But it is we, the readers, and not casual performers such as Vise and Bezos, who are the paradox. When Sam Goldwyn was negotiating with George Bernard Shaw the sale of the rights to one of celebrated author’s plays, the mogul expressed surprise at the fee demanded. Shaw answered, “The problem, Mr. Goldwyn, is that you are interested in the art, while I am interested in the money.” Like Goldwyn, we demand that everything we do yield a financial profit, and yet we like to think that intellectual activities should be free from such material concerns; we have agreed that books should be bought and sold and taxed just like any other industrial product, and yet we feel offended when our obscene commercial tactics are applied to prose and poetry; we are keen to admire the latest best sellers and speak of “the shelf life of a book,” but we are disappointed to find that most books are no more immortal than an egg. In spite of Bezos’s efforts, the saga of Vise is a cautionary tale whose moral was enshrined many years ago by the writer Hilaire Belloc: “When I am dead, I hope it may be said: / ‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.’”
It is perhaps unfair to ask what all this counting means. Lists are delightful things in themselves, the very essence of poetry (as W. H. Auden once remarked), and it would be mean-spirited to deny the author of Fungoids the pleasure of introducing himself at a dinner party with “Hello, I’m best-selling author number 2,999,999. My book sold seven copies!”
But it may be that a little vanity is a requisite quality in literary endeavors. “Seven copies,” reflects the protagonist of Thomas Love Peacock’s early-nineteenth-century novel Nightmare Abbey, “have been sold. Seven is a mystical number, and the omen is good. Let me find the seven purchasers of my seven copies, and they shall be the seven golden candlesticks with which I will illuminate the world.” In these days, when greed is considered a virtue, who would dare quarrel with such modest ambition?
Jonah and the Whale
“You don’t know how to manage Looking-Glass cakes,” the Unicorn
remarked. “Hand it round first, and cut it afterwards.”
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 7
OF ALL THE SNARLING OR moaning prophets who haunt the pages of the Old Testament, I believe that none is so curious as the prophet known as Jonah. I like Jonah. I have a fondness for Jonah, in spite of his posthumous reputation as a purveyor of bad luck. I think I’ve discovered what it was about Jonah that made people nervous in his presence. I think Jonah had what in the nineteenth century was called an artistic temperament. I think Jonah was an artist.
The first time I heard the story of Jonah, it was from a great-uncle of mine, who had the disagreeable habit of spitting into his handkerchief when he talked. He had a small claim to Jewish scholarship, which we believed did not go far beyond the few verses he taught us to memorize for our bar mitzvah. But sometimes he could tell a good story, and if you didn’t look too closely at the spittle forming at the corners of his mouth, the experience could be quite entertaining. The story of Jonah came about one day when I was being especially pigheaded, refusing to do something or other I had been asked to do for the one hundredth time. “Just like Jonah,” said my great-uncle, holding his handkerchief to his mouth, spitting heartily, and tucking the handkerchief deep into his pocket. “Always no, no, no. What will you grow up to be? An anarchist?” For my great-uncle, who in spite of the pogroms had always felt a curious admiration for the tsar, there was nothing worse than an anarchist, except perhaps a journalist. He said that journalists were all Peeping Toms and Nosy Parkers, and that if you wanted to find out what was going on in the world you could do so from your friends in the café. Which he did, day in, day out, except, of course, on Shabbat.
