Perhaps you’ve heard the recent news that Random House is suing to recover a $300,000 advance from P. Diddy for an autobiography he failed to deliver back in 1999. In the Guardian, Blake Morrison argues that Random House’s litigousness represents a departure from gentlmanly publishing practices of the past. It is most certainly the only article that I’ve ever come across that manages to find what P. Diddy and Marcel Proust have in common.
Of course, P Diddy is not a poet starving in a garret. In fact, thanks to his business interests, which range from ownership of Bad Boy Entertainment to the Sean John clothing line, he could probably afford to buy every garret in Manhattan – and still have something left over. Moreover, Random House could put that £160,000 to good uses – to encourage a first-time novelist, for instance.
Still, a worrying precedent is being set here. What will the world of literature come to if every late-delivering author is held to account? Authors have been slow to deliver ever since Moses came down from Mount Sinai with his tablets of stone (40 days and nights late, according to his editor). In the 19th century, those who failed to produce their promised magnum opus ranged from Coleridge and de Quincey (both of whom suffered an opium habit) to Casaubon in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, with his grandiose plans to write a scholarly Key to All Mythologies.
In the 20th century, it was Proust who set the appropriate tortoise pace.
