The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (37 page)

The second Mawsonian fallacy results from a mistaken notion of what “health” is. On this subject, I think that Laurence Sterne provided the correct perspective in his description of a visit he made to his doctor:

Since Mawson just took us to Antarctica, before leaving this particular field I might also add that I have always preferred the example of Shackleton—a much greater man. In the darkest depth of disaster, when all members of his expedition had to discard every piece of superfluous luggage, he refused to abandon his beloved copy of Browning’s collected poems. One day, some scholar should write a doctoral thesis on “The Role of Poetry in Polar Exploration”—but right now, I had better not wander too far away from my subject. My point was simply this: whatever fragile harmony we may have been able to achieve within ourselves is exposed every day to dangerous challenges and to ferocious batterings, and the outcome of our struggle remains forever uncertain. A character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa gave (what seems to me) the best image for this common predicament of ours: “Life is a shitstorm, in which Art is our only umbrella.”

This observation, in turn, brings us to the very meaning of tonight’s function—the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Any well-ordered state must naturally provide for public education, public health, public transport, public order, the administration of justice, the collection of garbage, etc. Beyond these essential services and responsibilities, a truly civilised state also ensures that, in the pungent squalls of their
daily lives, citizens are not left without umbrellas—and therefore it encourages and supports the arts. The Premier’s Literary Awards are one important aspect of this enlightened policy.

The beauty of all literary awards is that they produce only winners—there can be no losers here. For this is not a competition, and in this respect it resembles more a lottery. When we buy a lottery ticket in support of some charity, we expect nothing in return. Yet, if one day we were to receive a phone call informing us that our number had just won a sports car or a holiday in Tahiti, we would be surprised—and delighted. We would be delighted precisely because of our surprise. Though it may be pleasant to obtain something after a long and hard struggle, to be given it without even having had to ask—this is pure bliss.

Without doubting the quality of his own work, a writer who receives a literary award is perfectly aware that he is very lucky indeed. Not only does he know that this honour could have gone to any other writer on the short-list, but he also knows that there are many equally deserving writers not on the short-list; and furthermore, it is quite conceivable that the most deserving writer of all did not even succeed in having his manuscript accepted for publication—it was rejected by twelve different publishers, and may have to wait another twenty years before having its true worth duly recognised.

Yet these considerations should not tarnish in the least the happiness of the winners. Ultimately lotteries are designed to benefit not their winners, but handicapped children, or guide dogs for the blind, or whatever good cause is sponsoring them. And it is the same with the literary awards: year after year, they have only one true and permanent winner, always the same—and it is literature itself, our common love, which we have all gathered here tonight to support and celebrate.

*
Address to the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, 2002.

†
I hope this will not now hinder the smooth progress of his canonisation.

§
These notions are developed further in an earlier essay, “Lies That Tell the Truth.”

T
HERE
is no sublunary topic on which Samuel Johnson did not, at some time, issue a pithy and definitive statement; this particular subject is no exception, and although the Johnsonian quote is well known, it should still provide an apt starting point for our own little survey: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” Boswell faithfully recorded this utterance of the master, but he was shocked. Surely Johnson said this in jest? Did his own noble and tireless activity in the service of literature not give the lie to such a cynical paradox?

Yes and no. We know, for instance, how Johnson dashed off
Rasselas
at stupendous speed in order to pay for his mother’s funeral. Under the pressure of financial necessity, he could display a prodigious capacity for work, but his natural inclination towards indolence was no less colossal. Later in life, when his material circumstances finally became more secure, he wrote rather little. To Boswell, who had expressed respectful puzzlement at this relative idleness, he retorted tartly: “No, sir, I am not obliged to do any more. No man is obliged to do as much as he can do. A man is to have part of his life for himself.”

Yet Johnson’s attitude was not shared by all the great writers of his time. Voltaire, for instance, instead of writing in order to make money, made money in order to write. Through shrewd investments and clever financial operations, he accumulated an enormous wealth (bringing him a yearly income of £140,000) which, in turn, enabled him to acquire a splendid estate located strategically on the border between the kingdom of France and the republic of Geneva. This gave him the liberty to write and to publish as he pleased: whenever he offended censors on the one side of the border, he could find instant refuge on the other side.

Rousseau, who, for all his personal frailties, had a much nobler soul, also aimed at intellectual freedom but, unlike Voltaire, he never coveted riches. Although his books triumphed throughout Europe, in an age that ignored copyright they brought him fame but earned him hardly any royalties. In the last part of his life, he declined generous offers of patronage from the great and the powerful and opted instead for independent poverty: he made a meagre living by copying musical scores. He carefully calculated how many pages he needed to copy every day to keep his modest household afloat, and once he had done his daily quota, the rest of the time was entirely his own. In this way, he could secure both self-sufficiency and inner peace. He said: “I always considered that the condition of author is not, and cannot be, glorious and honourable, if it were also to become a paid craft. You cannot think lofty thoughts when you think for a living.”

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.