The story of Jonah was probably written sometime in the fourth or fifth century B.c. The book of Jonah is one of the shortest in the Bible — and one of the strangest. It tells how the prophet Jonah was summoned by God to go and cry against the city of Nineveh, whose wickedness had reached the ears of Heaven. But Jonah refused because he knew that through his word the Ninevites would repent and God would forgive them, and thus escape the punishment he thought they deserved. To escape the divine order, Jonah jumped on a ship sailing for Tarshish. A furious storm arose, the sailors moaned in despair, and Jonah, somehow understanding that he was the cause of this meteorological turmoil, asked to be thrown into the sea to calm the waves. The sailors obliged, the storm died down, and Jonah was swallowed by a great fish, appointed for this purpose by God Himself. There in the bowels of the fish Jonah remained for three long days and three long nights. On the fourth day, the Lord caused the great fish to vomit the prophet out onto dry land and, once again, the Lord ordered Jonah to go to Nineveh and speak to the people. Resigned to God’s will, this time Jonah obeyed. The king of Nineveh heard the warning, immediately repented, and the city of Nineveh was saved. But Jonah was furious with the Lord and stormed out into the desert to the east of the city, where he set up a sort of booth and sat and waited to see what would become of the repentant Nineveh. The Lord then caused a plant to sprout up and protect Jonah from the sun. Jonah expressed his gratitude for the divine gift but, next morning, the Lord caused the plant to wither. The sun and the wind beat hard on Jonah, and faint with heat he told the Lord that it was better for him to die. Then the Lord spoke to Jonah and said: “You are upset because I killed a simple plant and yet you wished me to destroy all the people of Nineveh. Should I have spared a plant but not spared these people ‘who do not know their right hand from their left,’ and also much cattle?” With this unanswered question, the book of Jonah ends.
I am fascinated by the reason for Jonah’s refusal to prophesy in Nineveh. The idea that Jonah would keep away from performing his divinely inspired piece because he knew his audience would repent and be therefore forgiven must seem incomprehensible to anyone except an artist. Jonah knew that Ninevite society dealt in one of two ways with its artists: either it saw the accusation in an artist’s work and blamed the artist for the evils of which the society stood accused or it assimilated the artist’s work because, valued in dinars and nicely framed, the art could serve as a pleasant decoration. In such circumstances, Jonah knew, no artist can win.
Given the choice between creating an accusation or a decoration, Jonah would have probably preferred the accusation. Like most artists, what Jonah really wanted was to stir the languid hearts of his listeners, to touch them, to awaken in them something vaguely known and yet utterly mysterious, to trouble their dreams and to haunt their waking hours. What he certainly did not want, under any circumstances, was their repentance. Having the listeners simply say to themselves, “All’s forgiven and forgotten, let’s bury the past, let’s not talk about injustice and the need for retribution, our cuts in education and health programs, our unequal taxation and unemployment, our financial schemes that ruin millions; let exploiters shake hands with exploited, and on to our next glorious money-making hour”—no, that was something Jonah certainly did not want. Nadine Gordimer, of whom Jonah had never heard, said that there could be no worse fate for a writer than not being execrated in a corrupt society. Jonah did not wish to suffer that annihilating fate.
Above all, Jonah was aware of Nineveh’s ongoing war between the politicians and the artists, a war in which Jonah felt that all the artists’ efforts (beyond the efforts demanded by their craft) were ultimately futile because they took place in the political arena. It was a well-known fact that Ninevite artists (who had never tired in the pursuit of their own art) grew quickly weary of the struggle with bureaucrats and banks, and the few heroes who had continued the fight against the corrupt secretaries of state and royal lackeys and investment bankers had done so many times at the expense of both their art and their sanity. It was very difficult to go to your studio or to your clay tablets after a day of committee meetings and official hearings. The bureaucrats of Nineveh counted on this, of course, and one of their most effective tactics was delay: delaying agreements, delaying the attribution of funds, delaying contracts, delaying appointments, delaying outright answers. If you waited long enough, they said, the rage of the artist would fade, or rather mysteriously turn into creative energy: the artist would go away and write a poem or do an installation or dream up a dance. And these things represented little danger to banks and private corporations. In fact, as businesspeople well knew, many times this artistic rage became marketable merchandise. “Think,” the Ninevites often said, “how much you’d pay today for the work of painters who in their time hardly had enough money to buy paint, let alone food. Think of the protest songs by musicians who died in the poorhouse, sung today at national festivities. For an artist,” they added knowingly, “posthumous fame is its own reward.”