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.
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