Closets of Knowledge

Frank Kermode

• Privacy: Concealing the 18th-Century Self by Patricia Meyer Spacks
  Chicago, 248 pp, £25.50, May 2003, ISBN 0 226 76860 0

Among other books by the author of this study is one called Boredom, hailed by the paradoxophile Adam Phillips as ‘spry’, a description that would just about serve for the style of Privacy, which, though redolent of the privacies of the seminar, is public in the sense that it is reasonably free of jargon and won’t mind much if non-professors choose to read it.

Before she gets on to the 18th century, her favourite period, Patricia Meyer Spacks makes some initial remarks about ‘privacy’ and related words, intending to show that privacy is in our time regarded as wholly desirable, indeed as a human right, whereas in the past it could mean something more like ‘privation’ and refer to a condition no sane person would claim or seek; or anyway that its social disadvantages outweighed its individual attraction. She further remarks that in our day, when the right to privacy is written into constitutions and defended in the courts, we seem to be keener than ever to breach the privacy of celebrities (who actually need to have their privacy breached in order to stay celebrated) and to gloat on the couch while other individuals, seeking their own brief moment of celebrity, retail for television interviewers – without compulsion, without shame – the contents of the sad rag-and-bone shops of their hearts.