Lament for Anonymity

SLOWLY but surely there has been rising in my breast during recent years a resentment against being told who is responsible for every line I read, every gown and pair of boots in every play, the casting, directing, photography, and continuity of all the movies. This distaste was brought to the point of protest by a few lines in a newspaper some weeks ago. A fifty-dollar-a-week scenario writer out in movieland was reported as having taken up the cudgels against his landlord because the latter would not put the illustrious author’s name in electric lights over the door of his house.

‘Is there no pride in the job for its own sake any more?’ I groaned. ‘Is no cog in the machinery of production in the arts — so called — small enough to be satisfied with obscurity and the knowledge that his work is done right and therefore helps to sustain the whole structure?’ We have depended for so long on publicity to bring rewards out of proportion to the quality of our work that it takes a very brave man indeed to stay in the background and be content to trust to the honesty of his execution to bring him his just deserts.

Great as is my annoyance at seeing programmes and endless feet of film covered with the names of those whose performance should be taken for granted, it is as nothing to my sense of disappointment in seeing anonymity steadily decrease in literature. That is one field in which there should be many things to say that lose in value when the personality of the author is obtruded. In order to establish his markets, John Smith may have to disclose his identity when he makes his first sale to the Red Review, so as to be recognized by the editor of the Blue Quarterly, to whom he sends his next offering. But surely there must be authors beyond the need of advertising, who enjoy, now and then, expressing things that they would not publicly father. They must realize that, as E. M. Forster says, ‘Anonymous statements have a universal air about them. Absolute truth, the collected wisdom of the universe, seems to be speaking, not the feeble voice of a man.’

The departments for unsigned contributions are fast disappearing from the magazines. Undoubtedly these periodicals have well-considered reasons for bringing their contributors out into the open, but in doing so they have robbed both writers and readers of certain qualities that flourish only in obscurity. Did Pepys secretly hope that some day his original system of shorthand would be deciphered, presenting him to the world as an author, or was it his belief in his impregnable privacy that gave his diary the naïveté that has made it a perennial joy? I incline to the latter belief and feel sure that only the assurance of anonymity can give us the best flowering of some men’s minds.

In the days when more space was given to anonymous opinion I used to find my interest greatly intensified by not knowing the writers’ names. There was always the guessing game as to whether some wellknown author was masquerading or whether some mute, inglorious Milton had become articulate because he could keep hidden. It is true that there are not many persons left who shrink from expressing, under their own names, their most intimate views on any subject. Reticence is in the discard and personality looms larger than it ever has before. Yet it is often only a personality assumed for commercial purposes that shows through signed writing.

There are certain emotional depths that some natures are unwilling to parade. The Anglo-Saxons’ instinctive aversion to expressing religious feeling is so generally recognized that almost any of them can appreciate the attitude of the woman who said, ‘Yes, I still pray, but I’d rather be caught stealing than doing it.’ I remember reading in that secret society, the Contributors’ Club, a brief essay called — if I remember rightly — ‘Awareness.’ It was by a woman who told of the way in which, in the midst of her humdrum tasks, she would suddenly become aware of the immanence of God. There was one time of day when the sense of this enveloping Presence was sure to come to her, and that was when she went to the garbage pail behind the house to throw away the refuse. Her little paper was full of a lovely feeling that has stayed with me to this day, and I am sure it was a feeling that would have gone unexpressed except for the guarantee of anonymity. Few souls would have had the hardihood to confess publicly to finding God on the way to the garbage pail!

Examination of anthologies of modern verse shows a falling-off of unsigned poems as compared with older collections — which is quite in accord with the trend of the times. Certain types of writing would carry no conviction if they were not signed. The scientific, political, or technical would have no weight unless an authoritative name went with it. But in the realm of personal experience and poetry I suspect that many a lovely thing is lost because there are so few clearing houses for the thoughts of that small handful who are still reticent enough to want to remain nameless. Perhaps I am deceiving myself in thinking that this species is not yet wholly extinct. But if that handful does remain, and their anonymity is encouraged, we might occasionally find something so full of depth and unselfconscious beauty that we should realize that ‘while the author wrote he forgot his name, while we read him we forget both his name and our own.’