A Cerfit of Riches
PUBLISHING
(SEE COVER) And now, panel, for the mystery guest. Masks in place? Good. He is salaried. He works for a profit-making organization. He deals in a product. It is smaller than a breadbox. On the side, he is a TV personality, a lecturer, and a writer of sorts. Also a show-biz nut, a pal of stars, a party trooper and a shameless punster. But he cleverly directs all these other activities toward the promotion of his product, the reward for which would fill a large breadbox with something like $375,000 a year.
Actually, there is no mystery here. Bennett Alfred Cerf, 68, is an open book. Board chairman of Random House, he is the nation's best-known book publisher--better known than many of the authors he serves. He is also perpetrator of a syndicated joke column and author of 21 joke and riddle books that have sold more than 5,000,000 copies, and a longtime panelist on that somewhat tiresome but seemingly indestructible TV parlor game, What's My Line? Wherever he goes, autograph hounds bark at his heels. Little ol|i ladies leap out of dark corners to foist "upon him shopping bags stuffed with autobiography. Cerf is the foist man in the world to welcome them (as he would put it). For who knows but that the next dingaling to come along will be the author of a bestseller?
That, after all, is Cerf's line. In all its divisions, Random House, publishes books for adults and books for children, writers living (Capote) and dead (Thu-cydides), textbooks, dictionaries and paperbacks. Its list of authors includes William Faulkner and W. H. Auden,
James Joyce and Richard Condon, John O'Hara and James Michener, Philip Roth, Budd Schulberg, Saul Bellow, Robert Penn Warren. In 1960, when Cerf acquired the house of Knopf, the names of Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Hersey and John Updike joined the parade. Cerf's biggest book of the year is the 2,059-page Random House Dictionary of the English Language, which took a decade and $3,000,000 to put together. Amazingly, for a reference book, it has been on the bestseller list for six weeks, and the first printing of 325,000 has already been sold out. Bigger than a breadbox, too.
The Print Explosion. The success of the Dictionary is indicative of the prosperity--and of the desire for education and information--that has helped transform the relatively fusty little American book business into a major industry. Within Cerf's own professional lifetime, which spans four decades, U.S. book publishing has grown nearly 600%. In just nine years, 1952-61, business increased 150%, and since then has doubled again. This year, alone, Americans will have spent $2.5 billion for 2.2 billion books, from 350 paperback mysteries and $2 third-grade geographies to $200 encyclopaedias.
Part of this print explosion can be accounted for by the country's population growth and the swelling school enrollment. But these factors alone do not explain the phenomenon. Not only are-more people buying books; more people are buying more books. They are stacked in supermarkets, racked in discount houses, packed in drugstores. The market is manic. Retail outlets now number about 120,000, and still they cannot stock the 190,000 titles in hard and soft cover that are currently in print, let alone the 28,000 additional titles that sprout every year.
This tropical growth was stimulated by the success of mail-order merchandising and the paperback revolution. Even today, perhaps only 2% of the population ever sets foot in a conventional bookstore--and there are only about 1,500 of those. But the U.S. letter-carrier has become the middleman in an enterprise that accounts today for about 15% of the book volume. All told, mail-order houses and book clubs, such as TIME-LIFE Books and the Reader's Digest Book Club, deliver $181 million worth of volumes to the buyers' doors every year. The market has bred a host of specialty clubs for teenagers, preteens, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, teachers, civil engineers, gamblers, photographers, gardeners, and salesmen.
Paperbacks, too, are blitzing the populace. They are spinning off the presses at the rate of a million a day, from Spock (18,000,000 total sales) to Erie Stanley Gardner (over 150,000,000).
As if this were not enough to make publishers blush from what the Random House chairman might call a cerfit of riches, the U.S. Government has stepped in to boost business even higher. Over the next five years, the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 will provide $500 million to school libraries for the purchase of printed materials and trade books--the term that differentiates general books from texts and reference works.
Translated into human terms, these statistics testify to Americans' widening interests and expanding consciousness. Despite some prophets who consider the printed volume doomed in this age of instant communication, books are not only being read; in many cases they are more powerful weapons than ever. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring awakened the world to the dangers of the improper uses of insecticides and was a work of high literary quality as well. Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any..Speed was the spark plug that started major safety reforms in the automobile industry. Particularly among the young, paperbacks are used in a direct, intimate way--passages underlined, pages torn out according to need. That was unheard of a couple of generations ago, when books were still relatively scarce and semi-sacred objects.
