Archipelago
ARCHIPELAGO
An International Journal of Literature, the Arts, and Opinion
www.archipelago.org
INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY
Conversations about Publishing
with the Editor of Archipelago
A Conversation with Marion Boyars
Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997 3
A Conversation with Cornelia and Michael Bessie
Part 1, Vol. 1, No. 4 Winter 1997/1998 28
Part 2, Vol. 2, No. 1 Spring 1998 52
Endnotes: “Fantastic Design, With Nooses”
Vol. 1, No. 4 Winter 1997/1998 73
A Conversation with William Strachan
Vol. 2, No. 3 Autumn 1998 78
A Conversation with Samuel H. Vaughan
Vol. 3, No. 2 Summer 1999 104
“Whatever He Says Is Gospel”
A Conversation with George Garrett 141
Retrospective: Lee Goerner
Vol. 3, No. 3 Autumn 1999 147
A Conversation with Odile Hellier
About Bookselling
Vol. 4, No. 1 Spring 2000 154
ARCHIPELAGO
An International Journal on-line of Literature, the Arts, and Opinion
www.archipelago.org
Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
Story and Photographs: STELLA SNEAD
Early Cabbage
Conversation: About Publishing
with MARION BOYARS
Close Reading: ROBERT L. O’CONNELL
on PYNCHON’S MASON & DIXON
Poems: M. SARKI
The Roundtable: VIRIDITAS DIGITALIS
in the Garden; ALFRED ARTEAGA: Beat;
and ‘Hecuba’ in New York
Endnotes: The Devil’s Dictionary; Economics
for Poets
Printed from our Download edition
INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY:
A CONVERSATION WITH MARION BOYARS
Katherine McNamara
Q: What should a writer expect from his publisher?
A: Loyalty.
Literary history, of which publishing is only a part, is marvelous and fluid. The
publishing of books is itself a curious undertaking. In Europe and America, the
organization, financing, distribution, and expectation of profit of the industry, that is, its
entire structure, is different than it was ten years ago. Substantially, however, what has
been changed? Do people read more bad books than ever? Fewer good books? Why should
a marketer’s opinion matter at an editorial meeting? What has become of the editor’s art?
Was publishing ever so good as it’s said to have been? What, indeed, was
“gentlemanly” about it?
I thought I would ask some notables of an older generation what they thought
about these matters. I wondered, What do publishers do? Why do they do it? What sort of
lives do they lead?
In turn, they recounted experience, spoke of writers they published and did not
publish, took note of the social and political hierarchies of their occupation, talked straight
about money, commerce, and corporate capitalism, ruminated on the importance of
language. They recognized that times have changed, but did not agree, necessarily, on why
and how.
Excerpts of these conversations will appear regularly in Archipelago and may serve
as an opening onto an institutional memory contrasting itself with the current
establishment, reflecting on its glories, revealing what remains constant amid the present
flux. Despite their surround of gentility, these publishers are strong-minded characters
engaged with their historical circumstances. Out of that engagement have appeared a
number of books that we can say, rightly, belong to literature.
KM
Marion Boyars, of Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd
Marion Boyars began her publishing career in 1960, by buying half-equity in the
firm of John Calder, who was known in England for publishing avant-garde writers,
among them Samuel Beckett. In 1964, the firm took the name of both owners. For more
than 15 years they published the work of novelists considered among the most avant-
garde and literary in Britain, among them Beckett, William Burroughs, Henry Miller,
Elias Canetti, Peter Weiss, Heinrich Böll, Hubert Selby (LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN,
prosecuted for obscenity); translations of the nouveau romain; the writings of modern
composers, and books by social thinkers. In 1975, Boyars and Calder began to dissolve
the company; by 1980, the list had been divided
Since 1975, Marion Boyars has published fiction, belles lettres and criticism,
poetry, music, theater and cinema, social issues, and biography and memoirs.
ARCHIPELAGO 3 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
Among book-people, she is considered a beautifully educated, very literary
publisher with a strong list, particularly, in fiction and music. She publishes a number
of Eastern European writers in translation and is, herself, fluent in three languages.
