#2:  PUBLISHERS LEAVING NEW YORK

[Part Two]

What a piece of work is mainstream book publishing in New York! Yesterday’s column looked at how remote and exclusive it’s become, how isolated from the rest of the country. The National Book Awards fiasco was cited as a humorous example, but two other influences (see below) demonstrate how serious the stakes have become.

Philip Roth Makes a Demand

I admit another side of me is saying about the National Book Awards debacle, So they had a little party (all right, a big party) — you don’t have to make a federal case out of it. Life in book publishing is not easy, and these people work hard to survive, so give ‘em a break. It was just one night.

Right. It’s what that one night represents that we should look at – indeed what Philip Roth has been railing against with his Nathan Zuckerman novels for years. That same Page Six mentality that turns the arts into a gossip machine has moved the focus of publishing away from books that are literature and put the spotlight on the authors who create literature. Roth doesn’t mean we’re honoring authors more than books – quite the contrary. He means we’re exploiting famous authors by writing biographies that deliciously and salaciously accent their hidden pasts, their secret inspirations, their dark side. It’s more lucrative to do that, he says, than to publish serious literary works.

In Roth’s latest novel, “Exit Ghost,” he especially indicts “cultural journalism” as presented and practiced by the New York Times.

“Cultural journalism is tabloid gossip disguised as an interest in ‘the arts,’ ” a character protests in a letter to the Times, “and everything that it touches is contracted into what it is not. Who is the celebrity, what is the price, what is the scandal? What transgression has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary aesthetics but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher, or pet?”

If you don’t believe mainstream publishers would rather dish the author than sell the book, Zuckerman steps up to supply two examples. First there was “dubious scholarly speculation” about Nathaniel Hawthorne having an incestuous relationship with his sister. It’s nothing but a rumor, mind you, but it persists. And what if it were fact – would it inform or hinder our appreciation and understanding of Hawthorne’s books? Well, what would that matter if your intention is never to read Hawthorne but to sell the heck out of a biography that scandalizes. Why, you might even get a blurb from Anna Wintour. That great Hawthorne scholar.

Then, too, look at Ernest Hemingway, says Roth’s letter-writer. Hemingway’s memory was maligned when a modern-day “cultural journalist” interviewed people in Michigan and their descendants ”who are said to have been models for the characters” in Hemingway’s early stories. When they told the journalist they felt “badly served by Ernest Hemingway,” their feelings were “taken more seriously than the fiction because they’re easier for your cultural journalist to talk about than the fiction.”

The NBA organizers bought into that same gossip-mill approach. Did the world hear about the literary wonders of the NBA winners or about the names of the quasi-famous who attended? The organizers could not see the problem because they’re trapped inside the mainstream.

(And of course Philip Roth loves to have his fun with us, having spent his career constructing his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman and then taunting “cultural journalists” and publishers for asking, gosh, is Zuckerman really Philip Roth disguised? Just by pondering the question, we reveal ourselves to be more interested in gossipy facts about the author than in the fiction he creates. Too bad the colossal ego in all Roth books has its own obvious needs, but we won’t go into that now.)

What to do about this? Here are a few suggestions.

Rebuild from the Bottom Up

When the Nobel Prize judge Horace Engdahl said that American writers and publishers were too insular, a lot of literary folk accused Engdahl and the Nobel Committee of being anti-American, thus launching an embarrassing pissing match that got us nowhere.

One unassailable lesson got lost in the shuffle: American writers and the mainstream publishing community “don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. When publishers refuse to enter the world’s literary conversation, their “ignorance is restraining.”

Whaaaa? (as the Latin lover in Astaire/Rogers movies and “The Drowsy Chaperone” says so noisily and comically when he pretends to be taken by surprise.) Americans don’t publish many works in translation?

Not by a long shot. The steady decrease of translated books coming out of mainstream publishing is “a national crisis,” the literature director of the National Endowment of the Arts told the New York Times. Salman Rushdie looked at the number in 2004 (874 translated books out of 185,000 total) and called it “shocking.”

Moreover, it’s been proven that the only way writers of other countries can become known in the world is to be translated into English. So when mainstream publishers in New York avoid publishing works in translation, “we are the clogged artery,” says the chair of PEN’s translation committee – “[we] prevent authors from reaching readers anywhere outside their own country.”

It’s true that translated books used to be harder to sell. But today, thanks to the Internet, English-reading book buyers who love translated works are easier to identify and target. One feels that mainstream publishers would like to stick their toe in international waters, but according to the New York Times, they simply have “no staff editors who read foreign languages,” so they have “hesitated to rely on the advice of outsiders.”

