A Novel Marketplace. Evan Brier
Bowles, according to Life, “hit a financial jackpot” with The Sheltering Sky (“Four New Writers” 35). By the time the novel left the best-seller list, it had sold nearly 40,000 copies, at a time when the average debut novel sold 2,000. In 1951, Signet published a paperback version that sold 200,000 copies in a year (Sawyer-Lauçanno 287).
This success needs to be contextualized in a few ways. First, accounting for the sales of a novel, particularly a first novel by an unknown author, is tricky. Publishers cannot reliably predict which of their products will sell. For this reason, they overproduce, publishing more books than they know the market can support, assuming that of ten titles, one or two will sell well. This is publishing’s version of the Pareto-Zipf distribution, or the 80/20 rule, according to which “20 percent of products account for 80 percent of revenues” (Anderson 130–31). Once the publishing house gets an indication that a book is selling, it can throw its promotional muscle behind it in an attempt to ratchet sales upward and, if the system works right, the sales of that book subsidize the others that failed to sell.34 It is a mistake to draw firm conclusions about the literary world from the sales of a single novel.
In addition, in the context of the postwar explosion of mass culture, it is worthwhile to remember just how small 40,000 purchases really is. That The Sheltering Sky was a best seller means simply that it sold a lot of books relative to the sales of others and it attained enough success to be profitable because the production of books is relatively inexpensive. Bowles’s association with the William Morris Agency exemplifies the links between the literary and mass-culture fields, but even as these links grew the readership for a typical best seller would be dwarfed by the audience for a television show; only in the rarest of cases would a book achieve what might be called “mass” success. The novel’s success, however, is of interest as an example of the way disavowals of the market could be commercially exploited. The relative success of The Sheltering Sky suggests that, contrary to the hand-wringing over the emergence of mass culture in the 1950s, the conditions that produced the emergence of mass culture were not antithetical to an increase in the number of readers or the survival of serious fiction; that hand-wringing—a significant aspect of both the promotion of the novel and the novel itself—would prove a good way to reach the book-buying audience.
Laughlin once remarked, “Advertising is useless for highbrow literary books, a waste of money. Word of mouth is what sells books, and it is reviews that get word of mouth started” (“History” 224).35 But when the reviewer is a friend of both the publisher and the author and functions as the de facto agent for both, the line between advertising and reviewing becomes blurred. (In fact, the text of New Directions’ paid advertisements for Bowles’s novel draws on Williams’s review.) Williams, moreover, trades on his literary fame to promote his friend’s novel; Gore Vidal writes that Williams “wanted to be helpful to The Sheltering Sky so he asked the New York Times to let him review it” (Point 238).36 At the time of the review, A Streetcar Named Desire had only recently completed a two-year run on Broadway. An assessment of the success of The Sheltering Sky and of the role that the review played must begin with Williams’s own literary celebrity.
The review serves as an unusually clear window onto the way the art novel could be promoted in a commercial context: advertising the author’s “disinterestedness,” his disavowal of audience. At the heart of the review is an idea about art in the age of mass culture and corporate capitalism; the idea is that artists and art are becoming rare because career demands and career possibilities interfere with the aspiring artist’s development. Williams begins his review by generalizing about the career of the American writer: “In America the career almost invariably becomes an obsession. The ‘get-ahead’ principle, carried to such extremes, inspires our writers to enormous efforts. A new book must come out every year…. I think that this stems from a misconception of what it means to be a writer or any kind of creative artist. They feel it is something to adopt in the place of actual living, without understanding that art is a byproduct of existence” (“Allegory” 7).
The implication is that whatever writers produce in an age of intense career pressures and career opportunities, it is not art. Williams’s notion that the career precludes the production of genuine art combines the discourse of Huyssen’s “great divide” (the idea of a “categorical distinction between high art and mass culture” [Huyssen viii]), most famously promulgated by Macdonald, Greenberg, and Horkheimer and Adorno, with ideas later famously articulated in popular sociology texts like David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and William H. Whyte Jr.’s The Organization Man (1956), critiques to which the American reading public proved enormously responsive. According to Riesman and Whyte, Americans had lost what had been their defining trait—“rugged individualism”—as economic changes (particularly the ascendancy of the corporate business structure) conditioned them to be far more responsive to the needs and desires of others than were nonconforming Americans of the nineteenth century. American writers, in Williams’s review, have analogously lost the ability to produce “art” (categorically distinct from the nonart they do produce) for similar reasons. Artistic expression is rare because the career has erased and replaced the self.
What makes Bowles special, according to Williams, is his willful avoidance of this self-and thus art-destroying careerism: “Bowles has deliberately rejected that kind of rabid professionalism,” enabling “his growth into completeness of personality” (“Allegory” 7). Williams draws attention to Bowles’s advanced age of thirty-eight and asserts that his artistry results from the fact that Bowles has waited until the time was right for him to produce a work of art—though we know that he set out to write a novel at the time that he did as a means to getting his short stories published and only after Helen Strauss secured an advance for him. The point here is not to deny Bowles’s artistry on the grounds that he fails to meet Williams’s criteria; rather, it is to point out that the idea of detachment from career concerns is perhaps less a precondition for artistry, as Williams would have it, than a constitutive aspect of artistry in Williams’s time, one that springs from the actual growing connection between the literary field and other cultural and economic fields, and as such a selling point. The review reflects and depends on Bowles’s place in what would prove to be a commercially viable network of literary production, and in it Williams celebrates an ideal of artistic detachment and congratulates Bowles for meeting that ideal. This irony is compounded as the thrust of Williams’s praise is repeated in the fullpage advertisement for The Sheltering Sky that New Directions placed in the Saturday Review on December 31, 1949. “Bowles is that rare thing,” the advertisement declares, “a writer who waited to live life before he began to write it.”
If the New Directions advertisements take their cue from Williams’s book review, Williams might be said to take his cue from the novel he was reviewing. In the review, Williams’s attack on the contemporary writer and his notion of the conditions that make art possible—“They feel it is something to adopt in the place of actual living, without understanding that art is a by-product of existence” (7)—are nearly identical to Bowles’s narrator’s account in the novel of why Port, the novel’s protagonist, who has pondered a career as a novelist, does not write: “As long as he was living his life, he could not write about it. Where one left off, the other began, and the existence of circumstances which demanded even the vaguest participation on his part was sufficient to place writing outside the realm of possibility” (200). The two passages appear to express opposite ideas. Williams asserts that “actual living” is a prerequisite of writing, while Bowles’s narrator suggests that living and writing are mutually exclusive, that as long as one is living one cannot be a writer. The confusion stems from the fact that Williams and Bowles use the word “living” in opposite ways. In Williams’s review, “living” signifies detachment, whatever one does when not pursuing one’s career. The novel suggests that Port could not be a writer because he was not detached enough; here “living” means engagement, the “vaguest participation.” The point for Williams and Bowles (or at least for Port) is that engagement of a certain kind is fatal to artistry.37
Thus the novel itself articulates a version of the “great divide” discourse that Williams used to promote it. Indeed, the novel is more uncompromising than the review: