The 2 Non-Artistic Professions Running
the Artistic World of Contemporary Fiction

MY ANNUAL RANT

I promised last week that I’d explain this week why almost all of what’s widely publicized as contemporary fiction these days falls into the lowest-quality categories that exist: Telling really badly, Telling mediocrely-to-competently, and Showing really badly.

I’ll tell you straight off it’s a goddamn artistic crime, is what it is, but this is what we have and what we have had in the U.S. gradually more and more since the 1980s.

Why?

Well, it was actually all clarified rather succinctly, if accidentally, last week in an article I’m not going to link to. The reason I’m not going to link to it is because almost everything in that article is incorrect. But the reason it’s incorrect is that it was written about the publishing industry by someone who doesn’t understand the artistic product sold by the publishing industry—fiction—not even enough to be able to tell that if you compare a Pulitzer Prize-winner of 2009 to a piece of throwaway pulp fiction of 1945 and find that the pulp fiction is vastly better written—more vividly presented, more powerfully plotted, more closely characterized, more detailed, more telling, simply all-around more engaging to the average reader—then something is truly, seriously, devastatingly wrong with your contemporary artistic product.

And through being so wildly mistaken about the art of fiction, that article clarified for me what’s happened to the American publishing industry in the past thirty years, how we got to a place where the fiction that’s allotted the most publisher support is chosen for its anxious reading public by the most non-artistic people involved in its production.

That’s right—what is brought to the reading public’s attention from all directions and therefore bought by the reading public in all directions is not the very best contemporary fiction being published today, but the fiction most attractive to non-artistic people.

People who don’t know fiction. Who don’t know why we read it, what we get out of it, or how great writers of the past became the great writers we all agree are great today. People who look at a novel that a consumer desperately wants to fall in love with (a novel the creator desperately wants the consumer to fall in love with) and ask themselves, “How many zeros?”

And just who are the most non-artistic professional people in publishing today? Well, of course, that would be:

1. business managers, and
2. marketers

Because those people have brains, they have strengths, and they have specialties. . .diametrically-opposed to the arts. They think incredibly logically. They value quantity over quality. They emphasize, above all else, their enormous facility with money.

And they do have facility managing money! At least I’m willing to believe they do. They manage multi-multi-million-dollar corporations, oversee the buying and selling of more than 50 million dollars’ worth of product every year, shuffle through the chute literally thousands of individually-designed products from the creators—many of them endearingly hapless in their desperation to supply these products for little or no monetary reward of their own—through many internal layers of money-changing hands, to the consumers who, again, fall over themselves to get their hard-earned bucks into those money-changing hands.

I sure couldn’t do that stuff. My brain doesn’t work that way. I don’t have their strengths. My strengths lie in the creation of the artistic product.

Of course, like many overly-eager applicants of the glories of capitalism, the business managers and marketers are finding that, after a certain amount of time, this numbers-based business model to which they’ve transferred the fiction publishing industry is FAILING DRASTICALLY—partly due to economic conditions way beyond their control and partly due to the fact that if you don’t understand your product you have absolutely no grounds on which to base predictions of its success or failure.

Seriously, folks. “What is it?” “I don’t know. But maybe people will buy it from us.”

This is what Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (and one of the last standing pillars dedicated to art in the industry), calls, “throwing it at the wall to see what sticks.” (P&W interview)

Business managers. And marketers. Non-artistic people.

But how did this happen? It hasn’t always been this way, has it? How did non-artistic people come to run the world of a thriving contemporary art?

There was a time when publishers’ editors—the people who both acquired fiction and polished it artistically for publication—were more artists than business- or salespeople. William Abrahams. Robert Gottlieb. Pat Covici. Malcolm Cowley. They held their jobs based on their ability to make an artistic product the very best artistic product it could possibly be. (Not, as Gottlieb proved, because they were cutthroat competitors or even, as Covici proved, because they were just that wildly successful at managing a business.)

But that is simply no longer true—even more than ever since Black Wednesday of December, 2008.

And how that happened is what the author of this article, who likes to describe himself as having been in the publishing industry for 25 years (yes, since the 1980s), calls turning publishing into a “business” rather than a “rich man’s hobby.”

In 1979 an IRS loophole was closed to prevent a tools manufacturer from working the system to avoid paying annual tax on warehoused product, effectively making it a financial catastrophe for publishing houses to warehouse backlists. And in the mid-1980s economic conditions conspired to create a climate in which many small-but-reputable American publishing houses were bought up by large (sometimes overseas) corporations as financial investments. And some people who were the long-time creative pillars of the publishing industry, who had overseen decades of such fiction as The Thin Man, The Big Sleep, Wise Blood, The Lord of the Rings, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tortilla Flat, Ship of Fools, Portnoy’s Complaint, all the great novels of the twentieth century, et cetera, et cetera. . .moved around. Some, honestly, just retired.

But this author is saying that, before the 1980s, publishing was simply not a business. It was only—so sad!—a rich people’s hobby.

Think about that for a minute. Fiction publishing was not a business when it was run for the purpose of creating an artistic product. Not only that! But here’s the unspoken insinuation: a rich people’s hobby is no kind of intelligent model for an artistic industry.

Because, without an economic system in which the arts were supported by rich hobbyists who just felt like supporting them, we would have no Leonard Da Vinci or Michelangelo, no Raphael or Titian or Botticelli, no Beethoven or Mozart or Bach, no ballet or opera or symphony or theater, no Chaucer or Shakespeare or Ben Jonson or John Donne. . .in fact, no great history of English literature.

But we would have McDonald’s!

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