Dropping bare acknowledgements

Great way to begin a substack: with the back of books

The danger of staying too detached from mainstream culture is that it seems newly creepy when you do reattach. Say you only watch full ads any more at the cinema (finger jabbing at a phantom skip button of its own accord like the haunted limb in a horror film)—you’re only the more weirded out by media grown abstruse while you were looking away. Like what’s it even for, this ad with a supernaturally smug young woman and man draping red balloons through an open-plan, open-mouthed office, the soundtrack a breathy acoustic cover of Ce Ce Peniston’s ‘Finally’? HSBC? Bodyform? Oh, it’s for an app for losing your savings on the stock market. Say you try avoid TV news like it’s lead poisoning, but the next thing you know you’re at your parents having to watch a professional journalist plus grown-up illustrate Covid deaths using the visual metaphor of a birthday cake.

To avoid such spiritual jolts I gave in a few of months ago to a bestseller that’d been haunting me from bookshop to bookshop. A few months later, still a novella-length away from its final and 900th page, I hauled myself to the first and last for a browse. This felt like safer procrastination anyway than checking my phone or snacking or probing every screw in my flat with an Allen key. At the front, the author biog, in which I could detect the gaps; at the back, dressed as encyclopaedia entries, adverts for other books. Then I had a jolt after all.

I’d exposed to myself the novel’s last, short chapter, or maybe the epilogue (it was in a different font). Before I properly spoiled the ending I made to shut the novel then I creaked it back open. The change in font, in tone, clarified that all I’d seen was the acknowledgements page. All! The acknowledgements pages. Seven of them.

What could this mean?

Seven pages is longer than Poe’s ‘The Tell-tale Heart’, than Borges’s ‘The Circular Ruins’. I went to a bookshop and worked the shelves in order, going straight from last pages to last pages. The staff, watching quietly, shook their heads. I must’ve looked like I was reading the endings of every book as though to get the jump on some arch-spoiler (if not like the villain himself getting his research in). One of the staff came over with a “Can I help you?” I said, “No. No, I don’t think you can.”

For it was true. Acknowledgements were metastasising.

Granted the buxom bestseller was so big maybe the acknowledgments had to be too—enlarge a photo and the background detail enlarges in kind. But now here was a chapbook with acknowledgements running longer than any one of its poems.

The poet at least was realistically comprehensive and gracious. She hewed to the older acknowledgements format for the most part: you thank your agent, editor, other such gatekeepers, then lesser folk working behind the scenes - the background detail as it were - running down the rungs before you loop back in time to the support network with an aw-bless final line saved for partner and/or family. Yet here was an epic fantasy novel, maybe taking a leaf from its crowded cast of characters, that acknowledged the librarian who’d kept the lights on a little longer, the always (?) patient post office clerk, the Random House receptionist so butler-discreet and -regular with the coffees. It was like a reverse suicide note, the buttonholing, the ‘and another thing’ pile-on, the surveying of a whole lifetime but come to praise not to bury.

Most authors won’t get to do an Oscar’s speech; this is the next best thing. But graciousness can broaden and thin into a clammy togetherness. Acknowledging “it takes a village” risks becoming that paradox of in-print self-effacement, as though the author is like, “What, I wrote this? Did I?” Self-effacement as self-promotion—call it the dearth of the author, haha. On the other hand, in my other hand, was a pop-neuroscience book whose author acknowledged a conference-worth of experts to the extent it became a kind of ass-covering, a preemptive spreading the blame. In either case acknowledgments were in service of the author’s brand. (Says you! hypocrite substackeur - mon semblable, - mon frère!)

Traditionally the dedication page at the front was where you addressed a loved one or other civilians while the acknowledgements were for the team behind the book, your crew-mates. (Oddly enough, films, where they have opening credits, run this the other way round.) Acknowledgments expatiate: the bestseller’s seven-pager read like an essay, was in fact a sort of after-the-event preface, what you might call a postface if it didn’t sound like some creepy new cosmetics trend or a mail-themed member of the Wu Tang Clan. Whereas dedications flash a window on or into the author: T S Eliot sucking up to Ezra Pound by calling him the greater craftsmen (and crank?); Nabokov carving his love for his wife into the world of letters by dedicating everything he wrote “To Véra”.

Then there are the undedications. E.E. Cummings changed the title of his 70 Poems to No thanks, a paraphrase of what he’d been told by various publishers, to whom he dedicated the book, a real pique-move that veers close to the category of ‘Whoooo caaaares!’ Bukowski dedicated Post Office “to no one” and that’s why he drank. Still, acknowledgements could take a leaf from these and become more like disacknowledgements. Say an acknowledgements section titled ‘IN YOUR FACE’. (Idea for a story: the preface to the 2nd edition of a novel argues with the 1st, the 3rd with the 2nd and so on; the novel itself never starts.) Or perhaps an author who acknowledges all the people they aren’t acknowledging. Whether that means billions of acknowledgement pages or one blank one I haven’t worked out. I can see them now, though, the books of the future, caught between swelling dedications and acknowledgments like trash between the grease-streaked walls of a compactor…

All of which is a roundabout way to say: in all the seven pages of your acknowledgements, how come you didn’t acknowledge me? I offered you a title for the novel, less faux-poetic and po-faced than what you and your publishers eventually stumped for. And one better at least than your working title had been—can you actually believe this person was gonna name their novel The Mirrors of Now? Yet instead of an acknowledgment, you gave me not even a copy of your book but a link for where to buy it, in that group email thank-you, and the hardback at that (the first of many hauntings). How careerist! How presumptuous! How pushy! How grasping! How-

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