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections
• 1 An Austrian Auden: A Media Construction Story
• 2 Sergei Eisenstein as Seen by Peter Greenaway: A Dialectic Representation of an (Anti-)Great Film Director
• 3 Fictionalisation in Biography: Creating the Dickens Myth
• 4 Visual Art as Celebrity Memoir: The Paradox of Peg Woffington’s Sick-bed Portrait
• 5 Writing Celebrity as Disability: Las Meninas, Performing Dwarfs, and Michael Jackson Fan Day
• 6 ‘Boswellized From Mere Persons to Personages’: Arthur Stringer, Mary Pickford, and the Trouble with Celebrity Profile(r)s
• 7 ‘Watergate-ing’ Norman Mailer’s Marilyn: Life Writing in Cultural Context
• 8 Pacts, Paratext, and Polyphony: Writing the Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt
• Index