Dalkey Archive Press is boldly bringing to readers' attention books in English and in translation that otherwise would not be in print.
One afternoon, sometime in the spring of 1980, John O’Brien and Paul Metcalf were complaining about the state of literary criticism in the US and said that someone had to start a magazine that would cover the writers who were being excluded.
These included such people as Gilbert Sorrentino, Paul Metcalf, Douglas Woolf, Wallace Markfield, and Luisa Valenzuela. O’Brien decided that afternoon that he would be the one.
Over the next several months O’Brien mapped out which writers he wanted to devote issues of the magazine to, and also decided that the magazine would last for five years, feeling that five years was enough time to get said what he wanted said and that at the end of that time, he would be ready to pack it in.
The first issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction was scheduled for the spring of 1981. O’Brien spent the next few months writing to people to ask them to contribute to the various issues he had planned, as well as trying to learn how one goes about publishing a magazine. He didn't have a clue about publishing and there was no one and no place in Chicago for him to ask about such things, even though there were a number of people doing literary magazines and small press books. ‘It was,’ he says, ‘and still is, a very scattered community, and you can live in Chicago for years without meeting your “colleagues” … So I started the Review out of a sense of isolation, as well as a kind of outrage at the fact that books and authors were reduced only to marketplace value.’
O’Brien also wanted the magazine to break down the artificial barriers that exist among countries and cultures. It was his view that one can't properly come to terms with contemporary writing without seeing it in an international context; it’s also his view that Americans generally don't want to know anything about the world outside the United States unless they are planning a vacation.
Three to four years after the Review began, there was money left over because overheads in producing it were so low. O’Brien decided that, with this money, it would be nice to reprint a few books, ones that really didn't have much of a chance of ever getting back into print through a commercial house and ones that were perfect examples of the kind of fiction that the Review was championing. Among the first few books were Gilbert Sorrentino's Splendide-Hotel, Nicholas Mosley's Impossible Object, and Douglas Woolf's Wall to Wall. In fact, all of these authors had been featured in the Review, and yet many or most of their books were out of print.
So the Press began with the intention of restoring to print 'just a few books.' Within a year or two, however, a few new manuscripts arrived, ones that deserved to be in print but that no other publisher would touch. Over the years O’Brien’s hope for the Press was that it would be the 'best' literary publisher in the country, even if that honor might be by way of default.
Whether it was through reprints or original works, he wanted the Press to define the contemporary period, or at least what he saw as what was most important in the contemporary period. Furthermore, he wanted these books permanently protected, which is why from the start the Press has kept all of its fiction in print, regardless of sales. And as with the Review, O'Brien wanted the books to represent what was happening around the world rather than more or less being confined to the United States. 'Like the Review,' he says, ‘Dalkey Archive Press was and is a hopelessly quixotic venture.’
So what is Dalkey Archive Press's 'aesthetic'? Avant-garde? Experimental? Innovative? All of these adjectives have been used, but O’Brien has never agreed with any of them. There is certainly an aesthetic on which both the Review and the Press are based, but there is no set agenda. O’Brien responds to the writers and books he likes, rather than trying to fit both of these into a formula.
‘We are in the process of bringing under one roof the best of modern and contemporary literature and creating a space where this literature is protected from the whims of the marketplace.'
Several years ago he was asked for a one-word description for the kinds of books Dalkey publishes. He finally came up with ‘subversive’, though he admits it's rather useless in terms of trying to pigeonhole what it is that they publish. These books, in some way or another, upset the apple cart, work against what is expected, and challenge received notions, be they literary, social or political. This is precisely the kind of fiction that O’Brien finds interesting: it does things that haven't been seen before, or it requires the reader to be figuring out how in the hell the writer is doing what he or she is doing.
Dalkey Archive Press is in the lucky position of not being dependent upon sales to survive. It does, however, rely upon the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. The latter was the first to give a grant, which meant the difference between being able to continue the Review and not being able to. The NEA came along a few years later and is primarily responsible for allowing Dalkey Archive to exist.
