RAY CHANDLER

Chandler was always a classy writer, and his correspondence should be made required reading not just for writers' workshops but for various Nobel laureates of recent years, who strike me as utterly deprived of the common sense without which they are destined to the world of coteries.

In 1949 he wrote as follows:

I have always thought it one of the charms dealing with publishers that if you start talking about money, they retire coldly to their professional eminence, and if you start talking about literature, they immediately yank the dollar sign before your eyes.

I would remind younger readers that in 1949 publishers could still read and write.

E-BOOKS

Left right and center I am urged to buy an e-book tablet of some sort, to download this or that, keep a traveling library, to dispose of physical books What books? I ask. I am not aware that Amazon is a particularly well-informed literary critic, no more than is Barnes & Ignoble suited to the task or, for that matter, most publishers. But I yielded to temptation, using someone else's passwords, and asked Kindle to kindly offer me the books I wished to read, books that I normally buy from John Sandoe. Perfectly current, ordinary books, such as John Banville's The Infinities, L.P. Hartley's The Brickfield, Indrisson's Hypothermia, Willaim Trevor's Love and Summer, Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, Nikolas Andreyev's A Month on the Fence, Victor Meyer-Schoenberger's Delete, etc.. Not one of which was available.

Not unsurprisingly, what was available was the equivalent of an Amazon/New York Times best-seller list. Do I detect a whiff of ordinary commercialism? Yes I do, and the lovely arteficial pricing quarrels between book publishers and Amazon Etc. prove it. E-books are no economy. $9.95 may be half the price of a hardbound edition, but it is exorbitant for something that costs Amazon nothing to produce and gives the writer very little back.

The truth of the matter is that the conventional book (with few exceptions) has steadily risen in price and diminished in quality (not only obviously of the content, but also of book-making), and I have been compelled to instruct my regular book-sellers not to send me any books that are perfect-bound, such books being unreadable on a flat surface and having spines that crack and break and pages that tumble out long before one has finished reading. Why should I pay $15 for a poorly-made object? Let's not even mention so-called scholarly books, which are nnow so priced that they are available only to the libraries that are forced to buy them.

These are of course not my only only objection to the e-book. In the case of a classic text, which edition will I receive? How about books in 'foreign', since all America purveys -- as though only English would do -- is of local production? Does Kindle offer you books from England, from Ireland, from Australia? Largely, no. It is as provincial as B&N. Can I fit an iBook or an e-Book in my pocket? Can I have one with me wherever I go? What about the world's Great Book Bazaar, those out-of-the way places where, for want of anything else, one can buy for next to nothing, books one might never otherwise see?

Above all, however, a decline to e-book myself because to do so is to deprive me of history. Its intent is to take me straight to the market: not, for instance, to the many writers of value whose early books are all on ABE second hand, not to the edition I want (e.g., the Clarendon Edition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives, but to the many subsequent editions as sorted out by the professorate) but to the newest, the latest. In keeping with technology of all kinds, e-books exist in a perpetual present tense. And once you've invested in the technology, you can be sure that that $9.95, already exorbitant, will soon rise to $13.95, then $15.95! And soon enough be obsolete.

I close by a curious experience. Among the Google ads was one from Book Collectors, a .com company which promised to make the cataloguing of your library ("I have 800 books," one testimonial read, when I have 18,000) dead easy and automatic. Well, in keeping with the presentism of Amazon & Co, you will not be surprised to learn that this service does indeed work: if your books happen to have a bar-code!

THE LITERARY LIFE 1836 AND 2010

In reading Mr Slater's lugubriously written but carefully informative biography of Charles Dickens and his 'breakout' year, 1836, I am compelled to report the following:

1. That in that year, Dickens published, sketched, contracted for and wrote: at least two novels, some thirty 'sketches' of up to 10,000 words each, innumerable press reports, an operetta or two, while managing also to fit in his own wedding.

