The Browser - Elective Anonymity

A weekly letter from the founding editor of The Browser. Topics may vary. Correspondence and criticism welcome: robert@thebrowser.com

This week: The uses of anonymity, with particular reference to Primary Colors, Elena Ferrante, and Satoshi Nakamoto.

I have had a marvellous couple of weeks reading and re-reading more of the business and political books which you have been kind enough to recommend after seeing the overly cautious short-lists in my earlier letters.

Thank you CP and LS for encouraging me to look again at Primary Colors. You were right. Re-reading Primary Colors 16 years after its publication I can report that it has held up magnificently as a work of literary fiction, even after shedding its early fascination as a work of political gossip. It is more of a classic than I had remembered. It deserves a place alongside Rodham on any top shelf of books about American politics in my lifetime.

I was all the more glad to be re-reading Primary Colors when I reached the end of the revised edition and found that it carried an afterword from Joe Klein explaining why had originally decided to conceal his authorship of the book, and why he had issued a series of false public denials when circumstantial evidence of his authorship accumulated. I cannot say that he explains himself very well.

Klein said that his agent submitted the manuscript of Primary Colors to Random House as "Untitled Novel By Anonymous Author". Klein had been planning to choose a plausible nom de plume, but Harold Evans at Random House “bought [the book] immediately and requested that the author remain anonymous”.

Klein listed three reasons for concealing his authorship:

— He wanted to see his book "judged on its own merits", and not as a roman à clef about his real-life relationship with Bill Clinton;

— He worried that his fellow-journalists would savage the book out of professional jealousy;

— He hoped that drumming up speculation about the authorship of the book "would be a clever bit of marketing and a hoot".

When Primary Colors became a best-seller, and media interest in the author's identity intensified, textual analysis pointed strongly to Klein. Klein made repeated public denials, which he came to regret:  

Continuing the ruse was a stupid choice on my part. And I behaved stupidly in the months that followed, vehemently denying authorship, swearing up and down, getting angry about it.

He maintained his denials for four months, until the Washington Post found an early galley of Primary Colors with corrections on it in Klein's handwriting, and the game was up.

Klein also said in his afterword to Primary Colors — somewhat ungraciously in my view — that he had persisted in his denials mainly at the request of his wife, Victoria, who had come to fear that intense public interest in the book and its author could pose a threat to their family:

Victoria cast the deciding vote: I would continue to deny authorship. In retrospect, I can understand her desire to protect our kids from what was becoming a strange, and potentially dangerous situation.

Of all Klein's retrospective explanations and rationalisations with regard to Primary Colors, the one claim which rings wholly true to me is his hope that publishing the book anonymously "would be a clever bit of marketing and a hoot".

It certainly was a clever bit of marketing; and if Klein found it less than a "hoot" to be lying in public about his authorship, that interlude seemed to do him no lasting harm.

But knowing more now about what went on behind the scenes at Primary Colors, I am all the more persuaded that there is no good reason for a writer to offer a book to the public, at least nowadays, while declining to be identified as its author. At best there may be a commercial reason, but even that will necessarily be tainted, however faintly, by the fact of gaming the reader for the author's gain.  

Thus an unusually prolific author may use a pen-name for fear of over-supplying their market — as Stephen King did when he started writing as Richard Bachman. An author established in one genre may use a pen-name to establish themselves in a different genre, as John Banville did when he began writing crime fiction as Benjamin Black.

As a general rule, we might say that the decision to publish a book anonymously or pseudonymously suggests at best, some tension between book and author — a fear that the book will lower the prestige of the author, or that knowledge of the author will lower the prestige of the book.

It is easy to think of pen-names adopted to safeguard the writer's prestige. John Banville wanted to experiment with crime fiction without risking damage to his reputation as an author of literary fiction. Stephen King wanted to write more books while retaining his reputation as a writer of quality rather than quantity.

But what of the other rationale — those cases in which concealment of authorship is thought likely to increase the prestige of the book?

