Things Written Randomly in Doubt Read online

  I wrote a long and rambling introduction for my book on language, In Praise of the Garrulous, which for some reason I was very pleased with. It was seventeen thousand words – about a third of the book again – and I wrote it in three or four days. Both my sister5 and Eric Hobsbawm politely advised me to drop it and replace it with something more succinct. I resisted only briefly, although it took a little longer to understand the enormity of the error I was about to make, not to speak of all that wasted paper. Hobsbawm added further advice: to write about why I wrote the book and to speak a little about myself. I took his advice in the right measure, I think, but if he were alive to read this book, he might think that I have now taken his advice further than he would have wanted. The essay too can encourage a writer to say too much that is personal, because personal experience provides part of our understanding of the world. It is, as nearly always, a matter of balance, but the best defences against getting that balance wrong are time and the advice of others.

  On the Soul

  The soul is out of fashion, except amongst fanatical believers who have, no doubt, a different idea of what it is. For them it is a rigid, unchanging thing, and for some of them a thing ordained and controlled by a God who marks our behaviour in schoolmasterly fashion and has his favourites – his elect. But “soul” is an essential word and like many of the really important words, it defies definition. Significant words say significant things or, to put it more clearly, they assume premises on which most people have already made a judgement. If you reject the word, you reject the premise. The premise that the word “soul” shouts out so loudly that it offends materialists and utilitarians is “Man does not live by bread alone.” It is a word hated by both worshippers of the market and humanists. The latter, for whom I have a certain sympathy, are worshippers of humanity alone, and I wonder if it’s good for anything to worship itself.

  “Ah but,” I hear some people say or sneer, “if the soul exists, where is it to be found? In your head, your heart or your big toe?” Consciousness must exist for everyone, and yet it has no place. We sense that it’s behind the eyes which are the windows through which we view the world.

  The soul also has no place. It is where we transcend the self, and by doing so become more alive. It is a rash person who opines too much on the nature of the soul, but I suffer from rashness, which hopefully is moderated by doubts. Or shall we say, everything in the following paragraphs is a metaphor for an imprudent hypothesis. We all have a soul, but if we don’t nurture it, it shrinks to the size of a pea. If it is nurtured, however, it grows and grows and grows. I don’t know exactly what that feels like, because mine is only the size of two and a half peas, and wanders mournfully around the area of my belly. It is not easy to nurture the soul in this society, and few of us are going to follow the path of Saint Francis and start talking to the animals.

  What evidence do I have for these ramblings? The evidence of more than sixty years on this planet and in that time I have frequented many more milieus than most people have. I have met sadists and friendly drunks, intellectuals and saints, the perennially enraged and the unshakably calm, the sad and the content, the selfish and the generous. Certainly, but aren’t all these behaviours the product of DNA, diet, education, culture, society and the list goes on? Of course, but wouldn’t all these people behave slightly differently – better perhaps – if they admitted another dimension to their being, if they engaged in some kind of moral exercise beyond all that jogging on the way to eternal youth, and sudoku, crossword puzzles and all that cerebral jogging on the way to clarity of mind?

  A large soul could be identified with spirituality, another term which is, I admit, a little unsatisfactory. It is a presence that can be felt, and I have noted it in some religious people and a surprising number of atheists who would deny its existence. Surprising? Perhaps not, given that nothing deflates the soul like smugness, and beyond a certain degree, religious faith (particularly in one religion) does lead to smugness.

  A soul does not have to be immortal, as a soul without a body seems more improbable than a body without a soul. An immortal soul would lead us back to the self.

  A mortal soul leads us to God. It is the way to shake off that bearded, patriarchal God who dictates certainties to his children. God, after all, has always been a reflection of human reality. Warriors had warrior gods. The fragmented classical world before Christianity had a god for every profession. Ancient Israel took a leap forward and produced a god for a whole people. From there came the God of all humanity in which Christians and Muslims believe. Some early twentieth-century Jews believed that Judaism had developed an even more universalist approach, because suffering had produced an enviable cosmopolitanism (term of denigration for the supposed Marxist Joseph Stalin and of admiration for the civilisation of the left). Religions last much longer than political movements, but they do so by changing incessantly. God in our own age will have to adapt again, relinquishing a little power and taking on more responsibility. Why should we care? Every concept has to evolve.

  Perhaps the soul is a fragment of God, and God is the totality of all human souls. When the last human being dies, God would then die with her: a blasphemous thought, but isn’t the moral world He represents a human one? It is also a Manichaean thought, and I like the idea that we all have to work to make the world a better place, starting modestly and generally remaining with our own most immediate human relationships.

  Liking an idea is not evidence of anything. God is, I suppose, the indefinable and unknowable absolute. We have to live with that, but the soul as something we are responsible for, and leading to a form of spirituality beyond the banal and self-indulgent, approximates to what many of us perceive to be a truth. It is a starting point, not a very stable one, I admit, but in this subject nothing is.

