Do you know any famous people? If so, I’d love to meet them. Because I no longer know any. I only know people who used to be famous. They might still be famous to people who don’t know them but not to anyone who does. That’s the thing about fame: it dissolves up close. People only remain famous for one or two meetings. After a second encounter the famous become whoever they are minus their fame. Well-known people, famous people, people everyone knows, they aren’t well known or famous in themselves, in their own right. But it gets complicated because some people are nothing but their fame. Which means that after two meetings they become nothing.
On the other hand, it is not unusual for famous people to be impatient to rid themselves of the coating of fame. The attraction of being famous for them lies in the way that it provides an excellent platform from which to manifest their ordinariness – a behavioural trait learned from the gods of the ancient world. People strive for recognition and then, once they’ve achieved that goal, can use their eminence as a way of astonishing followers with their down-to-earthness.
I have some examples in mind but don’t want to name-drop. Name-dropping is one of those strange human traits that persists even though it impresses no one and irritates everyone. But we all do it, even famous people, people whose names we’re tempted to drop. Steven Spielberg, for example, is an incredible name-dropper.
That’s a joke, obviously. A joke made by my friend Heather McGowan, the writer. I mention her name not to drop it but to give credit where it’s due, as when you quote someone in an essay or an academic paper, as I failed to when I lifted the sentence beginning “Well-known people” from A Man in Love by my dear friend Karl Ove. But when you do the right thing, when you acknowledge someone as having said something clever, it can come across as name-dropping when it’s really a desire to remove one’s own name from any claim of ownership of said remark.
The problem is that some names are too weighty to be sustained by normal conversation – they can only be dropped. You can’t say: “As Mick Jagger said to me” without also saying: “I am someone who had a conversation with Mick Jagger.” Referring to him as Mick intensifies the difficulty since you are then also saying: “I am the kind of person who calls Mick Jagger Mick.” Obviously that’s who he is to his friends but name-dropping is typically non-reciprocal. The name of the dropper means nothing to the person whose name is dropped.
“Mick was there,” said my friend P of a party she’d had the good fortune to attend. Naturally I wished I’d been there too, but the tinge of exclusion that followed the recollection of what I’d been doing that night – dinner with some shmuck whose name I can’t even remember – was alleviated by the knowledge that, at that moment, Mick was not enhancing the value of his evening by boasting to Keith that “P was there”.
So the intended suggestion of intimacy or proximity invariably ends up sending out the contrary message of distance – unless you are able to perform the contradictory feat of uttering the names in such a way as to strip them of exactly the suggestion of celebrity or power of which they are the titular embodiment. A stunning demonstration of this trick occurred last year when someone told me about an evening spent “at Michelle and Barack’s”. It was said so casually that for several seconds I had no idea who we were talking about. That French couple I met in Barons Court?
In literature and the arts, name-dropping can be high-scholarly (George Steiner) or beat-ecstatic (Patti Smith). The important thing is to make sure that one does not include oneself in any recitation of names, but sometimes the temptation – to drop one’s own name – proves irresistible. The most famous example occurs in Terry Eagleton’s book about Walter Benjamin where he decides to “review some of the names of the major Marxist theoreticians of the century to date: Lukács, Goldmann, Sartre, Caudwell, Adorno, Marcuse, Della Volpe, Jameson, Eagleton”. Do not try this at home – but if you have to do it, as Freud failed to say of masturbation, it’s better done there than on a bus.
In sports commentary, name citation takes the form of the possessive pluralisation of individuals whose talent is quite singular: your Maradonas, your Cruyffs, your Pelés. No one talks this way about literature: your Prousts, your Tolstoys, your Woolfs. Nor, for the most part, are writers referred to solely by their first names in the way that routinely happens with jazz musicians: Ornette, Elvin, McCoy. The fact that these names are unusual plays a part, but in spite of Mr Davis having a not uncommon first name, there is and only ever will be one Miles. First-name usage in jazz conveys both the intimacy of the listener’s relationship with the music and the mythic stature of the Dukes, Kings and Counts – there’s even a Pharoah! – who created it.
The same is true of Roger in the world of tennis. I’ve only ever seen him play twice, in the company of thousands of other spectators, but referring to Federer as Roger comes as naturally to me as if we grew up on the same street – though perhaps this is possible only because I have never met him. The distance on which fame usually depends here sustains the unwarranted presumption of intimacy. Suppose I were invited round to Roger and Mirka’s place where, in the course of dinner, he made some devastatingly witty remark about a certain Serbian tennis player who shall remain nameless. If I then recounted this experience by saying: “As Roger quipped the other night” it would seem like an absurd bit of posturing.
I’d still love to meet him, of course, but if we met a second time I’d be unable to stop myself asking if he’d ever met Bob. That’s the thing about the celebriarchy of fame and names: one’s gaze is drawn relentlessly upwards and there, at the summit of earthly renown, sits Dylan. Rilke – we are approaching a multiple climax of name-dropping – wrote that fame was the sum of misunderstandings attached to a name. He was thinking of Rodin but it applies nicely to Dylan. When I quoted this – “as Rainer famously remarked” – to someone who had been granted an audience with Dylan, she responded that fame is a form of mental illness. I remember who said this but am no longer sure whether she was referring to Dylan – who famously wrote that he could not remember the sound of his own name – or the effect he has had on the rest of us.
Geoff Dyer’s latest book, Another Great Day at Sea, is out now in paperback (Canongate £8.99). To buy it for £7.19 click here