English Test 85
Directions for Questions from 1 to 4:
The passage given below is followed by a question. Choose the most appropriate answer to question.
Writers’ invisibility has little or nothing to do with Fame, just as Fame has little or nothing to do with Literature. (Fame merits its capital F for its
fickleness, Literature its capital L for its lastingness.) Thespians, celebrities and politicians, whose appetite for bottomless draughts of public
acclaim, much of it manufactured, is beyond any normal measure, may feed hotly on Fame – but Fame is always a product of the present culture:
topical and variable, hence ephemeral. Writers are made otherwise. What writers’ prize is simpler, quieter and more enduring than clamorous
Fame: it is recognition. Fame, by and large, is an accountant’s category, tallied in Amazonian sales. Recognition, hushed and inherent in the silence
of the page, is a reader’s category: its stealth is its wealth. And recognition itself can be fragile, a light too easily shuttered. Recall Henry James’s
lamentation over his culminating New York Edition, with its considered revisions and invaluable prefaces: the mammoth work of a lifetime
unheralded, unread, and unsold. That all this came to be munificently reversed is of no moment: the denizens of Parnassus are deaf to after-the-
fact earthly notice; belatedness does them no good. Nothing is more poisonous to steady recognition than death: how often is a writer – lauded,
fêted, bemedalled – plummeted into eclipse no more than a year or two after the final departure? Who nowadays speaks of Bernard Malamud, once
a diadem in the grand American trinity of Bellow-Roth-Malamud? Who thinks of Lionel Trilling, except with dismissive commemorative contempt?
Already Norman Mailer is a distant unregretted noise and William Styron a mote in the middle distance (a phrase the nearly forgotten Max
Beerbohm applied to the fading Henry James). As for poor befuddled mystical Jack Kerouac and declamatory fiddle-strumming mystical
Allen Ginsberg,