How the Author Reaches His Public

MR. JACKMAN:

It is indeed a pleasure to have with us today, Canada's most distinguished man of letters, Dr. Robertson Davies. A man whose career has been so varied that one hardly knows where to begin--author, playwright, director, actor, editor, publisher, essayist, critic and educator his life has been so rich with experience that Canadians cannot think of the literary arts in this country, without thinking of the contribution of our guest today.

Dr. Davies was educated at Upper Canada College, Queen's University, and Balliol College, Oxford where he took his degree in literature. His first love was for the theatre and after gaining considerable experience as an actor in the English provinces, he joined the renowned "Old Vic" Company to act, and to teach in its Drama School and do literary work for the Director.

If the war had not intervened, perhaps Robertson Davies would have been permanently lost to Canada. In 1940, however, he returned, becoming literary editor of Saturday Night and then editor of the Peterborough Examiner, a newspaper which he has been connected with for over twenty years.

He continued his interest in the theatre and wrote a number of plays which were performed extensively in Canada and abroad. He also established an enviable reputation as an essayist and novelist. Much has been said about the difficulties which surround the creative arts in this country. Robertson Davies, although receiving more than a measure of success and recognition by Canadian standards, must have shared the frustrations of all Canadian authors during those early years who attempted to create a distinctive Canadian literary style.

The central character in one of our guest's own award-winning plays echoed this frustration by saying:

"I hanker for a little honour and a little money--these are things that Canada gives her scholars with utmost reluctance and usually when they are near unto death I am not patient! but I am not unreasonable! I can live on promises but in a country where the questions that I ask meet only with blank incomprehension and the yearnings that I feel find no understanding, I know that I must go mad or I must strangle my soul with my own hands.--Despised because I do not teach anything useful--Despised because I want things from life which nobody else seems to miss."

"Fortune my Foe Why dost thou frown on me And will thy favours Never greater be."

For "Fortune My Foe", Robertson Davies won the Dominion Drama Festival Award for the best Canadian play in 1949 and as time went on, our guest's contribution to our cultural heritage definitely established him as one of the great men of Canadian literature.

He has received honorary degrees from five Canadian universities--a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada--a recipient of many honours. His novels are now "Book of the Month Club" selections, reproduced in paperback with covers showing pictures of beautiful women in flimsy negliges--perhaps the surest and most certain sign that success and recognition have arrived.

In 1962 Vincent Massey, that very distinguished but rather peculiar Canadian who did so much for Canadian culture, established Massey College. For that very individual institution for post-graduate scholars, the logical choice to be the first Master, was none other than our guest today.

To become Master of a College at the University of Toronto and have to face today's generation of university students must have been quite a switch for Robertson Davies, but surely an exilerating one. In his own words, he has described his experiences at Massey as a great transformation--saying:

"Crisis follows crisis in never-failing profusion; the clash of personality and the displays of naked passion present a gaudy show. Every one of the seven deadly sins is demonstrated before my astonished eyes. I teeter like a tightrope walker along the farther precipice of the generation gap. My only worry is that the excitement may prove too much for my frail spirit."

Judging from our guest's robust appearance, he has made the transformation to educator admirably and the students who have had the honour of being exposed to his wit and humour will no doubt be much the better for it.

It is with great pleasure I introduce to you one of the truly great men of Canadian literature--Dr. Robertson Davies.

DR. ROBERTSON DAMES:

You have been told that my subject is How the Author Reaches His Public. I asure you this title has only a general relationship to what I am going to say. One of the most difficult things about making speeches is finding titles for them. A few weeks before the speech is due, the president of the club or the chairman of the Speakers' Committee calls and says: "What is the name of your address?" You reply: "It has no name." He says, rather sternly: "Well then, what is it about?" In this case I told Mr. Jackman it was about how a novel gets itself written. "Pull yourself together," he said; "you don't expect anybody to turn out to hear that, do you?" I replied modestly that I was always surprised when anybody turned out to hear me under any circumstances. But he was firm. He wanted a catchy title. I pondered for a few days, and called him. "What about, How the Author Reaches his Public?" I said. I had no delusions whatever that it was catchy, but at least it was a title. He very generously accepted it. So here I am, and here you are, and we must get on with our business.

