Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

In the eighteenth century, the livelihood of most writers depended either upon the patronage of the court and the aristocracy or upon the commercial activities of printers and booksellers. Modern publishing with its personal — yet also delicate and sometimes antagonistic — relations between authors and publishers was born in the nineteenth century. In our time, writers’ views on the subject were bitterly summarised by Edmund Wilson: “All publishers are dogs.” (It would be interesting to know what the publishers thought of this notoriously unpleasant customer.)

Authors’ complaints about publishers have been voiced on many different tunes, but their concert generally amounts to endless variations on the same theme: money. Either they moan piteously, like Henry James writing to his publisher: “The delicious ring of the sovereign is conspicuous in our intercourse by its absence.” Or they thunder with foaming fury and throw colourful abuse like L.-F. Céline: “If you were not robbing me, you would not be conforming to my views of human nature.” And, as his publisher had refused to increase an advance on royalties and advised “more patience,” he retorted: “Patience is a virtue for donkeys and cuckolds! If only you could kindly wipe your arse with my contract and let me free to leave your filthy brothel!” Yet screams merely betray powerlessness. Georges Simenon, wanting to rescind an agreement that had proved disadvantageous to him, resorted to different tactics: he achieved his aim by putting to good use his intuitive knowledge of the human heart. The novelist assessed how much it would be worth for him to redeem his original contract; then filled a briefcase with banknotes and won his negotiation simply by emptying the briefcase over the publisher’s desk.

Yet few writers ever find themselves in a position to perform such coups. Although some of the great and famous — Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, Walter Scott, Dickens, Maupassant — made (and sometimes lost) huge fortunes, for most of the others, literary genius amounted to a curse, at least as far as their material well-being was concerned. Literary history abounds with heartbreaking episodes of utter destitution. Dostoevsky, for instance, finding himself stranded abroad, penniless and starving, wrote The Eternal Husband in a last attempt to obtain emergency relief from his publishers. But as he was about to dispatch the manuscript on which his last hope rested, he discovered that he did not even have money for the postage. The despair and despondency experienced by Baudelaire were, in a sense, even more cruel: at the end of his life, the poet undertook to calculate the earnings of his entire literary career; he arrived at a grand total of 15,892 francs and 50 centimes — and the friend who recorded this grim exercise concluded: “Thus, this great poet, this perfect artist, who had worked so hard and without respite for the last twenty-six years, had earned on average one franc and 70 centimes per day.”

What hurt Baudelaire most was not poverty itself (his mother, who loved him dearly, was wealthy and would not have allowed him to starve), but what poverty meant: the cold indifference of the reading public. Leaving aside the problem of naïve authors who are cheated by dishonest publishers, there is no doubt that, when writers whine and curse about money matters (as they seem to be doing most of the time in their correspondence with publishers), it is not because they are needy or greedy; actually, what they are craving is not royalties but attention and appreciation. In this sense, money is for them a mere symbol, and if they were suddenly to win $10 million in a lottery, such a bonanza would hardly assuage their deeper anguish. On this issue, the interesting suggestion made by Cyril Connolly some seventy-five years ago still retains all of its relevance, and it might be well worth reviving it: “I should like to see the custom introduced of readers who are pleased with a book sending the author some small cash token: anything between half-a-crown and £100. Authors would then receive what their publishers give them as a flat rate, and their ‘tips’ from grateful readers in addition, in the same way that waiters receive a wage from their employers and also get what the customer leaves on the plate. No more than £100—that would be bad for my character — not less than half-a-crown — that would do no good to yours.”

Steinbeck remarked: “The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.” Still, book writing at least need not be a profession — it can be a compulsion, an art, an illness, a therapy, a joy, a mania, a blessing, a madness, a curse, a passion, and many other things besides, whereas book publishing must always confront first and foremost the ruthless uncertainty that characterises all business ventures. Could this explain the apparent meanness with which some publishers seem to treat their innocent authors? When Richard Henry Dana completed his immortal Two Years Before the Mast (1840), he was only twenty-five, he had no publishing experience, but he needed money urgently. He considered himself lucky to find a New York publisher willing to pay a lump sum of $250 for all the rights on the book for the next thirty years. Out of this deal, the publisher was eventually to earn $50,000—a colossal sum at the time — not a cent of which ever went to the hapless author. (When a British edition came out in London, the English publisher felt moved to give $500 to Dana, even though he was under no legal obligation to do so; in the entire history of publishing, this must be the only instance of a publisher paying an author money not owed to him. Conversely, there are also equally surprising and admirable examples of writers declining royalties which they deemed excessive. Before setting sail on a cruise across the Pacific, R.L. Stevenson was offered by the editor of Scribner’s magazine $3,500 for a series of twelve monthly articles; he replied, “I feel sure you all pay too much here in America, and I beg you not to spoil me any more. For I am getting spoiled; I do not want wealth and I feel these big sums demoralise me.”)

Returning to Dana’s unfortunate experience, one may feel that his New York publisher took unfair advantage of his ignorance; actually, this businessman may have been ruthless, but he was not devious and, at the start, he took a considerable risk in publishing the manuscript of an unknown young writer. The fact is that no one could ever have foreseen the huge and long-lasting success of such an unusual work.

Jacques Chardonne, before he became a distinguished novelist, worked as the assistant of a great publisher. His observations on the publishing business are particularly perceptive since he developed a career on both sides of the literary fence. His old boss (who was a notorious gambler) formulated an original philosophy of his trade: “On every book you publish, you are bound to lose money; therefore, the secret of a good publisher is to publish as few books as possible — ideally, none at all.” From his own experiences, Chardonne himself concluded: “Any truly good book will always find 3,000 readers, no more, no less.* We used to publish every year translations of some forty foreign novels. Invariably, one of these would suddenly sell 100,000 copies (which would pay for all our other publications) — and we never knew why .”

The truthfulness of this admission is especially noteworthy. Quite often, publishers, however shrewd and experienced, can hardly know what they are doing. With good reason, they could invoke the famous phrase (coined by Cocteau in another context), “Since we do not understand these mysteries, we might as well pretend that we are organising them.”

It is all too easy to laugh at the naïveté of the American publisher who rejected Orwell’s Animal Farm on the grounds that “animal stories do not sell anymore.” The original manuscript did not have much more luck at home with such a sophisticated connoisseur as T.S. Eliot, who advised Faber and Faber against publication. And, as everyone remembers, the greatest novel of the twentieth century, Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu , was at first pronounced unreadable and unpublishable by the most authoritative judges of the time, Gide and Schlumberger — and Proust had to print the first volume of his monumental work at his own expense. Publishers may argue that they are businessmen and cannot afford to play the part of patrons of the arts, but the problem, of course, is that in this field, lapses of aesthetic judgement make in the end little commercial sense.