AUTHOR CULT AUDIT ASKED

AROUND THE FAIR

Literary societies aim high, sell short

Prudence Crowther

When the bottom fell out of the Fitzgerald-Hemingway industry last month and trading on the Illustrious Humanists Exchange was suspended, investors speculated on what had really happened and why. Many were quick to cite abuses by societies they felt had degenerated into mere personality cults; others were defensive about their own practices and bitter about the effects of one group’s delinquency on public confidence.

Interviews with principals elicited nearly total cooperation, with the exception of Friends of Coventry Patmore, in seclusion at press time.

Paige Tourneur, recording secretary of the Cyril Tourneur Society and second cousin many times removed from the Jacobean revenge tragedian, was one who blamed the collapse on the lack of professionalism he says is endemic among his colleagues. “I felt uneasy even before this happened when I read about the formation of the Salinger Irregulars—I couldn’t believe he’d sanctioned them. When they established that beachhead outside his home in New Hampshire, it was ghoulish. He couldn’t husk an ear of corn without finding a questionnaire inside from one of the officers.”

“The line between serious scholarly inquiry and necrophagia is a fine one,” suggests Germaine Poindexter, president of Partial to Bacon and editor of Rinds, a bulletin of anti-Shakespeariana. According to its charter, the group seeks only “to provoke, sponsor, and cajole research, publications, and general interest in the life, time, and space of Francis Bacon through dissemination of our organ—a vital compendium of essays, notes, queries, cracks, and blurbs.”

Shouting over the din at Das Gottfried und Doris Lessing Cash Bar at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, Poindexter was seconded by Herschel Klein, treasurer of Anonymousers. “Most of these unlicensed embalmers behave like lice on a pig’s back,” he said, fanning a journal from one of the displays. “If this is for the greater glory of literature, I ask you, Where is the magisterial work?”

Klein hastened to defend his own flame tending, however. “Have you read this one: ‘O Westron wind, when wilt thou blow, / The small rain down can rain? / Christ, if my love were in my arms / And I in my bed again!’? It’s one of Anonymous’s most consistently anthologized poems, and yet we’re the first outfit to ask what the hell ‘small rain down can rain’ means."

Not all devotees are content with scholarly commemoration. Paula Knox of the University of Papeete is a fund-raiser for the Djuna Barnes Boosters, whose most fervent prayer is to one day sublet the writer’s tiny apartment at Patchin Place in Manhattan. To this end, the group is offering a pendant-sized facsimile of Barnes’s death mask to patrons for $50. “Even the Camus people have managed to put plagues on both his houses in Algeria,” Knox says, “and I’m convinced we’ll succeed as well.”

Sources elsewhere in the investment community tend to find the idealism of people like Knox naive in the extreme. Many brokers refuse to deal in the humanities at all, objecting that while an artist’s integrity is a noble attribute, it is not necessarily a hot property. Even so, most guardians seem unfazed by pressures to commercialize their trusts, retaining an abiding faith in the amateur society member.

Such a one is Mrs. Astrid KantWynne, the last direct descendant of the great German metaphysician and a mother figure to his acolytes. “I find most followers of Kant to be very caring and sensitive people—many read him as a child.” She credits the philosopher’s popularity to “his simple philosophy: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ ” She concedes, however, that as Kant collectibles become rarer, the club is attracting a wealthier, less rigorous member.

Will the delisting of FitzgeraldHemingway Inc. bring about greater regulation of the humanities? The Personalities and Exchange Commission has already begun an investigation of Petroleum V. Nasby (d. 1888) and His Ilk, a group that seeks “to set up multicultural centers for the testing and application of constructive uses of humor, and to promote the use of constructive humor in society at large.” Although its correspondence with the Jahrbuch der RobertBenchley-Gesellschaft is said to have been impounded, president Faith Bowser is confident of a clean report and unrepentant about the direction her organization is taking.

“We’re working with the Ohio legislature to get Nasby disinterred, and if we succeed, an autopsy will be our first priority. Of course the time lapse [ninety-six years] is insufficient for there to have been any noticeable evolutionary changes in humorists, but that’s the kind of thing we’re after.” The membership has already purchased an icebox for Nasby that allows viewing from three sides while keeping the humorist at a relative humidity of 50 percent. To support its research, the club charges a small fee for trying on Mark Twain’s mantle, recently acquired at auction.

Whether or not the FitzgeraldHemingway debacle is a single instance of academic malfeasance, the fact is that the fundamental impulse behind most societies has more to do with the soul’s hankering after truth and beauty than with escaping from life’s bleak anonymity. In the words of the A1 Dante Society: “We live in a world that not only lacks a common culture, but where, if you apply for a library card as Beatrice Portinari, the librarian asks if Beatrice is your last name.”

Now, as in the Pleistocene, our earthly survival may well depend on having access to a good club.