Law: Writers' Rights and Wrongs

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Perhaps. But authors also worry, with cause, that Doubleday's move reflects an erosion in the traditionally close relationship between publishers and authors. Bernard Malamud, president of American P.E.N., a writers' group, says that "P.E.N. hopes Doubleday will drop its suit. To go on with it implies approval of the disastrous effects of the court decision against the art of fiction and against the community of writers and publishers." Typically, as Thomas Thompson puts it, that community has in effect been "a partnership: the publishing house and the author get in bed to make money." But that is changing, largely because of the pressure of the huge sums involved in mass market publishing, in megabuck advances paid to writers for works that may generate millions in serializations and other spinoffs.

Satirist Kurt Vonnegut argues that in any case it is "quite hypocritical" for publishers to invoke the indemnity clause since they have encouraged writers to produce manuscripts where the lines between fiction and nonfiction blur. This genre has included many big sellers, among them Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song and Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff.

Many writers and publishers believe that a way must be found to modify the indemnity clause so that it continues to place primary responsibility for accuracy on authors but does not impose intolerable financial burdens on them when libel suits are filed. For the moment, however, about all that the parties on both sides of the typewriter can agree on is that, as Writer Gay Talese says, "lawyers have become the third force in publishing." He adds: "I see them as the new enemy."