  On Publishing

  The book was the first object to be mass-produced. It had always been there, but in the mid-fifteenth century the printing press made it more accessible and literacy gradually increased. Only at the start of the sixteenth century did the magnitude of change it was bringing become clear. All the new kinds of writing that are familiar to us still were then invented. The book challenged the sacred or, to use the clumsy academic word, it desacralised the written word by spreading it like confetti, and it created the need for religious and political censorship. The book started as a liberating force and aroused the demons of repression, who would come and go over the following centuries, and still do.

  It is said that modern technology is changing the publishing world. In the sense that other technologies are squeezing the printed word out, that is true, but the publishing world has always been unstable, and has always gone through fallow periods. Many writers have made a good living from writing, but they are not usually the ones we remember. Some of those who had both talent and success, like Dickens, had difficult lives because the printing press also created the first celebrity culture – not on the modern scale, but dramatic nonetheless. Celebrity can so often destroy the celebrated person. It was a new form of fame, alienating the person from their own personality, which becomes a form of public property. If this is the case, the demotion of the written word might be a good thing for writers and publishers, as they will find a little peace in neglect, and will be able to get on with their job without all the clamour. On the other hand, the written word remains more dangerous and potentially subversive than many of the other arts that have a wider public.

  The technology that has been inimical to writing has been around for a long time, and started with television. Modern printing technology, however, has been good for publishing, and has made it possible for quite a few hand-to-mouth publishing enterprises to be set up and survive in the shadow of the big corporations. E-books have been damaging for independent booksellers, whom small publishers rely on greatly, but on the other hand they have brought in extra income. On the whole, printing technology has offset some of the disastrous consequences of getting rid of the Net Book Agreement
.

  We are quite possibly on the brink of a period of increased literary and artistic activity, because economic crises often produce such outcomes. When crisis makes people more curious, publishing can survive in the harshest environment. Insane commercialisation of the arts is more damaging than any authoritarian rule. The splendid and varied Soviet writing even during the darkest years of Stalinist repression demonstrates this truth. Different societies react in different ways, and literature varies much more from one country to another than painting, music and architecture. This is partly because countries usually have different languages, but also because literary culture and reading habits can differ dramatically even between nations with the same language. If we look at twentieth-century architecture, the most striking thing is not the variety but how each decade produced clearly defined global styles. People talk about Stalinist brutalism, but actually this architecture was produced more or less everywhere. Some great architecture was produced in the Stalinist era, and also in Fascist Italy, along with some appalling architecture often reflecting more closely the governing ideologies and the harshness of those times everywhere. If you look at literature, you encounter huge differences across the globe, and the quality and influence vary too.

  When I come to examine publishing, even in the light of my own experience of it over the last two decades, I am struck by the continuity. Naturally there are ups and downs, and the disappearance of the Net Book Agreement gradually destroyed most of the innovation in the British publishing industry and created lifeless corporations run by accountants and managers. But in the last five to ten years, a new generation of publishers has been created. It exists because there are people who are not motivated solely by economic self-interest, as the spirit of our times dictates, but by a passion for books. Of course many people make a great display of their “passion for books”, and we have all heard rhetoric devalue those words. We hear them from bureaucrats, broadcasters and academics who would not cross the road to look at a new idea; they would rather recycle old ones. Some of the best people in the book trade have no pretensions; they just get on with it because they quite simply love the humdrum mechanics of it.

  Publishing is a business, and people who run businesses can get bogged down in margins and income streams and bad debt and all the jargon of modern business culture. I will try to avoid such things which are dull for anyone who isn’t in the business, but ultimately independent publishers have to sell enough books to cover the costs of producing them and this is where they come up against the corporate world. Business being business, not everything in publishing is as it appears. An apparently thriving publishing business may rely on authors paying the costs of publication – a form of hidden vanity publishing with no risk to the businessman. It is a good business, but makes a bad publisher.

  Publishing is a craft, and people who engage in a craft can get bogged down in its minutiae – flaps, formats, covers, paper, fonts and all the wonderful things that make a book apart from the most important thing – the text. When I started publishing, I happily pumped out a series of books with ugly, indistinguishable covers, white paper that could blind you on a sunny day, and fonts that hadn’t kept up with the aesthetics of fonts – something I still don’t really understand. I was ignorant of these things and arrogant enough to leap into the business without any knowledge of them. I thought that people shouldn’t judge a book by its cover and it would be enough to get the editorial part right. But I was mistaken: publishing is a craft and every element is important, and no one person can have all the skills. This is the collaborative nature of publishing, and that’s why it becomes so compelling – that’s why you have to continue, even when you’re lurching from one crisis to another.