Uncertain Domain. The map of the U.S. publishing world is divided into three unequal sectors. The largest consists of text-and reference books--chiefly encyclopaedias--which account for 50% of book sales and most of the industry's profits. Some firms devote themselves largely to this field. Qrqwell-Collier & Macmillan, one of the giants, does an annual business of $142 million. The second sector, where profits are just as reliable, is religious publishing; the Bible steadily sells 30 million copies a year.
Trade books make up the third and most uncertain domain of the publishing landscape. Still, 250-odd firms are now in this field--perhaps because it offers by far the most intellectual excitement, perhaps because it is so easy to enter. Anyone with a manuscript and a few thousand dollars can do it. In 1951, the Witkower Press, a one-man, one-book publishing house in Hartford, Conn., brought out Arthritis and Common Sense, and has since sold over 250,000 copies.
Most trade publishers are of modest size. Grossman Publishers, for instance, tackled the market last year with only 13 titles, five in paperback. New Directions, another Lilliputian publisher, brought out 16. Even an established firm such as Farrar, Straus & Giroux limits its production to about 75 adult titles a year, including the books of Robert Lowell and Bernard Malamud, who prefer their publisher to be small, cozy and literary.
Dependable Losers. The major houses produce titles in the hundreds; their bosses can scarcely remember the authors' names, let alone find time to read their books. McGraw-Hill turned out 662 last year, Doubleday & Co. 650, Harper & Row 633, Prentice-Hall 449, Holt, Rinehart & Winston 345 and Random House 421. They all print text-and reference books, as well as children's books, which are dependable moneymakers. Their profitable textbook and paperback operations enable them to gamble on adult trade books--which as a rule lose money. Random House President Robert Bernstein estimates that 60% of adult trade books end up in the red, another 36% break even, and only 4% turn a decent profit.
Finding that 4% is like betting on a two-year-old maiden race. Two publishers turned down the manuscript of a Gilmanton, N.H., housewife named Grace Metalious before Publisher Julian Messner gambled $1,500 on it in 1950.
Total sales to date: 10 million copies, an alltime record for U.S. fiction. In 1945, a Random House editor read A Lion Is in the Streets, by Adria Langley. He rejected it, reporting that "40 pages of this magnolia-laden junk was all I could stand." Lion, published later by Whittlesey House, sold 250,000 copies. A more recent example is the history of Attorney Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment, a shotgun attack on the Warren Commission. "We commissioned him to write it," says Publisher Barney Rosset of Grove Press, which is known chiefly for its back list of classic and not-so-classic pornography. "But he kept stalling, so I finally said, 'If you don't deliver it on time, don't deliver it at all.' " Lane did not deliver. He took his book to the New American Library, which rejected it as uncommercial. It was finally published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, has been on the bestseller lists for 14 weeks.
Slow Route. Bestsellers are about as rare as the publisher's ability to pick them. Most trade books still get printed in runs of 5,000 copies or under, sell a few thousand copies over a period of three months, and then quietly die. The surplus is remaindered--sent back to the publisher, who is lucky to get 300 a copy from the remainder bookstores, which deal in such wrong guesses. Multiplied many times over, this is the true picture of the adult book business which, except for the appearance of the paperback, has not changed its ways appreciably in 50 years.
The process of bringing a book to market is still singularly old-fashioned and slow. Ten months, and often more, elapse before the accepted manuscript arrives, printed and bound, on the bookstore shelf. Delays menace every step of the route; there is no quick way, for instance, to edit a lengthy manuscript and to check and recheck the galley proofs for printer's errors. A book must wait its turn at hard-pressed printing plants, like Kingsport Press in Tennessee, one of the largest in the U.S. The sheer bulk of books retards their progress; jobbers have only so much storage, and can be poky about emptying their warehouses to make room for new consignments. To meet some topical demand, however, a paperback publisher can get a book on the racks within weeks.
Despite these cumbersome methods and precarious economies, this is an era of unprecedented affluence for writers. A sale of 5,000 hard-cover copies at $5.95 will net the author only $2,975, at the royalty rate of 10% ; the percentage rises with book sales. This is not a great deal for a year or two of work. But paperback income--of which the author's share is 50% or more--can often amount to $20,000 even for a modest seller. And with successful books and name authors, five and six figures are common. Author James Jones got $800,000 against the paperback sales of three of his novels--none of them written at the time. Fawcett advanced Irving Wallace $325,000 after looking at his two-page outline of The Man.
