“Every business is a shitty business”

“Every business is a shitty business” is T. S. Garp’s blunt formula for the compromises and uncertainties of publishing. It begins as a demand that his editor treat a novel as a product rather than a matter of personal taste, but returns in their correspondence as a phrase neither man can quite dismiss: Garp uses it to press for sales, while John Wolf invokes it to defend the realities of the trade, including the promotional machinery that makes Garp famous for reasons he resents.

The phrase as a demand

When John Wolf questioned the direction of Garp’s book and asked what it was meant to protect him and his family from, Garp refused to explain before the editor had read the whole manuscript. Instead, he framed their disagreement in commercial terms: “Every business is a shitty business. I am trying to treat this book like business, and I want you to treat it that way, too. I don’t care if you like it; I want you to sell it.” The line is not a request for Wolf’s approval. It is a demand that editorial judgment and the work of selling be kept distinct.

Wolf answered that he was not a vulgar publisher, just as Garp was not a vulgar writer. He was hurt by Garp’s presumption about a business he understood better, but he also knew Garp had been through a bad time and believed he would write more, and better, books. His objection therefore carried both professional pride and personal loyalty: he wanted to keep publishing Garp, but would not accept the idea that selling a book was a simple matter of setting aside his own judgment.

Garp repeated the phrase with a sharper edge: “If you think the book is vulgar, then you should have no trouble selling it.” Wolf replied that vulgarity was not the only route to success and that no one knew what made books sell. Their exchange turns the slogan into a dispute about agency. Garp treats commercial appeal as something Wolf should be able to exploit; Wolf insists that the market does not obey so tidy a formula.

A phrase that outlasts its argument

The expression recurs when Wolf writes about the forthcoming The World According to Bensenhaver. Garp had demanded to be judged by sales, not by whether Wolf liked the novel, and Wolf answers by quoting the phrase back to him: “If you want to sell this book, we’ll sell it. ‘Every business is a shitty business,’ Garp. I am quoting you.” The repetition changes the line’s force. What Garp had deployed as a challenge now becomes Wolf’s reminder that the editor is acting on the terms Garp set, even while warning him that publication and public reception will have consequences.

Wolf’s warning is specific. He tells Garp the novel is not his best, predicts that it will become his biggest book, and anticipates that Garp will hate many of the reasons for its success. Wolf expects readers to be drawn to the writer’s biography as much as to the novel. On the jacket flap, he emphasizes Garp as the only child of Jenny Fields and invokes the loss of Garp’s five-year-old son, details Wolf considers useful to sales even though they are essentially irrelevant to the art of the book. Garp has not seen the jacket copy and is puzzled by Wolf’s apology; his own reply is characteristically practical: “Don’t weep; just sell it.”

That instruction comes to look less like a victory than a bargain whose costs Garp has underestimated. Wolf’s marketing and the public’s appetite for personal tragedy help the novel sell, but they also encourage readers to approach it through Garp’s life and Jenny’s fame rather than on its own merits. When The World According to Bensenhaver is widely mistaken for a feminist novel, Jenny calls her son the beneficiary of a popular misunderstanding. Wolf’s refrain that “Every business is a shitty business” thus accompanies not just the sale of the book but the compromises and misreadings that surround it.

Publishing success and artistic judgment

The phrase gains further irony from the different commercial fates of Garp’s novels. Procrastination receives praise for its historical research, originality, and scope, although reviewers repeatedly make Garp’s relationship to his famous mother part of their discussion. Garp resents the intrusion of biography into criticism. When one critic mocks his continued use of bears, the review makes the same tension visible: the public wants a story about Garp as a person, while Garp wants his work assessed for its own faults and merits.

Second Wind of the Cuckold fares worse. Reviewers debate its treatment of sex and marriage, but their arguments do not turn into sales: the novel undersells Procrastination by several thousand copies. Wolf reassures Garp that this often happens to second novels, yet Garp feels, for the first time, that he has failed. Even Helen dislikes the book, and Alice Fletcher never mentions it in her letters. In this context, the slogan cannot guarantee that a writer’s work will find readers. It describes the unpleasantness of the trade without granting its participants mastery over the outcome.

By contrast, The World According to Bensenhaver sells steadily for years and becomes controversial and widely taught in colleges. It is still, in Garp’s later judgment, his worst work. Looking back, he writes that the world never credited him for his first two novels and that he was therefore owed success. The explanation is revealingly different from Wolf’s. Garp treats popularity as compensation; Wolf understands it as a market event whose causes may have little to do with literary quality. The book’s success does not settle their argument so much as expose the gap between the value of a work and the reasons people buy it.

The phrase’s afterlife

Wolf’s use of Garp’s words also makes the relationship between author and editor more complicated than a simple clash between art and commerce. Wolf is wounded by Garp’s contemptuous generalization, but continues to publish him, advises him about the coming storm of reviews, and believes that the bestseller may send readers back to the earlier novels. He can be commercially shrewd without mistaking popularity for artistic merit. Garp, meanwhile, insists on sales when he needs them and later condemns the success he has received for the wrong reasons.

The novel extends this tension beyond the immediate publishing relationship. After Jenny’s assassination, Wolf authorizes an advertisement that trades on Garp’s loss of both his son and his mother. Garp never sees it, and Wolf later regrets it. The novel nevertheless continues to sell and enters college courses alongside Jenny’s autobiography, Garp’s other novels, and Stewart Percy’s A History of Everett Steering’s Academy. Students use the books to hunt for clues about which parts of Garp’s life are true. The sales logic Garp once invoked has helped turn his work into material for precisely the biographical reading he resisted.

As a recurring expression, “Every business is a shitty business” is neither a settled philosophy nor a simple punchline. It is a tactical demand, an editor’s rueful echo, and a compact measure of the distance between artistic intention and public reception. The phrase acknowledges that publishing requires compromises without pretending those compromises can predict success. Its sharpest irony is that Garp’s demand to sell his work is fulfilled most spectacularly when the book’s popularity depends on misunderstandings and personal details that, to him, should never have been the point.