  The author is the central figure in publishing, certainly literary publishing. The publisher has an essential, auxiliary role, and should keep out of the limelight. Some authors produce work that needs a lot of editing; others only require a few typos to be corrected. But the author always remains at the centre, or should do. As in all walks of life, self-knowledge avoids crass errors, and authors who need editorial assistance are wise to stay with a publisher who knows how to work on their kind of book. The publisher takes the artwork, frames it and arranges for it to be hung on the wall. The artwork is the author’s, and the modern author has to seek the limelight to survive – something that does not come easily to all of them, including some of the best.

  I heard a publisher quoting another publisher, and clearly the truth contained in the quote was immediately understandable to all the publishers present: “A publisher should not expect an author to be grateful, but should be grateful when the author is.” Gratitude for the risks a publisher must run is an unnecessary plus, but I would add that the real but unspoken gratitude comes from the work itself. The published work thanks you every time you pick up a copy. Occasionally there will be a defect (hopefully a very small one) and then the book will reproach you. It is difficult to explain the pleasure that derives from publishing another person’s work.

  My first two books, both novels, were published by Luath Press in 2004 and 2005. When it came to my book on language, In Praise of the Garrulous, Luath was less convinced and this led to the establishment of Vagabond Voices.1 I had no idea about what I was getting into. Shortly afterwards I met Allan Massie at an event in Glasgow. I knew him and knew from others of the existence of an unpublished manuscript of his – a book called Surviving. He agreed to let me publish it. I remember very distinctly that during the editorial process, someone rang and, as I was talking on the phone, my eye rested on a particularly well-formed sentence. I felt pleasure passing through my brain as I realised that this sentence was being published because I was making it happen. Of course, I made all those mistakes with the look of the edition, and the book did reproach me many times, until I made up for it and brought it out in a new and much better edition. Now the book thanks me, and it’s once again a pleasure to pick up a copy and read a couple of pages. All books I publish are important to me, but there is another I have to mention for no particular reason other than its brilliance. It is Chris Dolan’s Redlegs, another great work of art and this time a great Scottish novel in terms of its vocabulary and content, but also entirely accessible to any reader of standard English.

  Anyone thinking of going into publishing should remember this. Don’t go in for the money, there’s little to be made and you will probably have to work at least part-time on something else. Don’t go in for the kudos, as you’ll be at the back of the queue behind wealthier and better networked people. Go in for the pleasure of making these very special objects that can engage a reader’s mind for several hours and give them, hopefully, a new experience. The more people come into the business to revitalise it, the better. Every book is an entirely different thing, so publishers are not in competition in the same way that toothpaste manufacturers are.2 If we could create more publishers here in Glasgow, we would all benefit. There would be a greater pool of skills, and the reading public would grow as well. I would like to see a sistema literario, el sistema for writing. Most human beings have enormous untapped creativity, which atrophies in this society governed by monetary profit. I proselytise and hand out information on publishing, particularly the importance of digital printers who have taken some of the huge risks out of small publishing. I’m not talking about print-on-demand, because you need to believe that a book is going to sell a reasonable number, as each well-edited book does require some considerable costs that are not going to be covered by tiny numbers of books printed on demand. This brings us to the publisher’s most important task: choosing the right books and, having chosen, putting as much care and energy into the process as possible. Very good books don’t always sell, but across the range enough sales can be generated to survive. Generally speaking, survival is the target.

  Can a writer be a publisher? It’s true that writers are generally absent-minded, disorganised and occasionally grumpy loners. None of these attributes
are appropriate for businessmen, but as I have suggested, publishing is not only a business, it is also a craft. Moreover there is a long history of self-publishing – going all the way back to Gutenberg no doubt. But we don’t have to go back that far. Let’s look at some of the more illustrious examples: Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. They are simply the pinnacle of self-publishers on top of many thousands of less successful attempts, but they represent very clearly the two principal models for self-publishing.

  Proust went down the more obvious route: he went along to a printer and paid him to print a number of books. This method has cluttered bedrooms and garages for as long as anyone can remember. In the sixteenth century they presumably had broken carts that were used as receptacles for unsold books. Its main problem is that no thought is given to how those books are going to be sold. Potential Proustreaders have been thin on the ground everywhere, I suspect, especially before his fame, so there would be little hope of selling them from a stall improvised in a market square. Nevertheless Proust proves that it can work. Italo Svevo tried this system twice, and tragically became so disillusioned that for at least two decades he abandoned writing, before starting on his masterpiece, La coscienza di Zeno, which only got published because his English teacher happened to be James Joyce and Joyce perceived its brilliance. It and those failed early books are never out of print. The lesson here is that luck is also very important, and you have to give luck a chance. You’ll never be published if you write and show your work to no one. Luck does not knock at your door. Luck comes mainly in the form of good and preferably wealthy parents. That is why so many authors, good and bad, come from middle-class backgrounds. Even working-class writers who win critical acclaim, like Gwyn Thomas and James Kelman, to some extent struggle financially all their professional lives. Both of these are great stylists and depict working-class life through highly innovative syntax and diction. They sell, but they should be selling more.