Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial/R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The Writer, The Publisher, The Gull • • Now it strikes me as an extremely melancholy calamity that when the novel died some years ago the American novelist did...
...Norman Mailer would have been spared all the mortification he feels about having written but one good novel, and we would have been spared Truman Capote, a man who has yet to match even Mailer's scrawny accomplishment...
...When the unpleasant and unenlightening process is over, the average college graduate views the world from about the same perspective as the hapless hoofer hung wrong side up awaiting certification to be stamped on his rump...
...Nonetheless they become publishing events of great moment, and for weeks they sell famously and their authors gab incontinently on tv talk shows...
...When they are discussed it is only by readers who have seen the movie...
...They are all either gimmicky tales like Ragtime and that really repulsive story of the sea gull, or they are ventures into romantic turpitude...
...America has become a junkyard of fourth-rate fiction that rarely rises to the distinction of Maurice Hindus' forget-table Red Bread or Felix Salten's Bambi...
...It lacks art...
...What is beautifu is a complicated question but I do no...
...Hence, the popularity of general interest books like those of Teddy White and all the fawning potboilers about Daniel Ellsberg, Patty Hearst, etc...
...Really talented writers fret over each sentence, they might go for years without ever sending in a manuscript, and then its chances of weaseling its way into the best seller list are about equal to Richard Nixon's chances of becoming a Supreme Court justice...
...I am certain that few of them are actually read in their entirety...
...Laurent has over the ladies of high fashion...
...To the contrary, readers are generally the most abject slaves of fashion known to man, and those who design literary fashion actually seem to have a more profound power over their sequacious clients than Yves St...
...There is hardly a novelist in America worth reading, and none is capable of sustained quality...
...The gentle and pliable nature of the American reader has been noted forever and anon, but lately he appears even more gullible than in the past, a development about as astonishing as the discovery of dirt under Andy Warhol's fingernails...
...That it is trash is a fact of public record and that it will remain trash is certain for so long as it fixes itself to our stunted and demented Zeitgeist...
...Further, the great publishing houses could continue to disgorge their trashy stuff without any spasms of conscience—"The novel is dead and so are the novelists, alas, so up with our brassily acclaimed nonce editions," books of popular luridity, , books of bogus revelation about the system and the self, books of socio-political tosh, and that book about an admirable sea gull who was so steeped in the wisdom of Bertrand Russell that he broke away and became truly his own bird...
...With increasing frequency American readers are the shabby products of our pervasive university system—a system full of ghastly places through which students are herded like so many bewildered bovines run through the stockyards of a slaughterhouse...
...The Writer, The Publisher, The Gull • • Now it strikes me as an extremely melancholy calamity that when the novel died some years ago the American novelist did not die with it...
...It would have saved us so much time, so much money, and so many forests...
...So the publishers turn out poorly edited books written for the enthusiasms of the moment...
...No, I cannot believe that many of the popular books purchased in America are ever read, novels least of all...
...It often takes years to eradicate the damage that four years of college can have on a young mind...
...But it not art and until it returns to a pursuit o art it would be best for it and for its prac titioners if they were to be marinated it formaldehyde...
...Publishers realize that publishing junk is much easier and more lucrative than publishing quality...
...Television is the dominant pastime even for the readers and if a book is to sell it has to be written in the form of tv drama or tv news...
...It has to be simple, pretentious, and nerve-racking...
...Harold Robbins' baloney grinder is more productive and eager to please...
...however, I cannot envision such limits for general readers...
...There are no apparent Faulkners or Conrads loose in the Republic—notwithstanding the thousands of creative writing greenhouses now in existence—and it is costly and difficult to ferret out what talented writers there might be...
...4 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 197...
...Endless recastings of the adventures of Raskolnikov, Madame Bovary, or Huckleberry Finn have got to eventually weary even the Book-of-the-Month Club clientele...
...I imagine there are limits beyond which even the ladies of high fashion cannot be hoodwinked...
...And they make them idiotic, because they realize that even amongst their gullible readers there is a restiveness with the written word...
...Frankly, I doubt that very many of the books published are ever read...
...These innocents are more dangerous to literature and to publishing in America than a million Watch and Word Societies or two million George Wallaces...
...Some graduatesare so embittered by the experience that they become lifelong opponents of the written word, but, though they are the avowed enemies of writers and readers alike, their influence is practically benign compared to the influence of those graduates whose minds have been bedaubed with intellectual pretense and a vague yearning for occasional whiffs of "culture...
...They are carried by saucy-minded sales girls as they exhibit themselves on the subway, hoping to trap culturally inclined stock boys, or they are purchased by readers for whom the very financial transaction is a kind of cultural fix...
...Hardly a one of these books ever informs readers of anything that has not already been reported in the press...
...It is hard to say who is more responsible for the rubbish that is extruded from the publishing houses, the philistines who publish it or the philistines who read it...
...Truth to tell, I have always considered people who read contemporary fiction for purposes other than ridicule to be intellectually suspect...
...It has to soar ostentatiously on the winds of Zeitgeist...
...They are truly an epiphenomenon of the electronic press...
...People, not clinical statistics, make novels informative, amusing, en• gaging, and beautiful...
...it is too limited...
...I am too familiar with the commercial achievements of poseurs like Philip Roth...
...Anyone, even Richard Speck, must tire of reading about the bold, candid, teleological orgasms of Smith-educated lunatics or of belles lettres' he-man types...
...It is sophisticated gossip...
...Unfortunately, readers, and for that matter most members of the culturati, are rarely so demanding or so independent as, say, automobile consumers...
...Generally I would lay the blame on the consumers, for as with so many other free-market transactions, it is the consumer's vote that elects what is produced...
...I know that I certainly will not spend much time on these novels...
...Today the charlatans are doing a brisk business...
...think that there is any question thal beauty has a great deal to do with art And here we come to just what contempo rary creative writing lacks most...
...Which suggests another desideratum: novels can impart sense of the beautiful...
...How long are readers going to remain intrigued by woebegone figures peering into their belly buttons, figures who throughout history have always been put down as imbecilic, warped, or arrantly criminal...
...The authors should know something about people, not just the way they ejaculate or the way they butcher one another or the way they go bonkers, but the way they have lived for centuries and the way they live today...
...They make them long beyond belief, because it is more profitable...
...Literature is always safer when apes are burning books than when monkeys are buying them, for when monkeys buy them, charlatans are free to fill them with the rankest nonsense...
...What the novel needs is real people sweating it out in credible or interesting conditions...
...It is abstruse journal ism...
...The Western literary tradition is such an enormous vault of treasures—treasures which can be read and reread with pleasure and instruction—that I see no reason for an intelligent reader to loiter amongst the trash of contemporary fiction...
...The same can be said for our works of fiction...
Vol. 9 • December 1975 • No. 3
