Non-fiction: Gloriously Irresponsible? Ravi Mirchandani

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wiU apologize first, because I think I am going to be talking rather more about non-fiction than publishing. Partly because I guess books are more interesting than talking about the publishing of them, and partly because a n u m b e r of things I might have said has been rather covered by others. What I w o u l d like to say first is that w e have touched a n u m b e r of times over the conference on what seems to me a certain kind of chip on the shoulder about the status of non-fiction and culture. We have discussed to what extent it might differ between countries but I think there are elements of this in most countries. More times than I can remember I have had the experience of speaking to people at parties, people I had not met before, w h o asked me what I did for a living. A n d I said I worked in publishing, at which point they were often quite interested. Then they might ask me what specifically I did, and I would say I worked predominantly on non-fiction, at which point they seemed to be rather less interested than they had before. So certainly from a British experience, and from what has been said from a Dutch experience, there is a sense of that. I do not think it makes much sense to argue about whether fiction is more important than non-fiction. I certainly do do predominantly non-fiction and that is partly the direction in which m y career has taken me, partly my o w n preference. I think an awful lot of contemporary fiction--and I a m sure I would have said this if I were living in 1897 or 1797--is relatively slight and trivial, and the amount that lasts is a very small percentage of the whole. With non-fiction, though, I think the amount that lasts is an infinitesimally small percentage of the whole, For nine years I worked at Penguin, and m y office was next door to Paul Keegan w h o was the editor of the Penguin Classics. A n d I was involved with a certain amount of the Classics publishing myself, which is obviously one of the most important areas of publishing, if a relatively unglamorous one, the publishing of old books rather than new. A n d that particular publisher's list of books n o w out of copyright, is a view of the canon of Western literature as well as of non-Western literature. It is predominantly fictional writing, plays, poetry, and novels. Address for correspondence: Ravi Mirchandani, Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V2SA, England.

Mirchandani

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At various times w h e n I was at Penguin, we had discussions about h o w to expand the n u m b e r of non-fiction titles in the Penguin Classics. We did a certain a m o u n t of commissioning of editions and translations as a result of these meetings, but generally far less than we intended w h e n w e w e n t into them. The main reason for that, I think, is that the vast majority of non-fiction dates very rapidly. The bulk of non-fiction that lasts, certainly the bulk of nonfiction published in the Penguin Classics series, is philosophy and theology. Not so m u c h strictly technical theology, but religious and spiritual writings, w h e t h e r from a Christian tradition or one of the other major religions. A n d the reason w h y those books tend to last is, I think, because there is a sense in w h i c h there is no such thing as progress in our u n d e r s t a n d i n g of philosophical and religious questions. Therefore it is as relevant to our u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the major issues in those subjects to read Plato and Aristotle or D a m e Julian of N o r w i c h or Thomas Aquinas as it is to read the writings of contemporaries. O n the other hand, w h e n w e looked at areas like science or history, it was very difficult to find books that a) we felt we w o u l d be justified doing, and b) that we felt there was a market for. There are times w h e n there are wonderful books you w o u l d like to publish but as a publisher that you feel you cannot, because there will not be a market and you regret that. But here, most of the books w e discussed seemed not to have a market, and there was little to regret. In discussing historians, w e decided to add an edition of Burckhardt to the existing Thucydides and Herodotus, and to commission a n e w edition of Vasari. We rapidly ran out of names beyond that. We talked about doing a n e w translation of Michelet, of Guizot, or was there anything by Ranke that one m i g h t m a k e sense of doing? A n d in all those cases our answer was no. Equally in science, Penguin had published for m a n y years editions of The Voyage of the Beagle and Darwin's On the Origin of Species; we decided to add to those The Descent of Man. But w h e n Einstein's writings came up for discussion we decided against, as w e did for Newton. For different reasons. Einstein's popular writings are extremely dated, and his more technical writings are simply too technical for a w i d e audience. With Newton, the most fascinating bits to read are not actually about science but about witchcraft and astrology and w h a t w e n o w think of as non-scientific subject matter. Obviously his point of view w h e n he wrote was rather different from ours. He took such subjects as seriously as the w o r k for which w e n o w h o n o u r and credit him, the w o r k on calculus and so on. But trying to read Newton's writings on calculus, even for a m o d e r n mathematician, is extremely hard because the language in w h i c h the calculus is expressed has changed enormously. So as I say, we came up with a very short list. I do not think there is anything problematic about this. To be an educated person in our culture it is arguably important to have read War and Peace and Anna Karenina. It is not important to have read N e w t o n or Einstein, although it is desirable to have some understanding of w h a t their contributions were. It is

