Every person employed by a publisher, printer, or bookseller makes a living from the publishing of books: not many make a fortune, certainly, few make a very good living compared with other jobs, perhaps, but nevertheless all make a living. But not the writer, not the basic producer, not the prime mover, not the one factor without whom all the others would not be in business at all.
English publishing must surely be the only industry which is still at this antediluvian stage of evolution. How can such a situation exist in 1965? The reason lies in the nature of the labour force. Never can any workers in any occupation have been faced by so many blacklegs. The fact is that everyone, but everyone, thinks they can write: and many of them do, and most of those that do, submit their work. And all of them would be glad to see themselves in print for no payment at all, and such is the (to me baffling) prestige of mere print that some even themselves pay the less scrupulous sort of publisher to bring their work out. There is therefore no hope whatever of any union being formed that would be at all effective: the writers’ organisations that do exist, with their collaborative acceptance of the status quo and insistence, when pressed, on the myth that all writers are lone wolves, are demonstration enough of that.
Publishers maintain this situation by producing large numbers of books, and paying little to many rather than at least a living wage to fewer (and better) writers. To say that well over ninety percent of this output is rubbish can be confirmed by simple statistics. Those papers which review novels, for instance, find on average four or five a week worth notice: say 250 a year. This is roughly one-tenth of those published: yes, no less than about 2,500 novels a year are published in England. And that figure is for new novels: it does not include reprints. Most of these, of course, are never even noticed in the first place, so can hardly be said to be forgotten; it is as if they had never been. And any reviewer who has had to sort through them will tell you that the chances of a masterpiece going unrecognized by every paper are nil. Of the 250 which are reviewed, perhaps a tenth receive good notices and will still be in print five years later, or at all remembered.
Let me make myself clear: I am not against people writing, obviously, such intolerance would deserve condemnation. But my attitude is rather similar to that of the National Association of Schoolmasters over equal pay for women: the reward must be commensurate with the higher level of needs, not the lower. In other words, the quantity of books published should not be allowed to depress the earnings of the better writers, the serious writers, the professional as compared with the amateur. And there is no doubt that it is this thundering cataract of rubbish which is responsible for the situation at the moment, and which also engulfs bookbuyers and literary editors.
All real writing has its origin in some strongly personal need to express emotion or redress a wrong: this is all the excuse I make now for discussing my own experience of publishing.
I have accepted that to become a writer is a long and hard task, and that while I was learning I had to subsidise myself by means of other activity. I decided seriously to become a writer when I was nineteen, and it was ten years before I had learnt enough about writing to complete my first novel: this was published when I was thirty. Having served my apprenticeship, therefore, and moved on to the journeyman stage, it was all the more bitter to discover that publishers paid so badly. I had thought that to learn to write well was the difficult part, and it seemed (and still seems) a gross insult to this difficulty, to the very skill laboured so long to acquire, to the profession of writing itself: but perhaps this insult is a reaction on the part of that majority in publishing who are writers manqués. Anyway, for my first novel, the reading public paid some £2,000. Of this I received £200, which was reduced to £180 when I had paid my agent: who earned every penny of his share, I hasten to add. Of the rest of the £2,000, the bookseller took over £660 (one-third), the printer over £300, and the remainder went to the publisher.
Now I don’t suppose any one of the other three involved made much out of Travelling People: but at least they did not make a loss, at least they covered their expenses, at least it contributed in due proportion to maintain the living they are all making from the sale of the books. But £180 did not even recover for me my rent while I was writing it, let alone the cost of food and clothing during the two and a half years it took: and any sign of profit from the writing of it must be far away.
Of course, they say, you didn’t write it for money: of course, I didn’t, but since £2,000 has been paid for it, why should not my share at least equal what it cost me to write it? It seems obvious to point it out again, but it is necessary since the whole of publishing does not seem to acknowledge the fact: that £2,000 would not have been made at all without me, the basic producer. Some publishers even trot out that old myth about people writing best whilst starving in garrets, too: and they believe it, despite never having heard an author agree. And, though it almost passes belief, one person engaged in this ‘occupation for gentlemen’ even assured me that I was lucky things were now somewhat better than in the eighteenth century, when writers had to fawn before patrons to get published!
It is the proportion, then, of the price of a book received by the writer which is too small. When I suggested to another rich shark that he pay me an extra two shillings a copy, this publisher said that could not be done without adding six shillings to the price of the book. My naïve failure to understand the economics of this was met with arguments which merely showed that everyone concerned automatically reacted to keep differentials more or less the same. And there was displayed, too, that sanctimonious concern to keep book prices as low as possible, for the public good, which is largely hypocritical: ask them to take a smaller share themselves, and see how readily publishers keep prices down!
All writers accept this situation, it seems to me, out of sheer conceit and pleasure at being published. Some publishers agree the situation is inequitable, yet they refuse to act unilaterally. I found it intolerable, as should be obvious, but rather than merely bitch about it I decided to do something. I asked my publisher to pay me as much as he did his secretary (putting myself on no higher financial level, conceiving myself at least worth as much to him as she is) for the next five years, in which time I should write three novels. He refused to value me at even this level, did not value me enough to keep me alive to write these next three novels. Nor did several other publishers: but one, Secker & Warburg, has been enlightened enough to acknowledge in practical terms that this system is unfair, and has entered into such a contract for three years and two novels. The salary is still an advance against royalties, the proportion of which remains much the same, but the risk has been transferred from the writer, I shall no longer have to subsidise the publisher, and at least I shall be able to live during the next three years (albeit only at the level of a secretary) doing what I am best able to do.
A Marxist would of course point out that publishing is a classic, fossilized example of a capitalist industry in which the basic producer is exploited to the point of not being paid a living wage. And of course there is a classic Marxist answer, too: the basic producers should combine to form a co-operative.
Is this possible for writers? I think it is. A group (say ten) of established writers could undertake jointly to employ a printer, buy paper, and so on. Obviously new selling methods would have to be found: it would be difficult to persuade booksellers to take less than the grossly disproportionate third they take at the moment. But this would be no loss, since booksellers are in general ludicrously inefficient and bookshops are largely an anachronism anyway: new selling methods, like direct mail (already very effectively exploited by Paul Hamlyn) and completely new ways of promoting books and reaching people who would read if given the slightest encouragement could be discovered by market research. It is yet another indication of publishing’s nineteenth-century outlook that no market research has been carried out. Every other industry has been at great pains in the last twenty years to discover why peopl
e buy, in what circumstances, and how often: but not publishing.
All profit from a book published by such a co-operative, once costs were covered, would go to the author. One drawback would be that administrative work would take one or more of the writers away from writing: but this could be resolved by employing a manager, providing one could be found with sufficient enthusiasm for the project. Relatively little initial capital would be needed: enough to pay the printing bill whenever it fell due. The real capital would be the talent of the co-operating writers: if ten established authors were to form such a co-operative, it would take only one best seller to demonstrate the attractiveness of the idea to other writers.
And it would knock hell out of publishing as it is now within five years.
Censorship by Printers
Published in Censorship, Summer 196510
If it is true that the degree by which any censorship is concealed makes it in that proportion more pernicious, then the one exercised in Britain by printers (which is generally known only to authors and publishers) must be considered amongst the most dangerous.
The most notorious case of this was the first edition of James Joyce’s Dubliners, where objections by the printer led to a delay in publication of ten years. The three passages at which ‘The British Printer raised his Moral Thumb, blew his Moral Nose and lifted his Moral Eyebrows,’ as Gorman puts it in his biography of Joyce, were:
‘. . .a man with two establishments to keep up, of course he couldn’t. . . .’
‘. . .Farrington said he wouldn’t mind having the far one and began to smile at her. . . .’
‘She continued to cast bold glances at him and changed the position of her legs often; and when she was going out she brushed against his chair and said ‘Pardon’, in a cockney accent. . . .’
Joyce’s witty and dignified defence of his work, in which he pointed out amongst other things that far worse was published every day in newspapers, is contained in a correspondence with his publisher, Grant Richards; in another letter he says of the printer:
‘I do not seek to penetrate the mysteries of his being and existence. . .how he came by his conscience and culture, how he is permitted in your country to combine the duties of author with his own honourable calling, how he came to be the representative of the public mind. . .But I cannot permit a printer to write my book for me. In no other civilized country in Europe, I think, is a printer allowed to open his mouth. . .A printer is simply a workman hired by the day or by the job for a certain sum.’
The passages in Dubliners to which the British printer objected appear ludicrously innocuous today, of course, but the production manager of any publishing company will be able to provide evidence (though almost certainly he will not name names) that many printers are still allowed to open their mouths, still try to write books for authors, and still, in fact, operate exactly the same form of censorship today as they did in 1906.
I had experience of this myself over the printing of my first novel, Travelling People, in 1962. The printer considered that certain passages (mainly love-scenes which would really have been obscene if they had been less explicit) in it would lead to a case for obscene libel being brought by the Director of Public Prosecutions against the book. I knew at the time that the 1959 Obscene Publications Act required that any book thus prosecuted should be considered as a whole,11 and therefore for the printer to object only to parts was either to reveal his ignorance of that Act or to show that despite it he was determined to exercise the power of censorship that he had had before it was passed. The same Act also provides that expert (in this case literary) evidence can be submitted in defence of a work: as Travelling People had recently won a literary prize the printer was told that if necessary the judges of the Gregory Award (who were T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Henry Moore and Bonamy Dobrée) could be subpoenaed to give presumably favourable testimony as to its literary merit. The publisher resolutely supported my case, being prepared to look for another printer if necessary: at this point the printer capitulated and agreed to set the book as it stood. Had it not been for my stubbornness, however, and (almost fortuitous) knowledge of the 1959 Act, then my book would have been quite unnecessarily emasculated. It was my impression that many first novelists have given in to such pressure out of a natural desire to see their work in print and to cause their publishers no trouble.
