A View of the Absurd
Publish and perish
. JACK ENGELHARD Special to the Jewish Times

Hemingway told Bernard Berenson: "Having books published is very destructive to writing."

Salinger put it like this to me and to all writers (of fiction): "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing."

King Solomon (in Ecclesiastes) said that "there is no end to the publishing of too many books." He said that 3,000 years ago.

He also said: "Not everything you think must you speak. Not everything you speak must you write. Not everything you write must you publish."

All of it is vexation of the spirit.

I write and I publish because it's in my blood, in my DNA, in my pedigree, in my tradition, but it's really a waste of time.

There are, thank God, thousands and maybe millions of people who read and are faithful to the book.

They understand that a book being read constitutes a private and intimate conversation between reader and book.

There is more truth and intimacy in reading than there is in sex. The writer himself has no business intruding and should never be asked what he means, for really, he doesn't know. He writes what's given to him and by that I mean what's given to him spiritually, from that universe that resides in his soul, not his brain, not his flesh, but his soul, and he doesn't know his soul. So words appear to him mystically. Readers who understand this - they are what keep us going.

But barely!

To publish means that first you have to know somebody or be related to somebody or by one trick or another, gain entrance to the club. I cannot describe the club but those inside this club know what I'm talking about and those outside this club know what I'm talking about even better. When you enter Elaine's and everyone says hello, that's how you know you've arrived.

When The New York Times or The New York Review of Books mentions you, even negatively, you have also arrived.

First, I should say, you must find an agent but that is impossible if you don't already have an agent and Joseph Heller captured something like this in "Catch-22." You also need luck. "Catch 22" nearly went to press as "Catch-18" but was stopped just in time because Leon Uris had a novel coming out titled "Mila 18." It's doubtful that "Catch-18" would have caught on, as a book or as a catch-phrase, as did "Catch- 22."

There is mysticism in numbers as well and in fact, everything is mysticism and everything is luck. Everything.

After finding an agent or not, the next trick is to find a publisher and this too is impossible unless you already have a publisher.

You cannot get published unless you are already published.

If you are famous - say a politician or an athlete or a TV performer - all bets are off, or rather, all bets are on. You're in.

Quality doesn't matter and the words you write mean nothing as long as you are "marketable."

If you are a true writer, you must be lucky enough to find a true editor, and some are out there but they are rare, a rare species, such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald were lucky enough to find in Maxwell Perkins, who died many years ago along with so many other book editors who possessed understanding hearts.

Otherwise, you, the fool who wants to publish, will be told that you are too commercial or too literary, or too descriptive or not descriptive enough. The best advice - getting ahead of ourselves - is to take Salinger's advice and write only for your own pleasure. By accident you may please someone else.

(Yes, there are some writers, big time writers, who are happily published. They have earned their money and their glory properly. Their God is a merciful God. There are publishers, though they keep disappearing, who honor writers, books and words, and these publishers merit our gratitude and respect.)

Next - assuming by some quirk that you have mistakenly been published - you are target practice for reviewers and critics.

This used to be a specialized industry - - book reviewing - but with the coming of the Internet everybody in the world is a critic.

People who would normally hide in dark places can now perform openly, within thousands of blogs and web sites, and can say whatever they want about what you were sucker enough to get published. These critics who, like children, should be seen and not heard, may be half-witted but the world is theirs, and so is your book. (Maybe they should not be seen, either.)

They don't even have to name themselves as they suck the blood off your published words and many of them only provide initials and many others hide behind pseudonyms.

You, meanwhile, are out there hanging, or being hanged, by your real name. They - who used to sit at the table of the shallow and the wicked - now sit at every table.

Those are the amateurs. Professional critics are not always fun, either.

Norman Mailer's novel, "Harlot's Ghost," was reviewed in The New York Times by John Simon, a critic famed for his viciousness.

Mailer complained. He asked the Times why John Simon was chosen; when the same Simon had a proven grudge against Mailer.

Mailer devoted seven years to that novel only to have it scorched in one sitting.

(I'm convinced that Mailer failed to develop fully as a novelist because, unlike Leon Uris and Herman Wouk, he denied his roots, his Jewishness.)

But the review was already in, and so, much more recently, was a review of a book written by Martin Amis and reviewed in the Times by Michiko Kakutani and to say reviewed is to put it mildly but to say savaged is to put it bluntly. We will never know if Amis' book, "The Second Plane," was any good because Kakutani ruined it for us. She did not like his politics when it was his literature she should have been telling us about - but since she did not like his politics she destroyed his book and tattered his reputation.

Once, on Don Imus' radio program, Frank Rich laughed when he remembered that some of the stage plays he poisoned were not so bad after all and some were even good, very good. Frank Rich is now a cultural writer for the Times but back then he was theater critic for the Times and known as The Butcher of Broadway.

For all that whimsy, Broadway plays that may have run for years were shut down overnight because Frank Rich said so in one swift stroke.

How many playwrights never wrote again?

So why - those of us who are bent but not broken - why do we write? We write because we are commanded to do so by a higher voice. We have no say in the matter.

Why do we publish? We publish because there may be one person out there with whom we've made contact in a world so very brutal and lonely.

Jack Engelhard's latest novel, "The Bathsheba Deadline," now in paperback, places journalism at the center of our war on terror. Engelhard wrote the international bestselling novel "Indecent Proposal." He can be reached at viewopinion@aol.com.