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Writing Other Lives, Making Other Chances
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20105 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1992 |
2,269 Words |
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Audrey C. Foote
Audrey C. Foote is a book reviewer and translator who teaches
modern European literature. She lives in Washington, D.C. |
Anne Tyler's twelfth novel, Saint Maybe, is already on the best-seller lists and may well be a contender for one or more of this year's literary prizes. But Saint Maybe did not debut with the usual elaborate fete accorded prized authors by their grateful publishers. No splendid spread at the Four Seasons, no town hall reception in the author's beloved Baltimore. Nor even, as might be expected from the book's subject, was it launched with an elegant tea in some picturesque deconsecrated house of worship. Tyler's publisher, Knopf, to whom she has demonstrated a rare loyalty, would not have begrudged a major celebration. But the author herself surely would have declined to attend.
If you were to shake me awake in the middle of the night and say, "Quick, without thinking, what is the most important thing in the world?" I would say "privacy." I know that's not right ...that the true answer is probably love, or understanding, or feeling need … But I am telling you what comes to mind first and that's privacy.
This is not Anne Tyler herself speaking; it is Miss Vinton in Celestial Navigation (1974), Tyler's fifth published novel but her first real success. Of course, it is a vulgar error to impute to authors the feelings or beliefs of their characters, and it seems especially inappropriate to attribute to an attractive, slim, married, and highly esteemed novelist the tastes of a figure like Miss Vinton, a poor, prudent, elderly spinster. But when a write expresses a certain sentiment or conviction again and again in both fiction and interviews, it is obviously personally significant. On being asked once which of her own characters she prefers, Tyler answered that she most admires those who endure and then those who "produce some warmth without depriving others of their privacy."
Rudyard Kipling contemptuously labeled the public's hunger (relatively restrained in his day, one would have thought) for intimate details of writers' lives as "the higher cannibalism." Tyler simply refuses even to be nibbled at, rejecting all personal promotion or publicity, a rare stance in this day of TV interviews, People magazine, and authors greedy for the limelight. She declines to appear on television or radio, lecture at clubs or colleges, or talk to critics or journalists. She would not come in person to accept the National Book Critics Circle award for The Accidental Tourist (1985), nor even the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons (1988).
Yet unlike J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon, Tyler does not choose to be sequestered or
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