Paul Thomas: The literary set have a lot to answer for

Most of us have heard the story of the man who entered his 10-year-old child's (or pet chimp's) gleeful scribbles in a prestigious art competition and walked away with the grand prize. Those who insist that the creative arts are beset by cant, pseudo-intellectualism and fakery have new anecdotal evidence to support their case, and this time it's not apocryphal.

Patrick White is generally regarded as Australia's greatest writer and a key figure in his country's abandonment of the cultural cringe. His Nobel Prize for literature encouraged Australians to believe theirs was more than a lucky, sporty country; it was becoming a cultured and genuinely independent one.

Australia had emerged from the colonial cocoon and was finding its own distinctive voice and developing a culture capable of producing great art that was uniquely Australian yet had universal appeal.

The Nobel judges credited White with "an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature". They singled out his novel The Eye of the Storm for special praise.

Recently, the Australian submitted a chapter to a dozen publishers and literary agents, after changing the title to The Eye of the Cyclone and attributing the work to the unlikely anagram Wraith Pickett. Not only did they all reject it, they struggled to find a good word to say about it.

One publisher thought the author would benefit from attending a few writers' workshops. An agent suggested he should immerse himself in The Art of Writing, a how-to book for aspiring novelists, to get the hang of "exposition, dialogue, point of view, voice and characterisation". At least his punctuation was up to scratch. In terms of positive reinforcement for a young writer, this is the equivalent of "Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, what did you think of the play?"

When the dopey dozen were informed that they had dismissed the work of Australia's foremost writer as unpublishable, their responses varied. One said he'd never liked White anyway; another claimed the rejections proved they had their fingers on the publishing pulse because these days no one reads or buys White's work.

Only one admitted that professional literary people should be able to recognise good writing.

Amid the bluster and arse-covering, some pertinent points were made. The publisher's burden is the widely held belief that everyone has a novel in them. This manifests itself in the form of unsolicited manuscripts, accumulations of which are known in the trade as "the slush pile" or, even less benignly, "the shit pile".

Twenty years ago, the great American satirist Terry Southern recalled his experience of Esquire magazine's slush pile, which historically had been delegated to ambitious youngsters seeking promotion from the mail-room.

In his capacity as guest editor, Southern dived headlong into the slush-pile, expecting to come up with an unpolished gem, a work of striking originality. But there were no buried treasures in the slush pile and, after a while, Southern's critical faculties became so acute he could reject manuscripts on the basis of the first paragraph. Then it became the first sentence, then the title and eventually the author's name.

And 20 years ago, most wannabe authors used a typewriter or even wrote by hand. The advent of home word-processing has given a powerful boost to the notion that everyone has a novel in them. As with the microwave oven, the technology delivers convenience rather than quality.

Literature does have a touch of the emperor with no clothes, in that some of it deemed great, classic or essential would, if prised from academia's embrace, fade into obscurity because it is so out of synch with modern sensibilities or simply not that good.

I would have to be bullied or bribed into re-reading much of what I studied at school and university, but students are still being force-fed that indigestible fare.

Mickey Spillane, who died this week, would have greeted the thumbs-down for White with a snarl of approval. Spillane's attitude towards the literary set was like that of his hero Mike Hammer towards the degenerate commie scum who often found themselves at the wrong end of his .45.

By his own criterion - "if the public likes you, you're good" - Spillane should be regarded as one of the best writers of all time since the 13 Mike Hammer novels achieved total sales of 100 million. But popularity is no guarantee of quality. In fact, given the lowest-common-denominator formula that underpins mass-market consumerism, the opposite seems closer to the truth.

And neither critical acclaim nor commercial success is any guarantee of enduring relevance: it would be interesting to see what today's publishers would make of a pseudonymous slab of I, The Jury.

But there are worse fates than irrelevance. In 1973, the year White was the literature laureate, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger for negotiating an end to the Vietnam War. Many now believe that a more appropriate recognition of Kissinger's role in the southeast Asian conflict would have been his indictment as a war criminal.