Porter’s Pensées

On our Swedish island for the weekend. Beautiful autumn weather, a blazing log stove, and plenty of wine. It seems a world away from Donald Trump; but of course you can’t avoid him even here, and if he is elected even Sweden will suffer the fallout. Apparently Stockholm is expecting an invasion of rats over the winter, mainly in Östermalm, the posh quarter. I wonder how many of them are my compatriots escaping from the sinking ship that is Brexit Britain? – Serious blogging to be resumed soon.

Liam Fox’s encomium to global free trade, delivered recently in Manchester, the original home of the idea  (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/30/globalisation-poverty-corruption-free-trade-liam-fox), gives me an excuse to re-post this blog of mine from April this year, on the early Victorian version of the ideology, which Fox appears to have disinterred wholesale; and without having learned any of the practical lessons against it of the past 150 years. https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/30/global-utopia/. Take a look.

He’s right, however, to regard the European single market as an intrinsically anti-globalising institution in many respects. Theoretically, a country delivered from its protectionist rules should be able to trade more ‘freely’ in the world. That’s my worry.

Four or five years ago I had an unusually painful experience with one of my publishers, and decided to write about it for the THES. They eventually published the article, but only after it had been ‘lawyered’ almost to death. So, now that I have my own blogsite, I thought I’d recycle it in its original form. I doubt whether the publishers – Continuum – will bother to sue this very insignificant site; and in any case they no longer exist, having been taken over shortly afterwards by Bloomsbury, who are a different kettle of literary fish. So are the publishers I’ve had since then – mainly IB Tauris – whom I’m very happy with. My criticisms of Continuum don’t necessarily apply to them. So here it is. It may serve as a warning and a guide to young academics anxious to get into print.

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Here is my notion of the ideal academic publisher. He, or she – more likely the latter, these days – reads your book, or at least enough of it to be able to discuss it intelligently with you. She sends your proposal out to (paid) peer reviewers, and then, whether she accepts it or nor, feeds their comments back to you. She may give you advice of her own about the form the book should take, based on her knowledge of the academic market, as retailed to her by commissioning editors who have been out and about, scouring that market. She may also take you out for lunch. When you deliver the final manuscript (or file), she has it expertly read again, and passes more comments on to you. Academic authors need this; it’s often a lonely business writing books, and hard to be confident that you have yours right. You sign a contract, which you have had some input into first. You get an ‘advance’ on royalties – however small: for yours is only an academic book, after all. Then your publisher advises you about such matters as illustrations, if there are any, helping you to prepare them; and permissions and copyright, which of course she or her experts will be far more knowledgeable about than you. She will then get the book edited, either in-house or by independent editors: not only for spelling, grammar, consistency and ‘house style’, but also to spot inclarities and repetitions – always the most difficult things for an author to see – and, if you are lucky, to check facts. Obviously, the results of this – typically several pages of comments – are sent on to you.

The two of you discuss publicity, possibly with her marketing manager physically present, to which you, of course, will be able to contribute valuably, from your knowledge of the people, journals, societies and professional bodies who are most likely to take up the book: the key target audiences, in other words. The publisher, or her staff, will have contacts with general newspaper review editors and people in the non-print media, which will help. (‘I was talking with John Humphries the other day…’) During the long process of preparation and production she will keep in touch with you about developments, without your asking (because you won’t know what the developments are), and in general make you feel that the baby is still yours, even though you’ve passed it into nurse’s hands. If there’s to be a ‘launch’ (christening?), the publisher will suggest and arrange it. At the end of the day you can feel jointly proud of the bright young book that has emerged from this; and which it goes without saying she will have sent you the first copy of, hot from the press. She knows how you long to put it to your breast! That’s how academic book-birth ought to be.

I call it an ideal; but in fact this has been my experience of academic publishers for over forty years now, since my own first book came out under the Macmillan imprint in 1968. Publishing has changed in many ways since then: Macmillan no longer survives under that name, for example; but every publisher I have worked with since then (bar one) has closely conformed to this model. They are a wonderful species. But I’m now beginning to wonder whether they might not be an endangered one.