How she succeeds financially is much speculated about, as her books are expensive; she
is said to be very aggressive at selling rights. She is also said to be observed closely by
agents and other editors, who have been known to take her authors away; with rueful
pride, she acknowledges this. Odile Hellier, of the Village Voice Bookshop in Paris,
praises her for having resuscitated the career of Julian Green, the nonagenarian
Virginian novelist and diarist who is a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters and of the Académie Française, and whose work is not well known in America.
Marion Boyars Publishers was to be found in a narrow building on a side-street
in Putney, a busy little London village south of the Thames, beside a men’s hairstyling
salon and a Pakistani take-away restaurant. A small display-window held a dozen or so
recent volumes. This was a publishing “house” in the old-fashioned parlance. Inside,
the editorial office accommodated five people, all of them capable editors, who read
amid tall bookcases lining the walls. Authors’ photographs hung in the stairwell; desks
were piled with books, papers, manuscripts. There were word processors but no
computers. The fax machine worked erratically. The piles and stacks did not indicate
disorder: this looked to be the sort of establishment run on idiosyncratic but perfectly
reasonable lines. Upstairs, under the roof, the director’s office was a room smaller and
more crowded with bookcases. The air was dense with cigarette fug.
Marion Boyars, director of her firm, was a tiny woman of indeterminate age
and bright, sharp eyes. Her mouth was handsome; she smiled widely and often. Her
voice was soft but emphatic, her accent not quite placeable; she was born in America
but in 1950, had come to England to live, and had adapted its form to her intention.
She was pleased her visitor did not mind the smoke.
Acquaintance was made, the tape recorder set up, the cigarette lit, the invitation
given to go ahead. She was asked to reflect on why she became a publisher.
Why She Became a Publisher.
BOYARS: It’s a strange business. I find it very difficult to understand why
anybody can do this now. You learn something about yourself: what you know; what
you want. And I knew that I was not a writer. — One’s curiosity is challenged, and it’s a
complex field.
McNAMARA: You went into publishing because it seemed the thing to do?
BOYARS: Only for me. What I did, actually, was unusual at the time: I bought
half a publishing company. I had a lot of confidence in myself, and I wanted to start a
career that was intellectually stimulating and demanding. My financial advisor showed
me an advertisement in The Bookseller: the publisher John Calder was looking for a
partner. My advisor looked into it and thought it was a good idea. And then I met
John Calder, and I liked him, and so I bought 50% equity in the firm. That was in 1960.
We began at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
And we had adventurous times together, especially during the first ten years.
The Calder & Boyars imprint published some of the best pioneering writers of the 60s,
people like Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet, Georges Bataille, Ivan Illich and
John Cage, Hubert Selby, and so on. Our writers were often controversial — we
published in the fields of fiction, music, the social sciences.
ARCHIPELAGO 4 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
But our relationship deteriorated. In 1975 we slowly dissolved the partnership:
we created two new imprints, John Calder, and Marion Boyars. By 1980, the separation
was complete. We had appointed an arbitrator to divide the old C&B list, but the
division was uneven, in John’s favor, whereas I had bought 50% equity in the firm.
I had a wonderful lawyer. I called him up and said, “What should I do?” “Fight
a little,” he said. And I fought a little; unsuccessfully. We continued to share premises,
sales, and distribution, until I moved to these offices in 1984.
My goal in publishing was to give voice to exciting new ideas, you see, ideas
which excited me. This list is a reflection of my own interests: I want to share these
ideas. Many of the writers we published have become modern classics. I had some very
good books from the old Calder & Boyars. The big money-maker is still ONE FLEW OVER
THE CUCKOO’S NEST. That was my book.
But there is also a good percentage of failures.
She Was Their Mascot.
Publishing used to be called a gentleman’s occupation. It is perhaps best to
remember that “gentleman,” in its primary meaning, does not mean mere good
manners, but is a class or station in society; and furthermore, that good manners may be
wielded as deftly and cruelly as any other weapon.
BOYARS: There was a strange club, a secret club for men who owned their
publishing houses. Very few of them are left now; most have had to sell, and many of
them have lost their job. But then, they were very elegant. There was a trip to Russia,
the first delegation of British publishers to Russia, all the big boys of publishing, and
me. It was because of that trip that I was invited to join the club.
