Publishing in the Dark
by
IF SUCH a thing as Book Publishers’ Row existed, there would undoubtedly arise from it, above the thunderous rolling of the giant presses and the raucous shoutings of Book Salesmen hawking their wares, a thin crying or keening, as of strong men in pain. This occupational moan would faintly express the mental anguish of Publishers and Editors, unable to estimate in advance the public’s reaction to the books they are about to market. In their sanctums they chant to one another the grievous refrain that publishing a new book is as hazardous as producing a play on Broadway. You just can’t tell what its reception will be—whether the fickle public will ignore it coldly, be your ballyhoo never so fervent, or will, for some inexplicable unreason, take it to its collective bosom. Naturally such aesthetic and financial uncertainty translates itself into the keening sound, which, in texture, is not unlike the sounds emitted by Irish matrons in an Abbey play when Seumas is brought back from the fishing, drowned entirely, God save us all, in the black night.
Despite much evidence to the contrary, I incline to the belief that most of this moaning is more vocal than real. Publishers do not assume a financial risk comparable to that of the theatrical producer. The first lessons they learn in their chosen profession are those of the Manly Art of Self-defense. You seldom see a publishing tycoon plunging heavily on a volume of poems by a new poet, or on a 600-page book on “The Psychic Undertones in the Backgrounds of Beowulf.”For that matter, Broadway does not fling out the banners far and wide when an author appears with the manuscript of “Clytemnestra in Hades,” a Play in Blank Verse in Five Acts and Sixteen Scenes. Instead it flings out the author.
Publishers generally know w hat is obviously unsalable. They are, as a rule, equally alive to the possibilities of a made-to-order best-seller candidate. In a recent review I referred to the happy certainty of the Reader’s Digest group as to the publishing fate of their recent volume, Getting the Most Out of Life. It is an obvious natural.
If, however, I were the Uouncil on Marriage Relations, Inc., I should feel less certain about Shall I Get a Divorce and How? by John H. Mariano ($2.00), although a statistical survey of the results of malepicking in the United State’s would indicate cause for optimism. “One out of every five or six American marriages” is destined for the scrap heap. “The problem,”as Mr. Mariano in one of his purple passages puts it, “is indeed serious. Mismating is not just a pastime to be treated cavalierly. It calls for serious understanding and disciplined treatment.” But will the public, in the pursuit of understanding and discipline, read this book? In his Preface, the author says: “Many couples are con I used about
marriage their own marriage particularly. Often they do not know any lawyer — even fear them they do not know where to turn. Besides, marriage is such an intimate thing! Not to want to talk about it is only natural.” I read this several times and think I have the gist, of it. I am a couple and I am confused. I don’t know a lawyer, but I fear them (him?). I do not want to talk about my marriage. It is such a sacred, intimate thing that all I want to do about it is to scrap it. Therefore, here is a book which tells me how to do so without violating that shy reticence which is my outstanding characteristic. The line forms on the left. Or does it?
Where the publishing world seems least secure — and naturally so—is in dealing with that type of book which has genuine and obvious merits but may not possess that curious oomph which spells Sales Appeal. In these borderline cases the publisher, manfully protecting his jaw with both gloves, decides that a small edition is indicated and that the best policy is wait and sec. The critics — impartial reviewers all -announce that the book is masterful, something new under the sun, a magnificent performance. This is most gratifying; and after a fortnight, the publisher examines the list of repeat orders from the retail trade. He notes with a temperate enthusiasm that Fort Worth, Texas, has ordered three more copies; Birmingham, Alabama, two; one is craved in Los Angeles, California, and another (if autographed) in Buffalo, New York. The book has, of course, been tentatively banned in Boston. Thereupon, the publisher decides to pull in the horns of his dilemma as far as that particular item is concerned, and retires to contemplate with a sour aversion the humiliations involved in fathering a succes d’estime.
As a reviewer looks back and remembers the reception refused or accorded to books which he admired or despised, he cannot help sympathizing with the publisher in his confused hedgings. The publisher, as a result of painful experience, guesses rightly more often than the reviewer. The latter becomes so used to seeing a book which he praises with honest enthusiasm selling a brisk 1300 copies that he ends up by believing that any good book — that is, any book which appeals to him is doomed to fail.
I recall reading an advance copy and writing almost tearfully about the great merits of How Green Was My Valley, lamenting the fact that it would, of course, make no impression at all on the American reading public. Here is a book, I said, so new in its approach, so unfamiliar in its idiom, so special in its kind of fugitive beauty, that it will appeal only to the most discriminating readers in short, to readers like myself. In answer to a recent inquiry, the Macmillan Company wrote me that “Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley had through 1945 thirty-five printings, totaling well over 500,000 copies.”One member of the firm, however, added: “I was interested to know that you had believed the book would not meet with popular success, for that was my own feeling exactly.”What price book reviewers?
How much does the title have to do with the popular acceptance of a book? Nobody seems to know. Titles such as Anthony Adverse would seem to carry a grim undertone. Gone With the Wind has no implication of a rich possession. The Bridge of Son Luis Rey or The Sun Alsu Rises would not, of itself, induce a buyer’s stampede to the bookshops. On the other hand, one may point to excellent books with discouraging or repulsive titles which have failed to attract the public, and argue that the titles were responsible for the failure.
