Two old publishing men
Aug. 20th, 2009 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusA British bookshop can feel pretty much like a confectioner's shop, stuffed with TV tie-ins and lightweight toothrot. Here are the titles currently displayed in W.H.Smith's web window, for instance:
To restore my faith in publishing and humanity, confronted with ugly-sleeved, formulaic, calculated-bestseller fluff like this, I turn my attention to the two stubborn old men of serious, transgressive British publishing, Peter Owen and John Calder, both 82 years old.
Interviewed by The Daily Telegraph two years ago, Owen described how he started Peter Owen Publishers from his bedroom in 1951, then moved to a small office in Old Brompton Road. Muriel Spark was his editor. It was the time of her speed-induced mental troubles:
"She'd had a nervous breakdown and converted to Catholicism and was in the last stages of recovery when she came to work for us. Muriel was a brilliant shorthand typist and very efficient. One of the authors she wanted to bring in was Samuel Beckett and that was one of my mistakes... Beckett was getting on for 50, had never made it. We had a choice between Beckett and the Japanese Dazai. Muriel said, can't we do both? I said we can't afford both, and chose Dazai." Beckett went on to have a career-transforming hit play with Waiting For Godot, which was published by Faber. The rest of his writing went to John Calder.
There's an interesting mp3 of Calder telling a film crew about the Last Exit To Brooklyn obscenity trial here. Calder, like Owen, struggled with censorship throughout his publishing career. (I recently described how Thomi Wroblewski, who did covers for both Calder and Owen in the 80s when he was doing my record sleeves, would give me copies of Apollinaire novels that Peter had published, which had had whole sections paraphrased in bold type to avoid the British censor's pencil.)
At the end of the Calder mp3 there's a funny anecdote. Calder heard that Christian conservative pundit Malcolm Muggeridge might be testifying against him in the Last Exit To Brooklyn obscenity trial. Muggerige was the rector of Edinburgh University and flew often between Edinburgh and London. Calder was on the same flight as him one day and sat next to him. Calder reminded him of a day in June 1962 when he and Muggeridge were walking across George IV Bridge, near the Edinburgh University campus, and saw a group of pretty students. "If I were a student today I would fuck myself to death," Muggerige remarked. Calder told his old friend that this would come up in cross-examination at the trial, and Muggeridge promised not to give evidence against him.
That pretty much sums up prudish-prurient 1960s Britain in a nutshell; there's a sense (as in Jean Genet's play The Balcony) that the radicals and the conservatives are basically on the same page. They'd all fuck themselves to death given a chance, but the papers pay some to be sententious blowhards, while others stay stubbornly independent, cool, obscene.
Calder comes out very much against trendiness, though. "Publishing is about more than getting a return on an investment or being fashionable," he told Textualities. "Publishers have a chance to contribute to making a better world. I recently published Jeff Nuttall’s Art and the Degradation of Awareness, in which [Nuttall] says ‘Art gives out of courage; fashion takes out of fear.’ Most of the ‘art’ we hear about today is fashion driven by commerce. Money is just a means of exchange, a means of keeping a roof over your head and all that, but to pursue wealth for its own sake is decadent. I agree with Samuel Beckett that one has to teach oneself not to want things. One wants many things for no better reason than that advertisers train us to want them... The point of everything I do remains the same: to make ideas available to people, to expand their minds."
To restore my faith in publishing and humanity, confronted with ugly-sleeved, formulaic, calculated-bestseller fluff like this, I turn my attention to the two stubborn old men of serious, transgressive British publishing, Peter Owen and John Calder, both 82 years old.
Interviewed by The Daily Telegraph two years ago, Owen described how he started Peter Owen Publishers from his bedroom in 1951, then moved to a small office in Old Brompton Road. Muriel Spark was his editor. It was the time of her speed-induced mental troubles:
"She'd had a nervous breakdown and converted to Catholicism and was in the last stages of recovery when she came to work for us. Muriel was a brilliant shorthand typist and very efficient. One of the authors she wanted to bring in was Samuel Beckett and that was one of my mistakes... Beckett was getting on for 50, had never made it. We had a choice between Beckett and the Japanese Dazai. Muriel said, can't we do both? I said we can't afford both, and chose Dazai." Beckett went on to have a career-transforming hit play with Waiting For Godot, which was published by Faber. The rest of his writing went to John Calder.
There's an interesting mp3 of Calder telling a film crew about the Last Exit To Brooklyn obscenity trial here. Calder, like Owen, struggled with censorship throughout his publishing career. (I recently described how Thomi Wroblewski, who did covers for both Calder and Owen in the 80s when he was doing my record sleeves, would give me copies of Apollinaire novels that Peter had published, which had had whole sections paraphrased in bold type to avoid the British censor's pencil.)
