WHEN I first began to write I stood in great awe of publishers. When I first began to publish the awe was replaced by gratitude. Here were men and women prepared to risk money in order to give my scribbles to the world, or the infinitesimal portion of the world that reads books. It seems to me strange that such power and generosity should be housed in tiny offices with unwashed windows. When I signed my first contract – so eagerly that I dropped the pen – a London fog sat heavily outside the modest premises and, on the desk along with the contract, sat a bottle of celebratory sherry.
The circumstances were the same as for Henry James and Joseph Conrad. My advance on royalties was the same, too. In the contract I promised to give to my publisher first refusal of my next two books, and the subsequent contracts would similarly imply a relationship which, so it was hoped, would be lasting. There was much talk in those days of reciprocal loyalty and even the suggestion that a lasting friendship might grow out of what was not altogether a commercial bond. The relations between author and publisher were cosy, even domestic.
There were exceptions of course. Byron, infuriated by the sharp practice of Murray, wrote, ‘Now, Barabbas was a publisher’. Macmillan was too snobbish to invite the best-selling H.G. Wells to dinner: ‘Began life as a counter-jumper, you know. Damned fellow might steal the spoons.’ But generally an author had a sense of feeding with his regular manuscripts a cottage industry that offered him humble sales to match humble advances. And always there was that bottle of sherry on the table.
I speak of London publishing, which, in the year that I saw my first book in print, still had a gaslit Dickensian quality about it. In New York, as I was to discover, publishing was big business. There, I already knew, manuscripts did not proceed from copy-editor to printer with little change: manuscripts were processed. Max Perkins, the great editor (great? Can an editor be great?), made the unwieldy monsters of Thomas Wolfe into publishable commodities. Publishability meant commercial viability, and once an editor had Perkinsian power he grew closer to the cash values of literature than to the aesthetic.
Prescription was in order: cut out that passage – it’s dull; begin with this sex scene; your readers want action, not philosophy; the whole thing’s 200 words too long. Once it was decided that a writer of books did not really know how to write them, having to leave the job of editing to a man who had never written a book in his life, the age of the saleable commodity had already arrived. We don’t want literature, my friend: we want a bestseller.
The old cottage publishers never expected to make much money out of books. They loved good writing, even if the general public didn’t, and they were honoured by serving the art. Such amateurishness could not easily survive. The increased costs of the physical act of getting a book on to the market militated against the promotion of the best (of its nature not highly popular) and enforced the cultivation of the mediocre. Most people are mediocre, and want to see their mediocrity mirrored in print.
This is not to deny that, by some inexplicable quirk of the mass mind, the very best can occasionally be very popular, but the publishing world was surprised to see Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose heading the bestselling list, not at all surprised to find it eventually superseded by something by Harold Robbins or Jackie Collins. Once American publishers, with European publishers quick to follow, began to see their raison d’être in the purveying of mass commodities, their houses became heavily staffed and highly impersonal. There was a heavy turnover in personnel, so that talk of an author’s loyalty even to an editor became a sad joke. Great names subsisted, honouring dead founders, but loyalty to a great name had to be loyalty to an abstraction. There was no longer a greying head of the firm, somewhat shabby, with golf-tees in his pocket and that bottle of sherry ready to come out of the cupboard. Soon not even the great abstract name meant anything. Takeovers are endemic in the publishing business, and an author can literally end up not knowing exactly whose money is behind his advance or royalties.
Some authors desperately need the personal touch that the old-time publisher could give. Writing is a lonely occupation and writers are naturally prone to self-doubt; professional companionship to them is not the friendship of other writers, who are given to jealousy or disdain, or both at once, but that sense of a continuity of understanding, appreciation, constructive criticism that has more to do with devotion to an art than concern with the cash register.
Typescripts, or computer printouts, no longer go automatically to the cosy family firm that, out of a loyal belief in their worth, has kept their predecessors in print. Books are now auctioned, and the highest bidder hopes he can make sales match the exorbitant advance. The impersonality of the whole proceeding is mitigated, for the author, by money, but money, strangely enough, cannot easily compensate for the author’s sense of being reduced to a commodity like soap or peanut butter.
It is perhaps no wonder that the future of literature seems to lie in its reduction to an industry as domestic as the packaging of Morecambe Bay potted shrimps. I knew a young author in San Francisco who produced a series of novels in which the characters of the Popeye cartoons were turned into figures of theological allegory. He could not sell these to a commercial publisher but he could turn out 1,000 or so copies on an IBM machine. These he sold on the San Francisco streets and registered a profit, despite his many remainders. Eventually he died of an overdose of drugs, but that does not invalidate his procedure.
When Dante Alighieri and Geoffrey Chaucer wrote, printing had not even been invented: copying was the trade of the professional scribe. Despite the lack of a copy-editor and a contemporary Max Perkins, to say nothing of a literary agent, their works managed to survive into the Gutenberg age. Today’s literary works do not manage to survive at all. They are remaindered heavily and sold to paperback firms with a massive, and destructive, turnover.
There is a smell of well-oiled efficiency about all this, but the efficiency is often more apparent than real. At least two novelists sent typescripts of books that had 10 or so years previously been bestsellers to reputable publishers under the guise of pseudonymous submissions. They were not merely turned down flat; they were never even met with a whiff of recognition. Every New York and Boston publisher rejected John Kennedy Toole’s comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, which, when the author had committed suicide in despair, was given a National Book Award.
Books, being works of art, are delicate, and they are also highly personal things, and the impersonality of the contemporary publishing business is not well suited to handling them.
Modern industry being what it is, the quantitative view is considered more important than the qualitative. The books are churned out, to the detriment of the world’s forests, and all one can say of 99 per cent of them is that they are compilations of words with titles, jackets and blurbs. That their life is short is gleefully acknowledged: let them die quickly so that fresh books can take their place. This was not the view of those long-dead humanists.
Observer, 28 August 1988