Author Photos and the Tyranny of the Image

It is increasingly common to hear how the visual media are usurping the world of books, giving us a sound-byte attention span, splicing off the conventions of narrative, making the very process of reading seem as archaic as traveling by horse and buggy. If the camera turns the eye into a view-finder, the video image reduces the imagination to a 21-inch screen.

Yet there is another way in which the imagination is being eclipsed by the image, and that is when words are given flesh. All of us know how difficult it is to read a novel once we have seen it on the screen: The parts have all been cast for us, and the ghost-images of this rival production intrude on the one we’re staging within. The characters are no longer ours, but someone else’s. And seeing a film after you have read the book is scarcely any better: Suddenly, the lovely Dorset peasant girl who kept you company since youth is a German sex-kitten whose off-screen liaisons you know all too much about. Even the author is often helpless before this tyranny: John Le Carre has said that after seeing Smiley played by Alec Guinness, he could not see him in any other terms. His creation had been snatched away from him, his imagination blocked out by the BBC’s.

Now, though, it is not just the book that is abducted from our minds, but the author too. Most books now come with full-cover photos of the author, more and more of them in living color. Has anyone considered what the costs might be?

One of the pleasures of reading has traditionally been that we construct an author as we imagine him to be; he becomes, in a sense, a figment of our imagination. Thus every foreign correspondent--in the mind’s eye at least--is tall and lean and Burberryed, and every romance novelist has tumbling auburn tresses. Laurence Sterne is your uncle Toby, or the man down the street, or just an empty page: Madame Bovary, c’est moi! In the past, readers have created their authors as much as authors have created their readers--or their characters; we make them up to be the people we would like.

These days, however, this is increasingly difficult: The author’s face is everywhere. On video screens, on dust-jackets, on posters and on cable channels: His face looks up from a 3-foot display, his voice is on the Walkman, and his talking head is being broadcast live. Even when books do not show his face, notices of books do. Thus almost every reader today can conjure up Joyce Carol Oates’ look of owlish intensity, or John le Carre’s veiled urbanity; some authors’ faces are as ubiquitous as cans of Campbell’s soup. And inevitably, however much an author protests that he is not the “I” of his narration, it is easy to read as much into his picture as his words; in the absence of any other information, the face becomes the one to which we attach the disembodied words. The book takes on its maker’s image. At best, this is merely another kind of editing, or coloring, no worse than bringing the memory of an author’s previous books to his latest one; at worst, though, it can have a kind of proleptic effect, robbing us of the special thrill of reading, which is to plumb, page by slowly turning page, the mystery of another’s self. It is like reading the last page of a detective story first.

The dangers of this process are especially great, of course, when a book involves a first person, and greatest of all when that person is fictional. Yet even in the most distant of texts, it is hard, for example, not to see Robert Caro’s sober, besuited form shadowing Lyndon Johnson across the fields of Texas. Bret Easton Ellis appears next to the description of the American Psycho. Paul Theroux and Philip Roth have given characters so many of the details of their own lives that we inevitably complete the picture by giving them their creators’ faces. The only escape, it would seem, is for a Jay McInerney to write in the voice of a 20-year-old girl. But even that hardly guarantees immunity for the writer: I always see John Updike’s face attached to Harry Angstrom’s lanky body, and even the Jeevesian butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Remains of the Day” has something Japanese about him (as he would not have done had the author’s name been Wodehouse).

Some readers, perhaps, claim absolute impartiality--just as some examiners protest that they are not affected, or pre-disposed, by the names on the answers in front of them. Yet just imagine, for a moment, that a mischievous Puck transposed the photos of Joyce Carol Oates and Danielle Steel, or John Le Carre and S. J. Perelman; would that not have a wickedly subversive effect on our reading of all four? And does not the invisibility of the authorial presence in Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland” account for a large part of the novel’s eeriness and breadth? And what do photos do to the very notion of negative capability, the assumption that an author’s highest task is to make himself something other than himself? This isn’t just a matter of promiscuous celebrity, or the demystifying impulse of the age, in which we domesticate the rich and famous by devouring the small print of their lives. It is, rather, something more mysterious, even primal. Graham Greene shied away from the camera, one senses, not just because he did not wish to be associated with his self-indicting narrators; but more, perhaps, because he felt that the camera would, in some obscure way, catch his soul, or catch the uncertainty where his soul should be. The opposite fear is even greater: that the lens will not catch the soul, but everything but. Our reading becomes viewing.

