(Ed note: This is the fourth in a series of posts by Jeffrey Meyers. You can find Part I of A Writer in Economic Crisis and links to Meyers' previous posts here.
According to
Evelyn Waugh, standards of copy-editing and proof reading dropped sharply in
the 1950s when defrocked clergymen were no longer hired by publishers. He would be even more critical of today’s
standards. Copy-editing is now farmed
out to loosely supervised contract workers who often do an inferior job. I never read a current book without finding
many errors. Recently, high-handed
editors have sabotaged rather than supported my biographies. When I asked the editor what she planned to
do to publicize my life of Modigliani, she replied with alarming frankness,
“Nothing.” Publishers will no longer
promote their own books unless they have a substantial advance sale, and
national book tours are rapidly disappearing.
Another editor delayed my life of Samuel Johnson, despite my frantic
warnings, until a rival biography of Johnson came out three months before mine
and cut my sales in half.
Many publishers
and magazines have vanished, shrinking potential outlets for authors. Barnes & Noble Classics, for which I
wrote three long, well paid introductions, and journals like the Bloomsbury
Review, Wilson Quarterly, Common Review, Partisan Review
(I made it into the last issue) and the conservative The World and I
(which nevertheless published my articles opposing the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan), have taken the dirt nap.
Some excellent journals, to which I like to contribute, have reduced
their fees or completely eliminated them.
But I still write the occasional scholarly article or review expensive
bibliographies without pay. Spontaneous
commissions have also declined. The once lucrative book clubs, which used to
pay about $25,000 now pay only a few hundred dollars.
Book review
sections in newspapers have been severely maimed. Many (like those in the San Francisco
Chronicle) have shrunk; others (like those in my local free paper, the East
Bay Express) have been eliminated.
So there are fewer opportunities to review books or get my books
reviewed. Other newspapers that I once
reviewed for regularly—the Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer
and Portland Oregonian—now reprint reviews from other papers instead of
using their own reviewers. Steve
Wasserman, an editor who printed longer and more serious reviews, was fired
from the Los Angeles Times. To
attract new readers in times of dwindling circulation, book reviews (even the
highbrow New York Review of Books) have dropped many experts and
replaced them with younger novelists.
They can write book reports and express their opinions—like “Four legs
good, two legs bad” in Animal Farm–but rarely have anything significant
to say about the subject. This dumbing
down means that reviews pay less attention to serious books because the
audience for them has greatly diminished.
People who spend their childhood playing video games, their working life
in front of a computer and their evenings watching television, are not likely
to buy or read books. Publishers who
used to send me many free books to consider for review, including art books
from Yale and Chicago, have (except for Viking-Penguin) stopped sending
them.
Two Berkeley
bookstores, which used to have readings almost every night, have
disappeared. Cody’s on Telegraph Avenue
closed after fifty-two years and Black Oak moved from a desirable to a distant
location and canceled their readings.
I’ve read at these stores myself, and heard writers like Norman Mailer
and Allen Ginsberg, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie there. Closing these venues has been a great
cultural loss. Even Barnes & Noble,
which drove so many smaller bookstores out of business, has closed their huge
stores in downtown Berkeley (a town with 36,000 university students) and in
Oakland’s Jack London Square. Kepler’s
in Menlo Park (near Stanford) nearly went under, but was saved at the last
minute by a Silicon Valley millionaire.
With fewer stores and a shorter shelf life, books have no chance to
build up a momentum. Bookstores that
still exist devote part of their space, formerly reserved for books, to
comics—now called graphic novels.
Invitations to give lectures and appear in television documentaries have
also diminished. The best literary
festival, Harbourfront in Toronto, stopped inviting biographers, although we
talked about how we wrote our books instead of (like the novelists) merely
reading from them.
Fortunately, the
news is not all apocalyptic. I write
regularly for several journals (the Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan
Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, Raritan, Salmagundi,
New Criterion, Commonweal, London Magazine and Apollo),
and some of them are willing to have me appear in almost every issue. After a long hiatus, I’ve precariously
reorbited into the American Scholar, Georgia Review, Globe and
Mail, Mainstream, National Review, Sewanee and Spectator. I have five reviews commissioned, and books out
this year on Iris Murdoch with Palgrave-Macmillan and on Thomas Mann with
Northwestern.
There’s some
action nearly every day. I have a review
commissioned, get a book to review, send out an article, have one accepted,
correct proofs, get a published work or receive a check in the mail. Meager royalties come in from books published
as long ago as the 1970s; my life of Hemingway, in print since 1985, still
earns income; and there’s a trickle of cash from electronic rights. I’m involved, with many thousands of writers,
in a class-action suit against Google, which copied books and articles without
permission or payment, and will eventually have to pay for this.
I published my
first article in 1965 and my first book in 1973. After a lifetime of study and writing, I feel
I’ve now hit my stride. Writing every
day has become a way of life and I’d much rather write than not write. I have complete freedom to do extremely
interesting work, by myself and for myself, which has allowed me to interview
distinguished people like Henry Moore and Isaiah Berlin, Rebecca West and
Wilfred Thesiger, Fred Zinnemann and Billy Wilder. But I need to work very hard and write
fluently on many subjects—averaging more than a book and fifteen articles every
year—to keep afloat, waving, not drowning.
Though my life as a writer is still a struggle, I’ve been inspired by
Moses’ exhortation to Israel in Deuteronomy 31:6, which my hero Edmund Wilson
had cut in Hebrew letters on his tombstone: “Khazak! Be strong and of good courage.”
Jeffrey Meyers, a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature, has recently published Samuel Johnson: The
Struggle (2008), The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn
Monroe (2009), George Orwell: Life and Art (2010)—his fifth work on
Orwell—and John Huston: Courage and Art (2011). Thirty of his books have been
translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six
continents. In 2012 he gave the Seymour
lectures on biography, sponsored by the National Library of Australia, in
Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney.