The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics)

by Leys, Simon

  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.

  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.

  OVERTURES

  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.

  What appeared in 1950 to a European writer as a weird and barbaric American practice has become a common feature of international literary life. Yet do not misunderstand me; in principle I have no objection to first lines that generate instant excitement. Effective openings are first and foremost inspired openings.

  Inspiration is most enchanting and free when the writer is on the threshold of a new creation. Victor Hugo—a compulsive creator—jotted down dozens of dazzling openings for novels he never completed, nor seriously contemplated writing; he was simply indulging in the pure magic of beginnings.

  Inspired openings in literature have much in common with the overtures of great operas. A literary equivalent of the feverish expectation the orchestra can foster before the curtain rises is in the first paragraph of Moby-Dick, which opens with a breathtaking allegro con brio:

  Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever there is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet . . . then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

  Melville brusquely grabs you by the lapels and his grip never relaxes until, some 600 turbulent, bewildering pages later, he finally lets go of you. At that point, at long last, as the drama is finally over, there is a sudden change of pace: the narrator’s voice turns into largo maestoso, then softly fades away. Ishmael’s ship is lost with all hands, Ishmael alone survives, the coffin of his mate Queequeg becomes his lifebuoy, until another ship, searching for some of her own missing crew, rescues him:

  The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago . . . Buoyed up by the coffin for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by, as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage seahawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

  Coffins had been evoked on the first page, and a coffin bobs on the surface on the last: the ending is linked to the beginning with an invisible thread that crosses the oceanic immensity of the narrative. But it is too early to raise the issue of endings—I shall return to it.

  * * *

  The trumpet-blast overture is a feature of political essays. Jean-Jacques Rousseau made brilliant use of it in his Contrat Social:

  Man was born free; yet he is everywhere in chains.

  Nearly a century later, Karl Marx injected similar impetus into the first words of the Communist Manifesto:

  A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communis
m.

  Its 150th anniversary was celebrated last year. The criminal bankruptcy of all the states that used to call themselves “communist” has given a bad name to Marxism, which is perhaps unfair; after all, where has it ever really been tried? I am not competent to assess whether Marxism might still have a political future; one thing, however, is certain: whatever is well written is bound to last. On literary grounds alone, the future of Marx’s Manifesto is secure.

  Rousseau’s philosophical treatise heralded the French Revolution, and in the private realm his impact was as momentous: his Confessions opened the floodgates for the effusions of Romanticism.

  From the start, Rousseau’s autobiography presents a heady cocktail of naïve simplicity and stunning megalomania:

  I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent and which, once complete, will have no imitator. I propose to display before my fellow-mortals a man in the full truth of nature; and this man shall be myself.