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  It wasn’t always so. (Like walking, celebrity has a history.) The pursuit of fame in some sense has, of course, always been with us, even in a Christian culture that made humbleness a virtue. The very first work of Western literature, Homer’s Iliad, full of thoroughly un-Christian boasting and violence, takes as its premise that its angry hero, Achilles, is willing to give up his life for immortal glory. The pursuit of everlasting fame motivates many an epic and many an epic life. Alexander the Great traveled on his expeditions of world conquest with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow, as he tried to live up to Achilles as his role model. And he built a string of cities called Alexandria to perpetuate his renown. Lots of love poets, like Ovid, promised their lover’s name would live forever (if only she would sleep with a poor artist: the original kiss and tell . . .).

  But modern celebrity, which allows one, finally, to be famous for being famous, looks like a different thing from Alexander’s pursuit of military dominance of the world and his program of city foundation. Modern celebrity cannot really work without modern media and their speed of dissemination and penetration of the market. It was the nineteenth century that invented the new technology that made this explosion possible, and it is in the nineteenth century too that we see the new cult of celebrity beginning to flourish into its modern form.

  But it is still a strange thought, for me at least, that one of the key figures in this invention of celebrity was a dumpy Scottish poet with a limp who had trained as a lawyer and had a thing for old Scottish traditions—Sir Walter Scott. But he was one of the first artists to be treated to the full glare of the modern style of fame. I must confess that I have never much cared for Scott’s poetry. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!” are the only lines to have stuck in my mind (they are quoted often enough, though not many people actually know they were written by Scott, let alone in Marmion). His poetry hit just the right note at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and I don’t get on with it for exactly the reasons that made it so popular then. He was intent, like an archaeologist, to dig up the old and lost world of bards and minstrels, singing around the fire in the laird’s hall, songs about romantic ladies pining and swooning and chivalric heroes—sheep stealers—nobly pursuing vengeance. He was fascinated by the olden times of Scotland: Marmion is an epic about the sixteenth-century battle of Flodden Field, where an invading Scottish army was trounced by the English. The poetry itself tries to sound like old-style ballads from those days, but I can’t help wishing for something a little less like a Hallmark card (“The last of all the Bards was he, Who sung of border chivalry; For, welladay!, their date was fl ed, His tuneful brethren all were dead . . .”). What is more, both the romance and the epic are in service of a nationalism that is typical of the artistic and political inspiration of the nineteenth century: nationalism needed to discover the fertile past, the soil from which the modern nation had grown—our nation’s history. All this makes me quite jumpy, as I catch myself remembering that nationalism as an ideology bore much sick fruit, that we don’t do romance like that anymore, and sheep-stealing doesn’t exactly have a real heroic tinge. Not reveling in Scott’s poetry is one way I recognize how far I am from the era when it was such a hit.

  Scott’s poetry made him famous, as poetry could in the nineteenth century. But his novels made him a celebrity. He turned to fiction writing because he needed some cash, and so in 1814 he wrote Waverley. This was the first of what would come to be known as “the Waverley novels,” a series of historical fictions, mainly set around the borders of Scotland—of which the most famous, Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Bride of Lammermoor, and The Heart of Midlothian, have titles that remain instantly recognizable, even if the books themselves are not as much read as once they were. Although there had been plenty of widely read novels from the eighteenth century onward, the genre still had an image problem. The novel was seen as a slightly louche, if not seamy, form—a book to be read with one hand, was Rousseau’s definition. Scott made historical fiction a genre that anyone could read, and seriously.

