There is much anguished talk these days about the level of hype in the publishing industry, and the relentless sales pressure applied. Writers themselves, while deathly silent when their own work is being furiously flogged, have been known to regularly complain about the treadmill of public readings to which they are subjected by their publishers in order to promote the work. It is not always easy to sympathise with the authors, especially when exotic foreign trips are involved, with (fancy) hotels and (elaborate) meals and all the rest, though rest is often what the writers claim to miss most, the poor dears.
However, the notion of writer as public entertainer has undoubtedly gone too far.
Everywhere one turns there are readings, and one is no longer safe in walking into a bookshop for a quiet browse (a noisy browse is just not worth it) or into a hotel bar for a quiet pint without being regaled by some self-styled writer, who generally regards himself or herself as an undiscovered wit and entertainer. Such events may yet bring back the clown into fashion among so-called stand-up artists, but have little else to recommend them.
Artists, i.e. painters, are not obliged to re-create their work in front of invited posers or innocents who wander in. Composers of music do not stand at lecterns pencilling in crochets and semi-quavers. Sculptors are not obliged to carve away at wood in front of a rapt audience. Yet the writer, whose work is usually produced in intense privacy, is increasingly found standing up in public and reading aloud words written to be read in silence.
As for the huge success of audio-books, they prove only that most books are too long for most readers, and that actors make better readers than authors - as they should, given their training. But it seems public readings are here to stay. And if we are to accept them as another straw in the desperate life-search for amusement, it is time that writers were obliged to study the skills of public reading and learn how to make an impression, how to dress for a reading, how to deal with the public, how to handle the whole thing. Most are rank amateurs and it is not good enough. Even the non-paying public deserves better.
Just the other day, in the London Independent, there appeared an effusive article about the natural eloquence of author Toni Morrison at a recent reading of her work. Michael Glover began by noting how "book lovers are becoming increasingly passionate about making literary dates with live authors in performance - the touch, smell, see and (almost) feel factor".
He is quite correct about these people - but it may well be wrong to describe them as book lovers, even if there are book lovers among them. Many are no more than author groupies, whose favourites are usually delighted (however they may wish us to think) to be touched, smelt, seen and (almost) felt for the sake of their art, or at least their sales.
Ms Morrison, apparently, is quite a reader. She is among those writer-readers from whom, according to Glover, words issue "unforced, like water from a mountain spring, with a glorious shapeliness and cogency".
Not surprisingly, her reading went down a bomb, not least with Glover, as she "picked about amidst her words like some gardener working a familiar, beloved plot, taking every phrase, and every word within each of those phrases, at its natural pace".
Look: however good she is as a writer, Ms Morrison is obviously wasted on the written word. She must be given a public role forthwith. We are surely all agreed at this stage that there are far, far too many writers, most of them hopelessly mediocre, and clearly there is an insatiable demand for the rare good reader. Let Ms Morrison be paid double her regular income by her publishing company to lay off the writing and read from her literary stable-mates' output.
Mr Glover went on to explain how public speaking - not the same thing as reading - should not be done, by launching what some would see as a grossly offensive personal attack on Times editor Peter Stothard - who, "locked inside his dark and dingy day suit, looked sweaty, pent and mildly embarrassed . . . his salt-and-pepper hair seemed freshly sheared by some madman who had just jumped out from behind the hut in the allotment". It's hard to see what appearance has to do with speaking, but Mr Glover clearly has something to get off his chest, or shoulder, and his outburst should not bother readers of the Times. Peter Stothard is not employed to look good or sound good at public readings, but to edit a newspaper. Many excellent journalists known to me fit the Glover description and their readers should start complaining only when they devote less time to their journalism and more to sartorial effects, expensive haircuts and elocution lessons.
