The World of Publishing in Balzac's Lost Illusions

Not long ago I had occasion to discuss Jack London's classic novel Martin Eden here, and in particular its brilliant conveyance of what it is actually like to try and make a living as a writer. I could not help but think of that aspect of the book as I read my way through Honore de Balzac's classic three-decker novel Lost Illusions (1837-1843), one of the narrative threads of which is Lucien Chardon's attempt to make a career for himself as a poet and novelist in the Bourbon Restoration era.

Of course, important differences exist between the works. Where London captured the experience of being a writer, Balzac, if affording some memorable bits regarding that end of things (not least the reaction of a callow young author to the discovery that publishers say they read their work when they haven't even looked at it), offered a broader and fuller vision of that business of which Martin was never in a position to see very much. In this it helps that Lucien is, in the relevant portion of the story, physically present at the heart of the French publishing world in Paris, and dealing with the leading figures in that world face to face on many an occasion, so that unlike Martin Lucien never need wonder if those to whom he would submit his manuscripts are actual people rather than some form rejection-letter generating piece of machinery. The result is an unequaled treatment of "the realities of the craft, the practical difficulties of the trade," as effective as it is because of its attentiveness to the "social machinery at work" "behind the scenes in the theatre of literature," which the newcomer to this world has to "learn to see by bumping against the wheels and bruising [himself] against the shafts, and chains" of that machinery.

As Lucien learns from the publishers' own mouths publishers are not in the business for "amusement," and certainly no "stepping-stone to future fame" for aspiring authors like Lucien, but "speculators in literature" who are out "to make money"--"the monument reared with your life-blood . . . simply a good or a bad speculation for a publisher" that is only "so much capital to risk." And due to the necessities of "bring[ing] out a name and . . . induc[ing] the public to take up an author and his book" the mediocrity, or worse than mediocrity, who nonetheless has a "reputation" that can be "bought ready-made," however expensively, is a better risk than even an obviously brilliant unknown asking for a pittance, "[t]he manuscripts for which [such] give a hundred thousand francs pay[ing] better than work by an unknown author who asks six hundred." (After all, as increasingly becomes apparent to Lucien and those who follow him on his journey, the broad public sees "success," but not what alone permits it to happen--"the preparations, ugly as they always are," like "the claqueurs hired to applaud"--the good review, the favorable "buzz," all up for sale, and their purchase an ugly necessity.)

Even early on Lucien can only ask one of these men "how could a man publish his first book at all?" when that is the case--to which the man lecturing him sneers that "That is not my affair." The answer is that one has to depend on chance, which has the most depressing of implications for those in whose lives "chance plays no part," which is no random thing, for "there are no chances except for men with a very wide circle of acquaintance; chances of success of every kind increase with the number of your connections; and, therefore, in this sense also the chances are in favor of the big battalions"--those who know the rich and powerful and highly placed because they are themselves rich and powerful and highly placed; those who already have "distinguished names" who can make names for themselves, those who already have money who can hope to make (more) money in this line; so that the author who is not of the elite, who hopes to make a name and a living as an author on the basis of only their talent and work--and certainly to get rich and famous by being an author rather than becoming an author by being rich and famous--faces a pretty bleak prospect.

Moreover, the intelligent reader cannot take comfort in the thought that the system will at least permit "cream to rise" if it can get past these (gigantic, for most virtually invincible) barriers, for the author "of talent rises above the level of ordinary heads," and only comes to be appreciated with time, too long for the speculators, "dealers in printed paper" who "do do not care to take real literature, books that call for the high praise that comes slowly," and "would sooner take the rubbish that goes off in a fortnight than a masterpiece which requires time to sell." (Indeed, lest one imagine that the unsalability of poetry is a latterday phenomenon, young Lucien personally hears the fact declared by one of those publishers himself: anyone who comes into his establishment and says that they bring him a work of poetry one to be "show[n] . . . the door at once," for "Verses mean reverses in the booktrade.")

If Balzac could seem hard on publishers Balzac is just as hard on authors--"the most brutal bookseller in the trade . . . not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day," terrified as they are of a "possible rival," no, no help likely to come from this direction either. Nor, even, can one hope for much solace from their nearest and dearest, for just as "the world at large declines to believe in any man's superior intellect until he has achieved some signal success," it is the case that"[i]n the home circle, as in the world without, success is a necessity"--family, by whom "[a] man with a career before him is never understood," and indeed second to none in the severity of their judgment on a lack of "success," looking at their relation who has not "made it" as not merely someone who perhaps did not get their chance, but as one who had been weighed and measured and found wanting, the world right in its assessment and their dear one wrong, a failure who deserved to be so. Amid all that it is far less likely that the caterpillar will become a butterfly, so to speak, than that the "life is crushed out of the grubs before they reach the butterfly stage"--their efforts wasted, their potentials unrealized, and very likely their souls damaged or even destroyed, even if they do happen to make it. ("Perhaps it is impossible to attain to success until the heart is seared and callous in every most sensitive spot," Lucien realizes in a moment of clarity.) Indeed, Lucien's aspirations to a career as a poet are crushed out so forcefully so early on that he opts to makes his career as part of the "machinery" instead. ("Unconsciously he gave up the idea of winning fame in literature, for it seemed easier to gain success" as a hack journalist--and alas discovered the way here, too, so treacherous that he ended up sitting before his sister defeated, setting the stage for even worse to come. Much, much worse.)

Of course, it is a truism today that publishing is a business--but most who say this do so in brushing off some other person's painful experience, excusing the brutality with which they have been treated and so participating in it, worsening it, and all that usually without understanding what it means for publishing to actually be a business. By contrast it would be a very stupid reader indeed who came away from having read all of Lost Illusions without "getting it" (that publishing is a capitalist enterprise to publishers and only that, regardless of what they, their spokespersons and their sycophants in the media say; that publishers have no interest in cultivating new authors; that for an "ordinary" person however talented the way in is nearly impossible, critical acclaim another commodity to be purchased, and not even their loved ones likely to support them in what is almost certain to be a futile struggle, etc., etc., etc.). For the book gives us so much truth so plainly and forcefully that if those who ordinarily give the public their information about such things ever cracked open a book rather than just talking about them they would denounce it in a rage exceeded only by their stupidity, just as they denounce anyone who would speak any of this book's truths in public today, the same way the conventional denounce anyone who challenges the propaganda for the world as one great big meritocracy where talent and hard work pay off and those who have not done well have no one to blame but themselves. Which, I suppose, makes it not such a bad thing that the self-important but actually ever less important opinion-makers of such type never do crack open a book, let alone any book that is really worth reading.