  This reputation of unseemliness might help explain why Waverley was published anonymously. But the anonymity turned out to be a masterstroke of publicity. Waverley was a magnificent success, read by thousands across Europe and America, with fervor and excitement. Subsequent volumes in the series were also published anonymously under the new brand of “the Author of Waverley,” and as the new books were eagerly waited for—with Harry Potter–like queues and guesswork about future plots—the identity of the author became a feverish question. Famous authors and politicians wrote in praise; they sent their letters to the publisher and received replies, written by the Author of Waverley, but under the name of the publisher. Rumors about his identity spread and kept the public fascinated. This ruse lasted till 1827 (by which time it was an open secret in all the right circles: already in 1815 Scott had taken tea with George, the Prince Regent, who had wished to meet the Author of Waverley). Reading Scott became a sign of a certain cultural life. Men as well as women confessed to losing themselves in the stories; families read the books together; the characters became touchstones; the view of history offered by Scott formed the imagination of a generation. After Scott, the novel became the powerhouse of nineteenth-century culture, the genre by which we know the Victorian era.

  The Author of Waverley became a literary celebrity of a sort the world had not seen before. The only other writer to touch him was the poet Byron. Byron published the first part of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” in 1812 and, as he put it, “awoke one morning and found himself famous.” Byron had the advantage of a wild and too-public sex life, and, soon, a young death pursuing the classic Romantic dream of fighting for the liberation of Greece from the tyranny of the Ottoman Empire. He set the model for the James Deans and Kurt Cobains of modern culture (though with a touch more class—he was Lord Byron—not to mention a touch more articulacy). At John Murray’s, his publisher, there is an archive of “fan mail,” mostly from women he had never met, emoting about how his poetry had changed their lives, their internal lives. (One shouldn’t underestimate how much emotional turmoil it demonstrated for a woman within the bounds of nineteenth-century propriety to write a letter expressing such feelings to a stranger.) Even the Edinburgh Review, not given to slushiness, re- flected that readers felt Byron’s poetry “as secrets whispered to chosen ears”: “We feel as if chosen out from a crowd of lovers.”

  As writers became celebrities, a new vocabulary fell into shape. The artist of the moment was a “literary lion,” and the hero of culture was “lionized.” The term actually came about because there was a famous little zoo at the Tower of London that had lions as its main attraction: visiting the lions was the archetypal tourist outing. So when the literary celebrity entered London life, he became the social equivalent of a trip to the zoo and was pursued by “lion hunters,” the men and women who loved to glow in the reflected glory of being seen with such artists, such molders of the soul. (The lions at the Tower were a bit mangy, but so, frankly, were some of the literary types.) There were articles in popular magazines like Punch about “lion hunting,” and guidebooks appeared, called London Lions for Country Cousins and Friends about Town, or New Guide to the ‘Lions’ of London. Charlotte Brontë, who was pathologically uncomfortable with strangers, describes her misery at being taken up for a three-day trip by Sir James and Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, the doyens of upper-crust lionizers: “I wish it was well over,” she writes dismally on the first day. Even Byron was disconcerted when he “found the room full of strangers who had come to stare at me as at some outlandish beast in a rareeshow.” Charles Dickens, finger as ever on the pulse of popular humor, conjures, in Pickwick Papers, a brilliant caricature of an aspiring social climber, desperate for a literary salon of her own. Her name? Mrs. Leo Hunter.

  I felt I had to explain something about Scott, his fame, and his importance in the history of the novel because my wife, like the rest of my family, hadn’t read any of his novels and asked rather too often why we were going all the way to Scotland, and what was the name of his house, again. Wordsworth, Brontë, Shakespeare were up there in the pantheon, and Freud was king of New York—but Walter Scott? She knew that I had bought the full set of the Waverley novels, going cheap, in a pretentious adolescent moment, and had traipsed them, unopened, around our various apartments and houses, always stacked on the top shelf. But in the last few years, now that I had added Victorian studies to my classical credentials, I had read a good selection—and had actually loved them. Waverley, to my surprise, was not just a totally gripping historical tale but extraordinarily sophisticated, witty, and, well, modern. Scott puts the preface on the last page, on the grounds that readers always turn to the last page first and never read prefaces—so if he puts his preface at the end, there is some chance readers will read it at the right moment. The Antiquary, my favorite and Scott’s too, is a wonderful, tongue-in-cheek parody of the fantasies of historical fiction—Scott’s own obsessions. I had spent a day in a deck chair in the sun in the Fellows’ Garden at King’s College reading it with total joy. If this is work, give me more. . . . So I enthused. It made no difference. Scott remained a closed book for her. The fact that he had been a lawyer made it worse. “I don’t even have time to read fiction,” she exploded, as I interrupted the usual crisis of preparing for court the next morning. I didn’t think this was the right moment to explore the relation between fiction and a divorce client’s statement.

