It’s interesting that the sub-title
of this novel is blazoned huge on the cover, in yellow across a blue
background, with the actual title tucked away below in itty-bitty
letters of a blue only slightly darker than the background. You know,
you could actually miss the book’s title altogether. And there may be
a reason for that: call me cynical but isn’t this just the smartest
selling ploy you’ve ever seen to convince desperate writers to take
those copies from the shelves and comb the book for words of wisdom?
So, before you get too excited, let’s
slow down just a little. If you’re looking for a book which will
give you a blow-by-blow foolproof account of exactly what you need to do
in order to attract an editor’s or agent’s attention and sell your
book, this is probably not your best bet. Oh, it will give you lots
of advice, but you will have to dig around for it, which may not suit
you if you’re urgently worrying about whether including a stamped,
addressed envelope for your manuscript’s return is better than sending
a disposable manuscript and a stamped, addressed postcard. And in
searching for that information, I suspect you may become deeply
irritated. Put it down now. It’s not really that kind of book.
You can also read this book as a
mildly philosophical memoir about life in publishing, providing some
possible insights into the psyche of the writer and the editor and the
agent. This also works quite well though in a rather fuzzy, romantic,
sentimental kind of way. After years in the business, as editorial
assistant, editor and agent, there is no doubt that Betsy Lerner is
still in love with the business of publishing, which is good, especially
for her authors. Whether we really need to know this much about Betsy
Lerner’s love affair with publishing is more debatable. Myself, I read
it with my usual general curiosity about the publishing world, with an
eye out for a good quotation or a story I’d never heard before. As
such, I was satisfied. I particularly commend Pablo Neruda’s
comment: ‘For me, writing is like breathing. I could not live without
breathing and I could not live without writing.’
However, if you’re reading it for
clues about how to survive as a writer, you may find the book rather
less satisfying. Lerner has paid careful attention to the lessons that
publishing has taught her. She is sensitive to her writers’ needs,
their foibles, their desire for encouragement, praise and affirmation,
and makes some attempts to analyse why authors behave as they do in
certain cases. This seems to boil down to an inability to get down to
work, choosing the wrong form in which to work, or because they hate
their parents or vice versa, which is probably all true but would be
unlikely to encourage me to change my ways if I were a driven writer.
There are moments when the first half
of this book might be more easily approached as a textbook on how to
please Betsy Lerner, or how to acquire appropriate authorly behavioural
tics. (Please don’t try this at home unless you absolutely feel you
must.) Mostly, it taught me that writers’ needs are as individual as
the writers themselves, and that it’s a really bad idea to slavishly
copy anyone in the hope that a little of their cachet will rub off on
you. It’s rarely their ‘process’, i.e. their writing rituals, that’s
important so much as what they do during the exercise of those rituals.
The second part of the book seemed to
promise more concrete advice, Lerner having said at the beginning that
it would describe the publishing process from the editor’s point of
view. And so it does, after a fashion. There is no detailed breakdown of
the process of getting an agent, making contact with an author. The
advice is there but heavily hedged around with anecdote and Lerner’s
own experiences. For a book of advice, the pronoun ‘I’ seemed to
figure more frequently than I might have expected, and while I am
thrilled to read that Lerner has had so few editorial failures, I did
grow just a little suspicious after a while. Didn’t anything ever go
wrong in this woman’s career?
In the end, the best way to read The
Forest for the Trees is less as book of advice, more as a bedside
book: treat it as a memoir with some nice quotations, some
elderly attributed gossip, some more recent unattributed gossip, some
literary anecdotes, oh and some occasional advice for the writer. But don’t
pin your entire hope for success on memorising its contents and
following them slavishly.
