“The rest is marketing”

After listening to an eight-minute interview on NPR with a novelist who has a new book out (“She gamely answered the interviewer’s questions”), Patrick Kurp found that he was left with a “mild aftertaste of disgust,” even though his personal impression of the novelist was favorable. He could imagine himself enjoying a conversation with her. Why the disgust, then? As is his literary policy, Kurp turned to another writer to tease out an answer, to elaborate the thought. In this case the writer was L. E. Sissman, who said in his “Innocent Bystander” column in the Atlantic (a precursor of the book blog) that the “serious writer must take serious vows if he is to concentrate on his chief aim.” And among these is a “vow of silence, except through his work.”

“The rest is marketing,” Kurp concluded. Here he was alluding to the famous scene in the Bavli (Shabbat 31a) in which a derisive skeptic approaches Rabbi Hillel and asks him to explain the entire Torah while standing on one foot. “What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor,” he replied; “that is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary.” Likewise, Sissman was summing up the literary life while standing on one foot. Apart from the years of practice, the hard work, the sacrifice, the solitude, and the subordination of “the self as personality” to the “self as writer,” there is much else that may seem as if it were literature, but it isn’t; it is extraliterary; it is supplemental; it is mere commentary on the literary life.

From an early age I wanted nothing else than to be a writer. I didn’t know how to go about it, aside from reading my eyes out and writing so much I raised a thick horny callus on my middle finger, but from the beginning I knew exactly how not to go about it. I can remember the ads for Bennett Cerf’s Famous Writers School, which promised to teach me “to write successfully at home.” They made me vaguely suspicious, although I couldn’t say why. Believing that he was encouraging my ambitions, my grandfather, alav hashalom, bought me a subscription to the Writer magazine. I hated it, couldn’t finish the first issue, begged Grandpa not to renew the subscription. Advice for getting published, eight ways to make your manuscript stand out, how to find an agent, establishing an author platform, nine tips for marketing your first book—these hold out as much appeal for me as the book How to Seduce a Woman and Get Her Sexually Addicted to You in 5 Steps. The strategizing may even work, but what does the lucky winner end up with? A man who hopes to marry a woman is not thinking about seducing her.

In The Elephants Teach, I pointed out that the first practical how-to guides to writing were primarily by women. (A couple of them, Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer and Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write, both dating from the ’thirties, are still in print.) The relentlessly practical tone of these books identify them for what they are—self-help books. Not all of them are like Esther L. Schwartz’s So You Want to Write! (1936), which treats literature as a commodity that might contribute hard cash to the household income. But they are unanimous in rejecting what Schwartz calls “quality” and “artiness”; they laugh off the view that writing is, as Brande taunts it, a “holy mystery”; they urge young would-be writers to avoid what Margaret Widdemer in Do You Want to Write? (1937) calls “the highbrows.” Their attitude is easy to understand. Since women’s writing was not taken very seriously by male critics in the ’thirties, those critics’ claims for highbrow literature—the demands for quality and artiness, the hush surrounding literature’s holy mystery—must have seemed like rules for excluding women. Practical advice was women writers’ revenge on the men’s club.

Times have changed. In the 21st century, Sissman’s “serious writer” is as likely to be a woman as a man. Take one of my favorites. Marly Youmans is, as John Wilson of Books and Culture describes her, an “invisible novelist.” Although four of her novels were published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, she had to settle for Mercer University Press—not even a major university press—to publish her remarkable Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, a deeply Christian novel in an age that has been said to have abandoned the novel of belief. Her most recent book is a blank-verse epic. A writer who has more resolutely stood her ground against the tide of literary fashion would be difficult to name. And yet Youmans insists that it is “impossible” to “say ‘no’ to marketing.” To do so, she says, is to yearn for a “fairy tale world where no such work is needed.” As Ellen Olenska says to Newland Archer, “Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?”

I think Youmans may have misunderstood Kurp. I don’t think the literary life—the life of serious writing—is a “fairy tale” any more than I think (or than she thinks, I’d wager) that some writing, the writing also known as literature, has been called “serious” only for the sake of keeping women out. There is literature and there is marketing. A writer may or may not have to market her own book, but if she does so, she is no longer writing; she is marketing. For a serious writer, there is something vaguely distasteful about the need to market one’s books. Perhaps the source lies in class feeling, an ill-defined condescension to the life of commerce. Or perhaps the source lies in an impatience to get back to writing, the querulous feeling that one is wasting unrecoverable time in the pursuit of something other than literature. Whatever its source, the distaste is real and not to be denied. And when those of us who are serious about writing hear someone publicly talking about her books—hawking her wares instead of letting her prose do all the talking—we realize that we are not hearing about literature at all, but about the acceptable substitutes which are offered to a world not much interested in literature. We experience the same involuntary unease. It is impossible to live wholly for literature, but it is disgusting that we cannot.