“The Literary Mafia”

I don’t agree with Martin Amis etc. that Bellow is the great writer of his generation, but that Chicago boy had a way with words, that’s for sure.

After reading this book by literary scholar Dan Sinykin, I was moved to check out a bunch of its references, one of which had the grabby title, The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature. I enjoyed it and learned a lot. I have a general interest in the topic; for example:

– “Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel”
– Trips to Cleveland,
– Pocket Kings by Ted Heller
– “I’m sick on account I just ate a TV dinner.”
– Philip Roth biographies, and literary biographies in general
– Leaving a Doll’s House, by Claire Bloom.

I just had two comments/questions, which I sent to the author, Josh Lambert:

My first question is about Richard Kostelanetz. I came across Kostelanetz’s book, The End of Intelligent Writing, many years ago in some circuitous way, and I read much of it . . . It struck me as a piece of “outsider art”: the sort of thing you see in some museums, these fascinating artworks that might be painted on wood with pieces of cloth and scribbles all over, constructed over the period of many years by some obsessed person who is hearing voices. What I’m saying is, I’m surprised that you took it so seriously in your book. Out of curiosity, a few years ago I found Kostelanetz’s earlier book, a collection of magazine articles, and it was really mediocre. I enjoy literary essays, but in those, he had nothing to say. He didn’t come across as crazy, just as a dull careerist. But I don’t know his full story.

My second question is about Ann Birstein. I’ve never read any of her novels but I did read her memoir, which was worth reading. I shared my thoughts on it here, along with my speculations of why Kazin and Birstein didn’t seem to respect each other. Still, there were things about her memoir that didn’t completely ring true to me–not that I have any special knowledge of these people myself, there was just something about how she wrote that led me to not completely trust her judgments. I’m curious what you think about that.

Lambert replied:

Thanks for reading the book and for reaching out.

As far as taking The End of Intelligent Writing seriously: I agree that often Kostelanetz’s claims feel exaggerated or odd, but his references and notes are solid, and they often led me to other valuable sources. In many cases, I found independent evidence to support something that Kostelanetz discussed. For one example, as an editor, Jason Epstein absolutely did cross ethical lines that most people I know in editing or publishing would find disturbing; Kostelanetz was very angry about that, and I hope I’m much more dispassionate about it, and that I have been fair in trying to understand the behavior and its effects. But I appreciate that Kostelanetz did what he could, back then, to point this out, even if I don’t agree with his tone or conclusions. It’s a little convoluted, I’ll be the first to admit, but I stand by what I write about Kostelanetz toward the end of the introduction: “this book disagrees with those observers, like Capote and Kostelanetz, who claimed that a Jewish literary mafia took control of American literature in the 1960s. But it also recognizes that their claims … have done less damage to the way we tend to think about U.S. literary history than the knee-jerk reactions to them and the arguments used to counter them have.” Specifically, “ignor[ing] or minimiz[ing] the roles played by Jews in the modern history of U.S. publishing.”

I’ll add that your description of Kostelanetz as having produced “outsider art” made me think of how much of what we consider art is, specifically, “insider art.” In a way, a lot of The Literary Mafia is about specific ways insiderism works.

As for your questions about incidents in Birstein’s memoir that “didn’t completely ring true” to you, and “not completely trust[ing] her judgments.” Well, of course, memoirs aren’t any more trustworthy than people’s memories, and it’s pretty clear that people make a lot of mistakes when they try to remember details about what happened two weeks ago, let alone twenty years ago. Moreover, Birstein’s memoir definitely seems fueled by resentment. But we still have to rely on people’s memories, even while knowing they’re fallible and flawed and partial. There are two specific questions that I’m most interested in, in terms of the factuality of Birstein’s recollections, but if there’s something else on your mind, please say so.

One question is: was Kazin ever violent with Birstein? She says he was, at least a few times (I don’t have her memoir in front of me, but there were some specifics in there, I believe). I don’t know that we’ll ever have conclusive evidence of whether or not most of the specific events happened, or happened exactly when she said they did. But there’s plenty of evidence, in their letters, in Kazin’s diaries, etc., that the marriage was often extremely tense, acrimonious (as well as very loving at times). To my mind, it’s very plausible–given the time period, etc.–that in their fights, there was some actual violence, of the kind Birstein describes.

