Something unprecedented in the history of the English language occurs in Chapter II of Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 The Sun Also Rises. Jake Barnes, an American journalist in Paris, interrupts a conversation with Robert Cohn in order to attend to an assignment. While Cohn sits in their outer office, Jake and his colleagues spend two hours cobbling together a newspaper article. Jake explains: “Then I sorted out the carbons, stamped on a by-line, put the stuff in a couple of big manila envelopes and rang for a boy to take them to the Gare St. Lazare.”
What is extraordinary about that passage is not especially how journalism made do with typewriters and carbon paper before computers and the internet were invented. It is, instead, the appearance of the neologism by-line. Hemingway was coining a word to account for an increasingly common phenomenon in American newspapers and magazines throughout the decades of the 20th century. Signed articles could occasionally be found before 1926, but they were not the standard practice they would become a century later, when a piece without a byline (now usually spelled without a hyphen) is as rare as a bird without wings.
Adolph Ochs, the longtime publisher of The New York Times who insisted that “the business of the paper must be absolutely impersonal,” tolerated neither bylines nor even stationery embossed with the names of reporters or editors. The idiosyncrasies of personal identity should not distract from the work at hand. After Ochs’ death, in 1935, the Times increasingly identified the authors of the articles it published; today, it is not remarkable to see multiple bylines attached to a single piece. Much of the writing of the past 60 years has been a direct reaction against the ideal of objectivity that Ochs defended. About the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson and the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, in which the writer is an ostentatious presence, it could be said that every line is a byline. Instead of Min Kamp (My Struggle), the autofiction of Karl Ove Knausgaard might well have adopted the title of a book by Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself. The writer’s identity intrudes on every page.
Nevertheless, the British weekly The Economist maintains its tradition of unsigned articles. “The Economist has no by-lines,” declares a statement of principles. “It is written anonymously because its collective voice and personality matter more than the identities of individual journalists.” Aside from desiring to minimize the appearance of personal bias, publishers possess a financial interest in not wanting to provide particular employees, glamorized through bylines, with grounds for demanding higher salaries.
Of course, Jake Barnes was not the first writer to covet credit for his words. As if the very title of his poem “Song of Myself” did not proclaim proprietorship, in 1860 Walt Whitman altered that title for the third edition of Leaves of Grass to simply “Walt Whitman.” Although signed articles were rare before the 20th century, books have for centuries proclaimed the identity of their authors. Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Leo Tolstoy became celebrities and popular brands not only because of the power of their prose but also by having their names inscribed on covers and title pages. Even a nom de plume is a name. Although they are only pseudonyms, George Eliot, George Orwell, and George Sand have practical advantages over the cumbersome handle “The Poet Who Wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” because the author is unknown.
However, cave paintings and petroglyphs were unsigned. Later art, designed to glorify God and mortify the petty self, rarely emphasized or even identified its terrestrial creator. Vedic chants were not copyrighted, nor were royalties paid to composing troubadours. And when work is regarded as craft rather than art, there is less of a tendency to exalt it as personal expression. The pantheon of medieval literature consists of figures whom, for want of information, we can only call the Beowulf-poet, the Pearl-poet, and the Nibelungenlied-poet. Dante Alighieri and Geoffrey Chaucer were anomalies as not only identifiable authors but in inscribing themselves as characters into the Commedia and The Canterbury Tales, respectively. However, because of the ubiquity of anonymity, art historians employ the convenience of what they call a notname — for example, Master of the Prado Adoration of the Magi, Master of the Embroidered Foliage, and Master of the Legend of the Magdalen — when discussing the unknown artists who created notable works.
No less a master than Michelangelo chose not to sign any of his works, except one. One day, the artist was so upset when he overheard some tourists from Lombardy erroneously praise Cristoforo Solari for creating the Pietà that, according to Giorgio Vasari, “that night he shut himself in the chapel with a light and his chisels and carved his name on it.” On the sash across Mary’s body, the true sculptor inscribed: “MICHAELA[N]GELUS BONAROTUS FLORENTIN[US] FACIEBA[T]” (Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, made this). By contrast, Henry Gauthier-Villars published a series of very popular novels about a young woman named Claudine under his own pen name, Willy, even though they were written by his wife, Colette. After the marriage ended, Colette proclaimed her authorship of the Claudine novels. However, it was too late for royalties. Gauthier-Villars had already sold away the rights to Colette’s work.