At the end of the Calder mp3 there's a funny anecdote. Calder heard that Christian conservative pundit Malcolm Muggeridge might be testifying against him in the Last Exit To Brooklyn obscenity trial. Muggerige was the rector of Edinburgh University and flew often between Edinburgh and London. Calder was on the same flight as him one day and sat next to him. Calder reminded him of a day in June 1962 when he and Muggeridge were walking across George IV Bridge, near the Edinburgh University campus, and saw a group of pretty students. "If I were a student today I would fuck myself to death," Muggerige remarked. Calder told his old friend that this would come up in cross-examination at the trial, and Muggeridge promised not to give evidence against him.
That pretty much sums up prudish-prurient 1960s Britain in a nutshell; there's a sense (as in Jean Genet's play The Balcony) that the radicals and the conservatives are basically on the same page. They'd all fuck themselves to death given a chance, but the papers pay some to be sententious blowhards, while others stay stubbornly independent, cool, obscene.Calder comes out very much against trendiness, though. "Publishing is about more than getting a return on an investment or being fashionable," he told Textualities. "Publishers have a chance to contribute to making a better world. I recently published Jeff Nuttall’s Art and the Degradation of Awareness, in which [Nuttall] says ‘Art gives out of courage; fashion takes out of fear.’ Most of the ‘art’ we hear about today is fashion driven by commerce. Money is just a means of exchange, a means of keeping a roof over your head and all that, but to pursue wealth for its own sake is decadent. I agree with Samuel Beckett that one has to teach oneself not to want things. One wants many things for no better reason than that advertisers train us to want them... The point of everything I do remains the same: to make ideas available to people, to expand their minds."
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-20 01:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-20 02:17 pm (UTC)Culture flows through English channels... but not for long (http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/commentary/imomus/2007/04/imomus0410) was an article I wrote for Wired. It reports the findings of Rüdiger Wischenbart about the current realities behind book translation:
"Worldwide, he said, between 50 percent and 60 percent of all translations of books originate from English originals. It's sometimes higher: 70 percent of all books translated into Serbian, for instance, have English originals. In return, only 3 percent to 6 percent of all worldwide book translations are from foreign languages into English. English speakers, it seems, are talking a lot but listening very little. If this were the airline industry, we'd be talking about the kind of world where you can't fly from Moscow to Berlin without changing in London.
"Non-Anglo cultures are also listening less and less to each other, more and more to us. "In 2005," Wischenbart reported, "a mere 9.4 percent of all translations into German came from French originals.... Yet, this still brings French comfortably to second place in the overall translation statistics in Germany, as compared to 2.7 percent for Italian (number 3), or Dutch (2.5 percent, number 4) or Spanish (2.3 percent, number 5). Sixty-two percent of all translations were of English originals. All other languages and cultural in-roads seem like peanuts in comparison, and no politically well-intentioned process will ever mend this imbalance....
"Centrifugal forces are working against globalization, resulting in culturally fragmented islands and regions, with few cohesive lines in between."
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-20 02:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-20 02:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-20 02:31 pm (UTC)I just resent the suggestiong that WHSmith is representative of a typical British bookshop!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-20 02:42 pm (UTC)Congratulations on the book and the great responses it's been getting (and perhaps even the negative ones of the gradgrinding churls who I'm sure haven't read it and against whose dully breezeblocked imaginations your music, writing and art are all such wondefully invigorating tonics).
Just thought I'd let you know that I've tried to buy the book twice - once from the Konig art-book store in Dusseldorf and once from a regular store in Velbert, Essen. Konig couldn't find it on their system - even when I gave them the ISBN number and even though they have tons of Stirnberg titles. Nor could the shop in Velbert, but the lovely and diligent clerk there rang up Stirnberg personally to track down the distributor; I should be getting the book tomorrow.
Anyway, it seems like someone at Stirnberg should check its ISBN details so that less conscientious clerks than mine can locate it easily for customers.
Congratulations again.
S
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-20 03:02 pm (UTC)And, to keep the anons complacent in their cynicism, I'll just repeat that The Book of Scotlands is also available through Amazon (http://www.amazon.de/Solution-11-167-Book-Scotlands-Momus/dp/1933128550/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books-intl-de&qid=1250679235&sr=8-1).
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-20 03:09 pm (UTC)S.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-20 03:23 pm (UTC)I really want to read/buy The Book of Scotlands but Amazon.de won't accept my antiquated debit card. And it doesn't look like Amazon.co.uk will be stocking it. So I'll have to wait till i visit Berlin in December and hopefully pick it up at Pro QM...
gary
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-20 03:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-20 03:41 pm (UTC)so what do you think this does...
its rather easy to think oh thats bad... but... ? aside from good/bad... why would this be important.
I think this is taken for granted so I never considered the effect...
and also. English is the international language. I dont think its a bad thing that there is an international language. Be it English or another.