Some bookmen feel that all that lettuce is not good for writers--besides being a lot of trouble for publishers. "Novelists are subsidized," says President Edward E. Booher of McGraw-Hill. "My trade editors have to run around constantly just to keep up with the big writers--getting big movie deals, big paperback deals. We pay them big money, and then we don't know whether their books are going to sell."
Hard to Turn Down. "Every publisher," says Bennett Cerf, "thinks of himself as an idealist, although the idealism is in the back of his head." Cerf tries to fulfill his idealistic responsibility "by publishing poetry, belles-lettres, and first novels you know won't sell a copy. We do two or three of those a year." Nevertheless, Cerf concedes that "it's awfully hard to turn down a book that's going to make money. If I thought nobody else was going to publish it, it wouldn't matter. But the thought that if I don't, somebody else will--I can't stand that. Besides, the real excitement is having somebody new come along, helping him get famous and watching him move to Hollywood and start calling me a son of a bitch."
A persistent snow of manuscripts descends on Random House's midtown Manhattan headquarters--one wing of a Florentine stone mansion, shared with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. The manuscripts usually come from agents--grey cartons from William Morris, orange from Curtis Brown. It is here that the vagaries of book publishing can get stickier than a freshly glued spine at a book bindery. Established authors are apt to be stubborn, demanding, supersensitive, uneven in their production, and extremely difficult to hold on to. For example, Cerf did not want to publish Author Robert Crichton's second book, Rascal and the Road; he was convinced that it would not sell. Crichton insisted. Cerf published it, and sure enough, the book failed. Convinced that Random House had not done right by him--every author chronically suspects that his publisher doesn't spend enough money advertising his book--Crichton took his next novel to Simon & Schuster. The Secret of Santa Vittoria flipped right onto the bestseller list, is No. 1 this week.
On the other hand, Cerf was so positive that Stanley Wolpert's Nine Hours to Rama, a novel based on the assassination of Gandhi, would be a 1962 winner that he boosted the ad budget from $10,000 to nearly $30,000. It sold a disappointing 12,000 copies.
Adjust the Buttons. One of Cerf's big assets is a group of exceedingly competent editors. Albert Erskine Jr., 55, was Faulkner's editor, now handles John O'Hara and James Michener. Jason Epstein, 38, is in charge of W. H. Auden and Norman O. Brown. Epstein surveys his duties with cynical modesty. "You're just a valet," he says. "The suit comes in and you adjust the buttons. Any role you play is accidental. You were at the right place at the right time." But most authors consider the editorial function a little more important than that. In a left-handed compliment, Critic Leslie Fiedler once described the typical book editor as "an odd blend of schoolmarm and Jewish mother."
Both Erskine and Epstein, as well as most of the 22-man editorial staff, get complete freedom from Cerf in the choice of titles that Random House buys and in their dealings with authors. Cerf takes charge of important advertising campaigns--he even writes a few ads himself--and usually directs all important financial negotiations for his top authors. "In one month," he said recently, "I sold the paperback rights on three books for $1.7 million--Michen-er's The Source for $700,000, Capote's In Cold Blood for $500,000, and Kathleen Winsor's Wanderers East, Wanderers West for $500,000. Then a month later I sold O'Hara's The Lockwood Concern for another half-million."
Now and then, Cerf is called in to iron things out when editor-writer relations get difficult. He cajoled Jerome Weidman into rewriting a badly tooled draft of his forthcoming book, Other People's Money. Cerf also thought up the title for the book, as he did for Mac Hyman's No Time for Sergeants, William Brinkley's Don't Go Near the Wa ter, and Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate.
A Lot of Love. When he is not playing adman, businessman, referee and editor, Cerf devotes a good part of his time to keeping his authors happy. Fortunately, he enjoys it, even when his high-strung writers curl into knots. He likes to tell about the time that Sinclair Lewis spent a night at the Cerf apartment. "He had dinner," Cerf recalls, "and we were all sitting at the table. Then Bill Faulkner called up and said he was in town. I told Lewis and asked him, could Bill come over? Lewis said, 'Certainly not. This is my night!' Then at 9:30, Lewis went to bed. At 10:30, he shouted downstairs, 'Bennett!' I answered him, and he said, 'I just wanted to see if you sneaked out to see Faulkner.' '
Today, Cerf puts much effort into the care and feeding of his favorite author, John O'Hara. Whenever O'Hara telephones him from his Princeton, N.J., home and says, "Hello, Cerfie," Bennett knows that he has some kind of complaint. Often O'Hara calls only to ask Cerf to get him a hotel room. Cerf always complies, and also makes certain that the Random House parking lot will save a spot for O'Hara's Rolls-Royce. O'Hara is equally fond of Cerf. "He just needs a lot of love," says he. Besides, "85% of the time he knows how to handle me, and 85% of the time I know how to handle him too. He knows I'm in the stock market, and every once in a while he calls me and says. 'You see that goddam market today?' " Most important, adds O'Hara, "he knows that when I put something down on paper, it's right. He has sense enough to let me alone."
