Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

From being a craft, publishing has progressively turned into an industry; one consequence of this transformation is that it has become increasingly geared towards the production of “best-sellers.” Yet, by their very nature, best-sellers are elusive: they happen , they cannot be willed, as writers themselves know all too well, however skilful as artisans some of them may be. “No one can write a best-seller by trying to,” Somerset Maugham observed and, at the end of a long and hugely successful career, he ought to have known. He recalled in his Writer’s Notebook how he once attempted with a friend to accomplish deliberately this very feat; they had much fun writing it — and therefore failed. “The persons to whom we submitted our manuscript one and all said the same thing: ‘It looks as though you had written it with your tongue in your cheek.’” The conclusion is obvious: “You cannot write anything that will convince, unless you are yourself convinced. The best-selling writer sells because he writes with his heart’s blood… He gives the great mass of the public what they want, because that is what he wants himself.”

When a book is successful, the prejudice that it cannot be good is as silly as the belief that it must be good. As experience constantly confirms, the commercial triumph of a book — or its dismal failure — means simply nothing as far as its literary value is concerned. Hilaire Belloc had the final word on this subject — do not complain that I am quoting him at too great a length; actually my little paper has had no other purpose but to bring this remarkable page back to your attention:

To those who have had to pursue letters as a trade (and to this I have been condemned all my life since my twenty-fifth year), it certainly is the hardest and the most capricious and, indeed, the most abominable of trades, for the simple reason that it was never meant to be a trade.

A man is no more meant to live by writing than he is meant to live by conversations, or by dressing, or by walking about and seeing the world. For there is no relation between the function of letters and the economic effect of letters, there is no relation between the goodness and the badness of the work, or the magnitude of the work, and the sums paid for the work. It would not be natural that there should be such a relation, and in fact, there is none.

The truth is missed by people who say that good writing has no market. That is not the point. Good writing sometimes has a market, and very bad writing sometimes has a market… Writing important truths sometimes has a market; writing the most ridiculous errors and false judgements sometimes has a market. The point is that the market has nothing to do with the qualities attached to writing. It never has and never will… The relationship between the excellence or the usefulness of a piece of literature, and the number of those who will buy it in a particular form, is not a causal relationship, it is a purely capricious one.

*This figure does not seem to have varied significantly over the past 400 years.

THE IDEA for this little essay first came to me many years ago, as I was browsing in a bookshop. I saw a copy of Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill ; I knew the book only by its title; out of curiosity, I picked it up, opened it at the first page and read the beginning of the first sentence of Chapter One: “The human race to which so many of my readers belong…”

I bought the book on the spot and left the shop in a hurry. The sight of an old man laughing loudly all by himself in a public place can be somewhat disconcerting, and I did not wish to disturb the other customers.

I cannot say that the rest of the book fully lived up to its glorious opening but, having pitched its key so high from the start, what novel could maintain itself at that level over 200 pages? Still, The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a delight; it contains a great many pearls of wisdom (“Just as a bad man is nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet”) and offers enlightening observations on the essentially democratic nature of the monarchic system — actually the most democratic of all, provided the king be chosen once every year by lottery, a notion that could be useful in our republic debate.

Yet, for me, the most memorable aspect of my little experience in the bookshop was the discovery that sometimes a really inspired line in a book can compel you to buy it at once. Naturally, shrewd writers have not been slow to notice that it should be possible to trigger such an irresistible urge in their potential customers. In consequence, some of them manipulate their openings the way a fly fisherman dangles his lure in the hope of hooking a trout. See, for instance, how Anthony Burgess started his Earthly Powers :

It was in the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

In this case, the fisherman scored a bite — for I bought the book — but he did not actually land the fish — since this weighty volume has been majestically gathering dust on my shelves, still unread after nineteen years. In a way, I wonder if Burgess’s clever opening is not to genuine literature what an artificial fly is to natural insects: a little too shiny, and ultimately indigestible. The search for effect comes, here, dangerously close to one of those tongue-in-cheek entries in the competition named after Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the once popular author of The Last Days of Pompeii , and his now notorious opening of Paul Clifford : “It was a dark and stormy night…” An example of a winning entry:

Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the cutting edge of narcissism, was about to give his body and soul to a back alley sex-change surgeon to become the woman he loved.

For Earthly Powers , Burgess contrived an opening that was striking indeed; the only problem was precisely that it was contrived, and this is probably why, in the end, it could not provoke, in this reader at least, a real urge to persist.

The danger with talented artists is that too often it is their very eagerness to impress that ruins their more ambitious efforts. This willingness to resort to gimmicks reflects the domination of advertising over every facet of contemporary culture.

Hemingway was an early and influential exponent of this trend, often apparent in his stylistic mannerisms. See, for instance, the self-conscious wit displayed at the start of his story “In Another Country”:

In the fall, the war was still there, but we did not go to it anymore…

How smart indeed! If only the author’s cleverness had been better concealed. In some writers this fatal desire to show off their ability betrays a competitive streak, which taints their writing with vulgarity and ultimately kills their art.

The disease was accurately diagnosed by Arthur Koestler half a century ago, in an interview he gave to the New York Times shortly after he settled in the United States. His comments remain so pertinent that they deserve to be quoted at length:

The longer I live here the more I get the feeling that there is something radically wrong with the literary life in America… If you were to ask me what a writer’s ambition in life should be, I would answer with a formula.

A writer’s ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years, and for one reader in a hundred years. But the general atmosphere in this country directs the writer’s ambition into different channels… on immediate success here and now. Religion and art are the two completely non-competitive spheres of human striving and they both derive from the same source. But the social climate in this country has made the creation of art into an essentially competitive business. On the best-seller charts — this curse of American literary life — authors are rated like shares on the Stock Exchange… Can you fathom the whole horror of what this implies? And can you fathom the grotesqueness of Hemingway, America’s greatest living novelist, talking of his books in terms of “defending the title of champ”? I know he meant to be funny, but it just isn’t. It is a give-away; it betrays the basic assumption that writing is a competitive business like prize-fighting.