Well, surely that can be rectified.

Wouldn’t any publisher consider it a plus if a prospective assistant editor came to the job interview with a reading fluency in at least one foreign language? During college the candidate could have studied the classics in that language, traveled in that country and read all the promising modern authors. If hired, the new editorial assistant could comb through the foreign country’s publishing lists, acquire advance copies, investigate the U.S. market for prospective works in translation and write up Readers Reports that would be reviewed by a senior editor. This would be good training for the editorial assistant and it would sure breathe new life into an industry struggling to match the literary demands of the world.

Hire enough of these editors, nurture sales reps and marketing executives with similar expertise, and maybe the house will not only look worldwide for authors to translate but learn how to market them to Americans who are hungry for foreign writers. If you think these readers are too small in number to make publishing works in translation profitable, remember the audience for books by Middle East authors was zilch before 9/11 and has grown fantastically since. If that’s too tidy an example, I remember a lone paperback editor who started a reading craze in the 1970s by publishing Latin American authors aside from Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

And wouldn’t it be great if mainstream houses required prospective editorial and marketing assistants to have worked in bookstores outside (far outside) New York, maybe during summers and holidays while in college, and to have carved out an area of literary interest for which they can demonstrate real expertise?

Bringing in new influences from the ground up is not only a way to open the horizons of mainstream publishers. It’s a way to turn our attention back to the work we all want to do, and that is to attend the publication of books we believe in, from the most literary to the most commercial. It’s a way to fight captivity by corporate pressures and faraway owners. It’s a way to establish our own literary standards and strive to live up to them no matter where the house is located or who/what controls it.

Once again if I’m in the dark and this is already happening, I’d love to hear about it. Maybe Manhattan will freeze over before mainstream book publishers ever set foot off the island. But breaking out of literary prison can take many forms, some barely visible right now, and can only spread like the “good viruses” of our new Internet Age. Thoughts welcomed (you can send anonymously, too) at pat@holtuncensored.com.

#2: PUBLISHERS LEAVING NEW YORK

[Part One]

Right, they’ll never do it, but shouldn’t mainstream publishing houses want to explore a world beyond the Hudson River? Maybe talking about it will shed light on such fiascoes as the recent National Book Awards (see below) and the defensive reaction to a Nobel Prize judge’s accusations that the U.S. publishing community has become “too isolated, too insular.” (Honeys, it is.)

I’ve never understood why American publishers duplicated the British model of placing mainstream houses in one location so they would dictate to the tastes of the rest of the nation.

Why didn’t we load our printers and binders into the wagons as we went hacking and slashing across the Plains to the West? We certainly brought our newspaper presses. But for some reason – perhaps it was the independent wealth of publishing founders — we kept book publishing on the East Coast and eventually in New York City itself. We decided to depend on a “cottage industry” ideal in which literary ideas would foment within the social exchange of like-minded people.

By now, however, working in close proximity has made New York book publishers appear inbred and clannish. If you can’t get them on the phone, it’s because they’re calling/emailing/texting each other, lunching at publishing “in” spots, complaining about hotel rates at Frankfurt or BookExpo and working the room at author receptions as if a world outside publishing doesn’t exist.

And does it? Not long ago, Farrar Straus & Giroux was thought to be a serious rebel in publishing simply for having an address 30 blocks south of what was then called Publishers Row. St. Martin’s was sort of a maverick for operating out of the Flatiron Building seven blocks north of FSG. Publishers Weekly didn’t hire a correspondent west of the Hudson until the mid-‘70s. Around that time, one Los Angeles reviewer remembers this conversation with a book publisher after the National Book Awards:

Publisher: “Well, the West had some great victories tonight.”

L.A. Reviewer: “What do you mean? None of the winning authors live west of the Rockies.”

Publisher: “I meant the West Side of Manhattan.”

Today publishers’ offices are physically more spread out in New York, but by any standard, the industry is so remote and rumor-driven that it can’t help but appear exclusive and arrogant to the rest of the country.

Publishers know that, yes? Surely people in publishing are a bit embarrassed about shutting themselves off in a gated community of bigness where they appear so inaccessible, so removed, so jaded.

Or, is it rather that they are trapped. When my San Francisco Chronicle colleague Bill Chleboun (pronounced Clay-bone) and I used to visit mainstream houses in New York to talk about advertising, the publishing people we met always knew we had a tight schedule of about 60 meetings in five days. This meant we were racing through the gossip mill of NY publishing a lot faster than they could telephone each other, so around the second day of our trip, our hosts were asking us, “All right, so what have you heard?”