Mr. Oppernockety. From all indications, Cerf runs a happy shop as well as a contented stable. "They're all prima donnas," he chortles. "We're a firm of prima donnas!" When he tells a visitor that Jason Epstein is "the cross I have to bear," Epstein retorts, "and Bennett is the bear I have to cross." Corporation Secretary Charles A. Wimpfheimer, 38, gets in on the fun now and then. He once installed a parking meter in Cerf's private washroom, probably because Cerf himself started the local bathroom jokes by placing two copies of Lindbergh's autobiography side by side over the toilet, thus: We We.
Most of Cerf's puns and gags are better than bathroom humor--but not much. He tells about the fellow named Kissinger who had his name changed so many times that soon all his friends were asking "I wonder who's Kissinger now?" And about the piano tuner named Oppernockety, who never returns to fix a bad job because Oppernockety only tunes once. Or the Indian chief who was delighted to learn that his two youngsters had been invited to join the yacht club; the chief had always wanted to see his red sons in the sail set. Or the time that Cerf found his little boy about to tear up a copy of The
Wisdom of India; he retrieved it easily --it was like taking Gandhi from a baby.
Some of Cerfs competitors readily suggest that he is a creature of his own publicity, a quipster who has parlayed his way into the publishing pantheon through the good offices of television and Joe Miller's joke book. "Bennett," says one fellow publisher, "is not an intellectual. He's not a literary man. He's an entrepreneur, an impresario." But that is only the surface of Cerf. Explains Epstein: "Bennett runs Random House as a conservative branch of show business. The company is vulgar to a degree. But what makes the difference with Bennett is how important he feels it is to have Philip Roth and William Styron on the list. Some other publisher would know a thousand ways to get rich without having one author like that. Bennett Cerf doesn't."
"I Was Delirious!" Cerf started out in an era when big publishers were still considered cultural rather than corporate figures. He was born in Manhattan, the only child of well-off Jewish parents whose ancestors came from France. His father, Gustave, was a successful lithographer who designed ketchup-bottle labels and cigarette cartons, and his mother had a comfortable income from her family's wholesale tobacco business. Neither of these pursuits entranced young Bennett at all. Nor did a literary career. By the time he graduated from Columbia in 1919 with a B.A. degree in journalism and a Phi Beta Kappa key, his mother had died, leaving him $100,000. With nothing better in mind, "Beans," as Cerf was known in those days, joined his uncle's brokerage house as a clerk.
Cerf endured that job for three years, while all around him New York was bursting with bright, talented people; his friends and former classmates were men such as Composers Howard Dietz, Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers. The theater and Tin Pan Alley were his passions. Says Donald Klopfer, 64, Cerfs Columbia classmate and now vice chairman of the Random House board of directors: "Bennett was an extraordinarily handsome young man. It was murderous. He had a Cadillac--what more did you need?--and his dark, soulful eyes were even more soulful because he couldn't see out of them. They were magnified by the glasses he'd always worn."
Cerf was itching to get out of Wall Street, and at length, in 1923, he found the door. Another classmate, Richard L. Simon, had been working for the distinguished publishing firm of Boni & Liveright, and now he was planning to start his own house with Max Schuster. When Cerf showed interest in replacing him, Simon arranged for Cerf to meet Horace Liveright for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, Scotch-and-watering place for the famous authors and wits of the day. "There," he says, "were Robert Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Dorothy Parker--all of them! Sitting at the Round Table! I was delirious! In the middle of the lunch, I called Wall Street and told them I was never coming back!"
Birth of a House. Liveright, who had a penchant for backing Broadway flops, needed cash, so he sold Cerf a vice-presidency for $25,000. "My first job," remembers Cerf, still awestruck, "was to take Theodore Dreiser to a ball game. Theodore Dreiser! Those were the '20s! Things were popping, and publishing was popping too! Oh God, it was a glamorous place!"
