A truly great book needs no introduction; Today’s authors waste readers’ time with the clutter of ‘front matter’

January 17, 2014 5:39 pm

A truly great book needs no introduction

By Christopher Caldwell

Today’s authors waste readers’ time with the clutter of ‘front matter’

The other day, I started Alex Ferguson’s autobiography three times. Not that I was distracted or that the life story of the long-time Manchester United manager failed to hold my interest. One cannot help starting the book three times because the book actually starts three times. In his “introduction” Sir Alex describes how “several years ago I began gathering my thoughts for this book . . .” A few pages later is a “preface” in which he begins at the beginning, the 1980s, when he “walked through that tunnel and on to the pitch for my first home game . . .” But then in chapter 1, a few pages on, we learn that those were actually false starts, and that Sir Alex really wants to get the story rolling with his final match last May. (“If I needed a result to epitomise what Manchester United were about it came to me in Game No. 1,500 …”)The cluttering up of books with introductions and other “front matter” is a widespread problem. Sir Alex, a man famed for his directness, is only a mild offender. Other books have multiple prefaces, forewords, multipage acknowledgments, translator’s notes and so on. These obstacles stand like so many thickets, moats, snake pits and battlements separating the reader from the citadel of the main narrative.

The best way for an author to start a book about X is to say: “This is a book about X . . .” Thorstein Veblen does this in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899): “It is the purpose of this book,” he begins, “to discuss the place and value of the leisure class in modern life” – and 300 words later we are in the thick of it. Lord Macaulay begins his History of England (1848): “I propose to write a history of England . . .”

But the problem is not a new one. Before computerised typesetting, the front and back ends of a book were the only place where authors could afford to fix errors and air second thoughts. They almost never used this space wisely. I recently looked at the second edition (1874) of James Fitzjames Stephen’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Stephen was trying to bring himself to prominence by attacking John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Unfortunately for both of them, Mill died just as the first edition (1873) was being published. Stephen used the first 49 pages of the second edition to battle not Mill but various nit-picking reviewers. He might as well have sprayed his book with reader-repellent.

Today’s authors tend to waste readers’ time with similar hemming and hawing. They do it for a variety of reasons.

One is that influential American journalism schools tend to teach the “soft lead”. The best US journalism is built on a granite ledge of fact. But this makes US journalism a bore to precisely those literary-minded readers it most seeks to impress. So almost all writers are trained to sugar their dull stories by opening with pointless anecdotes.

A lot of people become authors because they have a story to tell – their own. But their readers want to hear a different one. Two or three pages of reminiscence about how the author first became interested in, say, Abraham Lincoln, might be as much autobiographical self-indulgence as the traffic will bear. Most publishers do not mind letting authors indulge themselves this way. In our audiovisual age, the stillness surrounding a book is eerie to some people. Chit-chat gives a sense of festivity, and of being on personal terms with the writer.

Finally, much of today’s serious writing is done either in academia or its immediate environs. Book-selling is influenced by university fads and politics. Fastidiously long lists of acknowledgments, which can add half a dozen pages to a book, originated in academic publishing, where gestures of gratitude are indistinguishable from shots across the bow. Assistant professor X will thank Doctor Y, who teaches at the University of Z – and, potential reviewers will hardly need to be told, controls all the grant money in the discipline.

In the internet age, explanatory stuff tends to become disaggregated from what it explains. MP3s do not naturally accommodate liner notes the way records and CDs did. This is not such a loss – the best record covers and liner notes from years past are usually available on the internet. Similarly, it is unlikely the tradition of cumbersome front matter will last long. There are some beautiful forewords in modern literature, but they would all be better as afterwords. And certainly no one will miss those literary essays that “introduce” classic page-turners by giving away the plot. A reader subjected to a lot of choppy, off-topic, preliminary prose has reason to be suspicious. It is often the sign of a book that is explaining something that should have been explained elsewhere, bullying the reader into reading the book in a certain spirit or insisting there is order in a narrative where there is none.