Peter Owen: I think it’s grown worse, for several reasons. There has never been sufficient state support for writing or publishing—or culture in general—in the UK compared with other European countries; Scandinavia, for instance, and Germany. The USA is pretty hopeless, too, although it does support publishers to a greater extent than here, and I believe there are more writers’ grants. In the UK, the arts councils have never had enough funding to make a major difference to the smaller independent publishers trying to launch lesser-known talented writers. Although they are trying to offer financial support, there are too many publishers applying for funding and not enough money to go round. Also, it’s increasingly hard to get literary books reviewed in the press. Serious writers are not sufficiently supported, and most of them can’t make a decent living from their craft. There are, of course, rotten books produced by celebrities—many of them ghost-written—and there are authors who make vast quantities of money from film rights but whose books are mediocre. Unfortunately it’s those who produce quality stuff or who are just starting out in their literary careers that have to scrimmage around for a living. Often there is little financial reward for them or their publishers. Book publishing, in my opinion, can be a pretty thankless task these days. You feel that way even after having worked with all of the authors you have for the past half-century?
Yes, I do. Many authors feel hard done by. Of course, in the present age most are lucky to be published at all. The sales of fiction by relatively unknown authors are negligible; in many cases a novel will sell as few as 200 or 300 copies, which is completely uneconomical. Publishers cannot afford to subsidise such writers unless they have bestsellers on their lists such as Harry Potter. The money isn’t there. Do you think this lack of sales in terms of fiction reflects our culture in a more general sense?
Yes, the English-speaking world has always devalued the arts and especially literature. For years books have been regarded as though they should be given away free because of access to easy library borrowing—although these days sales of literary fiction to libraries have largely collapsed. People tend to quibble about the price of books, whereas they wouldn’t argue about the price of a theatre ticket, which might be six times as much. They object to paying £10 for a book. Do you think there is a direct correlation between the quality of new writers in Britain and levels of available funding?
Yes, I believe so. Aspiring writers can make far more money writing for television, because if they’re lucky they can hit the jackpot in that field. Alternately they might have success in PR, journalism or advertising. Increasingly, the most gifted writers don’t even attempt to get books published. It’s got so bad I would be inclined to dissuade anyone who is unknown to embark on a career writing fiction—especially literary, non-genre novels or short stories. It’s that bad?
It’s pointless. They’ll most likely never get published. Even if they’re very good it’ll be difficult to find a publisher. If they’re mediocre there’s not a chance in hell. Our company is looking at very few new novels. We’re cutting back on fiction. I tell our editors attending the international book fairs not to waste time considering mediocre novels. You are renowned for bringing many foreign authors to an English readership for the first time—Anaïs Nin, Hermann Hesse, Yukio Mishima, Jean Cocteau, the list goes on. Do you not have a sense of pride in what you’ve achieved by making so much important work available to be read in English?
I think this company has certainly made a contribution to culture, but a number of the writers we took on, such as Jean Cocteau and Paul and Jane Bowles, had been around for some time, albeit not well known in English-speaking countries. Of course there were others we published who were not recognised outside their own countries at all. Hermann Hesse was hardly known when we took on Siddhartha. He had a very limited reputation outside of Germany, but his reputation snowballed in the late 50s and 60s. By the 60s, we couldn’t publish his works fast enough in English. We reprinted his books constantly in hardback and sold subsidiary paperback rights to Penguin and others. There weren’t even any American editions; we were shipping copies off to the USA. Today Siddhartha has now sold something like 400,000 copies in the English language. Do you think publishing today is dominated by the same insistence on celebrity as, say, the music industry, at the expense of talent and originality?
Yes, dreadful books such as the ghostwritten celebrity memoirs and novels will always dominate the charts. You get the same sort of thing in the music business. Usually there is a total lack of irony or humour in the celebrity memoirs and fiction. Some higher-brow modern literature may contain controversial sexual content. I have always felt you can get away with this if there is an element of humour, but if it’s really explicit and humourless then it’s just porn. Guillaume Apollinaire, who wrote Les Onze Mille Verges, is funny—it’s a take-off of pornographic literature—whereas contemporary authors writing about sex may do so with a total lack of irony or wit, and it becomes tedious or offensive. But you can’t sell pornography in book form now anyway. Les Onze Mille Verges has never done particularly well. If people want porn they prefer videos or the internet to literature. When you published the more explicit and controversial books in the 50s and 60s, by authors such as the Marquis de Sade, Apollinaire and Anaïs Nin, were you threatened with censorship?
At that time, things were still fairly difficult, it was around the time of the Lady Chatterley trial débâcle. We had Henry Miller; we were going to publish some more of his works, and I was advised we’d be sued. A lot of publishers were frightened after Lady Chatterley. I didn’t like that novel, but Lawrence was a major writer and it was a relatively harmless book. Probably I would’ve done it. I wouldn’t have published Last Exit to Brooklyn, whose author, Hubert Selby Jr, also provoked a trial for obscenity. But, again, I seem to remember that it doesn’t have much wit. At the time I didn’t think it had enough literary content to compensate for the subject matter. Perhaps I would think differently now. We turned down the second Apollinaire novel we were offered, even though it was less pornographic. I didn’t think it was good enough. It was about incest, a young man who was screwing his mother and his aunt. How did you come to publish the Marquis de Sade?
One knew about him, of course, and probably at first we did it for the wrong reasons, but we knew it would sell, and there was no de Sade available in English at the time. And Margaret Crosland was a good translator. There were no translations in print at all when you published de Sade?
