Eternal visibility?

This is forever but it won't last long,
This is a memory that fades away in neverending.
And in the death of all that's long been said and done before,
We'll wish that we were something more.

 

‘To Die For’ by The Birthday Massacre

When it comes to a writer being "invisible", if they are not known, they will have no personal legacy as a writer, and while their works live on - horcrux-like - as pieces of them, the writer as a person cannot be so easily associated with it. On the poem 'Westron Wynde', Al Alvarez writes that "nobody knows who wrote that poem or even precisely when he wrote it [...] but whoever it was is still very much alive" - alive in the sense that it is a piece of life recorded and is relatable.

I could leave behind many works of my writing and I don't know if I'd really care whether I was known, as long as people continue to read these things for centuries. On the other hand, it's nice to get recognition, and in the end I may feel unfulfilled if people knew my books but not me. I only follow a particular author's works if I loved something else they wrote, and the visibility of a writer helps - although for someone like Cheever, knowing about his personal life may be detrimental to enjoyment of his fiction. The main thing is what a writer writes, not who a writer is, because - as Alvarez writes - "the point is that the voice is unlike any other voice you have ever heard and it is speaking directly to you [...] in its own distinctive way."