One hears alarming stories: of publishers struggling, even the entire print media’s struggling, in the face of electronic publishing, digital scanning, Kindle, and so on. Standards are falling. Advances are shrinking. One academic author of my acquaintance is being asked to pay A$ 4,000 to have her own book copy-edited. My own most recent experience of an academic publisher doesn’t quite mirror that. They didn’t have my book edited at all, in the sense described above. Nor did they send it out for peer review, either as a proposal or as a completed manuscript. Maybe they trusted to my reputation, which I suppose was flattering, but is not sufficient (another of my publishers has sent out a proposal for a fifth edition to readers); and took no account of the fact that this book was on a subject outside my normal area of expertise. They probably didn’t read it – showed no sign of it, in any case. They declined any help over illustrations, copyright, and ‘permissions’. When I requested a small advance to cover the unexpected cost of illustrations, they refused me – though that is the least of my complaints. They never wrote to keep me in touch about the progress of the book, even when they made substantial alterations to the form of it, and decided to change the publication date – with the result that I booked the wrong flight back to the UK. They took not a blind bit of notice of any of the valuable suggestions I made about review copies, publicity, and so on; and when I asked (after publication) what had become of the idea I had passed on to them earlier from the Foreign Office for a launch there (the book is about the building), calmly told me that this sort of thing was up to authors to arrange. They didn’t send me my first copy of the book until some time after they had stocked Amazon. It goes without saying that they never bought me lunch. Throughout the whole process I was made to feel that I no longer had any interest in the book. It was now theirs. Marx would have called this ‘capitalist alienation’.

Early on in our relationship I sensed that things were going wrong. The chap I was dealing with seemed only interested in ‘presentation’, to the extent of trying to force on me a title that bore no relation to the subject matter of the book, simply because he thought it might remind punters of another moderately successful work of mine: in the first draft of my contract, in fact, it goes under the name of The Absent-Minded Architects. He also didn’t reply to emails. As a result I asked if I could withdraw from our arrangement, repaying any expenses they might have incurred (they won’t have come to much); only to be told that if I did they wouldn’t allow me to publish the book with anyone else. I’m still not certain whether that has any legal basis; but I didn’t risk it, and it got me looking through our contract again, when I realized how very one-sided it was. In brief: they, the publisher, could cancel it if they didn’t like the book, but I had no corresponding right to cancel if I didn’t like them. My obligations were spelled out in detail; theirs, apart from some very material ones – a publication date, my royalties, copyright, and my ‘free copies’ – were not. Nothing, for example, about peer-reviewing, or editing, or marketing. I probably didn’t notice this at the time because these were part of my understanding of what academic publishers basically did. Other publishers I have spoken to agree. Most think the lack of peer-review, in particular, is ‘bizarre’.

After the book had been published I raised these specific questions with the publisher; only to be fobbed off with arrogant and anodyne responses: ‘we’re quite happy with our procedures; look at our list’ and the like. They also boasted of their success in winning an award recently, for ‘Best Independent Publisher of the Year’. (I looked up the citation. It was for turning the company around financially. Could that have been at the expense of the services they are supposed to provide?) What I wanted to know from them was whether my experiences with them were typical – whether they make a rule of not sending MSS to readers and editors, for example; of disregarding authors’ suggestions about marketing; and not keeping in touch generally – or whether I was simply unlucky. The fact that they refused to respond to these points, or to this article when I favoured them with a preview of it, should be borne in mind if they try to come back on it. They’ve had their chance. If they had deigned to engage with me I probably wouldn’t have gone into print in this way. So they only have themselves to blame.