Authors are not very much in the public eye, unless they are in trouble because of some gigantic imposture about a book they haven't written, or should not have written, such as a biography of Howard Hughes. Occasionally they are deemed to be of interest if they are being divorced, especially if the cause is cruelty. There is a widespread idea that authors are absolute devils in their matrimonial lives. Sometimes the newspapers carry reports of an author's death. These often run like this: "The unkown man of shabby appearance who was knocked down yesterday by a pizza delivery van has at last been identified as Lanugo Inkhorn, an author once popular but long forgotten. Identification was possible because the sum of forty-seven cents, which was found in his pocket, tallied exactly with Inkhorn's 1969 royalties, which had been paid to him last week by a Canadian publishing firm, now under American domination." When authors die they are frequently described as "once-popular" or, more often "well-known in the thirties." It is unheard of for an author to be popular at the time of his death. This is part of the tragedy of my profession.

Another curious thing about authors is that they have no period of maturity. When they begin, they may be so lucky as to be referred to, for ten or fifteen years, as "promising"; after that, they are called "old-timers". Last year the Globe and Mail referred to me as an old-timer, and then I knew that I was a genuine Canadian author; I had passed from the bud to the yellowing leaf without any intermediate period of flowering. From now until the melancholy item about the pizza truck it will be all downhill.

No doubt you are saying to yourselves, "If it is so painful, why do you do it?" The answer must be, "Authors are authors because they can't help it"; it is like being born with eyes of different colours. Only, in the case of the author, it is the mind that is of a special colour. Being an author is a state of mind, and it cannot be changed. Nor, let me say, can it be faked. It is possible to learn to write well, and even very well, as hundreds of thousands of writers of technical and scientific and informative books have shown. But these are not authors in the sense I mean. I am talking about writers of two sorts: poets and story-tellers. You cannot become either one by any amount of effort, and if you happen to be born one, you cannot escape. You need not write, but the chances are very strong that you will. You have something to say that will not let you alone. You may be good and you may be bad, and the chances are very great that you will be somewhere in between, but you are not likely to be silent. Your urge to communicate is overpoweringly strong, and if you resist it the urge may take a very ugly turn, by which I mean that your fantasy life may get the better of your external life, and that can lead in only one direction.

So you must, somehow, reach your public, whether it be large or small, and how you do it is part of what I am going to talk about today.

You do it, in almost all cases, through a publisher. We hear and read a great deal about publishers at present, because their business, in modern Canada, is said to be under serious threat. It is suggested that they should receive assistance from the Dominion and provincial governments. I know nothing of the intricacies of this problem, and do not intend to comment on it, except to say that I sincerely hope that any help that is offered to publishers will take a variety of possible indirect forms. I do not like the idea of direct subventions or hand-outs to businesses, especially when they are as important to the artistic and intellectual life of the country as publishing. I do not suggest that any government would put obvious pressure on publishers to make them produce what the government, or its advisers, thought suitable. The evils of subvention are not so simple as that. What I do say is that it is impossible for any industry to take money directly from a government without feeling some obligation to serve the purposes of that government. There is a simple economic law which may be summed up in the phrase: Nothing is for nothing. It is a very good law, and it is inexorable. That is why we have to be so careful about any help we accept. Some passages in the recently published Draft Report of the Commission on Post-Secondary Education in Ontario should make the publishing industry extremely cautious about government aid in any form.

The author, then, finds his publisher. This may take a long time, and there are many stories of fine books which have passed from one publisher to another for years before their worth was recognized. But I think these are the exceptions, which is why they make good stories. I know many authors, and only a few of them have had much trouble in finding a sympathetic and friendly publisher.

Many of you, I am sure, have heard stories about the wickedness, the grasping meanness of publishers. Byron is supposed to have said that Barrabas was a publisher. I have a theory about publishers which explains their curious temperament: I think they tend to be undiagnosed schizophrenics. They are people of dual personality, and both of their personalities are directed at different sides of their business. They tend to be friendly, literate, agreeable men with a genuine enthusiasm for literature and a cultivated taste in it; they like authors and are nicer to them than most people because I may tell you that authors are not usually very pleasant companions, being often egotistical, or dishonest, or childish, or drunken and sometimes all four. Publishers often lend authors money, or buy them out of jail. I sometimes think that there is a saint-like streak in the best publishers, because the more detestable and troublesome an author is, the better they like him. This noble side of publishers is the one the author first encounters, and it is a side that will show itself at intervals all through their relationship.

