Publishing
Literary silly season
Paul Johnson
In recent years the autumn has produced what I can only call the literary silly season. It's not a question of filling empty newspapers with tall stories, as in the summer, but of turning literary non- events and imaginary punch-ups into headline news, in the belief that thereby more books will be sold. The autumn is chosen because that is the time when people are vaguely thinking about buying Christmas presents, and if books are news there's a chance they may slip onto the shopping lists, along with the scent, whiskey and gramophone records. In other words it has nothing to do with literary ex- cellence and everything to do with the Berkeley Square hype.
So, when the Observer produces a front- page headline: 'Best Books List Sets the Fur Flying,' you know that no fur is flying but that a successful PR exercise is going strong, What happens is this. The Book Marketing Council, a body of (fairly) hard- faced men whose job is to flog books like milk, as a wholesome commodity people need, appoints a committee of nobs to draw up a newsworthy 'Best Novels of Our Time' list. They select Sir Peter Parker, well described by Claire Tomalin in the Sunday Times as 'the man of a thousand commit- tees', Richard Hoggart, the odd-job man of the Cultural Establishment, and Elizabeth Jane Howard, a true literary lady, to be sure, but liable to be a little eccentric. These people have no more mandate, and perhaps not much more in the way of qualifications, to select the 13 best novels of our time, than you and I, reader, but no matter. They are all well equipped to participate , in a reverberating non-event.
So they duly produce their list, which is inevitably 'controversial', even tangential in places — who but Miss Howard would have selected Elizabeth Taylor's little-known Angel? — and the rest can be left to the quality newspapers, experts at getting up a cultural row. Messrs Patrick Bishop and Robert Low of the Observer promptly ring up a celebrated novelist not on the list, An- thony Burgess, and get a predictable explo- sion of wrath: 'Woeful . . eccentric . . . I totally execrate the taste of the judges and challenge their competence'. Then they turn to Kingsley Amis, always good for a neat quote on the telephone, who is on the list, and again ring the bell: 'A much better list than might have been expected. It has my lightly qualified approval.' Thus the 'fur flying' of the headline is justified and the exercise can be considered a PR success. The Marketing Council's last effort, the 'Best of Young British Novelists', pushed their sales up 328 per cent, it is claimed, and this one — they hope — Will sell an extra million copies of the books on the list. The hype is defended because it works. But then, so do the bingo games run by the Star and the Sun, and the Express's Millionaires's Club.
I'm all for literary lions lending themselves to these advertising gimmicks in order to sell more books. But let them honestly admit to what they are doing and not pretend they are saving literature. Let them, in particular, drop the nonsense that writing books has nothing to do with other forms of production and that writers are entitled to special privileges and honour. Not so long ago Julian Barnes, a leading cultural panjandrum, sternly rebuked Alan Bennett for doing a voice-over TV commer- cial. And the Booker Prize dinner, the cen- tral event in the literary silly season, is almost invariably an occasion for writers to indulge in pretentious tantrums. Some pocket the cheque and spit in the sponsor's face. Others take the opportunity to voice grudges, pursue feuds or engage in clumsy log-rolling. The people who run the event don't mind: it's all good for headlines, and that is what the Booker is about. But every year strengthens my view that writers are best advised to stick to their trade and not sound off in public.
This time we had a whining, self-pitying sermon, directed against publishers, by Fay Weldon, chairman of the Booker judges. As such, she is selected by the same ar- bitrary PR process which produces the 'Best Novels df Our Time' stunt and has no more right to speak for us writers, let alone Literature, than lots of other people. Yet that is precisely what she took it upon herself to do: 'We Writers' — that sort of stuff. 'Writers know well enough', she in- toned, 'that they are like Atlas, that they bear on their shoulders the entire literary world'. I have known writers for 35 years and have never heard one voice such paranoid delusions. Or again: 'There are very few of us'. Not true: it is, and has been for four centuries, a grotesquely over- crowded profession, Or take this: 'It is not primarily money miters are after.' In fact writers are roughly the same mixture of altruism and greed as any other middle- class group — publishers and literary agents, for example.
Miss Weldon's attack was particularly ill- timed because it is based on the assumption that most publishers are contemptuous of writers and exploit them. This has never been generally true and is now less true then ever. The best service a publisher can render a writer is to be efficient at his job — selec- ting, commissioning, editing, publishing and selling books. It is a fact, which may have escaped Miss Weldon's notice, that publishing is one of those industries which are emerging from the recession in much better shape than they entered it. A lot of the lazy old business habits, from which writers were bound to suffer, have gone, one hopes for good. For instance, publishers are now beginning to market books professionally: the Booker show has become part of this process. Miss Weldon concluded on a portentous note: 'The Booker Prize is a serious event and a serious occasion, and we must take literature seriously and put its house in order.' Hoity- toity! The Booker is not a serious event. It is a media-marketing event and, as such perfectly acceptable in its way. But let's not pretend that it, or anything else in the silly season, has much to do with literature.
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