The Metropolis

Diving for dollars: Where there is Bill Clegg’s muck, there’s brass

Cila Warncke | Saturday 3 July, 2010 15:36

For a glimpse at the eye-watering hypocrisy inherent in British culture pick up a newspaper and flip to the book reviews. Headline stories can, and sometimes do, pay lip service to allegedly shared values like fairness, equal opportunity, progressive politics, etc but the truth leaks out where you least expect it.

Case in point: the fawning coverage of Bill Clegg’s ‘Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man’. The Guardian ran a 3200-word excerpt from the book (5 June) alongside a hagiographic portrait of the blond, square-jawed author gazing pensively into the middle distance. Eager readers can order their very own copy from the Guardian bookshop at a discounted price of £11.99. Independent reviewer Julian Hall writes: “you’d be hard pressed not to be captivated” (20 June) and calls the book “addictive and masterful”.

What is the substance of this literary masterpiece? High-living New York literary agent Clegg (“[My boyfriend] Noah and I have moved into a beautiful apartment that Noah’s grandmother paid cash for, and we’ve filled it with vintage photographs and furniture and expensive Persian rugs”) gets addicted to crack, runs his agency into the ground, goes to rehab, and – yay! – he’s better now. The sheer, forehead-slapping stupidity of it boggles the mind. ‘Portrait’ is not the soul-searching of a man who genuinely plumbed the depths. “We’re turning a profit,” he writes, recalling business during the heyday of his rock habit. “A number of books that I am selling are reviewed well everywhere. There will be one, a cherished one, that becomes a finalist for the National Book Award.” Along with hitting the pipe, he hits shops for $3,000 Gucci suits, flies to Sundance to the premier of his boyfriend’s film, and goes to the cash machine every night “taking out batches of $200” to pay for his drugs.
“From a distance,” he chirps, “it looks like an enviable life.” Correction, you self-
absorbed prat: it is an enviable life.

What’s more, it’s a life Clegg is able to parlay into celebrity for the simple, sickening reason that he is white and wealthy. Imagine if the face in the author photo was black. Holy moral panic Batman! The scribes and Pharisees would swarm like locusts, howling to the heavens about the irresponsibility of ‘glamourising drug use’.

Editorials would question the ethics of rewarding Clegg’s crack habit with a reported $350,000 advance (New York Observer, 8 Sept 2008). The Daily Mail would run a series of lurid articles about crack babies, illustrated with grainy, irrelevant photos of people shooting up in stairwells.

I don’t blame Clegg for being an opportunist. If someone offered me a few hundred thousand dollars to write about the idiot things I’ve done, I’d take the money and run. What I can’t get past is that we live in a media culture where someone did offer him that money. It would be nice if there were at least a moral to the story but Clegg seems strangely unreconstructed, untouched by it all:
There is a time, much later, when I will imagine what it was like for everyone else: the employees at the agency who lost their jobs; the writers I represented who depended on me… family; friends; Kate. Noah. At first, I’m consumed with shame and guilt and regret, but slowly, and with help, these feelings evolve into something less self-concerned.

“At first”, he’s consumed with shame and guilt but “these feelings evolve”? Into what, pray tell? Into thinking: actually, it’s totally okay to screw over everyone in my life?

Clegg writes: “After I collapse and am taken to hospital, after a spell in a psychiatric ward and a successful period in rehab… I will be offered a job at another literary agency.” Because hey, as long as you’re white and middle-class being a crack addict isn’t bad. It’s a career move.

cilwarncke.wordpress.com

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