If only it were possible to stop there! But truth demands that I describe the other side of this schizophrenic. This is the side that draws the contract. Because the Dr. Jekyll side of the publisher leads him to make so many bad deals with authors who may be personally attractive, or pitiable, but not writers of readily saleable books, the Mr. Hyde personality of the publisher drives him to be a hard bargainer when he enters into a business deal. This Mr. Hyde is a shrewd man of business, and he knows that only in the rarest cases does the author know anything whatever about business. Lulled and disarmed by the caresses of Dr. Jekyll, the author signs the contract which has been drawn up, inscribed on human skin in dragon's gall, by Mr. Hyde. He will regret it, twenty years later, but at the time of signing he does not know what he is doing. To a young author there is something inexpressibly delightful about signing a contract. And, it must be said, he is probably extremely lucky to get a contract. What he may not notice is that the contract he is signing commits him to sign subsequent contracts, on the same terms, forever. This is the sort of contract Faust signed with Mephistopheles. When successful authors meet, they vie with one another in describing the hideous servitudes to which, in their foolish youth, they have committed themselves. Because authors, you see, never think they are to blame for anything.

Fortunately the picture is not all dark. Within this century there has come into being a creature called a literary agent, and unless an author is a skilful man of business like Bernard Shaw or H. G. Wells--he is wise to employ one. The agent arranges his business affairs for him, and does not permit him to sign any contract which has not been arranged on what the agent considers fair terms. For this the agent gets, as a usual thing, ten per cent of the author's earnings. As an author who has worked without an agent and with one, I consider the agent's fee money well spent.

Agents are rather like publishers, in some interesting ways. They like authors, and are often very kind to them. But they are primarily men, or women, of business. They know the market and what sort of publisher is most likely to be interested in any particular book. They employ people who are good at wrapping up parcels, which authors very rarely are. They always remember to enclose return postage when they send out a manuscript, which authors are inclined to forget. They are sharp at collecting royalties, which publishers sometimes forget to send. I am at present in the process of collecting some money which has been owing to me since July 1, 1968. I had better say that it is not from a Canadian publisher. I wish I had had the help of my agent in dealing with that situation, but because of the awesome respectability of the publisher in question I neglected to put the agent on the job. I suppose it serves me right that I am still waiting for my money.

Where are we now? The author has written his book; he has sent it to his agent; his agent has sent it to a publisher who likes it, and a contract is signed. Now what happens?

A long pause. About nine months, as a usual thing. During that time the publisher has the book designed, and printed, and has done something which he calls "fitting it into his list". This means that he chooses a publication date which will be as advantageous as possible for the book, but which will not mean that the market is crowded with books from a single publisher. This is a necessary precaution, for books have to be spaced out, or the booksellers, and the reviewers, will be glutted with books from a single publisher, and will be out of patience with him. They will think he is hogging the scene. Therefore, if a book of mine is to appear next October, I should have had the completed work in the publisher's hands some time last month. As a matter of fact, that is precisely what I have done.

What is the publisher doing with it now? I like to imagine him reading and re-reading it, lingering over the best bits, and calling in his colleagues to gloat over what I have done. But I am, as I told you, an old-timer, and I know that the publisher is marking up my beautiful neat typescript with marks which have a special significance for his printer, and the printer is ordering paper, and the binder is mixing up several pots of glue, and a great many technical processes are going ahead which will, unless there are serious accidents, have the book ready on time.

This period of waiting is a weary one for the author. If you were an actor, how would you like to finish your performance and wait nine months to find out whether the audience liked it or not? It is this sort of waiting that makes writers neurotic and bad-tempered. It also makes them live, as a usual thing, rather long lives. They expect everything to be slow and subject to unaccountable delay, and they have no intention of excluding death from this general pattern.

While he is waiting, the author has all sorts of personal anguish. He thinks of ways in which he could have made a better job of his book. He thinks of stupid errors of fact he has incorporated into it. Especially he thinks of the dreadful things the critics are going to say when the book appears. If he is a real professional, he never allows himself to think of critics while he is writing his book; he feels, and quite rightly, that if critics were as good as they think they are, they would be writing books themselves. But when his book has gone out into that terrible no-man's-land between completion and publication, from which no echo ever returns, he thinks of critics a great deal. If publishers are schizophrenics, writers are paranoids. He is sure the critics hate him, and want to destroy him; in this he is never more than half-right. If a critic gave him a good review last time, he shrinks from meeting the man, lest he should appear to be cultivating him in hope of future favours . . . And it is true that critics are capricious people and pick on things in a book that an author never thinks about. When my last novel was published a critic called attention to the fact that none of the beautiful women in it were Canadians. This was a sort of nationalism for which I was not prepared. Then my friend Mordecai Richler took the matter up in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, and the critic's feelings were hurt--for there is nothing so dreadful to a critic as to be criticised.

