Literati for Sale

Even the smart people want to make money these days. Years ago, I hear, they used to be satisfied wit one-room apartments, a hot plate and a library card. Writers and intellectuals used to stake their authority on their poverty. They had perspective; they were poor in a rich man's world. Today, the smartest of the smart-set need a little place in the Berkshires, a sporty car and a big old colonial on a hill. Can they keep their authority and their perspective?

A recent string of articles tracks the "over-heated" incomes of today's authors. Several months ago, The New York Observer ran a piece on the exorbitant book contracts being floated in New York City. A million dollars is nothing, the Observer trumpeted. If you weren't getting a million dollars for your book, you were probably being hoodwinked. James Atlas, writing in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago, describes how the literary scene has become infatuated with cash lately. The only things writers can talk about at cocktail parties are stock options and mutual funds. His writer friends are getting richer and richer. And he understands them. It would be nice to be a rich writer, he admits.

Closer to home, we have the phenomena of Harvard professors knocking out bestsellers. Two recent books, Professor James Kugel's The Bible as it Was and Professor Marjorie Garber's Dog Love prove that Harvard professors have what it takes to get on to the bestseller lists. Meanwhile, rumors are still floating around about the seven-figure advance for economics Professor Gregory Mankiw's Macroeconomics textbook that is being used in several of Harvard's economic classes this tern.

James Atlas suggests that writer have become increasingly into money as their influence declines. Atlas points to art critic Clement Greenberg as an example of a writer satisfied with influence alone. Greenberg could have become a very rich man had he wanted to, Atlas explains, but he was content to dictate the reigning taste in art instead.

Atlas speaks of money as a form of psychological compensation. Money is a way of feeling good about yourself, a way of measuring how far you have come. As one of Atlas's friends tells him, he needs money to feel smart. Money is treated as a psychological necessity, like security, or peace of mind. The New York Observer treats the book contract bonanza lore like a gold rush than a session with a therapist. There is so much money out there, you simply have to take advantage of the market. The Observer piece reads like a challenge to our yankee ingenuity. In the old days we would have had to invent some new spindle for the textile factories of Lowell, Mass. Nowadays, we just have to spin a good yarn, go hunting in the archives of one of the old city libraries and boom, we're in the money.

Writers these days are lucky the economy has shifted so far into the entertainment and edification business. This is the golden age for writers, if we limit success to the number of second homes owned by writers. The question is, can these wealthy critics keep their edge? Will they still have things to say if they have so much to lose? And will we believe them?

It seems to me that there are other ways of establishing one's authority as a writer then poverty. Some of our great American writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries managed to convince their audiences through their audiences through their strict standards of morality or their rigorous religious beliefs Income aside, these writers, including even the rich Boston brahmins, establish a critical distance by virtue of their beliefs.

There is no reason to believe that our current writers have strong convictions. Most of them seem to write the literary journalism" popularized in the '60s, minus any anti-establishment impulse. A typical article features some interesting event or person communicated in a "fresh" style that capitalizes on the writerly personality of the author.

If the million-dollar contract continue at this pace, it is likely that our critics will have less and less to say of genuine interest. Naturally, there will be exceptions--the rich writer who "doesn't buy his own smoke," as my great uncle likes to say. On the whole, we can imagine a bevy of writers trotting out clever anecdotes about caviar parties of making up involved historical "episodes" without anything more worthwhile to say. I do not think we have to be worried just yet, however. The economy is bound to relax a bit, the contracts should come down a few hundred thousand dollars, and the writers will get back to grumbling about mercenary businessman and slow-witted bourgeois types in suburban colonials.

Noah I. Dauber '98, a special concentrator, is a resident of Adams House. His column will appear on alternate Thursdays.