One example might be that of Mary Ann Evans, who published her novels as "George Eliot", because women writers in the 19th century were associated mainly with the production of light-hearted and frivolous fiction, and Evans wanted her novels to be taken seriously. Fortunately for literature, she succeeded. Her sixth novel, Middlemarch, is considered by many to be the finest novel in the English language.

I wonder if this is also the category into which "Elena Ferrante" falls. Ferrante's four-novel sequence, the Neapolitan Novels, has been one of the great literary triumphs of the century so far, and the basis of a much-admired television series. "Elena Ferrante" would surely by now be short-listed for a Nobel Prize in Literature, if only the prize committee could be certain who, in real life, would step up to claim the prize.

Ferrante has given interviews over the years, by email, in which she has been asked  why she decided to conceal her identity. She told Vanity Fair:  

I simply decided once and for all, over 20 years ago, to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people, those who believe they have won who-knows-what. This was an important step for me. Today I feel, thanks to this decision, that I have gained a space of my own, a space that is free, where I feel active and present. To relinquish it would be very painful.

Explanations of this kind have been attractive to Ferrante's readers. Her modesty and mindfulness, with just a hint of Virginia Woolf, are much of a piece with the sensibility of her fiction.

So when an Italian journalist called Claudio Gatti presented strong circumstantial evidence in 2016 that "Elena Ferrante" was, in real life, an Italian translator called Anita Raja, his investigation was widely denounced as a gross invasion of Ferrante's, or possibly of Raja's, privacy. "People are pissed", wrote Alexandra Schwartz in the New Yorker:

Like many — maybe most — enthusiastic Ferrante readers, I have no interest in knowing who the writer who publishes her novels under the name Elena Ferrante is. I don’t care. Actually, I do care: I care about not finding out ... Ferrante’s steadfast artistic choice to be anonymous can only be that: an artistic choice, made at the beginning of her writing career for private reasons that she deemed essential.

My own reaction to Gatti's "scoop" was quite different. I fell hungrily upon it, and I admired the New York Of Books for deciding that it merited publication in English. As a creature of insatiable curiosity I had wanted to know Ferrante's true identity from the moment I first read a review of My Brilliant Friend. I wanted to know why would any artist would not want to be associated with their art.

Moreover, at first glance, Gatti's "scoop" seemed about as anodyne as it could possibly have been in the circumstances. It said, in effect, that these novels represented as having been written by an Italian woman were, in fact, written by an Italian woman.

But Gatti's work pointed, mutely, in a more disruptive direction. As literary Italy well knew, Anita Raja was married to Domenico Starnone, a prodigious and highly accomplished novelist who had grown up in Naples; whereas Raja, though born in Naples, had grown up in Rome. Could Ferrante's novels, suffused with the life and people of Naples, be in some degree the joint work of Raja and Starnone?

Textual analysis of Ferrante's novels has found much evidence in favour of Starnone's participation. I may be wrong, but I do not think these various academic papers have been much picked up in the general and literary media, perhaps because of the repugnance with which Gatti's "unmasking" was received. I came across them thanks to an article by Elisa Sotgiu on Literary Hub last year.  

Does it matter whether "Elena Ferrante" is a woman, or a man, or a combination of the two? Surely not the quality nor to the long-term reception of the novels, any more than it mattered whether "George Eliot" was a man or a woman. Middlemarch was still a masterpiece.

But whereas Middlemarch, at least by now, enjoys an existence more or less independent of its author, Ferrante's novels and "Ferrante" still come as something of a package-deal. The novels are celebrated for the apparent authenticity of their female characters and of their Neapolitan setting, both of which are presumed to derive from the lived experience of an author who grew up as a woman in Naples.

If "Elena Ferrante" had wanted only to escape the intrusions and demands of literary fame, they could have done so without subterfuge. It is perfectly possible for a best-selling author to write under their own name and yet to remain a very private person: think of J.D. Salinger, and of Thomas Pynchon. To make a public show of one's anonymity, on the other hand, creates all sorts of complications, as Joe Klein found.