2. That in that year, his readership, which was to grow and stay with him throughout his writing life, another thirty-six years, became firmly established. He was of course his own agent -- since that now-parasitical occupation did not then exist -- wrote his own contracts, and was pursued to do more. Much of his production was available in print within days, some within weeks, and only a very small part required that he should wait for a few months.

3. That in that year the sheer exuberant variety of his work, ranging across genres and having as its subject 'ordinary life and ordinary people' was such as to create a real presence for him, not to speak of an income, by the end of that twelvemonth, that enabled him to dispense with his taxing, nocturnal reporting work.


It is small wonder that anyone who writes for his living as I have done for sixty-plus years should be profoundly envious of such encouraged prodigality and Dickens' close relatinship with his readers. I acknowledge, of course, that writers come in all kinds. There is the minging producer of the occasional poem or story and the logomaniac. Occasional writing -- such as Dickens' many sketches -- barely figures in the writer's life today, there being but scant market for it. For Dickens, such writing was his training ground. Newspapers and magazines abounded and consumed such material as soon as it could be worthily created.

Dickens would have been able to portray his Nancy Pelosi (the hairy one, in Italian) and Harry Reid in the kind of writing which dwellt less on what they did as on which sub-species of humanity they belong t0, how they walked, how their lips furled, how they talked. In other words, vividly, as a part of life. Apparently no one does this any more, though the reason may be that no one but I would publish it. But I have failed miserably to persuade writers that this is where art begins.

Serial publication made it possible for Dickens not just to respond to his public but also to change his novels in the course of writing them: that is how the Pickwick Papers began, as sketched by 'Boz'. When, however, Mr. Bellow and I, in ANON, sought to get writers to send in their manuscripts chapter by chapter, free to change them at will thereafter, we received a fair number of replies detailing that what was possible for Dickens (and Dostoievsky, etc.) was impossible for them. We reckoned that they cowered before the Perfection Brigade and that the rough-and-ready was not for such refined artists as themselves.

As for periodical publication of any kind, or the existence of such magazines as TRoL, many took the position, and so stated it with vehemence, that 'all that' literary activity was a waste of our time and talents: a true writer was one with a cabin in the woods producing the undying.

As for seeing one's work in print, what was more or less standard in my youth -- six to nine months -- has now become years. After all, how could Harvard or Yale possibly take a flying leap on a text that hadn't been peer-reviewed by a dozen dullards? And what would the charming editors at publishing houses do with their time if the author claimed sole responsibility for his text? (Granted, in many cases this would have led to some pretty awful and illiterate texts!)

Dickens was writing in a blessed era of literature in which the written, printed word was as valuable as nourishment of the mind as food was for the nourishment of the body. Of the six shillings a week he earned when he was twelve, Dickens spent at least sixpence on periodicals. I make that to be 8.25 percent of his income. The average college graduate, we are told, reading ten years later, manages to get through 1.5 books a year. Assuming modestly that his income (after tax) is 40,000$ per annum, a similiar thirst for the printed word would cost him $3,350 p/a, not a raw thirty bucks. There are clearly not many readers today who share his passion.

I doubt it is for any single reason that writers are now worth nothing more than a single meal without drink per annum. More likely is that reading in general has been abandoned by our educational system,and by teachers who are themselves -- like much of the public -- barely literate. When our esteemed senators were presented with major legislation (stimulus, health care), we are informed that they could not possibly read several hundred pages in the given time. Part of their problem, no doubt, was that the bills were not written in English but in lawyerly legislatise; but another problem, and a more likely one, was that in their busy days of flying about and dining and conferring and plotting, they barely had time to read even a whole newspaper. Or the inclination.

I should of course add that in 1836, Dickens was twenty-four years old and almost totally unknown, and that in the year that followed he began to edit a magazine, one of many in which he had -- by both editing and writing -- a powerful hand.

WRITERS & GATE-KEEPERS

Our writers -- some young, some old, scattered all over the globe (because we will read manuscripts in most language -- are mostly concerned with literature. Publication is all-important for them; it is a way of displaying their wares and finding their readers. Like most magazines, we take and publish only a small percentage of the dozens of submissions we get monthly. The usual result for many is a form letter or card. We don't do that: except for those who ought to have known better when they submitted. As for instance, we don't do obscenity, porn or smilies.

