I have always wondered at the passion many people have to meet the celebrated. The prestige
you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that
you are yourself of small account. The celebrated develop a technique to deal with the persons
they come across. They show the world a mask, often an impressive on, but take care to conceal
their real selves. They play the part that is expected from them, and with practice learn to
play it very well, but you are stupid if you think that this public performance of theirs
corresponds with the man within.
I have been attached, deeply attached, to a few people; but I have been interested in men in
general not for their own sakes, but for the sake of my work. I have not, as Kant enjoined,
regarded each man as an end in himself, but as material that might be useful to me as a
writer. I have been more concerned with the obscure than with the famous. They are more often
themselves. They have had no need to create a figure to protect themselves from the world or
to impress it. Their idiosyncrasies have had more chance to develop in the limited circle of
their activity, and since they have never been in the public eye it has never occurred to them
that they have anything to conceal. They display their oddities because it has never struck
them that they are odd. And after all it is with the common run of men that we writers have to
deal; kings, dictators, commercial magnates are from our point of view very unsatisfactory.
To write about them is a venture that has often tempted writers, but the failure that has
attended their efforts shows that such beings are too exceptional to form a proper ground for
a work of art. They cannot be made real. The ordinary is the writer’s richer field. Its
unexpectedness, its singularity, its infinite variety afford unending material. The great man
is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements.
He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you. For
my part I would much sooner spend a month on a desert island with a veterinary surgeon than
with a prime minister.