By 1925, Liveright, still strapped, was ready to unload his Modern Library, a shelf of 950 reprint classics whose only liability was a distinct and unpleasant odor emanating from the binding glue. Cerf rounded up Donald Klopfer, put the arm on his Wall Street uncle, and snapped up the Modern Library, smell and all, for $200,000. Within three years, Klopfer and Cerf, having retired their debts, decided to branch out by publishing a few new books at random. Thus was Random House born.
Seized at Customs. Brash, even impudent, Cerf barreled out to sign up the best authors he could find. With the Depression whittling away at Liveright, other publishers were swooping down on the agents who represented two of Liveright's most famous authors, Eugene O='Neill and Robinson Jeffers. While they haggled, Cerf piled into "a rickety plane," flew to Sea Island, Ga., and signed up O'Neill. Ah, Wilderness! soon became the first major Random House book. "And then," says Cerf brightly, "I took a train to Carmel, Calif., and signed up Jeffers." Shortly after that he went to England and called upon George Bernard Shaw, who had always refused to let his plays be included in anthologies. When Cerf cannily ob served that he was publishing O'Neill, Shaw relented, agreed to let Cerf have Saint Joan, provided that "you pay me twice as much as you pay O'Neill." Cerf gladly obliged.
In 1932, he sailed for Europe to see James Joyce, whose Ulysses had stunned the literary world with its brilliant stream-of-consciousness technique. The book was also studded with four-letter words and some swinging sex scenes, and had been barred from the U.S. After talking with Joyce, Cerf brought back a copy, which was promptly seized at customs. With Attorney Morris Ernst, Cerf took the Ulysses case to court. The now famous decision by Judge John M. Woolsey not only gave Cerf--and Joyce --an impressive victory, but it landed a staggering blow against censorship. For better or worse, it also eventually led to today's license to publish anything, including hard-core pornography that makes Ulysses seem about as shocking as Uncle Wiggily.
Pursuit. In 19^5^ Cerf married Actress Sylvia Sidney. The marriage lasted all of six months. "I fell hopelessly in love," he explains. "It was a short and tempestuous affair. It was very good for me--took some of the arrogance out of me." Four years later, he met Phyllis Fraser, a sometime actress and columnist. As Cerf tells it, New Yorker Magazine Editor Harold Ross "called one day and told me Ginger Rogers had brought 'her goddam kid cousin' out to his house and that I had to come out and 'take care of her goddam kid cousin.' " Cerf agreed to go--after extracting a promise of three New Yorker reviews of Random House books.
Phyllis and Bennett were married a year later in a ceremony conducted by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. They have two sons: Chris, 25, who is now an editor at Random House, and Jonathan, 19, a junior at Harvard, who has recently begun making rock 'n' roll records with a couple of friends. Phyllis once wrote a magazine article called Living with Bennett Cerf Is No Joke, and occasionally she declares Laugh Day: no matter what Bennett does or says, she and the boys break into hysterical laughter. It is their way of wreaking revenge for having had to play captive audience to his puns.
But the Cerfs enjoy their tireless pursuit of the full life. The chase begins either at their 42-acre country home in Mt. Kisco (near New York City) or their East 62nd Street Manhattan town house, from which Cerf often strolls to his office. Says his wife, an editor in the children's department at Random House: "Walking with Bennett is like walking with a dog. Only with him it's stopping at bookstores instead of fire hydrants." After business hours, the Cerfs usually give a dinner party or go out to one. "It is Bennett's theory," Phyllis once said, "that if you are going to have two people for dinner you might as well have 40."
On a recent Sunday evening, after drinks at home with Mia and Frank
Sinatra and House Guest Claudette Colbert, Bennett left for What's My Line?, later met the Sinatras, the Salvador Dalis and the Adolph Greens at the St. Regis Hotel. Next night, he took Colbert to a Broadway opening (Phyllis was out of town lecturing to educators in Florida), then dropped in at the "21" Club for an after-theater drink and a little hobnobbing with Barry Goldwater, who is preparing a volume of photographs for Random House, and Gina Lollobrigida, who had appeared on What's My Line?
On the following day he was lecturing (fee: $1,500) in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., before the Metropolitan Dinner Club. "I'm not going to be very serious tonight about world affairs," he began.
