The Cemetery of Letters

THE CEMETERY OF LETTERS

The Phoenicians, we are often reminded, produced no literature, although they allegedly invented the alphabet. Commentators discuss their philistinism from the basis of this absence of a written legacy, asserting that by race or culture, they were more interested in commerce than in the arts. Accordingly, the Phoenician invention of the alphabet served the lower purpose of commercial record keeping rather than the more noble purpose of literary production. (I remember finding on the shelves of a country house I once rented a mildewed history book by Will and Ariel Durant describing the Phoenicians as the “merchant race.” I was tempted to throw it in the fireplace.) Well, it now seems that the Phoenicians wrote quite a bit, but using a perishable brand of papyrus that did not stand the biodegradative assaults of time. Manuscripts had a high rate of extinction before copyists and authors switched to parchment in the second or third century. Those not copied during that period simply disappeared.

The neglect of silent evidence is endemic to the way we study comparative talent, particularly in activities that are plagued with winner-take-all attributes. We may enjoy what we see, but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture.

The winner-take-all effect discussed in Chapter 3 is visible in the large number of people who call themselves writers but are (only “temporarily”) operating the shiny cappuccino machines at Starbucks. The inequity in this field is larger than, say, medicine, since we rarely see medical doctors serving hamburgers. I can thus infer that I can largely gauge the performance of the latter profession’s entire population from what sample is visible to me. Likewise with plumbers, taxi drivers, prostitutes, and those in professions devoid of superstar effects. The distinction between Extremistan and Mediocristan in Chapter 3 helps frame this difference. The consequence of the superstar dynamic is that what we call “literary heritage” or “literary treasures” is a minute proportion of what has been produced cumulatively. This is the first point. How it invalidates the identification of talent can be derived immediately from it: say you attribute the success of the nineteenth-century novelist Honoré de Balzac to his superior “realism,” “insights,” “sensitivity,” “treatment of characters,” “ability to keep the reader riveted,” and so on. These may be deemed “superior” qualities that lead to superior performance if, and only if, those who lack what we call talent also lack these qualities. But what if there are dozens of comparable literary masterpieces that happened to perish? And, following my logic, if there are indeed many perished manuscripts with similar attributes, then, I regret to say, your idol Balzac was just the beneficiary of disproportionate luck compared to his peers. Furthermore, you may be committing an injustice to others by favoring him.

My point, I will repeat, is not that Balzac is untalented, but that he is less uniquely talented than we think. Just consider the thousands of writers now completely vanished from consciousness: their record does not enter into analyses. We do not see the tons of rejected manuscripts because these writers have never been published. The New Yorker alone rejects close to a hundred manuscripts a day, so imagine the number of geniuses that we will never hear about. In a country like France, where more people write books while, sadly, fewer people read them, respectable literary publishers accept one in ten thousand manuscripts they receive from first-time authors. Consider the number of actors who have never passed an audition but would have done very well had they had that lucky break in life.

The next time you visit a Frenchman of comfortable means, you will likely spot the stern books from the collection Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, which their owner will never, almost never, read, mostly on account of their uncomfortable size and weight. Membership in the Pléiade means membership in the literary canon. The tomes are expensive; they have the distinctive smell of ultrathin India paper, compressing the equivalent of fifteen hundred pages into the size of a drugstore paperback. They are supposed to help you maximize the number of masterpieces per Parisian square foot. The publisher Gallimard has been extremely selective in electing writers into the Pléiade collection–only a few authors, such as the aesthete and adventurer André Malraux, have made it in while still alive. Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hugo, and Stendhal are in, along with Mallarmé, Sartre, Camus, and … Balzac. Yet if you follow Balzac’s own ideas about literary success, you would accept that there is no ultimate justification for such an official corpus.

Balzac outlined the entire business of silent evidence in his novel Lost Illusions. Lucien de Rubempré (alias of Lucien Chardon), the penurious provincial genius, “goes up” to Paris to start a literary career. We are told that he is talented—actually he is told that he is talented by the semiaristocratic set in Angoulême. But it is difficult to figure out whether this is due to his good looks or to the literary quality of his works—or even whether literary quality is visible, or, as Balzac seems to wonder, if it has much to do with anything. Success is presented cynically, as the product of wile and promotion or the lucky surge of interest for reasons completely external to the works themselves. Lucien discovers the existence of the immense cemetery inhabited by what Balzac calls “nightingales.”

Lucien was told that this designation “nightingale” was given by bookstores to those works residing on the shelves in the solitary depths of their shops.

Balzac presents to us the sorry state of contemporary literature when Lucien’s manuscript is rejected by a publisher who has never read it; later on, when Lucien’s reputation has developed, the very same manuscript is accepted by another publisher who did not read it either! The work itself was a secondary consideration.

In another example of silent evidence, the book’s characters keep bemoaning that things are no longer as they were before, implying that literary fairness prevailed in more ancient times—as if there was no cemetery before. They fail to take into account the nightingales among the ancients’ work! Notice that close to two centuries ago people had an idealized opinion of their own past, just as we have an idealized opinion of today’s past.

To understand successes and analyze what caused them, we need to study the traits present in failures.