By contrast, some use bylines to deliberately disclaim or obscure ownership. An Italian author who refuses to be identified except as a native of Naples has been employing the pseudonym Elena Ferrante in order to divert attention from the novelist to the fiction. Similarly, Anne Cécile Desclos avoided personal involvement in the controversy surrounding the erotic novel The Story of O, which faced legal charges of obscenity, by publishing it under the nom de plume Pauline Réage. It was only in 1994, 40 years after the book’s publication, that Desclos publicly acknowledged her authorship. In addition, dissatisfaction, rather than coyness, might be a motivation for employing a fictive byline. When a filmmaker is unhappy with the final cut released by the producer, the Hollywood convention is to attribute the work to “Alan Smithee.” Thus, when director Martin Brest objected to the way his 1992 film Scent of a Woman was altered for showing on airlines, he invoked his right, under guidelines set by the Directors Guild of America, to have Alan Smithee listed in the credits instead of Martin Brest.
Although it is traditional to call the Torah, aka the Pentateuch — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy — the Five Books of Moses, they were in fact written by many unnamed sages over the course of centuries. On the spine of the first edition of the King James Bible is the name of the British monarch who commissioned it and the year of its publication, 1611. The title page identifies the publisher, Robert Parker, but none of the 47 scholars responsible for bringing the Hebrew and Greek into English.
Similarly, the Gutenberg Bible is known by the name of its publisher, Johannes Gutenberg, rather than St. Jerome, who is thought to have been responsible for its contents — the Latin translation of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles. Published in 1454, it is customarily referred to as the first printed book. However, the British Library houses what it calls “the world’s earliest dated, printed book” (“Printed Copy”), an artifact that explicitly pinpoints its own origin to what would be May 11, 868 in the modern Gregorian calendar. A 16-foot-long scroll onto which the text was printed with woodblocks, it is a translation from Sanskrit into Chinese of The Diamond Sūtra, also known as The Vajra Sūtra. Although a colophon at the end of the scroll identifies Kumārajīva as the 4th-century Buddhist monk who translated the work into Chinese, the name of the author is not identified. And that is quite appropriate to the text’s insistence on detachment from the self. A dialogue between Lord Buddha and a senior monk named Subhūti, The Diamond Sūtra preaches the doctrine of anātman, i.e., egolessness. Lord Buddha cautions his interlocutor not to be ensnared by phenomena that are ephemeral and illusory — such as the self. When art is conceived as self-expression, emancipation from the self becomes impossible. Attaching a byline to The Diamond Sūtra would have been a betrayal of Mahayana Buddhist belief.
As a general rule, anonymity was commonplace in ancient and medieval times. Nonymity emerged with the Renaissance and flowered during the Romantic Age. However, an ideal of detachment from the self resurfaces even in the 19th century, the Golden Age of rugged individualism and flamboyant egos — Napoleon, Whitman, Wagner — when artists were exalted as heroes. In a key statement of French Symbolist aesthetics, Stéphane Mallarmé declares: “L’œuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui cède initiative aux mots, par le heurt de leur inégalité mobilisés” (The pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields the initiative to the words, by the clash of their mobilized inequality). A century later, Roland Barthes would announce, in an essay published in English translation before the French, “The Death of the Author.” Instead of the biographical reality of an author, he employs instead the term scriptor, a purely textual function removed from the biological reality of the person who created the text.
Buddhism and Symbolism converge in T.S. Eliot, who was a careful student of both. The Waste Land, which famously ends chanting the Sanskrit word “Shantih shantih shantih,” appropriates both Paul Verlaine and the Upanishads. Eliot became immersed in Indian philosophy for his master’s degree at Harvard, and, when he chanced upon a copy of Arthur Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in France, he discovered Jules Laforgue, who wrote:
“Bref, j’allais me donner d’un ‘je vous aime’
Quand je m’avisais non sans peine
Que d’abord je ne me possédais pas bien moi-même.
