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: