Liam O’Brien, of Melville House, posted a think-piece on his blog about Paul Moran and his epic scrounging of Updike’s trash, responding to a recently published essay on “Finding John Updike” that appeared in Texas Monthly.
“The natural question that Moran’s trash collection begs is of ethics, not legality. The trash was not legally Updike’s after being discarded. But is it right to?” he asks.
“Moran’s essay certainly does him no favors in that regard, as far as I’m concerned. It’s grandiose and unsettling, and contains several straight-up disturbing anecdotes. (It’s also fairly overwritten, though Ian McEwan seems to disagree.) In one story, Moran claims to have found early evidence, in the form of printed emails, that Updike was suffering from the cancer that ultimately killed him.”
O’Brien is not a fan. “The privacy of public figures is a debate that’s flowered in the information age, and Updike’s trash is certainly a part of that debate. But when reading Moran’s essay, it’s hard to escape the idea that while this garbage collection may be interesting, and perhaps culturally significant, it would not exist without a collector whose motivations were colored by obsession, narcissism, and absolute moral certainty” (italics added).
In this last description of motivations, ironically, he describes any number of American writers.
“… privacy of public figures is a debate that’s flowered in the information age …” Well, I hold with Bagehot in his treatment of royalism as an institution in Britain where he said “one does not throw light on magic” (or similar words to that effect). Thomas Mann was a “closet” homosexual we are told and his wife got cosmetic surgery to make her breasts smaller, we are told. And this “explains” something about the “Death in Venice” we might otherwise overlook. well, I am not so sure I need to go deeper into any “celebrity’s” private life than I need to go into my neighbor’s. There is a nice piece by a German writer and critic where a student of German literature despairs, on the evening of his examination about “Goethe’s life and work”, when suddenly, like the scene in Faust I with Mephisto, Goethe himself appears to him and asks him what he could do for him. When he tells Goethe, the latter suggests he take his place in the exam. So Goethe, disguised as the student, sits the exam. With every question levelled at him by the professors he gets more indignant (e.g. he can’t remember events etc.) and when asked a question like “what was Goethe’s aunt twice removed’s name” … Goethe quips something like “that’s none of your business” and this “ultimately well prepared” student fails the exam …
Funny how Harvard was critical of my finds too. I just signed a contract this morning to allow Harvard to publish my photos of Updike’s Wang floppy discs. It’s like President Bush’s philosophy regarding embryonic stem cells. Not ok to harvest them, but once you have they are fine to use for the public’s edification.
Your welcome,
Paul Moran