(In short, I was going to give myself an “I love you”
When I realized not without difficulty
That first of all I did not fully possess myself)
The depersonalization of both Buddhist teaching and Symbolist aesthetics finds culminating expression in Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” “The emotion of art is impersonal,” Eliot proclaims. “And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done” So, too, did Mallarmé write, in a May 14, 1867 letter to his friend Henri Cazalis, “I am impersonal now: not the Stéphane you once knew, but one of the ways the Spiritual Universe has found to see Itself, unfold Itself through what used to be me.” Furthermore, Eliot’s insistence that: “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” resembles Lord Buddha’s admonition, in The Diamond Sutra, that detachment from the self is necessary in order to attain enlightenment, the path toward which a bodhisattva is advancing: “Subhūti, a bodhisattva with a notion of a self, a notion of a person, a notion of a being, or a notion of a life, is not a bodhisattva.”
Self-extinction seems inconsistent with self-assertion, but Eliot did not hesitate about attaching his name to “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” It was published in 1919, seven years before Hemingway, who was never shy about self-promotion, pioneered the term “by-line.” Eliot’s signature is rather plain and restrained: But he had no qualms about applying it to a large body of poetry and prose. For much of the 20th century, no poet writing in English was more famous than T.S. Eliot. He was anonymous in print only as required by the Times when publishing reviews there. In contrast to Eliot’s signature, John Hancock’s john hancock is bold and ostentatious; affixing it to the Declaration of Independence as president of the Continental Congress meant risking his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor. And, according to legend, he wanted his name to be large enough for King George III to be able to read it without his spectacles.
Stacey Schiff, a biographer of Samuel Adams, sums up Hancock as a plutocrat intent on buying a good name: “In modern terms Hancock was the billionaire philanthropist who never met a naming opportunity he could resist. He gave Boston a fire engine, a bandstand, streetlights, trees, a library, a church bell. (There were no media companies in those days.) He liked to be thanked and got his money’s worth; his name was everywhere bandied about.”
At least since the Renaissance, making a name for oneself has driven many to create. In “Quand vous serez vieille,” the most famous of his “Sonnets pour Hélène,” Pierre de Ronsard imagines preserving his love and his name, Ronsard, through poetry. He envisages a time when his beloved has grown old and, sitting by the fire and reciting his poetry, she marvels: “Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle” (Ronsard extolled me when I was beautiful). Philip Roth made “Philip Roth” the protagonist of five of his books.
However, for some, writing is a spiritual discipline, and a byline is either irrelevant or undesirable. The 15th-century devotional text The Imitation of Christ was published anonymously in Latin. Its probable author was a Dutch monk named Thomas à Kempis, but the book, anticipating the focus on “the text itself” by the New Criticism in the 20th century, cautions against paying any attention to his identity: “We ought not to be swayed by the authority of the writer, whether he be a great literary light or an insignificant person, but by the love of simple truth. We ought not to ask who is speaking, but mark what is said.” It rejects the modern idolatry of bylines: “If you wish to learn and appreciate something worthwhile, then love to be unknown and considered as nothing.” “I’m Nobody!,” declared Emily Dickinson. “How dreary — to be — Somebody!”
Of course, many writers are unknown, though not by choice. They swell the slush piles of magazines, publishing houses, and literary agents. Until a recent movement to acknowledge their crucial role in the global cultural economy, the names of translators were often omitted from the books whose words they furnished. John Kennedy Toole would surely have relished the Pulitzer Prize he received posthumously, for A Confederacy of Dunces, a novel whose rejection propelled him to suicide. Nevertheless, despite the odds, many write precisely in order to try to thrust themselves into public awareness. In a market economy, artists must market their art in order to eat.
A consummate performer, Mark Twain was no starving artist, but Knut Hamsun was for a while and captured the desperation of obscurity and poverty in the unnamed would-be writer who narrates his 1890 novel Hunger. “Po biz” buzzes in the network of magazines, prizes, conferences, workshops, social media, readings, and signings that poets employ to try to advance their careers. Even with bylines, however, fame for most writers remains elusive. “Fame is a fickle food/ Upon a shifting plate,” wrote Dickinson, who published only a handful of poems, anonymously. Fame came to her only posthumously, with the publication of her first book in 1890, four years after Dickinson’s death.
Amid eight billion contemporaries, bylines serve to sustain the benign illusion that each of us is important and unique. However, though an unsigned check is worthless, anonymous creations such as the Lascaux cave paintings, Gregorian chants, and One Thousand and One Nights are precious cultural treasures. A natural reaction to impending mortality and personal insignificance is to grab a megaphone and proclaim: “I am!” But equally understandable is the impulse to flee the tiresome demands of the ego. Bylines are an imperfect solution to the folly and fragility of being human.•