  Celebrity doesn’t guarantee lasting fame. Scott began to be sniffed at by highbrow critics, went out of fashion before the end of the nineteenth century, and by the middle of the twentieth was the epitome of the uncool—the sort of book that was given as a school prize or as a present by an unloved r
elative. So no surprise that, out of all our destinations, my fellow pilgrims disdained Scott. Not even the blockbuster film of Ivanhoe in 1952 (or the TV show in 1982) made much of a dent. (Jews read Ivanhoe, though, because it stars a beautiful Jewish heroine, who ends up in the equivalent of a nunnery, because she clearly couldn’t get married—too Jewish—or killed—not right for a beautiful heroine—the only alternative endings available.) But Scott’s house, Abbotsford, is the perfect place to start our pilgrimage, and not just because Scott is the earliest of the nineteenth-century authors we will be following, and not just because—I found myself almost wagging my figure at the nonbelievers—he is so important in the history of the novel and of writers’ celebrity. The house itself justifies the trip.

  Unlike all the other writers’ houses on our itinerary, Abbotsford was designed and built by the author as an expression of himself: it was constructed to embody architecturally what “Scott” meant in the world, and was created as a shrine to himself as author. Scott claimed to have seen the site as a youngster and longed to live there. It was called, with Scottish bluntness, Clarty Hole (roughly translated, “shitty dump”), but for his baronial and chivalric aspirations Abbots- ford seemed a more suitable moniker, with just the right touch of re- ligious history and old-style grandeur. He bought the cottage and the land for an inflated price in 1812 as a sign of his arrival as a poet, and proceeded to lavish a huge amount of money building the house of his dreams—with all the fantasy and vigor of a Randolph Hearst or Michael Jackson. Every detail was organized; the grounds were planted out with intense seriousness; tours were conducted with embracing commentary by the master and owner himself. It was one of the first modern houses to have multiple guidebooks and articles written about it. The press oohed and aahed over the costs, each article suggesting a larger total expenditure. (And it was a hugely expensive enterprise.) Kind visitors and hagiographic guidebooks called it “a monument of the high historical imagination.” Ruskin, with his discerning eye, called it “perhaps the most incongruous pile that gentlemanly modernism ever designed.” For Washington Irving, “a little realm of romance was suddenly opened before me.”

  For me, Ruskin’s description was the most immediately alluring invitation. How could one not want to see “the most incongruous pile” of all the incongruities of Victorian architectural folly, especially in the name of “gentlemanly modernism”—a delightfully snide recognition of Scott’s peculiarity? But Abbotsford also raises the central questions of writers and their houses in an especially sharp manner. The power of Scott over the imagination of readers across the world prompted a fascination with the man himself: there are several major biographies, starting with the seven-volume life (stretching to ten volumes in the second edition) by his son-in-law, John Lockhart. Lockhart was something of a prodigy: he graduated with a first-class degree in classics from Oxford at the age of only seventeen; he was the lead reviewer of Blackwood’s, the leading, staunchly Tory journal; he went on to edit the trendsetting Quarterly Review; and he even killed a rival critic in a duel. His biography of Scott has been called the second greatest biography in English (after Boswell on Johnson, of course), and one might have thought that such a masterpiece would have deterred rivals. But many others, it seems, felt the need to try to capture the wellsprings of Scott’s genius. In Hollywood terms, his life is actually extremely dull: he wrote books, and, despite his success, was financially crippled by a ludicrously poor business investment, which meant he had to write more books. All the biographies I have read set out primarily to find what made Scott tick as a writer, how he achieved such a hold over his audience. Scott seems to play up to this: look at my house, he seems to say, and see me in my home, my space as a writer, my place of inspiration. This is where the Waverley novels were written. Here, at Abbotsford, you will find Scott.

