378
PARTISAN REVIEW
Still, in the capitals of commerce, a certain prestige will always
adhere to the book trade, precisely because it doesn't deal in com–
modities whose marketplace value can be more easily gauged; it
more nearly resembles a futures market in ideas and opinions, val–
ues and reputations . If part of the aim is to discover masterpieces
and make them public, criteria more intangible and severe than
best-seller charts are called for.
It
is therefore always at least a little disconcerting to meet a
marketing man who refers to books as
product,
just as it's dismaying
to learn that in publishing jargon the term
literary novel
isn't a redun–
dancy . The antonym of
literary novel
is
commercial novel,
as if to state a
fact of publishing life that no serious writer or reader can want to
hear - that there's frequently an inverse ratio between a book's
literary quality and its commercial potential. Publishers will always
cite exceptions, of course. They'll remind you that Umberto Eco's
esoteric novel
The Name of the Rose
was a surprise best-seller back in
1983, that the even less likely Allan Bloom's
The Closing of the
American Mind
topped the charts last spring . Publishers usually
sound
optimistic, at least. You see, they say, there
is
an audience for seri–
ous books, even very difficult ones. Besides , they ask, why blame us
for giving the reading public what it wants?
"Commercial
means that it
sells, not that it's trash." Yes , and what does
literary
mean?
On the other hand - there's always that other hand when you
talk about the publishing industry. For every efficient executive type
who talks
product,
I'll show you five editors, book addicts all, who
started at puny entry-level salaries and counted themselves lucky.
You meet them everywhere, and not only at the
literary
imprints :
tireless people, generous with their ardor, who would sooner chal–
lenge the reading public than cater to its lowest level. Asking such
editors to describe what they do invites a profusion of metaphor. A
measure of sweet idealism is present even when the speaker takes
pains, a sentence or two later, to inject a gram of grim realism into
the talk. Daphne Merkin (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) likens one
aspect of an editor's role to "crossing a bridge between a Columbia
University graduate seminar and a commuter bus in New Jersey."
Jonathan Galassi (Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux) favors the image of the
double agent - meaning that the editor shuttles between author and
publisher, whose sometimes conflicting interests he must try to
serve, but implying too that the activity is clandestine and involves
crossing frontiers with a sense of divided loyalties . Arthur Samuel–
son (Harper
&
Row) describes himself as "the sort of guy who, when
he reads a book, walks down the halls to find somebody to talk to