I came to this publisher accidentally – they had just swallowed up the smaller firm I had originally approached – which was unfortunate. It was naïve of me not to have checked up on them. But herein lies a lesson for younger academics looking to publish their books: to take advice, and look around. You’ll find a number of publishers – I’m sure mine isn’t the only one – proudly advertising themselves as ‘academic’; which they are in the sense that they publish academic books. But they perform few of the other functions that most of us older academics have grown used to from academic publishers. So, young academic, be warned. If a no-frills type of publisher is what you want, like a no-frills airline – it gets you there, but in minimal comfort – then fair enough. (Of course, it would help if they pointed this out to you beforehand. At least you know what you’re likely to get from Ryanair.) But there are better, more helpful publishers out there, if your book is good enough; which will hopefully survive for some years to come. Secondly, you might try to get some reassurances about the services you expect them provide written into your contract. Otherwise you might be reduced to fuming impotently, in journals like this.

Bernard Shaw once famously dismissed all publishers as ‘rascals… without being either good businessmen or fine judges of literature. The one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them.’ I never up to now agreed with the first part of that, and still do not. But after my experience with Continuum, I’m coming round to the second. If publishers no longer have to get books type-set (we do that ourselves, on our computers), don’t get them peer-reviewed or properly edited, don’t help or advise on matters in which they must have more professional knowledge (like copyright), disregard authors’ usually pertinent advice about publicity, never consult about anything, and in general ignore us poor begetters of our books: what on earth is the use of them?

A small gripe. I get a bit fed up with Swedish friends suggesting – even jokingly – that I must have some latent ‘imperialist’ DNA in me because I’m British, and even more when they learn that I write about the British Empire. If they read my books (especially the latest, British Imperial) they’ll know that’s not true. More irritating, however, is the high moral ground they take to shoot these barbs (or jokes) down from. Sweden – that paragon of liberal social-democratic virtue – is entirely innocent of imperialism, even in the past. Isn’t that so?

Well, actually, it isn’t. OK, the Vikings were a long time ago; as were the Normans, who were ‘North-men’ originally, and subjected England to her most brutal colonial conquest in the eleventh century – amounting to almost a genocide in Yorkshire, where I live; and, in addition, bequeathed to her most of the noble families whose descendants became the leading British imperialists later on. (So, going back, our imperialism was all the Scandinavians’ fault.) Don’t be fooled, by the way, by the excuse that the Swedish Vikings, as opposed to the Danes and Norwegians, were peaceful traders rather than marauders. They did their share of raping and pillaging, albeit in an easterly direction; and traded in slaves. Later Sweden took several ‘proper’ colonies in Africa, eastern North America and the West Indies, abolishing slavery in the last of these a full twenty years after Britain abolished it in her empire; had an ‘East India Company’ just like England’s; ruled over Norway, Finland, northern Germany and the Baltic states at various times; did much of the dirty work in other nations’ colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (like the awful Belgian Congo); were the leading colonial settlers in Wisconsin and Michigan; and still could be said to exert what today is often called an ‘informal’ imperial sway all over the world, through IKEA, H&M and Clas Ohlson. (Far-fetched? But if the spread of American MacDonalds eateries can be described as ‘imperialism’, then so can this.)

All this isn’t to denigrate the Swedes in particular (God forbid!); but merely to show that any people can be ‘imperialistic’, and most have been at one time or another, ever since the Cro-magnons displaced the apparently much nicer Neanderthals (we’re not sure exactly how) 30,000 years ago. Imperialism, in other words, is a normal, and maybe even a ‘natural’, collective human activity. Sweden was implicated too.

But not of course any of my Swedish friends, who can’t be blamed for crimes committed before their time; as neither, however, can I. – There, that’s off my chest.

PS. Researching some time ago for a conference paper on historical British attitudes to Scandinavia – alas, never published – I found a couple of late-mediaeval/early-modern sources claiming that the European peoples as a whole originated in the forests of Scandinavia, swarming down imperialistically in hordes (waving their flat-pack swords, no doubt) to populate the whole of a previously quite empty continent. One of the names given to Scandinavia then, deriving from this, was vagina gentium. Oh dear.

