Someone famous for their ignorance reveals themselves to be a racist. An unknown Member of Parliament pays someone to poop in his mouth. It’s hard to get excited about modern misdemeanours. They had a better class of rogue back in the old days; who could forget Serge Gainsbourg telling a riled Whitney Houston that he wanted to fuck her on live television, or Jean Rhys ringing up a radio station to correct their announcement of her death, or Byron buggering and charming his way around Europe? The most offensive element of the modern mishap is the inevitable apology. Whenever a celebrity is caught out, you can count on an orchestrated statement of regret, and, after a suitable period of time has elapsed, we leave them to fumble on in their day jobs.
I don’t want or need to see Jade Goody’s blubbery face filled with insincere remorse, any more than reading about another MP’s wife’s decision to stand by her man will make me feel anything other than severe depression about how people live their lives. There is still this existing theory that how you behave in your privately affects your ability to perform what you do at work. This has always been the case in modern politics, as oppose to the old days, when stabbing, philandering and running the country went hand-in-hand. In the years since World War Two, plenty of nice old boys did the decent thing and shuffled off to live in exile in Bermuda and Kenya as punishment for enjoying themselves with illegal substances and bevies of lovelies. But since when did this puritanical rule apply to other figures in the public eye? When did other celebrities – the interesting ones, the authors, musicians, artists and filmmakers – have to behave themselves? Woody Allen leaving his partner for their adopted teenage daughter is questionable, hilarious and fascinating but caused him to almost be the subject of an industry embargo for his behaviour. To quote Raoul Lionel Felder, the Manhattan lawyer ‘I think his film career is flirting with real trouble… People seem to have accepted the fact that the two were living together as one more sick relationship in a sick world’ So what did he do to this poor ruined girl? He married her and they now have children of their own. What a rake.
We now have more evidence than ever of the glorious decline of our society. On a daily basis, the papers are full of mass murders and devastation, compared with the sadder, everyday stories of infanticide and bankruptcy. At the same time, the media is pushing for our culture to become homogenised and ‘normal’ and we look to celebrities to uphold certain moral standards. Whilst doing this we, of course, expect the media to prowl for any evidence of corruption or any other way in which they cannot live up to the tag of normal. But if everyone were normal there would be no cultural or social advancement, for better or for worse. The best art is, and always has been, produced by complete weirdoes, for want of a better word. Take Edgar Allen Poe, the brilliant American writer, for example. Orphaned before the age of two and rejected by his foster father, Poe married his fourteen year old cousin and earned so little money from his writing career that his wife and her mother starved to death one winter. To cope with the guilt of causing Virginia’s death, Poe increased his already-heavy opium and alcohol consumption, and died raving soon afterwards. His nightmarish fables and intensely gothic poems make so much sense in context that it would be disappointing to imagine it otherwise; for example/say, if Poe had been a bank clerk from Missouri and conjured up his writing in his spare time. ‘I can’t fix the porch just now, Virginia, I’m writing about the tolling of the bells again!’ That would be endlessly more disturbing; almost like finding out that your boyfriend is a serial killer behind your back.
Certainly I want my artists to suffer, like a butterfly on a pin, to produce things of beauty, but I can’t decide whether this is expectation on my part or a hangover from the existing rich heritage of skilled people who have suffered greatly. Look at this list of gonzo casualties of their own abilities; Woolf, Burroughs, Marlowe, Van Gogh, Basquiat, Peter Cook, de Quincey, Vicious, Jarman, Bacon, Syd Barratt and, on a slightly lower rung of the talent ladder, Kerry Katona’s compelling car-crash existence. These are just the first ones that sprung to mind. The key thing about this list is; they aren’t all the best in their own field. Anyone could put together a coherent argument for Vicious or de Quincey being talentless also-rans who were in the right place at the right time and caught the zeitgeist. There is probably a technically brilliant musician sitting depressed in his Wolverhampton basement flat right now that has never worked out why Syd Barratt got the press and he didn’t. And the answer is, whether or not you think Barratt produced fantastic music during the few years before he went cuckoo (and I do), you have to agree that his story is, just that, a great story.
