Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (13 page)

The philosophers tell us that man has fallen into the quotidian; it may be said that publishing at some point fell into the fiscal—the early-to-mid sixties is the likely starting date. One by one the great trade houses sold themselves to the conglomerates and the huge communications concerns, and so ceded, whether they recognized it or not, the control of their own destiny. On the side of the houses, the impetus for the sale varied. In some cases the founders or their heirs found themselves getting on in years and no longer vigorous enough or committed enough to handle the business of the firm properly. So in effect they cashed out their interests for a handsome price. In other instances the independent houses believed that allying themselves with powerful corporate owners would solve the perennial problems of modest concerns—cash flow and capital shortage—and allow them to ride out the inevitable lean seasons cushioned by the corporation’s substantial assets against the squeeze of high inflation and interest rates. Better to go to the friendly corporate owner than the possibly unfriendly banker or the impersonal capital markets for the necessary funds, the logic went. On the conglomerates’ side, these houses, controlling as they did substantial literary properties and themselves brand names of widespread recognition,
offered a highly cost-effective entry into what everybody saw as a growth industry, now that a vast new generation of Americans was in the process of becoming college-educated and thus, it was assumed, lifelong readers.

At the heart of these sales lay a terrible misunderstanding. The trade houses thought they would run their business as they had before, with similar independence of taste and action, safely cocooned within their conglomerates. The corporations, however, with far less naïveté, expected and insisted that their new assets adopt the same financial lockstep as their other assets, show quarterly growth, institute strict managerial controls—the shareholders expected no less. God, as usual, was with the big battalions, and today almost all the houses bearing the great names in American publishing are either huge corporations themselves or smoothly integrated into vast corporate combines. They now dance to the tune of big-time finance, and it’s not a fox-trot; it’s a bruising slam dance.

From down here on the shop floor, the results often look ludicrous and disastrous. Publishers are playing a big-money game with comparatively minuscule resources. On the map of corporate America as a whole, trade publishing commands such a small portion of the consumer dollar that it is barely visible. Let me illustrate the point. The January 1989 issue of
Manhattan, inc
. reports that Nintendo Video Entertainment was the toy industry’s top-selling product in 1988, grossing $2.3 billion. The net income to Nintendo from that one toy (assume 50 percent of gross) amounts to more than a quarter of the income of the entire trade book industry, which was $4.4 billion last year. What conceivable clout can even a $100 million company wield in such an environment? On the southern tip of Manhattan, twenty-five-year-olds in bright red suspenders buy and sell such concerns the way kids trade baseball cards—and with less feeling for the object in question.

No wonder, then, that publishers are demonstrating an almost inexorable tendency to huddle together in self-protective combinations, to weather the financial storms and preserve some autonomy of action. No wonder they are reaching out to create global publishing empires. Simon & Schuster, under the capacious Gulf and Western umbrella, now includes the Simon & Schuster imprint, Pocket Books, Poseidon, Prentice-Hall, Fireside, Touchstone, and a long list of subsidiaries. Random House, itself owned by the Newhouse family, which also owns the
New Yorker
and the Condé Nast magazine empire, controls Random House Trade, Alfred A. Knopf, Pantheon (which includes Schocken), Villard, the paperback imprints Ballantine, Vintage, and Fawcett, and recently concluded the purchase of one of the few remaining owner-run houses, Crown Publishing—itself a considerable nest of imprints and divisions and a highly profitable concern. On the other side of the pond, Random House has established a substantial presence
in British publishing by purchasing the venerable houses of Jonathan Cape, Chatto and Windus, and The Bodley Head, thereby making feasible the purchase and implementation of worldwide publishing rights in the English language. The latter is a special strength of my old employer, Penguin Books, which doth bestride the globe like a colossus and which, in this country, controls Viking, New American Library, E. P. Dutton … I can’t go on.