Talk of critics brings us to the actual publication of the book. The publishers, partly for reasons of business and partly because they are jolly fellows and like a party, often celebrate the occasion. They give a party. They invite the author. They also invite the critics. The result can be like one of those animal-taming acts which were popular in Victorian circuses, where lions ate happily from the same dish as lambs, and monkeys shared a banana with parrots without ever pulling feathers out of their tails. I say this can be the case; let me add at once that I have attended many such parties, both to celebrate books of my own and those of other people, which were delightful.

Then comes another interval, not of nine months, but of a fortnight or so, before the first reviews begin to appear. It takes two or three months before an author has received all the reviews of a new book, because reviewers have only a limited amount of space at their disposal.

Do authors read reviews? Most certainly they do. Sometimes they read and re-read them, studying them with a care usually reserved for Holy Writ. If the review is unfavourable they probe deeply for motives; they bite on the review like a man biting on an aching tooth, to see if it hurts as much as it did last time. If the review is favourable they read it for reassurance. And if--as sometimes happens--the review is a truly perceptive one, which shows that the reviewer has really understood what the writer was trying to do, and thinks he has done it well, it is graven on the author's heart. One can never tell what is in a reviewer's mind. I am thinking now of a Canadian writer, Arthur Hailey, who has achieved extraordinary success with several novels of a type which was, I believe, first made popular by Arnold Bennett; they tell a story against a background of some very big and complex business enterprise. His books sell in the hundreds of thousands, and usually the film rights have been sold before the book appears. But the curious thing is that the more successful Mr. Hailey becomes, the worse are the reviews he gets. Some of his critics have not hesitated to attack him personally. It is as if they felt such success was an indecency, an affront to public order, on the part of an author. It cannot be said that Mr. Hailey puts himself before the public as an artist, or an experimenter in the novel; he seeks to entertain, and he most assuredly succeeds. And his success annoys the reviewers. I do not attempt to explain it. I merely put the fact before you as a curiosity.

It is a fact that reminds me of a proposal that was once put to me by my good friend Alfred Knopf, surely one of the most distinguished publishers ever to appear on this continent. He said that he thought publishers might grade their books like eggs or butter, or else stamp them with designations of the kind used by the movies, so that people would know what the publisher considered Grade A, or suitable for the whole family, and what was restricted in its appeal, or unsuitable for certain types of reader. This would help the reviewers greatly. If they received a book marked "Entertainment Only; No Symbolic Content: No Intellectual Additives or Preservatives" they would treat it differently from one marked "For Advanced Intellects: Not Recommended for Readers Below the Ph.D. Level; Keep away from Children and Senior Citizens". But Mr. Knopf was not sure it would work. Neither am I.

A great many people are fascinated by the idea that a novelist may sell the rights in his book to a film company. They seem to think that this means immediate great wealth. The truth is quite otherwise. If a novelist sells the film rights of his book to a film company the usual thing is to begin with an option, which means that very little money changes hands until the film is actually made. Very often the film is not made, and even if it is the reward falls far short of munificence. Of course, if the film is a great success, like Gone With The Wind, the author stands to make a lot of money, but such films are extremely uncommon. A much more characteristic story is that of Margaret Laurence, a Canadian writer of the first rank, whose novel called A Jest of God was made into a good film called Rachel, Rachel. Mrs. Laurence received a welcome sum of money in consequence, but she would be the first to say that riches still elude her. Because, you see, if a writer makes a substantial sum in one year, his income tax in that year is very high, and the year following he has dropped back to a more modest level. There is a plan whereby authors can charge a single windfall against taxes over a period of three years, but you would be surprised how little this helps. On the average sum received for a film, the difference between paying everything in one year, and spreading the money over three years, may be as little as a hundred dollars.

The economics of authorship, you see, make very little sense. The rewards, considering the highly individual nature of the work done, are poor. This is why most writers, in Canada at any rate, pursue some other profession as a means of getting a decent livelihood. Personally I do not think that this is entirely a bad thing, for it keeps a member of a lonely profession in touch with a variety of other people. But it does mean that he has to remind himself every day that he is an author, and not a professor, or a banker, or whatever the other job is he does to keep the pot boiling. And as long as writers are willing to do other jobs for the bulk of their livelihood, the longer the government, and the public, will be willing that they should do so.