Perhaps because author’s day jobs are tied up with story telling, there are several that are hero-worship-worthy writers. By this, I mean those with lives that leap off the page, those who seem to have truly lived. To return to the introduction, Jean Rhys and Byron are two unforgettable personalities who produced varied literary results. Rhys was a twentieth century Anglo-Creole writer who had huge success initially and within her own lifetime became completely forgotten, although track down Wide Sargasso Sea or After Leaving Mr Mackenzie if you can, they’re wonderful. Her characters inhabit a mythological world of the French House, the Left Bank and the ditch. They are brilliant, abandoned, drunk, desperate but ever-hopeful, much like the author herself. When the conventional and contemporary novelist Rosalind Lehmann invited herself to tea with Rhys, in the hopes of helping her resurrect her career she arrived ‘to find Rhys drunk on the sofa looking unkempt and dishevelled, unable to register her visitor’s presence’ (Angela Smith). Her drinking, still unacceptable in a woman during the Forties and Fifties, overshadowed her writing.
Byron lived so fast that he didn’t have time to fall out of fashion. Similarly to Rhys, his life was characterised by highs and lows; wild successes, mad times, excesses and depression. He made up for his childhood obesity and lifelong lameness by inventing himself into the original dashing troubadour, occasionally stopping to dash off some more turgid and self-congratulatory poetry. Very few, other than dry academics, rate Childe Harold or anything else Byron produced as having literary value but that doesn’t stop his life being a one-man worldwind of seductive activity. The kind of man so highly sexed that he couldn’t pass his own family in the corridors at home without a stir in his breeches, Byron had a breathtaking Docherty-esque lack of interest, let alone concern, in what is conventionally right or wrong. Neither child nor beast was safe. His fame rested on this disreputability and he knew it. Byron couldn’t risk settling down as it would ruin his image. Just as his youthful vigour began to fade and polite society’s goodwill began to be exhausted, he ran off and got killed helping the Greeks. I doubt that modern imitators such as Russell Brand or Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow (who has something of the Byronic in his wobble behind all the Keith Richard’s allusions) could give us a line of verse, or indeed anything beyond the cravat and the leer, but it doesn’t matter. Byron is ninety nine per cent image, with a few scraps left over to his actual work.
So there are more similarities between Jade Goody and Byron than might have been expected; both are famous for fame’s sake rather than as a reward for the production of anything deep or worthy. There are only two definite differences, and the first is our society’s snobbery about class and wealth, although it is ironic that Byron was always completely broke, whatever image he might have portrayed, in comparison to Jade, who on this year’s Big Brother had developed the patina of wealth. The second is the ultimate lack of consciousness in her behaviour; from her racist comments to her public-access nudity to her nightclub dust-ups: none of it can be construed as self-destructive or tragic, but more a consequence of dumb stupidity. There have been many examples of dumb stupidity – the Renaissance playwright Marlowe’s death, stabbed in the eye in a bar brawl in Deptford, while most of his contemporaries were tucked up in their cushy beds – but it was slightly easier for them, because in those days you didn’t have mass media who told you how to feel about it. Then you could be adored by the small percentage that you knew would ‘get’ you. Jade Goody seems to have no potential and that is the unspoken third difference. She will never produce the kind of art that might require a capital letter. The Poes and the Dochertys revel in the essential glamour of wasted potential; of having the skill that most of us lack and choosing to throw it away.
However, my deep, and probably misguided, admiration for these lifestyles doesn’t mean that I would want it for myself. Perhaps that brilliant novel isn’t in me because I’ll quite happily have the odd sloshy wordless night a few times a week but I wouldn’t want to go full-time. I have no desire to bugger a cat. I like my sofa and if I want to watch the odd episode of Hollyoaks or Poirot, I will. But if I want to sit in my living room and read, or listen, or watch something worth it then I want the works of someone who properly cares. I want those who truly lived, so that we don’t have to.
SDW
