09-OnMeetingtheCelebrated

Ihave always wondered at the passion many people have to meet the celebrated.The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you knowfamous men proves only that you are yourself of small account. The celebrateddevelop a technique to deal with the persons they come across. They show the worlda mask, often an impressive on, but take care to conceal their real selves.They play the part that is expected from them, and with practice learn to playit very well, but you are stupid if you think that this public performance oftheirs corresponds with the man within.

Ihave been attached, deeply attached, to a few people; but I have beeninterested in men in general not for their own sakes, but for the sake of mywork. I have not, as Kant enjoined, regarded each man as an end in himself, butas material that might be useful to me as a writer. I have been more concernedwith the obscure than with the famous. They are more often themselves. Theyhave had no need to create a figure to protect themselves from the world or toimpress it. Their idiosyncrasies have had more chance to develop in the limitedcircle of their activity, and since they have never been in the public eye ithas never occurred to them that they have anything to conceal. They displaytheir oddities because it has never struck them that they are odd. And afterall it is with the common run of men that we writers have to deal; kings,dictators, commercial magnates are from our point of view very unsatisfactory.To write about them is a venture that has often tempted writers, but the failurethat has attended their efforts shows that such beings are too exceptional toform a proper ground for a work of art. They cannot be made real. The ordinaryis the writer’s richer field. Its unexpectedness, its singularity, its infinitevariety afford unending material. The great man is too often all of a piece; itis the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He isinexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store foryou. For my part I would much sooner spend a month on a desert island with aveterinary surgeon than with a prime minister.