The other question is very specific: did the editor Philip Rahv once, at a party, touch Birstein’s thigh, in a sexually aggressive way? Again, I don’t think there can ever be definitive proof of this, but there are other sources that suggest Rahv was a bit of a creep with young women (in my endnotes, I quote extensively from Mary McCarthy’s The Oasis on this topic) and Birstein wrote about this moment twice, once as fiction and once as memoir. It’s plausible, so I think it’s worth taking seriously.

All that said, I agree with you that we shouldn’t take anything Birstein writes in her memoir at face value, or accept it as fact without some serious consideration.

For what it’s worth, given your interests in literary history and your knowledge of statistics, I’d be eager to see what you have to say about some of the recent work that brings quantitative methods to literary studies. There’s an appendix to this article that talks about the statistical model being used, for example.

The discussion continued:

Gelman: I don’t know enough about Kazin or Birstein to have any sense of whether he hit her: I could well imagine that he did, also I could well imagine that he didn’t but she said he did–this is not to say I think she’s lying, just that I have no idea, and people all the time write things that are not the documentary truth but feel like they convey a deeper truth. With Rahv, sure, I can only assume that he pawed Birstein: that sort of thing was standard behavior, right? And I don’t see why she’d make it up.

The thing about Birstein’s memoir that seemed off to me was not so much the personal recollections as her attitude toward literature, as I discussed in my post on her book. The motivations didn’t seem right. I had a similar feeling as I had when reading Bertrand Russell’s autobiography, a fatal lack of sincerity. It’s not that I think Birstein was being deliberately insincere; it’s more that she was following some sort of template for the story she wanted to write. Anyway, this is all speculation, but speculation is fair enough when reading the work of a novelist! I’d hope that if Birstein were to be looking down on us right now, she’d be happy that at least we’re reading her work and taking it seriously.

Regarding Kostelanetz: yes, I can see how he’d be annoyed at Epstein’s “Godfather” shtick. And the fact that Kostelanetz was a mediocre writer (and not a particularly principled journalist, at least as I judge based on the evidence of his Master Minds article) doesn’t disqualify him from exposing Epstein. Indeed, to the extent that Kostelanetz felt himself to have been a mediocrity and a trimmer, I could see how he might be annoyed that Epstein, a man of no particular literary or ethical talent, managed to gain worldly success and the esteem of the cultural arbiters.

Regarding Sinykin’s statistical analysis: I was familiar with his general argument because I just read Sinykin’s book (I have a post coming up on it, actually). I confess that I pretty much ignored the quantitative bit. Not because I thought it was wrong–I imagine that with care their method could be improved, but I also guess that their findings are basically correct–but just because I was more interested in the literary/cultural story.

Lambert: For what it’s worth, I’m not sure I agree with the point you make, in your post, about it being strange that Birstein doesn’t discuss the literary works of the people she mentions. In Dickie’s List, she does do some (to me) charming parodies of the literary works of some of those people. I just don’t think it was her project, in the memoir, to talk about those works, but to fill in the social details that most people wouldn’t otherwise know about.

One more thing I’ll say about Kostelanetz is that he’s genuinely, very sincerely, invested in literary radicalism and experimentalism of various kinds. That’s not just mediocrity, per se, but an interest in things that aren’t going to please everybody, that are going to seem weird.

I’ll be interested in what you make of Sinykin’s book, which I generally admire, though I have some problems with it. In terms of the article I sent, yes, sure, skip to section 4, “Modeling Literariness.” My critique of it–which I’ve made to Sinykin directly–has to do with the size and representativeness of the sample, as well as the way he interprets the results. For one thing, the “conglomerate corpus”–on the basis of which Sinykin makes claims about books published by the conglomerates vs. independent publishers, generally–“contains 606 Random House novels,” published between 1980 and 2007. In that period, Random House published thousands of novels (interestingly, to me, Sinykin doesn’t even know how many, exactly), and the conglomerates published tens of thousands, at least. I know there’s a way to do sampling, in statistics, where a smaller set stands in for a larger one. But as I understand it, to do that, you have to make some claim about why the smaller group is meaningfully representative of the larger group, and I don’t see Sinykin doing that at all. So I don’t think it’s fair to say they’re “basically correct” about the claims they make about the words that are typical of conglomerate or independent fiction (in the chart called “American Fiction, 1980 to 2007,” which Sinykin reproduces in his book), or in a statement like “the language of conglomerate fiction is different, less about embodiment.” But, again, I’m no statistician, and I haven’t taken a math class since high school, so I’d be curious what you make of the claims there.