I don’t think so. I thought we couldn’t possibly get away with it. The scene was extremely difficult at that time. I was told we would have to cut it. We did water it down somewhat. It retained his style but without the really explicit content. It was pretty mild stuff by current standards, but then it was considered bad enough. How early on did you publish Henry Miller?
We did one Miller, The Books in My Life. That came through James Laughlin, the owner of New Directions, arguably the most important American avant-garde publisher of the mid-20th century. As it happened, we published most of the writers mentioned in that book. Miller was a very good critic; he knew his stuff. The authors he rated included Rabindranath Tagore, Hermann Hesse and Blaise Cendrars, to mention just a few of our authors. Cendrars is deeply underappreciated outside France, even though there is constant interest in the Surrealists, on whom he had a profound effect.
He had real talent. The first one we did was To the End of the World. I think it’s one of the funniest books we’ve published, a roman noir. It may not be one of his best, but it’s certainly one of the funniest. He was a writer with real talent and humour. His obscurity in this country is hard to explain. How did you come to publish Jean Cocteau, who was probably more famous for his work in film and art?
Our French literature consultant, the translator Margaret Crosland, has always been very important in advising us on books to publish. It was Margaret who pioneered Cocteau. She had already undertaken a biography of him. She also led us to Dalí, as she knew his novel Hidden Faces. Did you travel to meet Dalí before publishing him?
Yes, on several occasions I met him. He wasn’t unpleasant, but there was something seedy about him. He was a major artist, but I felt he lacked integrity. He was into money, so if it would make him some he immediately showed interest. Once when I visited him he greeted me by saying, “Dalí loves money. Have you brought me any?” He referred to himself in the third person?
He was arrogant. We did pay a lot of money for that book, one of the largest advances we have ever paid, and it was part of the deal that our English edition would include brand new illustrations. They were terrible. We put them in the first edition, but we removed them later, as they were just scribbles. But Dalí’s book has had a long life. It had to be heavily edited, but it was an important Surrealist text. How did you come to start putting out Anaïs Nin’s work?
It was at the end of the 50s. She was unsaleable at that time. I knew her reputation, and I was baited with the journals. At first she didn’t do too well. Sales and press interest gradually snowballed when the journals came out, but they were heavily expurgated, except for Incest, which wasn’t. The trouble was that one didn’t know what was true because it turned out she was a dreadful liar. The diaries were fictionalised?
One doesn’t know. I’m sure a lot of it is true. Incest is partly about the incest with her father. She had sex with him, with Henry Miller, her cousin, as well as Antonin Artaud. Her brother said it wasn’t true about the father, but I think it was, because he was pretty unethical, although the facts may have been slightly distorted. You were also pivotal in bringing Japanese literature to Europe.
The first Japanese author we published was Osamu Dazai. He was very good but has mostly been forgotten now. We actually lost Samuel Beckett’s fiction because of this, because we couldn’t afford to do both novels; this was before he achieved success with his plays such as Waiting for Godot. At that point, Beckett was unsaleable; no one had ever shown interest, and he was over 50. He had a reputation but no sales. I said to Muriel Spark, our first editor, “We can afford to do one or the other, Beckett or Dazai, and I prefer the Dazai novel.” That was one of my biggest mistakes. You also published Yukio Mishima.
Yes, Confessions of a Mask. I met him in Tokyo, after we’d bought the novel. That is one of our most important works of fiction and has gone through numerous editions. That book still sells, as it’s one of his best. What were your impressions of him?
I thought he was terrifically nice. I really liked him. He spoke fluent English, so I had written to him ages before I travelled in Tokyo. When I arrived at the hotel there was a letter waiting for me, delivered by hand. I went out to dinner with him that night. He was very friendly. I met him several times in Tokyo and in London. When I spoke to him, I said, “I think you’ll win the Nobel Prize,” and he said, “No, I won’t.” Mishima was very shrewd. We’ve had nine Nobel laureates in total, but he wasn’t one of them. I received one of the last letters from him before he committed suicide. [On November 25, 1970, Mishima committed seppuku, suicide by ritual disembowelment with a samurai sword, following a failed military coup to restore the Emperor in Japan.] What was your reaction to Mishima’s suicide?
I was very shocked. But it made sense to me in a way, as he was very vain. He would go the gym every day. Even in London, he joined a gym just for a couple of weeks. He was worried about his looks and his health and fitness. I think, too, he had written himself out—he’d written everything he’d wanted to write, and he felt he was heading towards old age. Also he had these rather odd nationalist or fascist tendencies. He was a very complicated man. He was gay, yet he was married; I never met his wife. Someone told me he used to drink a bottle of whisky a day, but I never saw him drunk. Do you think the style of publishing you’ve pioneered—independent and highly literary—can be replicated now?
I don’t think it can in the long term. This kind of publishing is possibly on its deathbed. You could only establish a similar literary imprint on your own if you were very rich and could afford to lose money. You would also need to know what you were doing. Of course some of what I’ve achieved has been down to luck. I’m not sure I would recommend anyone embarking on a career now to get into publishing. It’s different—it’s not fun any more. It’s tough, very tough. And, as I have said, I wouldn’t recommend anyone to embark on a novel, as I think most of them will be wasting their time. Even if they do so for their own pleasure?
If they want to do it then it’s up to them. They should never write for the market. They should write because they want to. And if they’re good enough, their fiction might just take off. Or it might happen after they’re dead. Who knows?