Why our literary White Whales need a publishing Captain Ahab

Recently, I had the pleasure of rereading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which celebrates the 159th anniversary of its publishing today. Although Melville’s style does tend to grate a bit on the mind that has lost much of its adolescent idealism, Ahab’s undying obsession and Ishamel’s sentinel voice still ring truer than the bells of St Paul’s.

It is Melville’s immersion in his subjects, both human and cetacean, that makes the novel a towering achievement, and although Billy Budd has surpassed it in the minds of the literary know-it-alls, it still stands among the definitive allegories of the age.

Right now, India seems to be in the grip of an obsession that differs rather greatly from Ahab’s — the obsession to write books. At the Sunday paper we receive numerous books that come in for review; a good 75 per cent of which publishers have no right to murder trees for.

Everyone seems to be writing these days, and publishing houses are keen to play pimp to the literary whores of our time. Been in love? Write about it; recently moved to the big city? Write about it; just learned English? Write in it. The result is a sewer of stories that should never be told, written in styles that should never be printed. Ten years from now, a mere handful of these books will be remembered; rather most be relegated to dusty bookshelves in second-hand bookstores, looked upon cringingly by those who once put so much stock in them.

The media is also responsible for this glut in tat. We give reams of coverage to substandard authors, simply because…well… they’re Indian. Of course, this trend is prevalent across the globe, and I’m sure an Inuit is sitting in his igloo reading Snow Bound: A Tale of Life and Longing in the Arctic and going “what the hell is this rubbish!”
All the above observations are, by their very nature, subjective.

My favourite book is John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, yet my wife thinks it’s one of the most pompously boring things ever written. Still, where’s the self-respect people?
As a teenage poet (at least that’s how I thought of myself; wrongly I might add) I amassed over 1,000 poems ranging from a few lines to over 40 pages. By the age of 17, I had decided that it was time to get published.

I took it to my books editor at the time, who glanced at a few, raised his brows, crossed his eyes, and looked like a possum having an orgasm, before giving me arguably the best advice anyone ever has: “Take these poems and put them in a drawer. After five years, read them again; then put them back. After another five years, take them out again, read them, and then put them back. After 10 years, take them out and read them, if they still appeal to you, get them published.”

It’s been 17 years and I have followed his advice. They’re still in the drawer, where I have decided they will stay forever. You see that’s the thing… every writer believes they have a great story in them, very few actually do, and you need that objective voice telling you, “look mate, that’s a load of nonsense”.

Years ago, a friend of mine, and a brilliant writer of newspaper articles, decided to write the book he said would be “the great English novel”. He quit his job at the  newspaper and ensconced himself in his bedroom to churn out the would-be classic.

Over a period of eight months, he toiled anywhere between six to 10 hours a day and we watched as the number of pages swiftly crossed 400. Then suddenly it was done. We saw the stack of papers on his desk, and wondered if we’d get to read it before it was sent to the publisher. It never got there. The next day, he burned the entire manuscript and destroyed his PC, hard drive and all.

He never told us why. Some say it was because it just wasn’t good enough and his pride would never allow him to publish it. I think it was because he did what he set out to do…write a book, and once he did, he proved to himself that he could, and that was all that mattered.

By writing and publishing rubbish in the quest for quick cash (of which I’m told, there’s very little, unless you’ve got the canny of Manu Joseph) we’re diluting the literary gene pool. But do we really care? One reckons not.

Melville writes in Moby Dick: “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”
If Melville were alive today, he’d be the exception that tests the rule. We live in a world of verbose fleas, the writers of Leviathans have sunk to the depths, emerging once every few years with a spray of words so beautiful, they help us forget that we live in the time of the literary minuteman, and an ill-armed one at that.