Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, February 6, 2025
Strolling through Dymocks
with a friend recently, I spied a book with a rapturous blurb from The
Australian on its cover. “A stunning piece of work,” it said.
“I wrote that,” I told my
friend, wiping away a little tear of pride. I didn’t mean that I wrote the book.
I meant that I wrote the blurb. More precisely, I meant that I had, many years
ago, written the book review from which the blurb had been culled.
On the back of the same book
were longer blurbs from other people. Unlike me, the authors of these blurbs
were identified by name, because unlike me these people were famous. Not famous
for knowing anything about books, mind you, but famous for other things.
How far should we trust
these celebrity book blurbs? Quite often they emanate from close personal
friends of the author, who want to remain close personal friends of the author.
Sometimes they come from people who are authors themselves, which doesn’t mean much
unless their own books are any good. Frequently they’re not.
Blurbs weren’t always so
easy to come by. Shakespeare himself struggled to get a decent blurb during his
lifetime. Indeed, his collected plays weren’t even published until seven years
after his death, when the First Folio appeared.
Looking for a suitably
impressive endorsement, the Folio’s editors approached Ben Jonson, the most respected
poet-playwright of the time. Privately, Jonson had a few reservations about
Shakespeare.
Even so, he coughed up a
pretty good blurb, in the form of a dedicatory poem. In it he hailed
Shakespeare as the “star of poets” and “wonder of our stage.” But he couldn’t
resist throwing in a little dig at the Bard’s relative lack of education. “Thou
hadst small Latin and less Greek,” Jonson observed.
Now there was a blurb you
could trust – not just because Jonson leavened it with some words of dispraise,
but because Shakespeare was dead when he wrote it. Plainly, Jonson wasn’t just blurbing
Shakespeare in the hope that Shakespeare would one day blurb him.
Writers can do crazy
things in quest of a blurb. When Norman Mailer finished his third novel, The
Deer Park, he sent a copy to his hero Ernest Hemingway, hoping the great
man would favour him with a blurb for use in the print ads.
Being far too macho to ask
nicely, Mailer made his pitch to Hemingway in almost insanely aggressive terms.
“If you do not answer,” he wrote, “or if you answer with the kind of crap you
use to answer unprofessional writers, sycophants, brown-nosers, etc, then f—
you, and I will never attempt to communicate with you again.”
Papa did not provide the
blurb.
Blurbs can be a delicate
matter in the book world. They can make or break a literary friendship. When
Vladimir Nabokov was struggling to make his name in America in the 1940s, he
would have killed for a blurb from his friend Edmund Wilson, who happened to be
the nation’s most influential literary critic.
But Wilson seemed curiously
reluctant to endorse Nabokov’s work in print. When their friendship imploded
years later, the two giants denounced each other in a series of delightfully snide
public letters. In one of these, Nabokov very elegantly made it clear that he was
still simmering about Wilson’s failure to blurb him.
“During my first decade
in America,” Nabokov wrote, Wilson “was most kind to me in various matters, not
necessarily pertaining to his profession. I have always been grateful to him for
the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels.”
Closer to our own day, Christoper
Hitchens and Gore Vidal got into a nasty public spat about a blurb. When
Hitchens published his book Unacknowledged Legislation in 2000, a generous
endorsement from Vidal appeared on the cover.
“I have been asked
whether I wish to nominate a successor, an heir, a dauphin or delfino,”
Vidal wrote. “I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.”
When the two men fell out
a few years later, Vidal took the extraordinary step of trying to retract his
blurb. Speaking to a reporter, he claimed to find it baffling that Hitchens had
been going around identifying himself as Vidal’s heir.
Hitchens wasn’t about to
let that pass. In a fiery magazine article, he pointed out that Vidal had offered
him the blurb voluntarily – and that he still had the correspondence to prove
it. Anyway, he added, he had “stopped making use of” Vidal’s endorsement some
time ago, having privately concluded that the man was losing his marbles.
When my own second novel
came out in 2017, it featured a glowing front-cover endorsement from Clive
James. It was a blurb for the ages. He didn’t quite use the word “genius”, but
it was heavily implied.
Equipped with a killer blurb
from Clive, I thought I had it made in the shade. Then certain grim realities
of the book business began to impress themselves on me. If people were going to
see the blurb, they first had to enter a bookshop and browse the shelves. What
percentage of book-buyers still do that?
Then I found, to my
horror, that in certain bookstores my book was being shelved spine-out instead
of face-out. Other books, with blurbs from people like Lee Child, were on full-frontal
display. To access my blurb, people didn’t just have to approach the right
shelf. They had to be so intrigued by my book’s spine that they would feel
compelled to expose its cover manually.
Speaking of Clive James,
he delivered the best crack about book blurbs that I’ve ever heard. When a
prominent Australian author blurbed a second-rate book as “unputdownable,”
Clive was sceptical. Perhaps the reason the prominent author couldn’t put the
book down, Clive said, was that it was so full of hot air it kept springing
back up again.
