Highbrow times

It's that time of year again....the time when I feel like hibernating in my apartment, curling up under a soft warm blanket with a literary great that can take me back in time....back in time to highbrow times. As I started reading the included short introductory biography section in Anton Chekov's compilation of short stories the other day, it occurred to me how much more interesting and diverse writers seemed to be in previous centuries than the current 21st century. Or maybe people of this time period were more honest and forthcoming in revealing the "real" person behind the writer's literary works? I don't know. But I DO know that when I have picked up a book by Leo Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, Anais Nin, Sylvia Plath, the Marquis de Sade, W.S. Maugham, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mary Shelley,etc, etc....they seem like people I would be personally fascinated to know if I were living in that time period.

They seem like people you would enjoy having an intellectual conversation with or share your most intimate thoughts, feelings, passions and creativity. In fact, as I recall my friend Jennie (and even my friend Sebastian) saying once upon a time, such classic writers are perhaps more interesting in reading about their personal life and/or memoirs and letters they wrote than even their fictitious endeavors. I would have to concur.

"The Journals of Sylvia Plath" were alot more interesting and revealing of Plath than were her confusing, highly idiosyncratic poems and the great "Bell Jar." And while I absolutely loved Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray," the published letters he wrote to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas found in "De Profundis" are even more intimate and phenomenal. I haven't read any of Nin's erotic fiction, but one of my favorite books sitting on my bookshelf has got to be "Henry and June," an account of her love affair with a literary great of the time, Henry Miller. Such passion, lust, and inner neuroses.

When I think about writers I feel this way about in modern day times, however, I am at a loss. There are few I can recall liking and being curious about beyond the books they wrote strictly for entertainment purposes. Maybe Augusten Burroughs, David Sedaris, and Dan Savage....but they are already in the memoir genre anyway, so technically it doesn't even count!

What I wonder is: what has changed? Why are writers less interesting than those of yesteryear? Is living in an ever expanding age of technology make it more difficult to establish (or even a want to do so) that most vulnerable rapport between writer and reader? Has culture shifted the writer away from revealing too much? Or maybe writers have become more focused on selling books (aka making money!) vs. "selling their soul" with their words? If I were to become a published writer, even though it would be scary, I would want my readers to "know" me via my thoughts and feelings that for whatever reason became part and parcel of who I am as a writer....because two centuries from now, aren't you going to remember the little things about the writer more than their literary achievements? Substance and character.

Classic authors are timeless. Their books are still read by people in 2007, their personal lives dissected and analyzed with utmost curiosity. It's the presence of inner psychological workings that set them apart from contemporaries. Maybe this is why they are timeless remembrances?