McNAMARA: How did the trip to Russia come about?
BOYARS: There was going to be a delegation of British publishers to China. I
had published a book about China [Julia Kristeva, ABOUT CHINESE WOMEN]. I was
interested in the women, as women do the work in most countries; and I was an
independent publisher. I was not accepted, because the Chinese wanted scientific and
language publishers. The Publishers Association then promised me that I could select
my next trip, and I chose Russia. I was part of the first English-language group to go; it
was around 1981. A person from the Foreign Office briefed us beforehand, instructing
us not to speak of politics.
Most of the group were scientific, or language, or specialized publishers. They
said, “Why don’t you write an essay about fiction, translation, poetry, the theater?” So I
went to the hairdresser, wrote my little essay, Arthur [Boyars, her husband] typed it,
and it was published in their fifty-four languages.
But then I talked to them about literacy. “The benefits are not what you think
they might be,” I said. I was proved right! Now the Russians want only potboilers.
But I made them laugh. Then I was assailed by a Russian who knew I had
published a dissident. Arthur had translated him [Yuli Daniel, PRISON POEMS], but I
had no political agenda and I wouldn’t engage them on political grounds. Then they
tried to get me on my husband’s translations: Montale, Éluard.... All the others there
knew what I was doing, and enjoyed it. They knew I wasn’t going to get caught out.
And so, for two days we had a fine time, because we laughed. It didn’t last, of course,
but my team saw how an atmosphere could be changed.
When we got back, they all had their limousines waiting for them. I had a
husband waiting. (Great laugh.)
ARCHIPELAGO 5 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
After the trip to Russia, the club secretary asked me to join. I was treated as
their mascot. And I enjoyed it enormously. Some outsider actually found out about it
and wrote articles. He called me; he said, “I found your name on the list of members.” I
said: “There isn’t a list of members, surely!” It was a secret; so, somebody must have
betrayed us. He said, “Anyway, you are a member of this club?” And I said: “Yes; of
course.” He said, “What are you doing there? Is it for price-fixing? What’s the use of
this club?” I said: “It is a social club!”
McNAMARA (laughing): What did you observe in this club?
BOYARS: Well, it was very interesting, because although you were supposed to
be among a group of people who were not going to tittle-tattle — because that was the
only rule: you didn’t tittle-tattle — and I’m sure they didn’t: it was all about, oh, you
know, talking about the currents of publishing, and some commercial things about
discounts to booksellers and chains, and other kinds of stuff — they were not entirely
truthful! I said to one of them, “What kind of discount do you give Waterstone’s?”
“Oh, nothing special.” Well, of course you do. Forty-five percent is what you give
them. (Laughs.) Now, this is very interesting. If they had been women, they would
have said they give forty-five percent. This not coming straight out: they were not
frank....
Now, Carmen Calill, the founder of Virago, is an interesting woman, actually.
She gets what she wants, and she wants the right thing. She’s very good.
She’s rather out of it now (Virago has been sold to Little, Brown, which is owned
by Time-Warner Communications). But the only way Virago could continue was by
selling.
McNAMARA: Virago was a wonderful imprint.
BOYARS: Wonderful, a wonderful imprint. They went wrong when they
published people other than the classics.—
She used to be very nice when she first started and we had something in
common. She was very supportive. We used to say hello and were friendly.
I had a court case in America, somebody had cheated me. We won, in a sort of
way; of course the lawyers took all the money. But I had to make a deposition. They
asked me all sorts of questions which didn’t apply to me, but applied to her. They
thought I was Carmen. I noticed it; and of course I could hardly contain myself with
laughter. They think one woman is like all others. (Laughs.) After the meeting I was
laughing. One of the lawyers noticed, and I said, “Well, you’re very funny.” “No, no,”
he said, “there’s something specific you’re laughing about.” “Something specific? No.
What?” “Oh come on,” he said: “you don’t want to tell me.” I said: “Nothing to tell.” I
wasn’t going to tell!
But I mean....
McNAMARA: What did you mean when you said you were the publishing
establishment’s “mascot”?
BOYARS: “Brave little publisher.”
McNAMARA: Right.
