Alan Jacobs

Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, in The Lost Week-End (1940), their generally fascinating and informative social history of Great Britain between the world wars, make a great many Olympian pronouncements. They say, for instance, that Auden “perhaps never wrote an original line,” a claim that, to the person who has read even a handful of Auden poems, is instantly revealed as one of the most dim-witted statements in the history of literary criticism. (“Who stands, the crux left of the watershed” — oh goodness, that hoary old chestnut?) And they declare that by the 1930s “low-brow reading was now dominated by the detective novel.”

Well … if the detective novel is “low-brow reading,” then how to describe magazines devoted to movie stars or Mills & Boon romances? “Such things,” we can imagine Graves and Hodge saying in the plummiest of tones, “scarcely deserve the name of ‘reading.’” But people who read such books really are reading, and contra G&H, detective novels, in their literary ambitions and expectations, are an ideal example of middlebrow literature.

I tend to think of middlebrow writing as the kind of thing that highbrows would never write but still enjoy. Auden, for instance, whether an original poet or not, loved detective stories, as did T. S. Eliot (among many others).

Dorothy L. Sayers — my current biographical subject — strikes me as a paradigmatic middlebrow writer, possessing the intellectual equipment of the highbrow but believing implicitly in the capabilities of what Virginia Woolf condescendingly called “the common reader.” Woolf was highly aware of the deficiencies of the common reader:

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole — a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.

Not well educated, not generously gifted, instinctively (not consciously) moved to create a whole but capable of constructing only the “rickety and ramshackle,” the common reader can only form “insignificant” ideas and opinions. Lovely.

Sayers would agree with some of this. But she did not think the ideas and opinions of the common reader insignificant; indeed, she thought them typically superior to the opinions of highbrows. More important: while Woolf takes the shortcomings of “the common reader” as givens, almost as natural phenomena like mushrooms or cloudy days, Sayers, by contrast, sees any such deficiencies as remediable — and sees such remediation as part of her responsibility as an intellectual.

Let me just make a few pronouncements of my own:

1. Woolf is a truly great writer; Sayers is not.
2. Woolf is a highbrow; Sayers is not, and indeed frequently makes highbrows the butt of her satire.
3. Sayers in her fiction regularly shows an interest in a wide range of social classes, with their accompanying habits, inclinations, and modes of speech; Woolf is interested in none of these things: all of her characters are of the same social class.
4. Sayers is far better-educated than Woolf, more learned, and has a wider intellectual capacity: Woolf could not have managed cryptograms in a novel, or forced herself to learn the biochemistry of poisons, or translated Dante and and Song of Roland … but of course Sayers couldn’t have written Mrs. Dalloway either.

(Digression: I might add, in relation to that last point, that while Sayers was only eleven years younger than Woolf, a major transformation in the possibilities of education for women in England accelerated between Woolf’s adolescence and Sayers’s. Virginia Stephen was largely educated at home, though she did get to attend classes at King’s College London for a time; Sayers took a first-class degree at Somerville College, Oxford: when she completed her studies in 1915, women could not yet receive Oxford degrees, but she was awarded hers retroactively in 1920. The whole business of women’s education was immensely complicated in this era, with different universities changing their policies at different rates. For instance, Flora Hamilton, later to be Flora Lewis and the mother of C. S. Lewis, took a first-class degree in logic and a second in mathematics at Queen’s University Belfast in 1885. But by the time Sayers took that belated degree openness to both sexes was nearly universal, though of course informal bigotry would continue.)

I would further suggest that Sayers’s translations of Dante, and her sequence of radio plays The Man Born to be King, are classic middlebrow endeavors: attempts to render old, difficult texts and ideas comprehensible to a general audience. (A project in remediation.) I will also argue in my biography, though probably not in detail here on my blog, that her detective novels do some of the same work, as she tried in them to do what Wilkie Collins had done in the previous century: marry the story of detection with the social novel.

But wait: I haven’t defined my brows, have I? What do I mean — what should one mean — by highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow? As it happens, that was a central question of mid-twentieth-century intellectual life — and it gave us some categories that we still use today. So I’ll be exploring that in future posts.

Leah Libresco Sargeant: “The struggles of much bigger tech companies to make their AI corrigible suggest Catholic Answers won’t have a reliably orthodox chatbot any time soon. But the problem with the project goes deeper: To imagine that a chatbot can be a catechist at all indicates a profound misunderstanding of how evangelization works. … God invites us to imitate him as sub-creators. It is a profound misuse of that invitation to build tools to take over our most human and relational tasks.”

The Five Spot, on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan, hosted most of the great jazz musicians of the middle part of the twentieth century — Charles Mingus, for instance:

It was also a block-and-a-half from 77 St. Mark’s Place, which is where for a long time Auden lived for about half of each year. (Leon Trotsky also lived there for a time, and a section of the street provided the image for the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti.) I often find myself wondering how often Auden passed Miles Davis or John Coltrane on the street, or sat next to them at a local bar.