(I should mention that Bill and I rarely felt the arrogance or smugness coming from individuals [as opposed to the industry] that authors outside New York so often describe when dealing with the mainstream. Just about everybody we knew in New York publishing remained open and human, while the system they worked for seemed increasingly to ooze rudeness. The pressures of their jobs demanded insane results, whether in dollars or awards or publicity, for the “big” books, always to the exclusion of the “small” books. Under those pressures a thousand different agendas emerged, making the business of books arbitrary and competitive, very much like Hollywood. With this came a tone of stiff-arming condescension that kept New York publishing more distant and more arrogant than ever.)

The National Book Awards Fiasco

So let’s look at what happened with the National Book Awards recently and see how working in such a tight-knit community can limit one’s perspective.

First a few questions:

1) When it was agreed that the tired old NBA dinner needed “reinvigorating” to “make it fun again,” did the organizers hire a Broadway theater with famous actors and get PBS to cover the proceedings – or at least webcast it themselves — so a DVD of the best moments could be sent to booksellers/librarians all over the country who could run a loop for customers/patrons at the check-out counter and to book groups that could show it at the next meeting and to YouTube so that people outside New York could personally experience the timely and literary importance of the NBAs and buy lotsa copies of the winners’ titles?

No.

2) Or did the National Book Award organizers decide to cancel the ceremony because of the rotten economy and instead design a smashing four-color poster of finalists and winners to send out to bookstores/libraries/schools everywhere and with the money left over interview finalists and winners for a DVD to send around (as above) and maybe even dispatch the authors themselves on a strategic tour of, say, five cities where they would promote reading and literary adventure along with their own books?

No.

Instead the organizers decided to move the NBA from a modest hotel and hold it at a posh black-tie dinner in a “regally decorated,” very expensive restaurant called Cipriani’s Wall Street with “the gold columns and the arches and the elaborate floral arrangements hanging from the walls.”

This sent a message to underfinanced authors and hanging-by-a-thread booksellers (not to mention frugal readers) that dining on baked tagliolini and roast filet of beef is what you do in New York when the rest of the world is counting pennies.

Oh, but pardon, they weren’t through yet. So as not to exclude anybody in the New York publishing scene, the organizers continued the NBA ceremony at a big after-party in a hotsy totsy in-spot called Socialista. This way “the very young” assistant editors and marketing people who weren’t invited to the dinner could have their own wasteful and wasted evening.

Nor was that the end of it. To turn a dreary literary occasion into what the NBA board described as “a bigger experience,” the organizers decided to glam things up with New York celebrities from the magazine world - you know, Anna Wintour of Vogue and Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone and zzzzzz. Throw in Candace Bushnell of “Sex and the City” and you couldn’t get a more provincial NY would-be celebrity setting that sat back on its self-congratulatory plush seats.

Granted, some publishers at the dinner looked around at the “lush opulence” and saw it as “totally inappropriate,” as Steve Ross of Collins told the NY Observer. “But, you know,” he added, “we get so few opportunities to have anything to celebrate.” Aw. Well, look at it this way, Steve: The amount of money tossed down the drain on food, booze, cash prizes, tuxedoes, cab fares and corporate tables for this one night could have kept several independent bookstores out of bankruptcy court for months.

Of course looking at it from inside the New York scene, who could blame the organizers? The new NBA’s were what is called a Page Six event, meaning the gossipy insider page of the New York Post might have mentioned the “boldfaced names” for two seconds. It was dished more than covered by the New York Observer’s book columnist Leon Neyfakh, who also lost the focus. Quoting “one of the fashionable youngsters” at Socialista as saying, “Why does this party suck?” (too crowded), Neyfakh wrote: “Ms Joffe seemed to be wrapped in a sleeping bag made from several snow leopard carcasses.” So much for making the NBAs about books.

Happily, other media like National Public Radio brought word of the NBAs to a larger audience, but that seemed to be peripheral, like a bonus. After all, the idea was to make the New York book publishing scene nearly aristocratic in its glitzy and self-adoring excesses, to tell everybody watching that you’re an outsider until you’re an insider, to build “it” and hope they will still come.

Well, they don’t any more. That was the air of desperation one could feel 3000 miles away. For one thing, there is a parallel world on the Internet where a revolution in publishing is shifting power from the bottom up (more columns to follow about this). Then there is the flat sale of books that began long before the economy tanked and requires solutions from outside traditional industry sources, not from digging further into rusty old celebrity baloney.

In any case, publishers fiddling while the book trade burns to the ground is not the image I want to take from this. Rather it’s what we can learn from the NBA fiasco that’s been staring us in the face for years.

The second part of this (windy even to me) post will be up tomorrow.