  I don’t know. Can you build a house to reveal your inner self? Or is it just the projection of an image—acknowledging and manipulating your readers’ hope of finding the real man? What sort of display did Scott think Abbotsford made? In his writing, he is so guarded and canny about self-revelation, always hiding behind a grin and a twist of disingenuous self-mockery. When he invited Washington Irving in to see his daughter sing Scottish ballads by the fire, how knowing was his picture of “the Scott family at home”? Was this the People or Hello magazine of its time? Scott seems to have been both deeply serious about Abbotsford as a venture and wryly self-conscious about his public persona at the same time.

  That’s why I thought the first stage of our journey should be to Abbotsford. I wanted to test the principle of the pilgrimage from the start. If writers’ houses do get us in touch with the writer and his work, as I keep being told, what happens when the writer constructs his house like a stage set on which to act the role of author? Will it make a difference that this is not a romantically humble garret or cottage or parsonage, but a baronial castle with turrets and a huge driveway? I am afraid it might prove easier to feel warmly attached to poor Charlotte Brontë writing at the kitchen table than to Sir Walter Scott, Bart., surrounded by suits of armor, famous guests, and the trappings of Victorian status. Scott put up his Latin motto over the door at Abbots- ford: clausus tutus ero, which we can translate as “I’ll be safe behind walls,” or “security in concealment.” The Latin is also an anagram of “UUalterus Scotus,” or . . . Walter Scott. He conceals and reveals himself in or behind the words he blazons over the entrance, words that promise safety when the boundaries are kept in place. That seems to catch the problem perfectly.

  The train from King’s Cross to Edinburgh takes you gradually north, through the postindustrial wastelands of the midlands to the preindustrial wastelands of the borders, as the terrain changes to rolling hills and then mountains, and the houses from concrete to brick to old gray stone. The journey gives you time to acclimatize to another country without getting up from your seat, a swift lesson in geography and the class history of north and south, through the windows’ images, slowly transforming as they fl ash past. No shuffling security lines, no desultory strolling round garishly lit shops, no forms to fill out, no instant transfer from lounge to foreignness. You can sit opposite each other all the way and chat, face to face. Trains are much better than planes for people-watching too. Our cast included a blond, straight-haired American family, with pampered complexions and more luggage than they could possibly carry, failing to galvanize a surly English porter with their friendliness; a nervously proud mother taking her confident daughter to look around universities; two silent government officials, tapping away at mysterious documents on their laptops, a can of lager every two hours; and two elderly couples, all dressed for a cold summer, with thin sandwiches in Tupperware boxes, delighted to meet each other and exchange stories of the fangledness, new or otherwise, of contemporary life. And four Jews, talking too loudly, and eating a gastro-picnic with overexpressive gusto.

  The pilgrimage, however, nearly foundered as soon as we got to Edinburgh. I had hoped to do the whole journey by Victorian transport, by slow travel. But to get from Edinburgh to Abbotsford—a journey of some thirty-five miles—is really diffi cult these days if you don’t just jump in a car and pop down the A7. The train service that once ran to Galashiels was cut by the Tory government of the 1960s, though in places you can still see the tracks, one of the many scars of planning policy across the country. It would have to be a bus (or two days’ walking or a whole day biking, neither of which thrilled the room-service mavens I had chosen to travel with). The bus would get us to Galashiels or Melrose, but that still left a few miles. A bike had seemed the obvious solution when planning the trip at home. But “I canna take the bike on the bus.” “Why?” “Against the rules.” “But you take push chairs!” “Aye. But I canna take a bike.” “There is plenty of room and I will buy a ticket for my bike.” “I canna take a bike.” In the bathroom of the bus station there was a sign, handwritten in rough capital letters on a white paper bag and stuck with Blu-Tack on the door of the cubicle. “Sorry about the bulb. It will get changed sometime.” To my jaundiced eye, it seemed grimly symbolic of Scottish infrastructure.