Read this by Ted Gioia in conjunction with my everyone knows post. Twenty years from now, nobody will believe parents who say “But I had no idea that giving my five-year-old a smartphone would be harmful!” People will say, “You knew, but you didn’t care.” And they’ll be right to say it.

My recent posts on how I choose what fiction to read and what’s going on with the publishing industry share a theme: perverse incentives. (Indeed, it seems that a lot of my writing is about perverse incentives, but more about that another time.) The intellectual/political monoculture of the modern university leads to an intellectual/political monoculture in the major media companies, and when you combine that with the many ways the internet has disrupted the economic models of all the arts, you get a general environment in which interesting, imaginative work is not just resisted, it’s virtually prohibited. All the incentives of everyone involved are aligned against it.

Thus the thesis of this essay by James Poniewozik: “We have entered the golden age of Mid TV”: 

Above all, Mid is easy. It’s not dumb easy — it shows evidence that its writers have read books. But the story beats are familiar. Plot points and themes are repeated. You don’t have to immerse yourself single-mindedly the way you might have with, say, “The Wire.” It is prestige TV that you can fold laundry to. 

Or you could listen to a Sally Rooney novel on Audible while chopping the veggies. Same, basically. This is what I think about almost everything from current big-studio Hollywood movies to new literary fiction to music by Taylor Swift or Beyoncé: it’s … okay. It doesn’t offend.

But wouldn’t it be nice to have something better? Wouldn’t it be cool to be surprised? Crevecoeur famously described early America as a land characterized by “a pleasing uniformity of decent competence.” But after a while the competence isn’t all that pleasing. As Wittgenstein famously wrote in the Philosophical Investigations: “We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!” I wrote an essay about this.

Of course I think about this stuff all the time. 

The good news is that these production-line periods tend to produce a reaction: Romantic poetry was one such; punk rock another; the Nouvelle Vague in French movies yet another. Indeed, so was Wittgenstein’s philosophy. But the bad news is that today our manorial technocracy makes the project of finding cracks in the walls more difficult than it has ever been. So I’ll be watching the rough ground to see who turns up there, but in the meantime, here’s how I make my decisions about watching movies: 

• If someone I love wants me to go to a movie with them, I do. 
• Otherwise, I don’t watch movies produced and/or distributed by the big studios. (I had been leaning in this direction for a while, but I didn’t make it a guideline until three or four years ago.) I just don’t, for the same reason that I don’t read novels by people who live in Brooklyn: it’s not a good bet. The chance of encountering something excellent, or even interestingly flawed, is too remote. Not impossible — I really enjoyed Dune, for instance, and Oppenheimer, both of which I watched with my son — but remote. 
• I don’t subscribe to Netflix, or HBO, or Amazon Prime. (I do have Apple TV as part of my Apple subscription, but I primarily use it to rent movies. I did try watching For All Mankind and Masters of the Air, but both of them were too … Mid for me.) The only service I subscribe to is the Criterion Channel, because it allows me to watch (a) classic movies, (b) independent movies, and (c) foreign movies. All of which are much better bets than anything the current big studios make. 
• I never hesitate to watch a favorite movie again when that’s where my whim takes me. In fact, I watch movies from my Blu-Ray/DVD collection more often than I stream anything. 

Old Japanese train tickets

Brent Nongbri on Candida Moss’s recent work: “Overall, this book has an effect that is similar to that of E.P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977). Even if you don’t agree with every interpretive move the author makes, the collective force of the book’s examples leaves you with what can only be described as a new perspective. In other words, if the field takes God’s Ghostwriters seriously (and it should), then there is no going back. And the way forward will involve greater effort to pay attention to the enslaved people who played important parts in producing, promulgating, and preserving the writing of the Roman world.”

If I’m irritible over the next few days, it’s because Apple’s forced reset of my password means that all of my app-specific passwords have been erased and now I have to create new ones. Great.

This award-winning building … is a glass cuboid. The world’s ten billionth glass cuboid.

What happened to Michael Tsai also happened to me today. Annoying as heck. All my Apple devices are confused.

Re: this list of sites that prohibit your linking to anything but their home page — I wonder how it would play out if a dispute about this policy went to court here in the U.S.? What if I linked to a page on Bill Gates’s site and he sued me? What would be the legal basis for his suit, and what would be the best legal defense of my Right To Link? (I suppose my lawyer would have to say something more than “You posted this on the open web, dumbass.")

Like almost every other writer in America, I’ve weighed in on that Elle Griffin nobody-buys-books post – or one implication of it anyway.

Elle Griffin seems to have carved out a niche for herself telling hard truths to would-be writers – which is an unpleasant but useful service, I think. But there’s one troublesome point I think she actually understresses — though it will take me a few minutes to get to that point.

