"Once More unto the Breach, Dear Friends, Once More": The Publishing Scene and American Literary Art.

Literary mores no longer place as much stock in the hieratic model of the winner, which is just as well. Unless one is good at self-sacrifice, is endowed with an iron will and a genius-sized gift, it's likely to be a defeating thing to insist on producing Art or nothing.

--Theodore Solotaroff, A Few Good Voices in My Head

Once upon a time, not so long ago, trade books published in America were conveniently divided (segregated might be a better word for it) by publishers into two basic categories--"popular" and "serious." It was those terms, as much as anything else, Saul Bellow was fighting against when he coined his own opposite poles--"public" and "private." We are talking about, roughly, thirty years ago: the War over with, replaced, of course, by other, smaller wars without ceasing; the last of the original millions of veterans, who had crowded the campuses as never before on the G.I. Bill and changed American education (among other things) for better and for worse forever more, gone off into their long deferred "real" lives at last; the paperback revolution which had furnished the affordable textbooks of that era and which had, for a time, revitalized the dozing, yawning American publishing business with the double whammy of fresh new money for the taking and the up-to-date sweaty greed to go out after it. About thirty years ago we had even had a little literary revolution, too, one of those once in a century or so (maybe) overturnings of the statues and monuments of the Literary Establishment and their replacement with a new set of heroes and icons. (I suppose the nearest thing to it was in seventeenth-century England when the Roundheads finally managed to kick ass on the Cavaliers and shut down all the theaters as part of what they hoped was a final solution. Of course, half a century later the theaters were back in business, but utterly different. The old Shakespearean stage as long gone and forgotten.) In our own revolution, for example Faulkner, Fitzgerald. Hemingway and even Steinbeck, none of whom could be said to have prospered greatly, either in rewards or reputation in the years before the War, were now suddenly declared to be the Old Masters of the first half of this century. (You want to see how highly regarded they were during that first hall century? Go and pick up any old New York Times Book Review or Herald Tribune or Harper's or Scribner's or any other literary magazine between, say, 1920 and 1945, and you'll see who the Updikes and the Oateses of the time were, and they were sure not Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway or Steinbeck. Wolfe, maybe, but his time was brief, brief.) Needless to say, certain publishers began sifting through their backlists looking for old-timers and unknowns who maybe could be resurrected to the cheerful music of the cash register. And, do not forget, for the first time ever, courses in modern and contemporary literature were now being offered at American colleges and universities. There was going to be some good money there, too, for these lucky or clever publishers who could get their snouts up close to the edge of the trough. "Serious," or to use another synonymous term of the period, "prestige" writing just might pay off in the long run after all.

It is an important condition of modern and contemporary literary art that the most prominent and active American publishers of our times have had, at least as a secondary or "spin off" goal, the desire to be not only successful but also socially respectable. Money alone could not purchase or confer that reward. It was necessary to publish something not merely worthwhile, but recognized to be worthwhile, at least within the precincts of the New York City where they lived and worked and prospered. See Theodore Solotaroff's essay "What Has Happened to Publishing," in A Few Good Voices in My Head (1987), where he writes "of Jewish newcomers using family money to establish houses that conformed to their desire and drive to play an important cultural role in New York, much as their counterparts were doing in Vienna, Berlin, and London." We could make too much out of the special limitations, partly…