All these famous American men
The rise and fall (or fall and rise? or rise and fall and rise?) of an “influencer.”
Like cult-leaders, Instagram influencers must navigate a complex symbiosis with their followers to remain popular. Unlike cult-leaders, their lives are often funded by a commercial system of sponsored posts, a practice which Caroline abstains from. Instead, in March, as the world shut down, she started making money from selling topless photos on the platform ‘Only-Fans’.
So, photos with the tops cut off so that you get trees lopped in half or people whose faces stop at their nostrils? Doesn’t sound all that lucrative.
I tell her the way she uses Instagram reminds me of how Sylvia Plath wrote poems: art as an act of confession.
Or attention-seeking, or both.
But Calloway wants to chronicle her life more traditionally too. Her book, called Scammer, will come out next year – if she finishes it. I tell her (she is the kind of person you want to confess everything to) that I want to write about myself, but I feel like a narcissist when I try to. She tuts, “that’s so sad!” Does she ever feel the same? “No, no, no! I think British people see memoir as something so fundamentally guilt inducing, it’s something you should be shamed for, it’s just so fucking English, it’s so fucked up!”
She insists that the English “see a woman who wants to write about herself and the first word that slaps their frontal cortex is narcissism.” I’ve proven her point for her. But the accusation is thrown at Instagram Influencers as much as writers. The act of sharing yourself is easily perceived as obsessing over yourself.
Caroline thinks it’s different in the US. “Something America has that Britain doesn’t is a tradition of white male memoirists. Ernest Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast, Nabokov…with Speak Memory, George Orwell wrote Down and Out in Paris and London. All these famous American men left this long legacy for American women to pick up and hoist on their backs that I don’t think exists in England. But I think,” she hesitates, deliberating “I always think your own story is worth telling.”
Heeheeheehee.
They’re bound to fix it eventually, so I’d better do a screenshot just for safety.
Oh dear. The quintessential Englishman George Orwell and his Down and Out in Paris, Texas and London, Ohio. (I had to look up the London one.)
“Influencer.” Is that even further removed from having actual talent or accomplishment than “celebrity?”
How does she know he’s not Canadian? My province of Ontario boasts both a Paris AND a London (the latter being my own home town).
Orwell aside, how ‘American’ a writer was the worldly, cosmopolitan Russian emigre Nabokov?
And how did the Orwell faux pas get by without so much as a (sic) in the Cambridge (England!) student newspaper?
And the funniest thing about it is how easy it would have been to find legitimate American memoirists. She just doesn’t know much, apparently.
Take that author bloke Jack Londoin for example. With a name like that you would not have to look far for him. You’d probably find him in some pub down on the Old Kent Road, corblimey. Probably not hanging round Eastcheap, but could be Highgate.
Orwell was a different case entirely. He was definitely American. Did’t he write that book Homage to California?
lol
Plus Animal Farm, which is set in the lush rolling hills of Ohio, or is it Iowa, or do I mean Idaho.
The new woke thing seems to be British-centered xenophobia… Is this related?
Reminds me of the story i once heard. Someone was explaining that she came from Iowa, and the other party was very confused. Finally, a look of recognition fell upon the other parties face, and she said: “Oh! Where I come from, we pronounce that ‘Ohio’!”
Well the author of the story has certainly managed that gushing, cringe-inducing interview style that seems de rigueur today. There was an interview in the Guardian just the other day with the British rugby player, Maro Itoje, in very much the same style. Perhaps they teach it at Cambridge nowadays – after all, it gets people’s well-paid jobs which seems to be the only reason why education is still regarded as important. There are in fact plenty of memoirs and autobiographies by British writers, artists, philosophers, and others – if one cares to look for them. De Quincey, Bertrand Russell, Robert Graves? More recently, Ferdinand Mount & the theatre historian Charles Duff – I particularly recommend the last. There is Rousseau, who was of course not British, but had a great influence on the Romantics.
Recently, the British writer Polly Barton published a memoir called ‘Fifty Sounds’, which is about the use of ‘onomatopoeia’ in Japanese, and describes her struggle with the language. In many ways it is a fascinating book, and I recommend it. She draws on the later Wittgenstein to to make some extremely interesting points about language in general and Japanese in particular, and about what is involved in learning a language (since more than language is necessarily involved). But the book was marred for me as it progressively became more and more concerned with intimate revelations about her life and lovers (one of whom, I suspect, a Japanese man called, simply, ‘Y’, would not have been very happy to have his interests in pornography and love hotels revealed, despite the fact that the book is dedicated to him. I am doubtless somewhat puritanical, but I am simply not interested in such revelations, and dislike the cult of letting everything hang out in pursuit of a supposed ‘truth’ & ‘sincerity’. Truth and sincerity are not such simple things.
Not knowing her name, I googled and found her claim to fame: “Caroline Gotschall Calloway (born 5 December 1991) is an American internet celebrity known for posting Instagram photos with long captions on social media.” I guess it doesn’t take much to feel writerly.
Yes, how easy ‘fame’ can be nowadays, and how unfulfilling… they always want more, and more, and more, they glut themselves on it.
Warhol had it right, didn’t he?.
@Tim Harris – White male British memoirists -Sassoon; Gavin Maxwell; T H White (Goshawk) – there’s a whole spate of memoirs about engaging with wildlife these days including Robert Macfarlane. Not to mention the travel books which are really about the writers – Geoff Dyer is one. Oh and both Amises. Christopher Hitchens.
“I always think your own story is worth telling” – if it is if you have been involved in a war like Graves and Sassoon; or have lived with otters and goshawks; or you have had a lot of achievement in the arts/science/politics behind you and have met the great names of your times.
Yes, KB Player, there are piles of memoirs if one looks for them, as CC clearly did not bother to (she seems to find her ignorance as deserving of accolades as herself). I’m afraid that, of those I have not read, I shall not bother with Martin Amis, whose writing and personality I cordially dislike. Where women writers are concerned, and not exciting white males, there are, among other a number of other things, Virginia Woolf’s diaries, Alison Uttley’s memoir of her childhood, and Denise Riley’s extraordinary, genuinely truthful and harrowing ‘Time Lived, Without its Flow’, which is about her experience after losing her son. (Denise Riley is one of the best British poets at present, and to my mind the best.)
Ah. comrade: same here about Martin Amis.
A more obscure diarist I like a lot is Frances Partridge, who was also part of the Bloomsbury set but not an egomaniac (not a Martin Amis in other words). The WWII A Pacifist’s Diary in particular.
I like Frances Partridge’s diaries as well. Also James Lee Milne’s.
Oh yay, I don’t know anyone else who’s even heard of her. I quoted a bit from the Pacifist’s Diary in a Free Inquiry column last year, hoping to spread the word a tiny bit. And yes about JLM – I used to have a volume or two but don’t think I do any more…
Yes, Frances Partridge! I had forgotten her. I don’t know James Lee Milne’s work, KB, but shall look it up. Nature writers: W.H. Hudson, a writer whom I loved in youth and still admire now – ‘Far Away & Long Ago’. Also, the great Tim Robinson, who died of Covid last year, whose books on the Aran Islands & Connemara are extraordinary; there are some good autobiographical essays as well, including a very funny one about visiting Mount Athos.
Oh, I am glad we are agreed about Martin Amis, Ophelia: I find him a second-rate oick.
BK:
Please. It’s called TERF Island.