There are other important funders as well. Certain foreign governments, especially the French, have helped with some of the translations. But the significant funders for the Press, all starting around the same time in the early 1990s, have been the Mellon Foundation, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, and in particular the Lannan Foundation. The combination of these three, each with a different purpose, has had a major impact on the Press and has allowed them to get to where we are now. Without their support, the Press could not have survived. It's that simple.
One of the Press’s primary aims is to keep all the titles they publish in print ‘in perpetuity’. How will Dalkey Archive Press be able to survive financially into the distant future? O’Brien states baldly that ‘the permanence of the Press is THE critical issue for the future.’ What is needed is an endowment: ‘the interest from an endowment, plus sales and annual fundraising, will not only protect us from any marketplace disaster but will allow us to function at full capacity, which means that we will be able to reach as many readers as possible, maintain highly professional staff, and compensate writers and translators at a higher level. Without an endowment, I have a very hard time envisioning a future.’
Roughly half of the titles published by Dalkey are translations. O’Brien says that ‘some of the best fiction ever published by Dalkey has come out in the last few years from foreign countries, utterly amazing work that in some cases had been left untranslated for many years.' Academia also seems to have become aware of the importance of translations: the Press relocated to the University of Illinois in late 2006 in order to be part of a new center for translations that the university was planning on creating and which it very recently officially established. Reviewers – especially online – also seem to be paying more attention, and a number of foreign governments have also devised some inventive ways of supporting translations. What hasn't much changed, according to O’Brien, is philanthropic support for translations, especially among foundations.
So what does the future hold for the Dalkey Archive Press? O’Brien puts it succinctly: ‘We are in the process of bringing under one roof the best of modern and contemporary literature and creating a space where this literature is protected from the whims of the marketplace. What this suggests is that at the heart of our mission is an educational, interpretive function that goes well beyond what most publishers are doing, or even need to do. Unlike many small presses, and certainly unlike commercial presses, we have always been rooted in critical inquiry.’
‘If through some miracle,’ he adds, ‘all good books were published and kept in print by other publishers and if there were no longer a need for Dalkey Archive, we would still have the same mission we now have, but would place an even greater emphasis on interpretation and education.’ This is currently achieved through the Review of Contemporary Fiction and Context, a free publication founded upon the ‘rather perverse idea – perverse in terms of how books are treated in our culture – that books do not grow old.’ Context is also concerned with a certain kind of literature and with establishing the historical context and tradition for this literature.
Ideally, O’Brien hopes that Dalkey will or should be publishing about 24 books per year, perhaps evenly split between original titles and reprints. The point, though, is always not how much but how effectively; in short, do they reach as many people as possible with them or do they just print them? ‘The 'kinds' of books won't change, except that they will publish more translations.
O’Brien says, ‘I am obsessed with finding writers in unlikely places, or writing that normally wouldn't ever be translated into English because of its difficulties or inventiveness. I believe that there are writers of this sort everywhere but that we don't see them because they do not conform to American publishers' stereotypes of what, for example, African or Middle Eastern literature is like. So, I want to find these writers and publish them, though this obviously will be even more hopeless financially than doing the American ones of this sort.’
Above all, O'Brien hopes to ‘shake things up, cause writers and critics to re-inspect what they do and think, cause academics to open up their classes to other kinds of writing. But maybe this is too much to hope for. What in fact will happen – which is what one must settle for – is that you plant seeds out there for others. Revolutions happen in small ways. Or at least change happens in very small ways. But without that change, the culture just falls back upon itself and remains stagnant.’
[This is an abridged and amended version of an interview with John O'Brien. To read the full version, visit the Dalkey archive website.]
If you would like to support Dalkey Archive Press or read Context magazine online, visit www.dalkeyarchive.com
Dalkey Archive titles are available to buy in the UK.