The following year the same printer refused outright to set my second novel, Albert Angelo, which contains perhaps a dozen uses of swearwords known to everyone and, I am sure, used in a printing house every time a case of type is dropped on someone’s foot. Fortunately, not every printer felt the same about the book, and another was found who was prepared to accept the work: but the first printer was quite willing to bind the book once the second had printed the sheets, since then his name would not appear on it! Had the decision been mine and not my publisher’s, I would not have given him the chance to make money from this piece of gross hypocrisy.
There was not the slightest indication by anyone at any subsequent time that either of these two novels was liable to be prosecuted for obscene libel, and this points up the most serious aspect of censorship by printers: for a printer must always err on what he considers to be the safe side, must always be governed by what has been permitted in the past, and is therefore always against experiment and always against any extension of limits. Printers are rarely, I would suggest, good enough judges of literature to know whether a defence of expert evidence is likely to be successful, so they must class literary work which they believe to offend together with pornography. A printer may, of course, choose what he will or will not print, and no one is attempting to deny him this freedom: but when in so doing he sets up criteria which are clearly beyond his province, then, as I suggested in my case, he is either ignorant or desires to act as a moral censor.
And of all those engaged in the book trade – authors, publishers, booksellers as well – it is the printer who takes the least risk financially: his only real risk is that a publisher will go bankrupt, and this does not happen so often that it is more than a comparatively remote eventuality. The power he exercises through his censorship is therefore without true responsibility. I can understand that there is nothing for a printer in pornography – the high price this can fetch goes mainly to the author and the publisher, and the printing is no more profitable than it is in the case of a straight book – but unless he will accept the authority of a reputable publisher capable of telling the difference between this and literature, then interference by printers will continue to be bitterly resented.
The 1959 Act did make some attempt to exclude the printer from prosecution, and he is not mentioned by name in it: but the wording had to be such as to include anyone in any way involved in the dissemination of matter considered obscene, and this must obviously include the printer.
The wider issue is, of course, the law itself, which seems based on faulty premises: no one, to my knowledge, has ever produced any definitive evidence that anyone has ever been corrupted or depraved by a book. An equitable law would state that if a Director of Public Prosecutions was to maintain that a book was liable to deprave or corrupt, then he should be made to produce a significant number of persons that it had depraved or corrupted. This would be difficult, defenders of the current state of affairs reply to this eminently reasonable argument: of course it would, but if such defenders agree they have never known persons corrupted, then how can they support the present law? For the law is based on the certainty that people are corrupted and depraved by books, and will continue to be. Obviously, the whole question of obscene publication should receive the attention of those recently appointed to consider law reform in Britain.
The particular concern with the censorship exercised by printers, however, is that another Dubliners may be prevented from reaching its audience for a decade, or that it may be caponized out of its true identity, and that only its author and potential publisher will know anything about it.
Holes,
Syllabics and the Succussations of the Intercostal and Abdominal Muscles
Lecture given to students at Belfast University. Written in August 1965, subsequently published in the Northern Review, vol.1, no. 2 (1966)12
I want to start by asking myself two questions: why do I write at all? and more specifically, why do I write novels?
I write because I have something to say that I fail to say satisfactorily in conversation, that I fail to communicate to most people personally, as a person: I recently went to a wedding where the bride’s father thought that, because I was a writer, I could make witty speeches: he seemed disappointed to learn that it was exactly because I could not make witty speeches that I was a writer.
There are other reasons, many other reasons: conceit, stubbornness, a desire to get my own back on people who have hurt me, a desire to repay in some indirect way those who have helped me, a great sort of humanistic religion-substitute desire to create something that may live after me, the sheer technical joy of forcing wretched intractable words into patterns of meaning and form that are uniquely, for the moment at least, mine, a need to make people laugh with me in case they laugh at me, a desire to codify experience, to come to terms with things that have happened to me, and to try to tell the truth, to discover what is the truth, about them.
All these are reasons for writing, for me, and there are others, too, I’m sure, that I don’t know about consciously, all adding up to a compulsion to write, for me, a quite irresistible compulsion.
But why write a novel? Here I make a distinction, maintaining that there is a conscious decision made to write everything except poetry: poetry just comes, writes itself through me. But my conscious decision to write a novel was governed by a number of things.
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