Griffin cites this chart from Penguin USA:

Category 1: Lead titles with a sales goal of 75,000 units and up Advance: $500,000 and up

Category 2: Titles with a sales goal of 25,000–75,000 units Advance: $150,000-$500,000

Category 3: Titles with a sales goal of 10,000–25,000 units Advance: $50,000- $150,000

Category 4: Titles with a sales goal of 5,000 to 10,000 units Advance: $50,000 or less

Four times in my career I have received Category 3 advances; in two of those cases (The Narnian and How To Think) I ended up with Category 1 sales, thus significantly overperforming my advance. In one case (Breaking Bread with the Dead) I have achieved sales to match the “sales goal,” though not (yet?) enough to earn back my advance; in the fourth case (Original Sin) I underperformed the sales goal.

All this assuming that the above information is correct, which, I dunno.

Anyway, this track record should make it possible for me to get another Category 3 advance, should I want one, and if I can come up with the right proposal. I’m not a sure-fire winner, but I’m a decent bet when I do get a big-house contract. (My academic books don’t figure into this discussion, because while they sell well for academic books, even taken together they don’t make enough money annually to pay my property taxes.)

And if the numbers Griffin cites are correct, the sales of my more successful books put them, to my surprise and puzzlement and discomfort, in the top 5% of published books. It’s true that How to Think has sold more copies than books from the same period by Billie Eilish and Justin Timberlake, which should tell you something – mainly that fans of Billie Eilish and Justin Timberlake don’t read books. I should also add that How to Think really took off for a little while because Fareed Zakaria loved it and hyped it on CNN. Funny old world, ain’t it. But still … the “top 5%” thing just feels wrong. 

Anyway, let’s imagine that I receive a $100,000 advance for a future book. Not impossible by any means. The thing is, and this is the point I think Griffin should lean on more heavily: “advance” is a misleading term. Advances don’t come all at once, they come in stages, either three or four of them, for instance:

• $25,000 at contract signing;
• $25,000 at submission of an acceptable (but still to be edited) manuscript;
• $25,000 at publication of the hardcover;
• $25,000 at publication of the paperback, or, if the publisher chooses not to make a paperback, one year after the publication of the hardcover.

(Sometimes the unit payments vary: for instance, for Breaking Bread with the Dead my agent negotiated bigger payouts for the first and third stages, smaller ones for the other two.) In a typical situation, after you sign the contract you might need two years to write the book. Supposing that your manuscript is pretty good and just needs editing, that process can take several months, and then getting the book ready for publication can take several more months. And the final payout will come a year after that initial publication. So while a $100,000 advance sounds like a lot of money, it often ends up being $25,000 a year; not nearly enough to live on. 

The moral: Writing books can be a nice supplement to your day job, but it is virtually impossible for it to replace your day job, even if you’re in the top 5% percent of sales. That I, several of whose books appear to be in that category, couldn’t make a decent living if I sold three times as many of those books as I do, should suggest … not, as Griffin keeps saying, that no one buys books, but that the whole industry is smaller than most people think and a money machine for only a handful of writers. You probably have to get into the top 1% of published-by-publishers writers to make a living solely by writing. Probably only a few hundred, or at most a few thousand, people in the entire world manage that. (Griffin seems to think Substack offers a better chance for success, but I bet the percentages there are roughly the same.) 

 

P.S. I’m probably not going to get another significant advance, because I doubt I will ask for one. I can’t at the moment imagine wanting to write a book that a Big Five publisher would want to pay for. That could change, of course, but I don’t expect it will. I decided to write my Sayers biography for a university press rather than a trade house primarily to write the book I wanted to write — not the book I needed to write to earn back an advance.  

P.P.S. I see Freddie has weighed in also. Some good thoughts there, but I’m not sure about the title: “Publishing is Designed to Make Most Authors Feel Like Losers Even While the Industry Makes Money.” Maybe that’s right. It’s certainly that advances used to be smaller for the biggest sellers and larger for the mid-list writers, which made it possible for mid-list writers to make a modest but firmly middle-class living — especially when they could supplement their book income with writing for periodicals that, in inflation-adjusted dollars, paid much more than they do now. (Why could so many magazines back in the day pay so much more? Because they got much higher ad revenue in periods when ad money didn’t have nearly as many places to go.) The publishing industry has clearly borrowed the Silicon Valley venture capitalists’ practice of hoping for one or two hits in a thousand investments, but I don’t understand how that affects their decisions about how to distribute the money they have available for advances. I wish I did. 

Taken in SE Colorado, March 2023.

Live webcam at Valles Caldera, New Mexico. The webcam is cool but it’s one of those places that simply can’t be appreciated except in person — a photo doesn’t capture the scale of the place.

This morning I wrote my most boring post ever! It’s about citations of a literary critic.