The new, often young and untried, writer has his work cut out for him today. It was not always thus. When I started out publishing, neary fifty years ago now, the most common communication I got from editors was, 'Where's the manuscript? What are you working on next?' Agents recruited; publishers recruited. Both were more or less literate; both knew a good book from a bad. My agents in England -- Helga Greene, Deborah Rodgers, Pat Kavanagh -- were intelligent, polite and diligent. So were Candida Donadio and Harriet Wasserman in America.

Today, I make it that there are at least five levels of gate-keeping to be navigated before a book of 'literary' fiction makes its way to the public. First, the general negative response to 'literary' fiction, for if publishers don't want it, then agents don't want it either. This negative reaction has nothing whatever to do with whether the public wants the dreaded LF ('literary fiction'). Some do, some don't, and some might if they had access to it. Saul Bellow and I calculated that with a population of 300 million, a minority literature was still possible. The 'one in a thousand' still gave us a base of 30,000 potential readers. We thought we should be able to attract maybe five percent of those, or 1,500. And indeed TRoL did. So the market for LF existed, however small, and it seemed our job to attract it. Needless to say, the same should apply to publishers. Of course it does not, since the conglomerates which now dominate the business, in tandem with Barnes & Ignoble and the other chains, are only interested in Volume, and we are delgaditos, ever so meager, thin and appetiteful.

Therefore, taking our cherished Work in hand, we set forth to find agents, the Number 2 Gate-Keepers (Mine are long dead, clinically depressed, retired, or have jumped off the Golden Gate bridge.) Well, good luck to you. When I returned to fiction in 1990, I set forth in search of such, starting with the agents I had long worked with. Candida Donadio Associates, I found, had been taken over by a not very good crime writer whose view of LF was painfully expungatory; he didn't want it and he didn't think anyone else did. As is the norm these days, he did take up he better part of nine months to reach that decision, or so inform me. High hopes were placed in my old friend Herbie Gold's new agency, to be headed by the very able ex-editor of the Los Angeles Times book section. He took even longer, and much hand-wringing. God he loved it, God he wished he could. . .You know the line. After some dozens of these, I simply gave up the search for a agent.

Which in turn led to Gate-Keeper 3: that no commercial publisher will even look at a book that has not been submitted by an agent (preferably by el Tiburon, Mr. Wiley, 'owner' of Messrs. Bellow, Amis, Roth and countless backlists). There are exceptions. You may submit directly to publishers if you have done something suitably disgusting, if you have insider info on Michael Jackson or some other spurious celebrity, if you retire (or are fired from) public service, and so on. Random House will greet you with open arms, and so will many, if you can guarantee enough fame to get you on Fox for minimal payment, if you can splash out a few hundred thousand on PR, are buddies with Oprah, or have a specific lobby (Tea Party, Evangelical, etc.) as your target audience. Supposing you have none of the above, being no more then good at your trade (LF), then this Catch 22 will keep you unpublished.

Gate-Keeper 4 is the critical establishment, a dying breed. Writers get known by word-of-mouth, yes, but also by serious citical attention. Where would they get that today? With rare exceptions, the main 'reviewing' organs, the newspapers and magazines that take writing seriously, have never been of a very high quality. With the take-over of many magazines by the Academy, that dead hand has been instrumental in destroying literature, the truth being that professors love themselves and hate books. The middlebrow media, such as the New York Times or the weeklies, in America especially, remain closely tied to the commercial publishers who advertise in their pages. In what country would you have a 'service' such as Kirkus reviews to tell you what will sell and what you should cover: opinions delivered by housewives at piece-rates?

The final Gate-Keeper is the Public. I bow to them. All the previous Gate-Keepers have done their best to exclude literature; the public has been resistent, and is the final judge of the survival of this writer and the oblivion that awaits that one. The other Gate-Keepers have deprived them of choice. We labor to make it otherwise; as do others. I am not optimistic.