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PARTISAN REVIEW
strategy is to buy instant credibility at no matter what inflated price,
which is something you can do only if you've got money to burn.
Thanks to Ann Getty, money is one thing W
&
N has in good
supply. The publishing industry has a long history of relying on an–
gels with deep pockets , and the pockets don't get any deeper than
Ann Getty's .
If
people are expecting a lot from Weidenfeld
&
Nicolson - and
from its Getty-owned cousin, Grove Press - it's because they're in a
position to do us a lot of good. They are rarities , after all: medium–
sized, privately-funded, independent-minded houses, receptive to
books of cultural significance and literary sophistication. As it is,
there are few enough trade publishers in New York that an agent
can approach if what he or she has to hawk is a work of belles lettres,
a collection of essays, a volume of poems. Consider poetry. Recent
personnel changes hammer home the sense of a desperately con–
stricting market. When in the space of a few months last year both
Harry Ford and Elisabeth Sifton came to Knopf-from Atheneum
and Viking, respectively - it meant that Knopf had gained two very
talented, very experienced editors and consolidated its majority in–
terest in American poetry; at a stroke, Knopf became the publisher
of John Ashbery, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander,
Philip Levine, Richard Howard, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. At the
same time, however, this exodus of poets from Atheneum and Vik–
ing indicated quite clearly that both houses - historically among the
most prestigious publishers of poetry - are now rather less than pas–
sionately committed to verse. (What's more, Knopf now has so
many poets on its list that it may well declare a moratorium; if you
weren't a Knopf poet on New Year's 1988 , you can probably forget
about it.) So while it's heartening to observe Knopfs affirmative in-
terest, the effect of all these changes has got to be a net loss for
poetry, and fewer outlets for it.
It's an odd feeling knowing that the art you practice is almost
universally regarded as a lost cause. But that, of course, is really a
statement about our culture and not about the New York publishing
community.
* * *
Publishing requires making calculations in the dark: you
must constantly try to determine how many copies of a book not yet
written will sell at some future date under conditions that cannot
now be predicted. The standard division of labor between an editor
