KEY POINTS:
We are so used to the idea of writers being public figures that it comes as something of a shock to be reminded that this wasn't always so. When publishers try to convince us that the creator of Collecting Marmalade Jars for Fun and Profit is a sparkling personality well worth an Oprah show appearance, John Mullan's chronicle of hiding authorial light under a bushel arrives as an absorbing picture of a forgotten world.
But the catalogue of classic works that appeared - at least at first - without the author's real name probably outweighs those that made an unblushing debut. Mullan analyses a range of reasons why the preference for concealment developed.
For some, there was a social issue: it would not have done for the nobility to admit to being anything so vulgar as a scribbler. For others, as is in the case of some pioneering women writers, there was a question of overcoming prejudice. In some periods there was the issue of real danger.
Those associated with political and religious writings, including hapless printers who did not dob in anonymous authors, could - and did - end up being hung, drawn and quartered. The cases of Salman Rushdie and Naguib Mahfouz might suggest that anonymity has not outlived its use now.
Although rarely stretching as far as courting execution, reviewing can be a risky business and had the anonymous convention persisted, there are those who might have been spared public retaliation for suggesting, for example, that not all New Zealand television programmes are works of genius.
Mullan also points out the potential for, as he puts it, mockery and devilry with the nameless writers having fun and games with their public or, more often, the literary establishment of critics, colleagues and rivals. More rare is an authorial desire for the work to be judged on its own merits as distinct from the personality of the writer.
This is almost always a vain hope for, as Mullan points out, the veil of anonymity is almost always torn away, usually with the complicity of the writer particularly when discretion was only a convention. Even when the writer does not collude with exposure, the desire for readers to know his or her identity is an irresistible impulse and the hunt to name an author often absorbs more energy than reading the book in the first place. Often the writer's identity was well-known to a coterie but not the general public.
There is nothing more alluring than being on the inside of a secret and this still accounts for the appeal of the gossip magazines or the likes of Private Eye whose accounts of the dirty doings of Fleet Street executives manage to captivate readers who work for the Post Office in Stevenage.
The new inheritors of the tradition of anonymity, of course, are those bloggers who blaze away at all and sundry under pen names and those who write confessional sex epics purporting to be true but discreetly not naming themselves. The game goes on. Mullan is an academic, although he moonlights as a popular broadcaster and journalist, and there are passages of detail in this book which will have more appeal to the English Lit scholar than to a general reader.
But, as the next Writers & Readers Festival caravan moves on and pulls in thousands to see what their favourite writer really looks like, this book is well worth a second look.
* John Gardner (his real name) is an Auckland reviewer.
Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature
By John Mullan (Faber & Faber $39.99)
