Online haters in the low-budget literary biz

I’m a big fan of John Lennon (the American author, not the English musician, but, sure, I’m a fan of the musician too). I’ve read most of his books, and it saddens me that literature is such a niche interest that even a versatile, talented, and accessible novelist such as Lennon can’t make a living out of it. OK, I understand the economics: if there were more money to be made from writing fiction, more people would be doing it, there’d be more competition, so it’s not clear that Lennon himself would thrive in that environment. But still.

Lennon’s an interesting case in that he’s had a certain amount of success–early books being published by serious commercial presses and getting respected reviews, and these books made it into stores to the extent that readers such as me came across them), he gets asked to write for the London Review of Books (all they ever publish of me is letters!) and he has a comfortable job teaching at an Ivy League university–but his fiction nowadays . . . ummm, “disappears without a trace” would be putting it too strongly, but readers have to go and search for it. There are just too many people out there who can write well and would like to write for a living, and too few people who want to pick up a book and read a story. The numbers don’t work out.

The above is all background to a weird and kind of mysterious story, which is that there’s someone online who hates Lennon’s guts, but not for any personal reason, just professional grievances of some sort. The person in question is Colin Fleming, and he seems to be, like Lennon himself, a moderately successful writer, which, as discussed, seems like a frustrating position to be in. Fleming has a low opinion of Lennon’s work. That’s fine; literary judgment is subjective. But he’s so angry at Lennon, which just seems odd to me. Lennon’s just some guy, right? Fleming’s blog reminds me of a wacky book from fifty years ago by disaffected journalist Richard Kostelanetz (see some discussion here). I find something fascinating about these cul-de-sacs of literature and publishing–but it’s disturbing to see it happening real time, directed at a real person.

If you want to draw connections, you can note that Lennon once reviewed a book by James Lasdun who once wrote a book about how someone had stalked him. Fleming doesn’t appear to be a stalker; he’s just really angry in a way that seems disproportionate to whatever set him off. At least, that’s my perspective; Fleming seems angry that Lennon has reached literary heights while writing really bad stuff, but, as I see it, Lennon is just getting by–publishing four stories in the New Yorker over a twenty-year period isn’t enough to pay the bills–and I think he’s an excellent writer. I get that Fleming is angry, but it doesn’t seem to me that he’s picking an appropriate target.

P.S. Just incidentally, I think Fleming underestimates the difficulty of coming up with a good title. Coming up with a good title is harder than it looks (unless you’re Donald Westlake). When people can do it, they deserve our respect. When they can’t, they deserve our sympathy, not our mockery. Even some great books have mediocre titles.