It is astonishing how indifferent the general public is to the needs of writers, although it must be obvious to anyone with any sense of what civilized living is that writers are a necessary group of people, who perform an irreplaceable public service. A nation without a literature is not a nation, and the quality of its literature is one of the standards by which a nation is judged now and will be judged in the future. Yet manifest injustices are not only permitted, but encouraged, against the author's work. One of these, I am sorry to say, is the way in which public libraries lend a single copy of a book literally scores of times, without any reward whatever coming to the author. If the books were lent to people who cannot afford books, the injustice would be less, though not negligible. But a great many people who afford luxuries that are not provided by the state, depend on free books. I was amused a little while ago when I met a lady who is known to be of substantial means, and who was at the time wearing a very beautiful fur coat, in a city about three hundred and fifty miles from Toronto. "Oh Mr. Davies," she gushed, "I'm so anxious to read your new book, but the waiting list at our neighbourhood library is so long I know it will be months before I get it." I knew what she was after. She hoped I would say, "Dear lady, I cannot bear to think of your distress; allow me to send you a copy." Should I have done so? I leave the answer to you.

I don't think that anything can be done about this. It is a well-established form of robbery, done under a cloak of public service. It is as little defensible as the piracy of books by foreign publishers which was so common in the nineteenth century.

That still goes on, by the way. Last month a friend of mine returning from Japan brought me a very handsome copy of a book of mine, which he said was selling very well in Japan. But I had not heard of its appearance there, and I shall never get a penny out of it. But what can be done about such things as this in a civilization where the marvel of almost instantaneous copying machines has made copyright a joke? Recently, in a Toronto newspaper, the news appeared that our own Government is establishing these copiers in our Post Offices, with a notice saying that they will copy, among other things, books. The machine and the Government will get some money, but the author will get nothing. Much of this kind of robbery goes under the cloak of education. I have looked in the papers for some sort of protest against this practice, but so far nobody seems to care.

What can be done? If I had a solution, I would certainly tell you. But the only thing I can think of is the provision of pensions for authors from public funds, as a recompense for the protection which the law is unable to give them, and which the Government itself seems to think unimportant. The pension plan is not in itself absurd. More than a hundred and fifty years ago the government of Norway was providing pensions for its authors, and without his pension Henrik Ibsen would not have been able to live. But in European countries there is a long tradition of respect for literature as an art, which has never taken root on this continent. We have the Canada Council, of course, which provides grants for writers who can show good reason for receiving them. But is the author's reward to be a periodic hand-out? After a certain length of time there is a want of dignity about applying for grants, and the policy of the Canada Council to concentrate on youth and promise--a policy which I do not quarrel with--still leaves the writer who is no longer young, and whose promise has been realized, in an ambiguous position. He is given occasional assurance that his country wants him and needs him, but he has daily assurance that his country will not lift a finger to protect his right in what he alone has created.

I set out to tell you how the writer reaches his public, and I have tried to give you some idea of the progress of a book from the writer's desk to the reader. Perhaps you wonder if the writer's public ever reaches him? I am happy to tell you that it does, and in many gratifying ways. One of the pleasantest rewards of authorship is the stream of letters that come from people in unexpected parts of the world who have been pleased by what he has written, and who take the trouble to tell him so. This is not an easy thing to do. To write a letter to an unknown person, who may be a misanthrope, or indifferent to public opinion, is not an easy thing to do. I have rarely written to authors myself, because I hesitate to trouble someone I do not know, even to praise him, and yet I know from my own experience how welcome these letters are, how keenly they are read, and how they are preserved. I myself cannot bear to throw away a kind letter from somebody who has liked a book of mine well enough to write and say so, and I am proud to say that I have some quite thick files of them. This is what really reaching the public means.

When I began to speak I said that I meant poets and story-tellers when I spoke of writers. Both kinds of men are of an incalculably ancient ancestry. The poet declaimed wherever people would listen to him; the story-teller unrolled his mat and called the passers-by to listen to what wonders he would unfold. In those simpler days the public response was immediate. Nowadays the response is by letter, and unfortunately our technology is now so advanced that the mail service gets poorer every week. Still, however late it is in arriving, the kindly letter, when at last it comes, assures the author, as nothing else can do, that he has reached his mark. He has found his public, and his public, after the delays I have described, has found him.

Dr. Davies was thanked on behalf of The Empire Club of Canada by Mr. Graham Gore.