Let Us Now Praise Obscure Men

It is among the most common human failings to be preoccupied with fame, and, like most failings, writers suffer from it most and British writers are completely rotten with it. This accounts for the eight-hour BBC series "Fame in the 20th Century," which PBS will be running in many cities this week. All the writers I know will be watching it to see if they're mentioned alongside Madonna, Albert Einstein and Stalin, but they will all be disappointed. The British critic and television personality Clive James, who wrote the series and the companion book, set extremely high standards for celebrity, eliminating anyone whose name was not known to essentially every civilized person in the world during his or her lifetime. Thus the index skips, for instance, Graham Greene, in going directly from Cary Grant to Che Guevara. This rule produced a list of approximately 250 men and women who stand apart from the other 10.5 billion who have lived in the 20th century, and, unsurprisingly, everyone I know is in the second category.

What motivates them, these anonymous billions, in their drive for obscurity? How, in a world in which the newspaper clippings about Sydney Biddle Barrows make a two-inch-thick stack in the NEWSWEEK library, have so many others managed to escape the relentless spotlight of celebrity? This is a question that invariably puzzles writers, who by the nature of their business are compelled to see their names in print. Readership is the measure of success in writing, unlike most other fields, in which it's money. It is possible to have a great career as a stockbroker without ever having one's name on anything bigger than a business card. But a writer nobody has heard of is by most definitions a failure.

Which seems to describe the great majority of them, in James's eyes. While many of the people in his book qualify technically as authors, they are almost always better known for some other accomplishment entirely, like Adolf Hitler, Jane Fonda or Donald Trump. But if James is correct, posterity will fail to record the names of Proust, Bellow or Updike-or, to look on the bright side, Sidney Sheldon or Jackie Collins. Georges Simenon gets a mention, although only as a lover of Josephine Baker; Norman Mailer's significance, famewise, is as the author of a book about Marilyn Monroe. (Ernest Hemingway, though, has one of the biggest listings in the index, twice as long as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Shirley MacLaine combined.)

James presumably knows what he's talking about here. His jacket lists 22 previous books, including three autobiographies, but he's probably best known in Britain as a television host. As a medium for self-promotion, television has it all over literature. A book usually has a title which is distinct from the author's name, but James has cleverly contrived to name most of his television programs ("Saturday Night Clive," "Clive James Meets. . .") after himself. In America almost no one has heard of him at all. At a symposium in New York last month he recounted his first experience at a Hollywood party filled with stars. "What I never got over was their jaws dropped, too, it had been so long since anybody they didn't know had got so close," he recalled. "Paul Newman looked very worried until someone explained to him that I was Bob Hoskins's father."

Eva and Ari: Of course, the quest for fame corrodes and distorts the personality in all kinds of ways, and James's self-mocking little joke is one particularly unattractive manifestation of it. The only happy people I know are those who honestly don't care about fame. My wife, for instance, has a good job in a useful field, but it seems never to have occurred to her that she could or should be recognized in a restaurant as that famous city planner they saw on the cover of the Journal of the American Planning Association. I doubt very much that "Fame in the 20th Century" will change her mind about this, or that she will regret not having been seduced by Aristotle Onassis between his conquests of Eva Peron and Maria Callas. "Mutual fame was . . . a sort of pre-established intimacy," James writes, recounting how Onassis had Peron in bed "within minutes" of their introduction.

The season's best commentary on the human need for recognition is another piece of work entirely. It is "Remembering Denny," a memoir by Calvin Trillin of a college classmate who was once literally famous for his good looks, brilliance and charisma: his graduation from Yale in 1957 was covered by Life magazine. "We used to have conversations about how he might someday be President," Trillin writes. But his life took a different course, and after completing his Rhodes scholarship he held a succession of middling jobs in government and academia, ending up as a professor of international relations at an institute in Washington-so near to power, so far from Madonna.