The New York Times’s books section this week published a letter from Mario Vargas Llosa protesting about a review of his book Notes on the Death of Culture – a polemic in the tradition of TS Eliot and George Steiner against a dumbed-down world of “spectacle” that shuns or scoffs at serious thought and difficult art – in the previous issue. At the end of the review, the novelist Joshua Cohen suggested there might be something hypocritical about Vargas Llosa’s condemnation of the infiltration of popular culture’s values into high culture and in particular his trashing of trashy journalism. The 79-year-old, he pointed out, had recently appeared in Hola! (the Spanish parent magazine of Hello!) in an “exclusive story” revealing his new relationship with the socialite Isabel Preysler, ex-wife and mother respectively of the pop stars Julio and Enrique Iglesias, and told the celebrity weekly the affair was “going very well”.
Enraged, the 2010 Nobel literature laureate thundered that he was “flabbergasted to learn that this kind of gossip can find its way into a respectable publication such as the Book Review” - a “slanderous and perfidious” instance of the convergence of posh and pop that his book inveighs against. “I have never had a Twitter account”, he insisted, and “have never sold a story to Hola!”, so Cohen had been wrong to assert (on the basis of a Daily Mail article, which recycled allegations in the Spanish press) that he had tweeted about the affair and been paid for the photo-feature. Both claims were deleted from the review, which now appears online with a humiliating triple correction beneath it, as originally it also misspelt Preysler’s name.
The next day, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq similarly took up the cudgels against a broadsheet newspaper usually seen as earnest and respectable, even stuffy. As a curtain-raiser to the madness of France’s “rentrée littéraire” (589 novels will be published between mid-August and mid-October) and the stately unfolding of its literary prize season (the Goncourt 2015 longlist, presumably featuring Houellebecq’s Submission, will be announced on Thursday), Le Monde had run a series of biographical articles about the scruffy, grumpy novelist, homing in on his drinking and his choice of home (a tower block in a far from fashionable part of Paris), and telling an anecdote of him being treated as a tramp when he stayed at a monastery for research. Houellebecq reacted by calling reporters “cockroaches” and accusing the writer of the series of making “malicious slyness” her “trademark”; more seriously, he argued that revealing his “daily habits” would cause his police bodyguards difficulties (he is a potential target because of his past criticisms of Islam and Submission, which imagines a future France under an Islamist government and appeared on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo murders). But, unlike the New York Times, Le Monde refused to back down; the editor, Jérôme Fenoglio, instead counterattacked, effectively calling Houellebecq a control freak.
He was able to be so defiant because there was much that was puzzling about Houellebecq’s complaint. Fenoglio and the writer, Ariane Chemin, responded that every detail of the author’s everyday life in the pieces had already appeared elsewhere with his consent (and to amusedly point out that they hadn’t disclosed, pace Houellebecq, that he did his shopping at his local Monoprix). But also the author has put his personal life into the public domain in his fiction as well as when promoting it. And his self-depiction in the Goncourt-winning The Map and the Territory (in which the protagonist, an artist, creates a portrait of him) is far less lenient than Le Monde’s portrayal: its “Michel Houellebecq” is a morose, alcoholic, latently suicidal, possibly paranoid near-recluse and misanthrope.
Vargas Llosa has been warier of making his private self public, but nevertheless his protest had puzzling aspects, too. The Hola! article has not been taken down, and visitors to hola.com will find he and Preysler graced the 1 July issue’s cover and reappeared on holiday this week, with the literary grandee showing no sign of displeasure at being photographed and joining the media spectacle his book disdains.
Rather than being a cheap jibe, Cohen’s ironic noting of his celebrity status continued the argument of a review that suggested he exemplifies the very mixing up of lowbrow and highbrow he criticises: as a regular newspaper columnist, a novelist whose film- and soap opera-influenced books are a “high-low blend”, and now a B-lister fated to be “paparazzied”. The older novelist’s letter overlooked this well-informed and cogent critique, instead focusing (just like any other aggrieved celeb) on the misinformation about tweets and photo deals. In ignoring the more serious issue, you could argue that he was being revealingly shallow.
