Art and Commerce

MICHAEL BESSIE: Up to now, I’ve been talking about what I’m not so much interested in; I’ve not talked about what I am interested in, which is literature and how does it get published?

KATHERINE MCNAMARA: Let me quote from an article you wrote for the Virginia Quarterly Review: 1 “If the publisher were simply a commodities salesman concerned solely with profit and loss, he might say, ‘There it is. Fiction is down, so we concentrate on other lines, and the public be served. But of course, life is never this simple.’” And then you go on to say why life never is this simple, concerning the sales of fiction. But my question is: What does it mean to “serve the public”? Who is “the public”?

CORNELIA BESSIE: “Who is the public?” The public are all those people with all those different tastes, some of which may not be yours. You may not think that reading romances is the way you want to spend your evenings, but there are readers out there and they should be served.

What it means, in our lives, is the challenge of the book that may not have the audience, that may not have the obvious audience, but where you say, “This is very good, I want to do this.” It comes down to great simplicity, for me. It comes down to whatever you think quality is, and have the arrogance to think that your notion of quality may have some validity.

MICHAEL BESSIE: Basically, of course, what you do, I think, is acquire along the way your likes and dislikes, and your own sense of how widely shared those likes and dislikes are. Give you a simple example: when I started Atheneum, one of the things I knew about myself, and said to Pat Knopf [Alfred A. Knopf, Jr., co-founder of Atheneum] -- because it was originally just Pat and me -- I said, “You know, I have an outstanding weakness: I have no real appreciation or appetite for commercial fiction. I wish I had. And there certainly is some commercial fiction which I enjoy; but I don’t have any gift for it.” And Pat had already had the notion of inviting Hiram Hayden to join us, because Hiram had already demonstrated not only his commercial skills, but had published people like William Styron. A few years later, we got Hiram to join us.

One of Atheneum’s failures during the time when I was in charge was the failure to develop commercial fiction. Now, I say this despite the fact that we published two or three of the most successful commercial books -- James Clavell’s TAI PAN: Herman Golub [an editor at Atheneum known for his strength in commercial fiction] brought that in.

The thing that you learn from, mostly, is your mistakes. Cornelia and I muse from time to time over the books we’ve published -- and I can certainly illustrate this -- which we were certain were going to be commercially successful, and weren’t! That doesn’t teach you how to avoid such mistakes, but it gives you a notion.

¹ Michael Bessie,“American Writing Today: A Publisher’s Viewpoint,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 34:1 Winter 1958, p. 4.