"I don't know any more about Viet Nam than President Johnson does." The next 70 minutes were sprinkled with plugs for Random House authors and Random House books.
Book Factories. The industry that Cerf represents, for all its lingering, old-fashioned ways, is in the early stages of a thoroughgoing transformation. More and more publishers are combining with electronics companies to find new ways to keep up with the information explosion and fashion new materials for educational use. Radio Corp. of America, for example, recently bought Random House (Cerf and his staff retain full editorial control, however). RCA presumably plans to utilize Cerf's textbook division for electronics developments in education.
Nobody yet knows how mergers of this kind will affect trade-book publishing, though many bookmen are pessimistic. Roger Straus, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, envisions huge factories that will turn out books like sausages. Big publishers "are through as serious influences in literature," he says. William Jovanovitch of Harcourt, Brace disagrees. He believes, with many other experts, that television, for instance, "has increased the use of books by contributing to an ambiance of information, art and instruction. Greater assimilation of information means greater literacy, and greater literacy means greater use of the language. And that's good for us."
But greater use of the language does not necessarily enhance the present quality and future prospects of American literature. Few of the approximately 2,500 novels that are produced every year are really worth reading. And today the complaint is no longer that good or experimental work goes unpublished--on the contrary. "It's too easy to get published today," complains John O'Hara. "People get to be writers before they are writers."
Non-Books & Osmosis. There are many first-rate novelists at work today whose output is read widely. O'Hara's books invariably become bestsellers. Bernard Malamud's The Fixer is sailing along profitably. Cheever, Updike, Steinbeck, Mailer, Bellow, Styron, all have ready audiences as well, despite the torrents of trash that flow off the presses alongside their work. Truman Capote insists: "There are more gifted writers in this country now than there have ever been before."
Probably--but among the gifted, where are the truly distinctive voices, let alone the great ones? Fiction writing--and reading--has declined over the years. Last year, $210,000 in fiction prizes went begging for want of suitable entries. "When I entered the business," says Cerf, "fiction outsold nonfiction five to one. Today the situation is exactly reversed."
It is information and not fiction that is at the center of today's publishing. Books are often commissioned like magazine articles. The nonbook flourishes more than ever, sometimes recognizable by its title: Murray The K Tells It Like It Is, Baby; How to Make Yourself Miserable; The Red Chinese Air Force Exercise and Diet Book (a spoof). Human Sexual Response, a technical laboratory discussion, was never meant for the general reader, but it has been on the bestseller lists for 31 weeks on the strength of its title and clinical content. Typically, it has spawned two illegitimate children, What You Should Know About Human Sexual Response and An Analysis of Human Sexual Response, both mere condensations of the original, both non-books.
How many books among those sold are actually read? "It's almost a process of osmosis," according to President Paul R. Andrews of Prentice-Hall, "as if the book becomes a part of you just by your act of buying it." This is sometimes true even of novels. John Earth's labyrinthine allegory, Giles Goat-Boy, unexpectedly made the bestseller list, but the number of people who really read their way through its 710 pages not even WESCAC, the story's omnipotent computer, could determine.
Jason Epstein suggests that "people don't look to novels for what they used to. When I was in college, you looked at them for the truth. That transcendental phase is out now. I think perhaps novels succeeded too well--they told all they could. People look elsewhere for what they once got from novels--it may be to social writing or maybe TV, depending on who they are."
In his book Waiting for the End, Leslie Fiedler argues that the novel may simply disappear. If so, it will be "first, because the artistic faith that sustained its writers is dead, and second, because the audience need that it was invented to satisfy is being better satisfied otherwise"--by pornography and television, the movies and other forms of pop entertainment, for instance.
The Great Bunch. Cerf agrees that there is a malaise in fiction today. "Novelists are still saying things," he declares, "but they are no longer saying them exclusively. To say anything startlingly new in a novel is difficult--it's being said so often by real life, and in the world of reporting and commentary. Most novels today represent the fears rather than the hopes of man. Maybe that's one trouble: the mood is too pessimistic. But it's a gloomy world. We're not in a happy period of our history."
And yet Cerf is keenly, folksily optimistic. He feels that there are positive forces at work too. "The trash market is always with us, but the thrill of dirty words and explicit sex episodes is a very evanescent one, and as the taboos drop, it is already beginning to pall. Today's writers are a great bunch. Out of that group will emerge the next Hemingway and Faulkner. You can't rush it."
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