If it turns out that the persona of Elena Ferrante was indeed manufactured by a husband-and-wife team as a strategy to sell more books, then readers of "Elena Ferrante" who have invested themselves emotionally in the supposed authenticity of the Neapolitan novels will be entitled to feel let and down and manipulated — however wonderful those novels might be in any objective sense. One expects a novel to be fictional; one does not expect its author to be fictional.

Please stop reading at this point if you wish to remain within the bounds of literature, since I want throw in here a few final ruminations about Satoshi Nakamoto, the supposed inventor of Bitcoin, whose successful disappearance has always seemed to me the most truly interesting recent case of elective anonymity.

Let us first admit of the possibility that Bitcoin was conceived by an intelligence agency or bad actor to some dark end which is not yet apparent. To obscure this parentage, the agency or actor would have wanted to equip Bitcoin with a relatively innocuous origin-story, for example, that Bitcoin was invented by a lone public-spirited genius who covered their tracks before disappearing altogether.

If, on the other hand, Bitcoin really was the work of a lone genius (the theory which I favour), then I can see why such a lone genius might reasonably have decided to conceal their identity.

It was highly probable when Bitcoin was invented 15 years ago that any adventures in advanced cryptography would be seen as hostile acts by America's security services (as in the case of Phil Zimmerman, inventor of PGP); and that adventures in currency-making would be seen as hostile acts by any number of regulators and prosecutors. One could well imagine, for example, that "Satoshi", had their identity been known, might have been charged alongside Ross Ulbricht, who is now serving life imprisonment for creating and operating the darknet market Silk Road, on the grounds that Bitcoin had made Silk Road possible.

In that long-ago year when Ian Buruma was editing the New York Review Of Books, I asked him if I might try to penetrate Satoshi's cover, and bring the resulting story to the Review. My work halted with Ian's premature departure, but I still think my strategy was a good one.

I wrote to a series of past winners of the Nobel Prize in economics, asking them whether they thought Bitcoin was a financial innovation worthy of a Nobel Prize for its inventor. One said yes, one said maybe, five said no.

My next step would have been to see whether the prospect of a Nobel prize nomination might persuade Satoshi to step out of the shadows.

Although I did not then know who was behind Satoshi, I did know somebody who I was pretty sure did know, so I thought there was at least a possibility of getting a message through. Besides, I thought genuinely that Satoshi, whoever they were, deserved a Nobel Prize.

I thought, and I still think, that Bitcoin was the greatest innovation in the technology of money since John Law popularised paper currency in France three hundred years earlier.

Yes, the price of Bitcoin has been volatile, and many lesser cryptocurrencies have been scams. But think of the mischief attending the early days of paper money. Law introduced banknotes to France in 1716, refinanced the French national debt in 1719, and went bankrupt in 1720. Just a century ago the banknotes of three major European countries, Germany, Russia and Poland, collapsed to near-zero value. The fluctuations of our cryptocurrencies today, and the antics of their creators, are almost decorous by comparison.  

I am currently reading, at Irwin Rosenthal's suggestion, the thoughts of "Mr Dooley" as recorded by Finley Peter Dunne. I owe to Mr Rosenthal my single most treasured reading discovery of the past year, the Holmes-Laski Letters, so I am highly optimistic for Mr Dooley's Philosophy, but first I need to find a better, printed, edition. The Kindle edition of Mr Dooley's Philosophy is a blurred photographic reproduction which makes reading feel like hard work where it ought to be purest fun. Perhaps inevitably, a first glance at Dunne's Dooley brings to mind Flann O'Brien's Myles, which I mean as high praise indeed.

But enough for the moment, save that I must apologise for not having written last week. Upsets in travel arrangements left me without enough time to both think and write, so I thought it better to remain silent. There is a convention, I know, of sending out an email at such times saying that one will not be "writing" this week, with some brief explanation, but I have never warmed to it. I would have been very surprised, years ago, to have received a letter in the mail from somebody saying that they were unable to write me a letter, and I am not sure that email should be treated so very differently.

— Robert