Having resisted commenting on the Clinton-Trump ‘debate’, on the grounds of lack of expertise, I may have something to contribute based on my long historical view. For me, the telling episode in the debate came when Trump justified certain anti-social financial chicaneries of his on the grounds of ‘That’s called business’. Which confirms the analysis I made of his movement (and others) in a post in March this year, as simply the climax of the inexorable march in the world (? let’s hope not) of the capitalist juggernaut. Here’s the link: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/03/10/trump-the-long-view/. Get it up. I think it’s OK, possibly important, and an example of how a sense of history can help.

I’ve changed both the title and the design of this blogsite. (Ben, the ‘Happiness Engineer’ (sic) at WordPress.com, was very helpful.) The ‘Search’ facility should be useful. And I now have a ‘domain’: ‘bernardjporter.com’, though I don’t yet know what to do with it.

Yes, we woke up at 3 a.m. (Swedish time) to watch The Debate. And yes, we were predictably appalled by Trump, and – in my case less predictably – impressed by Clinton. But I have nothing original to contribute here to the debate about The Debate; no points that aren’t already being made in this morning’s papers. I’ve studied American history, and have always taken a deep, almost obsessive, interest in American politics (I was there for the 2008 Election), and I think I have some understanding of Trump’s popular appeal. Obviously by any objective and intelligent understanding Hillary ‘won’ last night, and by some distance. But how well that will play with the American electorate – her cool female reason against his male blustering and bullying – I can’t tell. America is an alien place. Our transatlantic cousins? Hardly.

I try to restrict my comments on this blog to things I have special knowledge or experience of. On the USA, I’m just one of the boring, predictable, liberal-intellectual crowd.

Capitalism may be a lot of good things, but one thing it isn’t is creative. It almost never originates new or great things; only develops them, at best, or exploits them, for the profit of others, and often arguably to the detriment of the creations themselves. Football (soccer) is an example. Capitalists didn’t create it; ordinary folk, entirely independently of the capitalist system and ethos, did. But then, when it became popular, and capitalists saw the possibility of a quick buck in it, it was wrested away from its creators, and turned into something very different. That’s what all the fuss about West Ham’s move to Stratford – see my last post but three – is about.

That particular cause is now lost. But it’s worth considering some of the more general implications of it. One is that, even in order for capitalism to thrive, certain aspects of life must be kept clear of it. Material necessity isn’t (always) the ‘mother of invention’. Too often it’s its enemy. How many great scientists, artists, writers, composers, writers, even footballers, have been motivated originally by the profit motive? It follows that if capitalism can’t create, and indeed is inimical to creation, we still need to have, even in as capitalistic a society as we have now, areas entirely free from it, in order for the seeds of creativity, invention, art and (I would say) scholarship to flourish in, before they are snatched away. The goose must be protected from the factory farmer in order to be enabled to lay its golden eggs. Otherwise capitalism will find itself with nothing worthwhile to exploit.

That’s the simple capitalist case for not subjecting universities, public service broadcasting, and every other area of genuine creativity, to the ‘laws of the market’. There are of course other and perhaps better reasons. But capitalists work on the principle of selfish material advantage, so maybe this argument might get through to them where the others wouldn’t.

(PERSONAL)

Since starting this blog I’ve been diagnosed – well, not exactly diagnosed, as there’s no test for it, but all the symptoms fit – with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, otherwise known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME); which is why I find it hard to get up in the mornings – I never used to – and why there’s no chance of my ever writing another book. This blog has now turned into a therapy for me, to keep my old mind active, without needing to do any hard work. I’m living off the fat I have built up over the course of the twelve books and dozens of scholarly articles I’ve published since 1968, and what I read in the papers. If I don’t write regularly I’ll fade into pleasant oblivion. There’s no need for you to read it.

ME used to be dismissed as an excuse for laziness. In my case I suspect it was triggered by a tick bite I got on Svartsö two years ago; the one that can give you Lyme disease. A dangerous country, Sweden. Democratic, but dangerous.

