The faint sense that Shashi Tharoor had been cloned by his publishing house last week was inescapable. There was Mr Tharoor at the launch of his own book, Pax Indica; presiding over the launch of Chetan Bhagat’s book; in conversation with several authors, from Shehan Karunatilake to Yasmeen Premji.
Mr Tharoor’s ubiquity is unremarkable. As one of the few genuine literary superstars left from his generation, it would have been far more unusual if he had been restricted to just his own launch. For authors like him, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth and a few others, the relentless publicity blitz is the price they pay in return for the privilege of being left in peace to write for the rest of the year.
And Mr Tharoor’s life in politics has left him better prepared than most for the curious contradiction at the heart of the writer’s life: the necessity of drumming up a public performance from the most private of the arts. Early storytellers were, in truth, performers — the telling of a story was as important as making it up in the first place in the age of the spoken word. But the shift to print changed the nature of authorship. A storyteller had to address his or her audience directly; a writer could, for a brief while, push the book out there and let it do the talking instead.
In 1989, when Mr Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel came out, the book launch hadn’t acquired the ceremonial importance it holds today. A smattering of book discussions at the Sahitya Akademi or the India International Centre offered the humble incentive of chai and biscuits. (The importance of the speaker could be gauged by whether the evening ran to chocolate or jam biscuits rather than plain Glucose or Marie biscoot.) Vikram Seth read to packed halls at JNU, Shashi Tharoor was welcomed at his old college, St Stephen’s, but even when the first few launches began to push authors into the public eye, the five-star hotel launch was a long distance away.
Today’s launches are like the sangeet and the mehendi at weddings: completely inessential and utterly inescapable. Most publishers don’t think launches do anything to promote books, but they can’t stop the practice without upsetting their authors and, worse, disturbing the delicate ecology of the literary world, for whom book launches are the equivalent of the coffeehouse adda. Authors may be aware that a book launch, however entertaining and well-executed, is basically a bald call to The Public, asking them to please buy your book, but few would skip the launch all together.
Some do, explaining, as I Allan Sealy memorably did, that they would much rather be back home doing the gardening. Mr Sealy did one or two rounds of author interviews, book launches and festivals before retreating to Dehradun where, as he had threatened, he occupies himself with the writing and the gardening, and emerges only rarely into the public eye. But few authors would be comfortable with Mr Sealy’s choice, or as happy to walk away from the limelight. As another writer friend said, only 50 per cent of your work as a writer has to do with the writing. The other 50 per cent is, depending on one’s perspective, about accepting the need to market your book, or about being gracious enough to thank your readers for the time and money they’ve invested in you.
For a lucky few, the public life of a writer doesn’t have to be a burden. The happiest writers seem to be the ones who don’t measure their festival appearances in the number of books sold — the missionary approach to writing, which sees all readers as potential converts. Instead, they see the public life as a necessary balance to the essentially private, solitary, quiet act of writing; the festivals and launches are ways of introducing you to your creative community.
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In an essay on Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf reflected how close the other author had come to losing her obscurity — Austen was so close to becoming famous, at the time of her death. “She would have stayed in London, dined out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, travelled, and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to feast upon at leisure.”
Woolf was not thinking of fame as we define it for writers these days – photographs in the paper, Amazon sales ranks – but as the passport to a life with a broader margin. “Her sense of security,” she writes of Austen, “would have been shaken.” The launches are mere ritual; the real gift that a public life might offer a writer is unusual encounters, and a useful sense of uncertainty.