editorial
Peter Craven
IT'S AN ODD PLEASURE for someone who was once addicted to the business of editing to write an editorial for another magazine but it's a genuine one in the case of the present ABR under Helen Daniel's editorship because the magazine has an absolutley secure place in our culture and is widely perceived, against almost all odds, as the place where some of the most authoritative reviews in the country are published. ABRcontinues to be thought of as something like a house journal of this country's literary and intellectual worlds and it commands the loyalty of those worlds, or the better part of them, because it is not subservient to their worst features and tendencies. It remains a publication dedicated to the discussion of Australian books and ideas at a time when our very newspapers -- though not thank God, their book pages --- show every sign of following whatever market wind might blow, whatever fad or beat-up might sell a story.
Not so long ago we saw the Fairfax press, for instance, run with a story about the number of supposed Nazi scientists who had been allowed into this country by the Chifley government after the Second World War. The most remarkable thing about this was not simply the lack of any kind of historical sense, the lack of awareness of routine pressures Germans were under to join some branch of the party, but the way in which the very spectre of the Holocaust was degraded (no doubt unconsciously) to something like a tidbit for a market niche.
What is happening to the press is nothing as simple as newspapers without news but something rather more complex, the apparition of newspapers where the readership no longer has any reason to believe in the hierarchy of news which is inside them. It is, after all, possible for human beings to think of themselves as rather more than the aggregate of their particular qualities and enthusiasms. Your life may happen to be dominated in various ways by your enthusiasm for Japanese woodwork, cricket, girls' legs, Italian cars and the debates of the founding fathers leading up to Federation but you have the right to be suspicious of a press which saw you and your ilk as reducible to nothing but these enthusiasms or more commonly held versions of them.
The gravest sin of a newspaper, the thing equivalent to a politician dismissing any belief in society, is to dismiss the 'news' and with it, not unrelatedly, the significance of particular areas of human life and endeavour. This latter point is widely misunderstood in a world where a necessary pluralism is too easily assimilated to market mania. If, for instance, a great painter dies that is significant to all of us. Such an event (of all things) should not be beaten up as something that might appeal to one fraction of a readership that might want to identify with the 'prestige' associated with art. Ultimately that is a form of marketeering which is inimical to art for the same reason that it is inimical to journalism. And it is the market gone mad or gone stupid which publications like ABR does something to define itself against.
What I am talking about is a world where our universities are more interested in selling courses and (in their most recent phase) selling places that they have no time left over to think about the enrichment which comes from offering a subject for its own sake, because it contributes to human knowledge. In the case of publishing we confront a world of good intentions which is, as often as not, defeated by amateurism and contemporary economic trends. A number of writers have decried the tendency for publishing companies to take their budgets away from editors and put them into publicity and marketing a literary product which may have been sent into the world with all its imperfections on its head.
That is an obvious failing and the best publishers avoid it but I wonder how many publishers in this country actually understand how to walk the tightrope between highbrow or intellectual publishing and commercial viability. I look at a fattish fraction of the books published in this country and I constantly see books published by university presses which would not only have been viable if they had been published by commercial houses but which would have benefited from the process. And I also wonder where in our publishing is the imaginitive effort towards education, the uncompromising effort towards popularisation that characterisies all heroic periods of publishing. But all of this is carping about a world that ABR does its best to represent in all its height and depth.
In the meantime happy reading. One of the advantages is that in this magazine Australian writers and thinkers can talk to each other without too much hype or mediation. I'm particularly looking forward to pieces by people I have disagreed with in the past: to Cassandra Pybus's letter in reply to Robert Manne's review of The Devil and James McCauley and to the rolling column by that barrel of laughs -- your friend and mine -- Mark Davis.