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their ideas that are important, not the form of writing that they i m b e d d e d them in. Whereas in fiction the actual book is and always will be crucial. With scientific or historical topics, for the general reader it makes more sense to read a m o d e r n treatment of the ideas of, for instance, Newton or Einstein rather than going back to the original text. So the sense that the actual book is more important in fiction than in non-fiction is one that I would not wish to disagree with. That said, there is every value in publishing serious non-fiction for one's current culture, however much one knows that in twenty years time people will be reading the same ideas or progress on those ideas treated by authors w h o are at school now or not even born rather than the books that w e are publishing now. As for the non-fiction w e publish now: virtually none of it will last and I do not think that is in any way a problem. That also affects the amount of non-fiction that can usefully be translated, because where you want a book on a subject and you go to an expert and you ask h i m to write it, most of the time it makes more sense to get one of your local experts to write it rather than translating from another language. Only the handful of books, such as Huizinga's, to take a Dutch example, that really raise themselves above that level, are worth being published in translation and get beyond the particular need of a particular linguistic market. My second point goes back to one Mizzi [van der Pluijm] mentioned about the frustrations of some academics' attitudes to writing for a wider market. I certainly share that frustration from time to time. There are a n u m b e r of eminent figures in Britain w h o either are incapable of writing about their ideas for the widest---or even a wider--audience, because frankly they do not have the literary style, or else they are incapable of making their ideas accessible to the widest audience. Or most frustratingly: they simply do not want to because they despise the activity. Which is, from a publisher's point of view, regrettable. But looking at it from a wider point of view than just the publisher's, it is actually rather more complex than that. A line that I often quote---or slightly misquote to scientists w h e n I am publishing their first book for a wider audience than they are used to writing for, is Einstein's: "Make your theory as simple as possible, but no simpler." And this is particularly problematic with science. It is arguable that an awful lot of m o d e r n physics cannot be understood without very sophisticated mathematics. And however well you do your analogies, your metaphors, and however brilliant some popular writers are in this field, you are misrepresenting your subject by leaving out the mathematics. I do not think that means that one should not publish these books, I do not think it means that people should not write them, and I think it is important that academics make important work available to people; nevertheless something is lost in translation. And I use that phrase quite deliberately. It is analogous to what is lost w h e n you translate poetry from one language to another, poetry being the most difficult genre of creative writing to take across languages.

Mirchandani

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There are many pressures on us as publishers to find ways of simplification, even when the subject matter is already a simplification or generalization of a complex historical or scientific debate. One book that has not yet been published in the UK, or anywhere in fact, which I was proud to commission at Penguin, is a biography of Hitler by the British historian Ian Kershaw. We sold a number of translation rights on this book at a relatively early stage on the basis of synopsis, chapter outline, and so on, well in advance of much of the book actually being written, and I was regularly asked by my colleagues: "What is his line on Hitler? What is going to be unique about this book?" And I quite understand the reasoning where the bibliography of writings on Hitler in the fifty-odd years since his death is huge. Nevertheless, I got increasingly frustrated with these questions and replied: "He does not have a single line on Hitler. This is not going to be one of those books that explains that everything Hitler did was to do with his irritation and dislike of Wittgenstein when he was at nursery school, it is not going to explain Hitler in terms of his frustrations with the failure of his ambitions to be an artist or his psychological unhappiness with the fact that he only had one testicle or so on and so forth." Equally this was not going to be one of those books that would explain the rise of the Nazis and the Third Reich in terms of impersonal historical forces, the legacy of the Treaty of Versailles, and so on. Why I thought this was going to be a fine book to publish, was that it was going to have a much more sophisticated and multifactorial, multicausal view of the sophisticated historical interaction between the character of an individual and the character and events of his times. And in many ways that is the kind of history writing that I most admire as a human being rather than as a publisher. I am a great believer in the idea that most things are more complex than most people think they are. But hedging yourself around with qualifications in academic writing, saying that things are complex, produces books that are more difficult to publish than ones that take a single line. And there is, I think, a very real and important tension between what we were characterizing this morning as the tradition of Germanic history or Germanic scholarship, of the importance of backing up everything you say with footnotes and so on, and the freedom of ideas to rise through the facts and to generalize and be less concerned with whether every precise detail is true. I went last weekend to a dinner at King's College Cambridge, which was the latest of a series of events to celebrate the eightieth birthday of the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm, who is I think sufficiently widely known across Europe to be familiar to most of you here. I was talking afterwards in the college bar with a young Oxford historian about a category of books that he called "gloriously irresponsible." Now, one can have many debates about which academic books might fall into that category, but what I want to discuss here is its existence. One book that we discussed at some length was A.J.P. Taylor's The Origins of the Second World War, a book published I think in the early 1960s, which we both thought falls into that glorious irresponsible category.

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We were using the phrase in quite heavy inverted commas and I think there is something more sophisticated to say here, but if one rereads now the view of Hitler's war aims, foreign policy, and international relations that is presented in Taylor's book, it is deeply unsatisfactory. I do not think any serious scholar of the subject would simply say that Taylor's case on Hitler's foreign policy is correct or closest to the truth. The book was shocking and much debated at the time because it presented a view of Hitler as comparable to most statesmen, presenting him as a typical Machiavellian Principe-figure. Now you could argue that to suggest that Hitler was not much worse than any other statesman is irresponsible. But I think that Taylor's book was important to publish at the time, and it is important in the discussion of this subject, because so much of the immediate post war discussion of Hitler, rather understandably, was simply to present him as a demonic figure, rather than seriously attempting to put him in historical context. And Taylor's book is an important corrective to that. Subsequently a whole series of books were published which drew partly on Taylor's criticisms of what had been a predominant paradigm up to that. They toned him down and they qualified what he had to say, and his ideas dissipated inevitably yet became part of the continuing discussion of Hitler and the Third Reich. I think that a lot of the time history in particular moves in an almost Hegelian fashion with thesis, antithesis and then synthesis, and that it is sometimes important to exaggerate your case in order to get people to take notice of it. Hence this gloriously irresponsible category.