This note card from Edmund Wilson seems quaint today. The card was sent to a student group that invited Wilson to give a reading. Wilson’s handwritten answer reads, “I don’t give readings either unless I’m offered a very large fee. E.W.” (Click the image to view larger.)
Over at Crooked Timber, the card triggered an interesting discussion of the decline of the “public intellectual”: Wilson could afford to bat away requests like these because his income from writing was secure, a luxury few intellectuals enjoy now. But even a lowly non-intellectual midlist novelist like me has to smile at Wilson’s imperiousness, for no novelist today would dare declare, “It is impossible for me to blog, tweet, Facebook, appear at conferences, give ego-crushing readings in empty bookstores,” etc.
Today even reclusive novelists play the publicity game. As Nathan Bransford recently pointed out, Thomas Pynchon has put together a playlist of songs for Amazon and Cormac McCarthy dutifully appeared on “Oprah.” I don’t know where this ends — J.D. Salinger’s blog? Philip Roth on “Dancing With the Stars”? — but one wonders what will become of the brilliant but publicity-shy young authors out there. Is talent enough? Has it ever been? All I know is: there are no Edmund Wilsons in my shop, either.