Have you ever opened a book and wondered why its first two or three pages are filled with names that you have never heard of and whom you have no interest in knowing anyway? It seems to be happening to me increasingly frequently and, frankly, I find it rather annoying. What used to be inserted into the Preface is now regularly separated into a section called ‘Acknowledgements’ that now regularly runs to several precious pages, better employed in improving your love scene or, if you are a historian like me, analysing that critical turn in diplomacy that brought the world to the brink of war. I’ve come to call ‘Acknowledgements’ the ‘Cocktail Party List’ and I skip over it as fast as my fingers can run.
Who are these people in ‘Acknowledgements’ and why are they there? Honestly, did Professor Henry Higgins of Hereford and Hampshire University really contribute to an improvement in your style? Queen Elizabeth II came down personally from her chambers to open for you the gate to the Royal Archives?
Only yesterday I heard on Radio 4 a British author complaining about this very problem. Then across the Atlantic came the voice of an American author whose most recent novel contains
four pages of ‘Acknowledgements’! He claimed that writing today is becoming a much more ‘collective enterprise’. I just don’t believe this. It is simply not possible to write a novel collectively. I am not even convinced that is possible to write good history collectively, though it has been tried many times with the usual deplorable results. The radio interview went on to debate the issue of collective contributions to the new type of ‘creative works’ that publishers are supposed to be offering us. It is a prime example, in my view, of what Sartre used to call
mauvaise foi, ‘bad faith’. Such works do not exist.
What is actually happening? There seem to be two factors at work here. One is the increasing influence of Marketing Departments over the actual process of writing. The other is the growing disinclination of authors to do their own research.
The first is probably the most important. Authors are having an increasingly difficult time being recognized by the public. We live in the lottery age of the mega-sale, where one author in a million gathers in all the stakes while the rest politely starve. The economics behind this was described by Tim Hely-Hutchinson in a recent issue of
The Author. It was interesting to note how the article, which showed little concern for the creative side of producing books, failed to elicit a single response from member authors of the SOA. As Hely-Hutchinson pointed out, the mega-seller is a fact of life today, though not one that authors could in any way welcome.
The response of authors is to be found not in editorials or in published correspondence but, first and foremost, in the Acknowledgements pages. Here we discover their desperate attempts to hook their relatively unknown names to some celebrity -- in ways that are sometimes comic. Did he shake hands with a Mega-author three years ago? We’ll slip his name in. Catch a smile from one of yesterday’s film stars? We’ll pop her in, too. Talk to the mayor of Timbuktoo during a recent holiday in the sandy Sahara? He certainly deserves a mention. Academics have their own star system which can be easily deciphered from the Acknowledgements pages -- sometimes even longer than the endless Endnotes. It was the academics who set the trend, now being imitated by novelists, travel-writers, fashion purveyors and how-toers.
Why do they do this? Because the Marketing Departments, along with the Media, now scan ‘Acknowledgements’ for a possible story, a bit of publicity, an edge on a rival author; it is one of the major topics of conversation in their canteens and coffee-shops; they build in their minds networks of partnerships and relationships more complicated than the Hapsburg marital system at the height of the Holy Roman Empire. That’s the way Marketing Departments operate: they love the social web implied in Acknowledgements because it corresponds to their own world. A long Acknowledgements list is the Author’s bow of allegiance to the marketing powers-that-be.
But it is more than that. Everybody enjoys contact with a creative person. It is elevating, ennobling; it fills that hollow spot one sometimes feels in oneself. But such relationships quickly become perverse in the Mega-sale world -- where the Mega-author is not necessarily the most creative spirit in the world’s assembly of authors. False hierarchies are thus created by the Marketing network. And these rapidly turn exploitative.
It was, again, the Academics who started the process off. The Master would be surrounded by a team of Research Assistants -- some of whom were more creative than the Master himself. How easy it was for the Master to enter into his footnotes books he had never read and documents, in strange foreign languages, he had never consulted -- especially after around 1970 when Publishers urged the authors of those biographies to make their footnotes as numerous as possible. Ah, those eighty-page bibliographies! Who compiled them? Worse was to come when the Master discovered that his Research Assistants could write… Ah, those pages on the subject’s complicated ancestry! Who wrote them? I don’t mind admitting that a long Acknowledgements section creates in me the wicked suspicion that someone else wrote the book. It began, as I said, with the Academics. Now it has spilled over into the world of Fiction…
An editor friend of mine told me of a famous Mega-author who would send into his publishers ‘notes’ which a team of editors painfully transformed into a book. Did these poor sub-editors turn up in the Acknowledgements section? This Mega-author never had one. Ghost-writing is a laudable profession, its texts preferable to the gibberish most politicians would churn out if left alone. Do the people who perform this fine trade turn up in Acknowledgements? It’s rare. Acknowledgements are used, rather,
pour brouiller les pistes.
So I hate these Acknowledgements pages: they are dangerous because they hand over too much to the Marketing Departments, they are misleading because they don’t give primacy to the people who really have contributed to the work: they are just plain perverse. Cut out Acknowledgements, I say. If you really have people who have helped you along that lonely, difficult creative path, then express an authentic ‘thank you’ at the end of your Preface where their names will dance -- for an eternity -- to the music of your own words. Thanking should be an act of grace.
What do you think?
