Shostakovich and free speech (3rd comment)

As Robert Zaller and Steve Cohen note in their recent BSR reviews, Shostakovich wrote his "Classical Symphony" when he was threatened with imprisonment or death if he failed to satisfy the artistic dictates of Stalin and his Kremlin cohorts. I can only second their comments concerning the intense, moving performance the Philadelphia Orchestra delivered under Yannick Nézet-Séguin's leadership.

But I must confess that my incurably quirky mind moves in a different direction when I ponder Shostakovich's plight. I find myself thinking about how American writers deal with less harrowing versions of the same situation.

To me, Shostakovich was confronted with a problem that bedevils creative people in every society, under every system humans have tried, to wit: What do you do when your creative impulses conflict with the demands of the people who control the system that funds and distributes your work?

Thanks to the First Amendment, American writers needn't wonder if their work will provoke a visit from the secret police. They merely have to worry that our market-based, profit-oriented publishing industry will reject their words.

Literary Siberias

Their greatest peril is the danger that they'll be exiled to literary Siberias, like advertising agencies or college creative writing departments. But they're wrestling with the same issue when they come in conflict with the powers that run their industry.

They've developed strategies for dealing with it. I can detect traces of those strategies when I listen to Shostakovich's works. For example:

—Give them what they want, mixed in with the stuff you want to do. The "Classical Symphony" opens with a thumping, Beethovenish introduction, just like Stalin's culture czars thought a symphony should. But then Shostakovich proceeds to do something entirely different. To placate a publisher, American novelists may throw in a sex scene or a bit of violence, and then continue with the character development and social interactions that really interest them.

Readers may remember the sexual episodes in Mario Puzo's Godfather novels, but Puzo once told an interviewer he hated to invent sex scenes and only included them because "the public wants it." He was primarily interested, he said, in scenes that showed "the operation of power".

— Do something you want to do that gives them what they want. If you were planning to write a conventional, classically oriented symphony some day, why not do it now? If you think you might like to write a novel on a sensational crime-and-violence subject, write it first and build up an audience for less salable work.

The British novelist John Fowles followed that pattern when he achieved fame and fortune with The Collector—a best-selling first novel about a butterfly collector who kidnaps a young woman and imprisons her in his basement. Fowles's second novel, The Magus, was a longer, less sensational work that he had been writing for five years before he put it aside and wrote The Collector. It sold because every copy carried a blurb noting it had been written "by the author of The Collector."

Ironic parodies

— Insert the stuff they want, but do it in a way that makes fun of them. To Steve Cohen, the march at the end of the Classical Symphony is an "ironic parody." Other writers have cited the "sarcasm" in Shostakovich's work. The commissars applauded the bombast, and the cognoscenti smiled behind their hands.

— Concentrate on the kind of stuff they're asking for, but do other things that mean more to you on the side. Shostakovich went through a period in which he mostly composed chamber music for private and semi-private performance. American writers who prefer short stories may write novels, which are more lucrative, and produce short fiction when they can fit it into their schedules.

— Stay inside the limits but keep pushing against them. Russian composers and writers produced some of the world's greatest works under the censorship imposed by the czars and the commissars.

In the U.S., writers are always pushing against the taboos of commercial publishing and denouncing publishers for their timidity. When I first started reading adult novels in the 1950s, popular fiction ignored homosexuality and most sexual activity took place in the line breaks between scenes. Novelists like James Jones created literary scandals with books like From Here to Eternity, but they had their effect. Today, most of the subjects that publishers avoided 60 years ago have become standard elements in young adult novels.

Fooling Franco's censors

— Settle for less— or nothing, if you must. Under the Soviets, forbidden works circulated in secret, in typed copies and illicit photocopies. The writers weren't paid, but they reached readers. In the U.S., we have small-circulation niche publishers, bloggers and opportunities for uncensored self-publishing. Poetry doesn't sell, but we still have poets.

— Exploit the cracks in the system. In totalitarian countries, the censors sometimes goof. In Franco's Spain, as I noted a few months ago, writers discovered they could slip forbidden ideas past the censors if they wrote science fiction— a childish genre no one took seriously. (To read that column, click here.)

In the 1950s, the Soviet censors made a similar mistake when they decided Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was an attack on American culture. They distributed 500,000 copies before they realized the book expressed Bradbury's feelings about censorship and book burning in every place and time.

In market-based countries, writers can exploit a fundamental weakness in the publishing industry: Nobody in the business really knows what sells. Keep your manuscript circulating, and you may eventually find an editor who'll take a chance on it.

Rejecting Harry Potter

Harry Potter enthusiasts like to remind us that 20 publishers rejected the first book in J.K. Rowling's gold mine. That's actually a fairly common story. Editors are always rejecting manuscripts on the grounds that "that kind of thing doesn't sell"— and discovering that a competitor struck it rich by testing the rule.

Tom Clancy's first techno-thriller, The Hunt for Red October, went through the same dreary process before he sold it to the Naval Institute Press— a specialty publisher, associated with a military professional association, that normally publishes books on naval history and naval affairs. The book became a best seller and the publishing industry acquired a new genre.

The American system has its advantages, but American writers shouldn't be too confident they can beat it. They can pull off every ploy I've listed and still be stymied by the most diabolical obstacle that publishers thrust in the path of writers who are trying to fulfill their artistic destiny: money.

My agent, my enemy

I recently chatted with an anthology editor who had tried to commission a novelette by a famous novelist. The editor offered a substantial sum, by short fiction standards, but the author's agent rejected it with an unanswerable response.

"Why should my client write a 10,000-word novelette for $4,000, when, in the same amount of time, she can write a novel that sells for $4 million?"

There is no limit to the infamies of capitalism.♦


To read another review of the Orchestra's "inter-war concert" by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohn, click here.
To read a response, click here.