In the meantime, Kajsa has been cruelly cut off from all formal contact – including her email address – with the university she has served for thirty years. ‘Is there life after academia?’ she asks. Perhaps together we could set up a new university for the tired and the rejected.

The coverage of the British Labour leadership campaign in the Swedish press has been astonishing. I don’t remember a Swedish general election getting this kind of attention in any British newspapers, let alone a mere internal party squabble. The reporting has been full and – so far as I can gather – fair; far more so than in most of our British papers. If you want to read a really informative and unbiased account of the Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon, you should go to Dagens Nyheter. On the other hand, I’m not quite sure the Swedes really understand what’s going on.

That’s because their political culture is so very different from ours. From here (Sweden) British affairs appear exotic, exciting, even a little mad. I’m sure that’s why the press here dwells on them so much; not – surely – because Britain is still important, like the USA, which also, of course, gets a lot of coverage. Swedish politics is protected from the internal party battles that have riven both Labour and the Conservatives recently, by its proportional system of voting, which enables the party situation to be more flexible, and which encourages compromise. There are two left-wing parties here, the Social Democrats and the Vänster (old Left), which would accommodate both of the warring tribes in our Labour party, while still giving each electoral influence in line with their popular support. (See https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/09/06/the-soul-of-british-politics/.) So a row in either party over its ‘soul’, which is what we are going through, is almost unimaginable, or at least would be far less serious and damaging than the one that British Labour is going through now. (Having said that, there is some soul-searching going on in Miljöpartiet, or the Greens. But they’re quite small.)

As well as this, Sweden’s politicians are more boring. Jimmy Åkesson, for example, the leader of the Sweden Democrats, their equivalent of UKIP, is a smartly dressed young man who wouldn’t look out of place behind a bank counter; with nothing like the panache of our Nigel. Swedes can hardly credit that people like Farage and Boris are active and even influential in British politics. Even Jeremy Corbyn must look a little under-dressed. For a nation whose public life lacks colour, I would say, Britain fills the gap; the small, silly parts of their souls that they might like to express themselves, but are too polite to.

Lastly, the Swedes don’t have our press. That’s the feature of our politics and society that shocks them the most: not only the rank sensationalism and near-pornography of the tabloids, which have no real equivalent in Aftonbladet and Expressen, but the blatant propagandizing of all our papers; their use by their proprietors as mouthpieces of one particular ideology or another, usually shockingly unbalanced, and with any regard for the truth being – at best – secondary. Of course Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet are directed to certain readerships, mirroring their political preferences to an extent (Svenska Dagbladet is more Conservative), but it’s well-nigh impossible to detect this from their reportage. (Kajsa and I – both of us Lefties – take both of them.) They all – even the tabloids – have what we would regard as ‘high’ Kultur sections. So you can see why we (the Brits) appear so fascinating to the Swedes. It’s our daring, our lack of political correctness, our colourfulness, our sheer awfulness in many ways.

This, however, isn’t why they’re interested in Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn would not seem particularly exotic in a Swedish context. His policies are pretty mainstream, for a Social Democratic country. ‘Momentum’, vilified in the British press as a Trotskyite entryist conspiracy, resembles a score of Swedish grass-roots rörelsen (social movements) in the past, out of which most Swedish parties and policies have grown. This is natural to a country that has accepted ‘bottom-up’ (or if you like, ‘democratic’) politics for generations. The fascination with Corbyn lies not in his politics, but in the fact that he is so omstridd, or viciously beleaguered, in his own country, instead of being calmly accepted and reasonably debated with, as he would be here.

But then here they don’t appear to have the patronizing view of politics we Brits have, or at any rate to the same extent: of a country needing to be run by an ‘establishment’, of whatever party; in other words, by governments set over it, albeit with the people being graciously allowed to choose which particular establishment they want to knuckle under every few years. That of course is one of the things that Jeremy is challenging. If he succeeds, who knows? Britain might become a little bit more like Sweden. Hurrah.