A Jugmob Sort of Guy

William Grant to the June 5, 2008 London Review of Books:

It’s not very charitable of Terry Eagleton to complain that John Mullan’s history of literary anonymity contains only ‘an absurdly brief epilogue on Anon in the modern age’ (LRB, 22 May). I imagine the reason it’s absurdly brief is that it could hardly have been anything else, now that there are so painfully few glimpses of Anon to be had when gazing around at the world of print. Publishers have long grown used to insisting that we know more about the authors whose books they bring out than many of us have any wish or need to know, and just in case the cosy revelations about where and how they live fail to win our hearts and minds, they like to throw in what is usually a blatantly outdated snapshot showing the author at their loveliest. And all this when, as Eagleton has just before comprehensively shown, the whole Romantic notion of authorship has been fatally and one might have hoped definitively undermined. It’s all very frustrating and I can only suppose that the publishers’ publicity departments that Eagleton invokes are simply part of a much wider conspiracy to repress the unwelcome knowledge that authors never have been singular beings but are simply names of convenience allotted to an anonymous conglomerate.

Karin Laval, Swimming Pool #24, Annecy, France, Tulla Booth Gallery, Sag Harbor