|
|
|
Laboratories against the literati John Brockman is the agent who made top scientists sexy – and he loathes the ignorant literary world
The John Brockman who welcomes me to his suite in a Belgravia hotel
is not the John Brockman I have been led to expect. He is just off the
plane from the States, he explains, and thus neither here nor there.
It is surely not just jet lag, though, that makes his manner seem seasoned
and reflective. If you didn't know who
he was, you might take Brockman for a professor on the high plateau
of his career. But this is a man legendary for forcing a publishing
culture with its spiritual home in Bloomsbury to do business the Wall
Street way. A striking picture had emerged from my background inquiries:
he is brusque, aggressive, ruthless and proud of it; he makes editors
feels bullied; he doesn't care about authors, only the next deal. And
that was from people who work with him.
The man himself delivers
a similar verdict. "I run my agency as a business," he says. "There's
nothing literary or genteel about it. I'm in business to make money.
I don't pretend I'm there to help people. If I make money, my clients
make a lot of money. If they want somebody to hold their hands, let
them go somewhere else.
"It's a very refreshing
message for the clients, because it depersonalises it. They're the geniuses,
they write the books; I do the best I can to get them what they're worth.
It's very simple: it's a bullshit industry, with a bunch of phoneys
in it, and I'm just a business person."
The tone is matter of fact,
as though he is describing the décor of his office. But he seems
to relish the opportunity to insult his customers. I mention one frequent
criticism: that he sells books on the basis of sketchy synopses, often
knocked up on the fly. "Absolutely," he agrees. So it's fair criticism?
"Fair compliment," he replies. "Why give lazy people too much to do?"
Nowadays, he provides text
aplenty, but requires publishers to visit a Web site called rightscenter.com
in order to read it. It's like buying a car, he explains. If you want
a Rolls-Royce, you have to go to a Rolls-Royce dealership.
Brockman picked up the
basics of business from his father, a Boston flower trader. "I used
to be sitting talking to publishers in less than a genteel manner and
realising that it was my father's voice coming out." It was, he observes,
a direct business. You looked your trading partner in the eye; you didn't
refer his proposals to a committee. And flowers don't keep. You pick
up the habit of closing deals quickly.
Ideas are not flowers,
but the strategy works. Perhaps scientists are reassured by the attitude
of an agent for whom "literary" is a dirty word; who spurns membership
of a club from which they are excluded. He has helped make some of them,
such as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, winners in the winner-takes-all
market that publishing has now become. What, I ask him, does he consider
he has done for his scientists?
"I've gotten some of them
one tenth the amount of money the Pope gets for writing a book," he
answers. Is that what they want, though? "No. I've never encountered
a group of people less interested in material things."
And that's the odd thing
about Brockman's relationship with the many scientists among his clients.
His reputation rests on his ability to obtain the highest price in the
marketplace, but he obtains these prices for authors who appreciate
them less than most.
If scientists really wanted
money, then they wouldn't have set out to be scientists. Likewise, if
Brockman was only interested in money, he would presumably buy and sell
the pure stuff, without the nuisance of manuscripts.
He does like the taste
of it, judging by the coverage he gives on his Edge webzine to the "billionaires'
dinner" he gave for associates in the computer industry. But a postscript
to the interview suggests a degree of sensitivity on the money question.
He sends me two e-mails, both asserting that it's the journalists, not
his clients, who are obsessed with advances.
The real significance of
the money lies in the fact that it has consolidated a genre. While a
few authors hit the big time, the rest get more modest sums that make
writing books a reasonably attractive proposition. Brockman has brought
about this state of affairs because he sees that science is a global
genre, and because he recognises that "we're in a science world; we're
in a software world".
He is also a partisan.
"We have this bifurcation in the States where you have the business
pages, which are filled with new technology and new exciting advances,
and then you have the arts and books section, where people seem to have
been brain-dead for 50 years."
This feeling dates back
to the mid-1960s, when Brockman began to hang out with artists, and
"found that the artists were all reading science. They weren't reading
the literary people. The literary people were still fighting the same
fights – who was a Trotskyist in 1937? They're still doing it today.
These are the people that hi-jacked the word 'intellectual' in the Thirties
from the scientists."
Brockman recalls how, as
a graduate student back in 1963, he "used to run to the news-stand to
get the latest Encounter, to see what people like Stephen Spender
and Hannah Arendt were arguing about." It might have been the case of
Adolf Eichmann, or something like that. Now the arguments that excite
him are the kind that take place between the palaeontologist Stephen
Jay Gould and philosopher Daniel Dennett, the latter a Brockman author,
over the nature of evolution.
His anecdote prompts me
to suggest that science has largely replaced politics in shaping world-views.
"I'm not equipped to compare it to politics, which I find enervating,"
he replies.
He simply is not a political
animal. Although he recognises that science will raise increasingly
political questions, about human nature and social equality, the ideas
that appear under Edge auspices tend to be upbeat.
Brockman's vision of the
future is of a human intelligence unified by digital technology, rather
than of a humanity divided by genetic classification. While he has a
stake in both sides of the Gould-Dennett clashes, he backed only the
liberal side in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, an implicit
riposte to Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's conservative book
on IQ and destiny, The Bell Curve.
Brockman's idea of the Third
Culture is based on the conviction that scientists are the new public
intellectuals. "C P Snow talked about a third culture. He wrote an addendum
to his 'Two Cultures', and he said eventually the literary people will
learn science and explain science to the people. It didn't happen. What
happened is the scientists went direct, writing their own books."
Brockman's Third Culture
was anticipated by British scientists like J B S Haldane and Julian
Huxley in the 1930s and 1940s. But, for Brockman, the slim blue Pelicans
of the time were mere popularisation. The Third Culture, he says, is
about scientists writing for their peers in other disciplines.
"When a physicist like
Brian Greene [author of The Elegant Universe] writes a book,
he knows that if he wants his colleagues in biology to read it, he has
to write it in English. And if he writes it without the jargon of his
field, then I can read it." Science becomes a spectator sport, in which
the elite conducts conversations "and the public gets to look over their
shoulder".
So does Brockman himself.
As a Web publisher, he's a one-man band with a PowerBook and a Dreamweaver
editing package. He does his own links.
"It will take me three
or four hours to get a new edition out, "he says. "While I'm doing it,
I'm thinking about these ideas, and whose ideas are they? Well, you
could argue that it's as good a list as any of thinkers in the world
today. To me it's a graduate school; it's the best one in the world,
and there's one student. So while I'm sitting there doing HTML coding,
I'm thinking about evolutionary biology or the human genome, and learning
about stuff at 59 that most people stop thinking about when they leave
college.
"But I do have a 19-year-old
who scorns this activity, and says 'Dad, you couldn't even get a 14-year-old
to do this'."
Published in The Independent, March 24, 2000. Copyright©2000 by Marek Kohn John Brockman's Edge Bio page. |
Home | About Edge| Features ( (alphabetical)
| Edge Editons (by date)
| Press | The Reality Club | Third Culture | Digerati | Edge:Feed
|
|