With some authors, of course, this is fair enough--indeed, it is precisely what we ask of them. We pay celebrities to present us with a certain face--to play themselves--and they professionally oblige. If many people now become celebrities because they are authors, just as many become authors because they are celebrities. Others, whose faces are, quite literally, their fortunes, are duty-bound to show us the looks out of which they made their living.

Real-life authors can occasionally emerge intact. Some, after all, look exactly the way they are supposed to look: Tom Wolfe has, in the Wildean fashion, constructed a cream-suited public self perfectly matched to the persona behind the books. Somerset Maugham’s face was as invisible to most readers as his narrative “I”s (until, at least, Anthony Burgess re-created him in novel form). Don DeLillo is protean enough to look just the way we imagine him to be--a shadow man on guard against the camera’s intrusions. As for literature’s dandies, like Mishima and Whitman, they could not get enough of trying on selves for the camera, and doubtless felt that the postures they fashioned in real life were as creatively satisfying as the ones they fashioned on the page. In some books, the face scarcely matters: We hardly see Ursula Le Guin in the otherworldly realm of Earthsea.

Yet even those authors who know how to play the image game become its victims: If Truman Capote helped to launch his career with the (in)famous photo on the cover of his first book, he also served to limit it: In keeping his face always in the public eye, he diminished it too, till people thought of him more as a talk-show feature than a serious craftsman. And more often, reality cannot keep pace with the imagination. Hunter Thompson’s weedy bald-headed figure on the cover of his recent books has surely reined in, as much as it has filled out, our sense of the self-abusing wild man within.

The reader can, of course, perform some touch-ups of his own: Samuel Johnson always gains a few pounds before the mind’s eye camera and Oscar Wilde loses some. Yet still the fundamental point remains: A large part of Shakespeare’s power would be lost if we could visualize his smile; and Homer would be the poorer if we could hear him speaking in a Michael Jackson falsetto. That is one reason, perhaps, why university presses tend not to run pictures of their authors: Their absence makes the words seem more dispassionate--impersonal expressions of imperishable truths. I never knew what Northrop Frye looked like, and his words were the more deathless for it.

For the heart of the issue is that an author has a self out of which he writes, a private self, a self that no one sees and he keeps jealously to himself. Everyone knows how writers “in person” are seldom the persons we imagine them to be. But an author’s photo defines a self, and it is generally the self that didn’t make the book. Besides, the very taking of a photo can itself make alterations in a writer’s image--the visual equivalent, perhaps, of believing your own press. Often, in fact, authors’ photos commemorate nothing but a writer’s pose--so unless he is Oscar Wilde (or Quentin Crisp), the highest part of him is being sold by the lowest.

None of this would matter, really, except that we can all feel the process accelerating, as images proliferate, and “novels” such as “Havana” and “Dances With Wolves” fill the shelves, and an author’s voice explains them to us on Channel 4.

Is there any way out of this hall of mirrors? Probably not, in an age when publishers’ contracts oblige authors to promote their books, and the author-video seems only a micro-brainwave away. Some writers may refuse to be photographed, or use pictures that give nothing away (as Thomas Berger does); some, like the famous novelist-recluse in DeLillo’s “Mao II,” may choose to mass-produce photos instead of books; some may turn their pictures to their words’ advantage (Mary Gaitskill probably gained extra exposure for her first book with a striking portrait).

Perhaps the best idea, in these Milli Vanilli days, when so many celebrities hire ghost-writers, is for writers to hire ghost-celebrities. Could any first novelist with Rob Lowe’s face, or Greta Scacchi’s, on his cover, fail?