Lust & money
McCarthy, Abigail
Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy LUST & MONEY THE NEWEST PORNOGRAPHY WRITING has been a fruitful occupation for many women, and women who write abound in Washington. Included are some...
...Sex, he said, no longer sells books...
...Now, it would seem, this condition is so widespread as to have affected the readership of fiction...
...Surely this is a reflection of the growing influence of greed as a motivating force in our society...
...Think of some of the bestsellers of recent years...
...Money as money has no value except in its use," says the old Catholic Dictionary...
...During his gloomy discourse the young publisher dropped, however, some incidental nuggets of fascinating, if unrelated, information...
...Included are some congressional wives who have had really significant success in the field...
...One of them was a minor bombshell...
...Writers, old or young, who work on books which do not conform to current best seller formulas, have less and less chance of publication...
...The effect of that world on American sensibilities and the formation of American attitudes can hardly be underestimated...
...A Woman of Property, A Woman of Substance, Merger, Noble House, the block-busting novel by Clavell...
...These two and several others have formed a group who regularly meet over a brown bag lunch and compare notes...
...The selling of books is now in the hands of giant chains - again run by people interested not in stocking bookstores for browsing, but for quick turnover...
...He cited the most recent James Bond book as an example...
...As the righteous set about combing school libraries for books to ban, they might well give some thought to books about money...
...There are few publishing houses today willing to nurture young writers and bring them along because so many publishing houses have been gobbled up by conglomerates whose executives are interested only in the "bottom line...
...The future of fiction is especially bleak...
...The love of money is far worse than the love of the flesh...
...In our foundering economy the question answers itself...
...Among them are June Bingham, wife of the New York representative, who was the author of biographies of U Thant, former head of the United Nations, and of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and Marilyn Scharp, wife of the Indiana representative, who wrote Sunflower and other thrillers...
...And I should think readers would be relieved at not having to plough through some of the labored and fevered scenes which have resulted...
...No nation can consider its affairs sound when its money is not put to use - to renew its industry, to produce goods for its people...
...The overriding subject is money - how to get it, how to manipulate its institutions, how to make it grow, how to use it as an evergrowing source of power...
...But, is another obsession taking its place...
...The news is not especially good...
...What is happening there is, of course, of concern to all of us, whether we are writers or not...
...He says "sex was there" - but the publishers were counting upon gimmickry and gadgetry to sell this new Bond...
...Whatever one may think of David Stockman, his description of lobbyists and advocates for special interest groups converging on the capitol in an exhibition of unbridled greed, like pigs to a trough, touched a nerve in all of us...
...Loyalty and longevity on the staff of a particular house were casualties of the new arrangements...
...There would, he thought, still be books specializing in sex as the basis of their appeal but, in general, the public seemed to be sated with it...
...If books reflect the age, it is good to know that the obsession with sex that has marked our time is on the wane...
...The literary editors who once served writers as faithful mentors, book after book, are no longer identified with this publishing house or that...
...Writers would have to depend on something more to sell their books...
...I was invited to join them recently when a New York publisher came down to talk with them about what is happening in the publishing world...
...Dante, in the Inferno, vividly and picturesquely reminds us of the gradation of sins in the sight of God...
...The obsession with money may well run the same course, but what will happen to our society in the meantime...
...This should be welcome news...
...It seems so...
...When we seek money solely to accumulate it, when money is used merely to breed more money, then the ancient sin of usury is rampant in the land...
...ABIGAIL MCCARTHY...
...Editors now move from house to house in search of better jobs...
...Social observers have been pointing out that our permissive society has brought about a phenomenon variously described as "the cool beyond sex" and "the chastity of boredom...
...Paola and Fran-cesca, whose sin was sexual, who preferred a human love to love of God and his law, float like autumn leaves on the wind on the outer rim of hell, but the grisly depths are reserved for those who preferred material goods to the All-Good...
...It should be especially good news to those priest novelists who have, of late, set their celibate imaginations to what must be the unwelcome task of creating sex scenes so that their novels will truly reflect life...
Vol. 109 • March 1982 • No. 6