I’ll learn from the example of King Canute and spare myself a plea that all this merger activity stop. But even when such major reshufflings are handled sensitively and efficiently, there must of necessity be a disquieting interregnum of new managers, shifts in publishing philosophy, rerouting of the lines of communication and hierarchies of authority. At its worst a blind corporate stupidity descends upon a house, a reign of chaos in the putative name of profit and rationalization that in very swift order leads to the demoralization of the staff and the final destruction of its publishing identity and mission. Some of these latter cases are willful, others the simple result of putting the management of the finely tuned entity that is a topflight publishing house in the hands of apes in suits. (One of the finest literary editors in American publishing was given his walking papers with the contemptuous remark, “You’re a six-thousand-copy editor,” six thousand being about the lowest feasible printing for the average book. O sweetest of ironies, though, his first acquisition for his next employer sold about a million copies in hardcover!) The effect of all this on serious book editors scarcely needs spelling out. Suffice it to say that they move around a lot these days from house to house, hoping to stay a few steps ahead of the whirlwind, searching for the diminishing solid and stable places where they can hang out their shingles for a few years and do some good publishing.

The loss of an editor is almost always a shock to the writer, for it is the rare writer indeed who can write a book in splendid isolation and autonomy; and once the book is done, the writer must depend on the editor to guide the book through the course of its preparation for publication. The Brownian motion among the editorial class has resulted in a situation where many fine writers no longer feel they can
afford
any particular loyalty to a single publishing house. They’ve been taught the core lesson in modern corporate American life: expendability. Lately they’ve been learning another lesson as well, one writ large in the massive prices paid for corporate buyouts and objets d’art alike: that value is an exceedingly variable quality, its assessment highly dependent upon circumstance and subject to all manner of manipulation. The loss of heart suffered by many editors is paralleled by a similar decline of faith on the part of the writers that the writing itself will be enough, that the artistic act will suffice, without assiduous attention
to literary politics, public presentation, and publishing strategy.

We enter here into highly ironic territory. The conventional wisdom of the early eighties was that the rise of corporate publishing and the mirror-image growth of the huge book retailing chains could spell the end of serious writing and publishing—that so much time and money and effort would be expended in putting under contract and marketing the sure commercial thing the accountants demanded that nothing would be left over for the risky, the new, the demanding work. (See Thomas Whiteside’s
The Blockbuster Complex
for this argument in its purest form.) Oddly enough, something quite the opposite has happened: these days nothing is hotter, nothing more sought after than the prestige property, the fresh new face and voice. For that let us thank God, for a world full of Ludlums and Kings and Steels and Sheldons alone is not a world worth living in.

There are a variety of reasons behind this development. I would first cite a saving conservatism in the book business and in book culture, a saving remnant of people at all levels and in all areas of publishing whose commitment !o quality has never flagged and whose energy on behalf of good books (and inventiveness) knows no bounds. Then there was the at-first bewildering and later inspiriting best-selling success of such unlikely books as Umberto Eco’s
The Name of the Rose
and Allan Bloom’s
The Closing of the American Mind
, which demonstrated the heretofore unsuspected existence of a genuinely mass market willing to purchase, if not finish reading, works of obvious difficulty. Apparently the same vast distribution mechanism that channels oceans of schlock can be used to deliver the better class of goods in heroic numbers. Lastly, a crop of new writers of quality and freshness arose whose first books managed to find an audience sufficient to put their books on the best-seller lists and to indicate the rise, among writers and readers alike, of something like a new generation. These books include Jay Mclnerney’s
Bright Lights, Big City
, Ethan Canin’s
Emperor of the Air
, David Leavitt’s
Family Dancing
, Tama Janowitz’s
Slaves of New York
, Mona Simpson’s
Anywhere But Here
, Bret Easton Ellis’s
Less Than Zero
, and Michael Chabon’s
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
. Each of these books was a legitimate best-seller; each of these authors was under the age of thirty-five when he or she published his or her first book, and a couple of them were barely past twenty-one; and two of these books were short-story collections, utterly confounding conventional publishing wisdom about the commercial difficulties such books should face.

This is all very fine, in that it gives serious writers and their editors confidence and heart and clout as they write and publish. The world will not end with a five-part miniseries, at least not yet. But there is a palpable Faustian element to the bargain: the huge distribution mechanism and the
celebrity-hungry media machine that function to make these splashy successes possible extract their own costs and compromises and create much confusion of literary values and financial value.

Among the younger writers these days one can observe a great deal more career ambition—an itchiness to get it now—than purely literary ambition. Far from offering any resistance to the mighty engines and subtle strategies of contemporary success, they eagerly embrace and employ them. In this regard they are only mirroring the behavior of their contemporaries in business and financial services who reportedly sense failure if they haven’t made their first million by the age of twenty-seven. The eighties have not been a decade noted for patience. The proliferation of creative writing programs has made possible
ab ovo
a career-management approach to literature. Go to the right college, get into the right MFA program, make the right contacts among established writers and book and magazine editors, find the right literary agent, who’ll sell your book to the right publisher, who’ll give your book the right cover and shake down the right writers (some of whom you already know, of course) for the right blurbs, and you’re off! You get the good review from Michiko Kakutani in the
New York Times
, the paperback reprinters and Hollywood producers begin throwing money at your book, the hip nightclubs beckon, the galleys begin to arrive asking
you
for blurbs, you guest-teach at the right creative writing program, you summer at Yaddo or McDowell … everything is on track and on time.

And, very possibly, out of scale. What nobody will tell the hot young writers, least of all their editors, is that however fresh or unusual their first books were, they may have a long way to travel before they develop mastery of their craft. (That news may be delivered, brutally, by reviewers of the second book.) The system that helps make these talented young people also exploits them and can possibly destroy them. They may be living in a flashy Potemkin village of their agents’ and publishers’ construction. What the showy early success removes is the possibility of a slow, even fitful progress toward artistic maturity, well away from the harsh spotlight and the demands of an impersonal star system. The Muse does not speak on the Bitch Goddess’s schedule, and for many writers the most precious gift of all is not a big fat book contract, but the space and time to find their unique style and subject, to learn from an honorable failure, perhaps, without being tossed on the ash heap for it.

What also seems to have departed from the world for the moment is the desire among young writers to create the masterpiece, the total work that, whether gorgeously compressed or encyclopedically vast, seems to say all that must or can be said at its particular moment. Once upon a time (1944)
Cyril Connolly could write, to general agreement: “The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” To live by such words is to cultivate an imperial contempt for the mundane, for the world and its shabby workings. It is impossible, I believe, for an attitude of proud self-sufficiency such as cultivated by a Lawrence or a Joyce or a Beckett to coexist with an eagerness to play ball with the literary star search. It is certainly impossible for an editor to expect his young author to make the complete spiritual and artistic commitment the creation of a masterpiece demands when he has previously ascribed cultural authority to the system of hype. The masterpiece, almost by definition, is written outside this system.

Implicit in the above remarks, of course, is the assumption that the main event happens on the page, not in the gossip columns and on the celebrity circuit. This assumption is not one shared universally by writers and publishers. At the baroque end of the spectrum of literary decay stands Tama Janowitz, a figure one could find poignantly pathetic if she were not so annoying. Having gone to school on Andy Warhol, Janowitz proceeded to promote her genuinely fresh collection of stories,
Slaves of New York
, with shrewd shamelessness—the writer as photo opportunity, the self-huckster as literary waif. Her publishers were delighted to play along: as her publicist averred, “Tama’s too fabulous to waste on the book pages.” The so-called promotability of an author—one with an interesting personal story, a mediagenic profile, a set of powerful friends, a snappy line of patter—is routinely taken into consideration by publishers these days and may well obscure certain literary failings in the work even as it enhances its dollar value. Shall we call these young writers Capote’s Children?