When writers had power

Graham Greene lived, and thrived, in an age when writers were powerful, priest-like, remote, and elusive.

Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape

Graham Greene

In my youth certain authors on the order of William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, Saul Bellow and Ernest Hemingway were held in something approaching awe. Even if you had never read one of their books, you knew who they were. Their very names had clout, and their names and their books were about all we knew about them. Do such writers exist in today's world? I can't think of any.

Yes, we still have outstanding literary writers, and we still have best-selling authors. People like Stephen King and James Patterson are stars in the publishing world. We know their names and their faces, perhaps even their voices if they have appeared with Oprah or on NPR. Still it's not quite the same. Stars are not gods.

The very familiarity of today's writers is the source of the problem, as Paul Theroux suggests in his essay on Graham Greene in Figures in a Landscape. "Until the past twenty years or so, writers were not accessible to the reading public," he writes. "They did not turn up for readings at bookstores; they did not give free talks at the library or sign your book. They were not visible. They were the more powerful for being somewhere else, only whispered about."

At some point publishers, by now mostly owned by big corporations, decided that writers should sell their own books. Instead of spending money on big publicity campaigns, they sent writers on multi-state book tours. These writers began showing up at every Barnes & Noble, book fair, reading festival and public library event, signing even books that nobody purchased. At one time a book bearing the signature of a major author was a very big deal, the book itself a treasure. Nowadays a signed copy, especially if it's a paperback, means little. Writers, like rock stars, even make their own videos to promote their books.

Writers, it turns out, are just ordinary people, and ordinary people are usually good at one thing or another. Writers happen to be good at writing. When we meet authors at bookstores and book fairs we see they are mostly introverted, self-conscious, self-doubting, middle-aged people not that different from those we pass on the street every day.