Albert and Charles Boni published in the 1920’s The Worm Ourohoros, by Eric R. Eddison, followed in 1926 by his Styrhiorn the Strong. As the publishers wrote me latch, the former (and the better book) “was received by practically every critic as a masterpiece of romance.”It was just that. Quoted on a catalogue page enclosed by the publishers, I read with bemused nostalgia words which I myself had written in praise of Ourohoros. Twenty-odd years ago I possessed a more trenchant, vivid style than is the case today, so I was able to sum up my opinion of the volume in one dazzling phrase which at that time I was able to coin with little or no difficulty.
“An amazing book!” I wrote.
In spite of that eloquent endorsement, Mr. Eddison’s books remained almost unknown, and that is a great pity. They were vigorous romances of sheer,
frank magic, the scenes laid in a vaguely Scandinavian fairyland where the supernatural was entirely natural and titans and devils dealt with forces more formidable than the atomic bomb and with motives as native as humanity. Mr. Eddison died last year, presumably in the belief that he was a failure as an author. Some day Ourohoros will be republished and will become a classic. And some other reviewer with the gift of the illuminating adjective will discover in his turn that the book is “amazing.”It really is.
In 1916, Mr. Edward Lucas White wrote, and E. P. Dutton and Company published, a novel called El Supremo, dealing with the life and character of “indubitably one of the greatest men this world has ever produced, and, without exception, the most wonderful man ever born in North or South America, Dr. Jose Gaspar Rodrigues de Francia, Dictator of Paraguay from 1813 to 1840.”Alas, the attitude of the North American public toward Dr. Francia and nineteenth-century Paraguay was a bland, contented ignorance of the know-nothing variety. A few people read the book and realized that here was something new in historical romance, a vast picture whose structure was firmly based on thorough documentation and profound understanding of the human actors in a vanished civilization. An exciting narrative which needed no cumbrous “plot” or mechanism, — such as was later found in Anthony Adverse,— El Supremo should have delighted hundreds of thousands. Its readers — all word-of-mouth advertisers — have been faithful. The book has, at my last account, enjoyed twelve printings and, to quote the publishers, has “to date rolled up a sale of 17,000 copies.”Twelve goes into seventeen how many times?
In 1921, Mr. White’s superb novel of Imperial Rome, Andivius Hedulio, was presented to the reading public. It received the endorsement of fourteen printings (up to and including October, 1941) and has sold the enormous total of 25,000 copies. Mr. White committed suicide in 1934.
I do not claim immortality for either of these spacious books, but I am entirely confident that in most good and enduring qualities they are the equals of any best seller of the last thirty years. They have every desideratum except plot and brevity and, if you like, literary distinction — which should win for them, not only applause, but a great popularity. Why are their sales, after all these years, 17,000 and 25,000 respectively, the equivalent of ephemeral novels by bright young people; Their successive small printings must have been in answer to an insistent demand. It will take an indefinite period for a secondhand dealer to find a copy of Andivius for your order. I know, for I have a standing order to replace copies purloined by dear friends to whom I have sung its praises. I am now engaged in trying to build up as we say — a backlog. Were the titles of these four books responsible for the fad that they belong only to the few?
There is no denying the fact that publishers are often unaware of how good —— in the long run —a book of theirs may be. While I am boasting about my critical acumen, I may mention Hudson’s Green Mansions, which I read sometime before World War I. I trotted up and down, busily buttonholing acquaintances, telling them that here was a very great book, but that it was almost impossible to get a copy of it, and that nobody knew anything about it. Other things seemed more interesting to my contemporaries than a book dealing with a bird bride. I can’t give facts and figures to show the slow, slow steps by which Green Mansions crept into the public’s favor. Mr. Knopf wrote me this year: “I am pretty sure that Putnam originally published Green Mansions in the form of sheets which they imported from Duckworth. I persuaded Galsworthy, who had interested me in Hudson by his enthusiasm when I was first in England in 1912. to write an introduction for our edition, which we published from American plates in the spring of 1916, It was our first great success. I remember Ma jor Putnam’s great courtesy in turning his firm’s rights in the book over to us.”
Green Mansions is, of course, permanently enshrined in glory — and Major Putnam’s courtesx will be long remembered. In fact, it could hardly be forgotten, either by Mr. Knopf or by Major Putnam’s successors in the firm which bears his name.
After all, omniscience is not commonplace, and good books will often be inadequately appreciated by reviewers, publishers, and t he public, or any one of the three. The role of Publisher’s Prophet is more difficult than that of the classical haruspex, whose only duties were interpreting the flights of birds, studying the omens in animals’ entrails, and trying not to laugh out loud in front of his customers. How would you estimate, for example, the publishing chances of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse’s latest, Joy in the Morning (Doubleday, $2.00)? Here are Bertie Wooster and Jeeves and Aunt Agatha, and the Earl of Worplesdon, risen, like so many Lazari, from the grave. The old mechanism creaks a little, someone has forgotten to oil the wooden bearings, but the plot is refreshingly familiar and the dialogue just as it was in days of yore. Will the public boycott the book because Mr. Wodehouse broadcast that he was a comfortable prisoner—after Dunkirk and that some of the Germans were in reality stout fellas? Will they agree with Mr. Orwell, who alleged that Mr. Wodehouse, when it came to politics and World Wars and Germans, was quite as imbecile as some of his characters and should not be judged by ordinary standards? Or will a repressed desire for more Jeeves sweep all impediments away and carry the volume into every self-respecting household?
If you can answer these questions correctly, there is a job waiting for you in any publishing house. Unfortunately, few opportunities are open for ambitious young men to become book reviewers. There are too many reviewers already — and, after all, what ambitious young man wants to be a book reviewer? There are always openings in the bull ring game or the flagpole-sitting world or steeplejacking. This is the land of opportunity.