Gelman: OK, fair enough on the Birstein book. There was something about that rubbed me the wrong way–I think it had to do with how the book was written, not out of a defensiveness on my part toward Kazin–but, yeah, I’m just one reader, and, indeed, I was taking that book to represent some sort of complete statement from her, but from her perspective it was just one of her many books.

You can see my Sinykin post in a couple days . . . I liked his book, it was refreshing to me just because he was writing about an area that I don’t hear much about, and he had a pleasantly non-judgmental style–it wasn’t just a story of the good guys and the bad guys–but also it was academic in the sense of trying to see the big picture, in contrast to all those memoirs of the New Yorker etc. that are full of wonderful stories but seem to work so hard to avoid making any larger claims. To my taste, Sinykin’s book was a bit too focused on the individual personalities of those editors and agents–now that we’re all living many decades after the events being described, but overall I found it interesting. I’m currently reading Janice Radway’s book about the Book of the Month Club–I’m in chapter 3 now, and it’s wonderful so far. I guess she was the originator of this sort of study, and Sinykin and you and others are working in that tradition?

Regarding your question about the Random House books: yes, I agree that it would be better to get a representative sample–or, if your sample is nonrepresentative, you’ll want to adjust for differences between sample and population.

Finally, when I said that Sinykin’s claims seemed “basically correct,” I just meant that they were plausible from the perspective of my general understanding of mainstream fiction writing during that period, not that I had any comment on the statistical analysis.

Lambert: Your take on Sinykin’s book makes sense. I think a lot about how very difficult it is to see the bigger picture, writing about literature (or popular culture). On this topic, I like David Perkins’ book Is Literary History Possible? (short answer: not really!).

Yes, I’ve never met Radway, but I read that book in grad school and she’s definitely one of the most influential figures in literary sociology/literary history.

Since we had that email exchange, I’ve read the rest of Radway’s book, and I really like it. Lots to think about on nearly every page. Its writing style is mixed–in some places Radway is very conversational and engaging; in other places the academic jargon and phrasing is so thick that I can only read it by skimming. What I’d like more of here is Radway’s literary judgment on individual books. When she does talk about what makes particular books enjoyable or interesting or products of their time, etc., she has lots to say and she puts it well, integrating her personal takes with what might be called external literary judgments. When she talks about the economic and cultural side of the book business, that’s interesting too, it just gets a bit jargony.

In any case, I highly recommend Radway’s book, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. It came out in 1997 but she started research on it in the mid-1980s. Part of the charm of the story is her recounting of the club’s sad decline from its mid-twentieth-century heights of prosperity and influence; in that way it stands as a representative of middlebrow literary culture as a whole. I’m just annoyed at myself for not having read Radway’s book earlier. It sets the template for so much of the literary studies that has come after that I find so interesting.

One thing in particular that I appreciated about Radway was that she took the challenges and contradictions of the Book of the Month Club seriously, and she did not indulge in a facile populism, rooting for the just plain BOMC members against those annoying highbrows.

I also recommend Lambert’s The Literary Mafia, which also includes this quote from a Saul Bellow novel:

The world’s changed hands. I’m like the Indian who sees a train running over the prairie where the buffalo used to roam. Well, now the buffalo have disappeared, I want to get off the pony and be a conductor on that train. I’m not asking to be a stockholder in the company. I know that’s impossible. Lots of things are impossible that didn’t use to be. When I was younger I had my whole life laid out in my mind. I planned what it was going to be like on the assumption that I came out of the lords of the earth. I had all kinds of expectations. But God disposes. There’s no use kidding.

There’s nothing like a juicy passage from Saul Bellow. I don’t agree with Martin Amis etc. that Bellow is the great writer of his generation, but that Chicago boy had a way with words, that’s for sure.