BOYARS: I’m sure they didn’t take me seriously, and they kind of liked me. I
made them feel liberal and generous. I had a sense of fun, and I didn’t take myself too
seriously. I’m small. I think that has something to do with it. If I were taller, if I had a
large face, they would have been intimidated.
I don’t like this kind of role. I’m quite serious. They found Carmen Calill
difficult, because she wasn’t like a little pet.
ARCHIPELAGO 6 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
Schooling.
McNAMARA: You’ve lived in England since 1950.
BOYARS: I’m actually an American, but I went to school in Switzerland. I went
to NYU, in New York; then, before graduation, I came here to get married. And they
started a university, called Keele, in the Midlands, where I lived. So I went to Keele.
It was 1950, and there were as many undergraduates at that time in the whole of
England as there were at Columbia and NYU combined: very elitist; and then they
opened university education up, and now it’s wide-open. But at that time, for a girl to
get into university was still rare.
There was a wonderful man called Lord Lindsay of Birker, Alexander Lindsay.
He was a moral philosopher who taught at Balliol, and was made a peer. He was very,
very socially concerned — he was Labour. He invented my university.
I lived in Shrewsbury, along the Welsh border. There was a university in
Birmingham. I had been at NYU already. I was too young to be a mature student, and
they didn’t recognize my NYU credentials. And this college was being started, and it
was work I admired, and so I went along. Lord Lindsay was a very open man. He had
brought a new course to Oxford, PPE — politics, philosophy, economics, called
“Modern Greats,” which I took at Keele. For me it was absolutely wonderful, because it
started with 150 students and 25 dons. You had the most personal education you could
possible hope for; I mean, not only the tutorial system, which they used to have and is
now almost gone, but you were with these people, you even had coffee with them. Lord
Lindsay loved the students, he liked to talk with them, very much, over coffee.
Keele was the first university founded after the war. He had great ideas. It
actually has a very good music department and a very good American literature
department. His idea was to create a campus that didn’t exist at the time in England.
He felt that English education was too narrow. And so he invented the foundation
course. During the first year, it was a core-year course. You had lectures in every
discipline: it made it possible for you to switch over from an arts subject to a science
subject, if you wanted to; even for the degree course, the requirement was that you had
to take at least one social science and one hard science, so that even the people in
literature would have to take, say, an economics course. I took physics as a subsidiary,
which was dubbed Physics for Fools. I rather liked it: it didn’t teach me much physics,
but it taught me, and showed me, how the scientific mind works. I was interested in
methodology. I didn’t know much about real science, and so, this gave me an insight, a
little insight; and that was his idea, you know: to have a much broader education.
McNAMARA: That would have been a way of communicating between the “two
cultures.”
BOYARS: That’s right; I’m sure [C.P.] Snow’s book had something to do with it,
too. Lord Lindsay thought that with all the specialization there was, the scientists
didn’t understand the arts students, who certainly didn’t understand the sciences.
I actually lived outside my college. It was residential; and I was married and so
couldn’t have a room; I boarded during the week. One of the professors gave me a
room. He was a professor of philosophy who was really more interested in poetry, and
his wife was a writer. We would spend our evenings reading poetry. I had a second
education living in that home.
And I had a car. I was the first student who was allowed to have a car, and it was
great fun. It’s only 30 miles from Shrewsbury. I would drive over at 80 miles an hour. I
ARCHIPELAGO 7 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
had an old Ford V-8 two-seater, and when you opened up the trunk there were two
more uncomfortable seats in there. And this was the fastest car on the road!
I was the only American, that’s number one. Number two, I was the only one
who drove a car. And number three, I was the only one who was married.
McNAMARA: So you broke all the rules.
BOYARS: I broke every one of them. I had a very good time there. But, when we
got our degree, Lady Lindsay said: “What are you going to do now dear?” She was like
a little empress. I said: “Have babies.” “Oh, dear,” she said. I said, “Well, I’m married.”
“Well, that’s all right then.”
So that’s what I did: I had babies.
McNAMARA: And then you decided to be a publisher.
BOYARS: I graduated in 1954, and then Susan was born in 1955, and the
youngest one was born in 1957. And then I went to London in 1960, with my two little
girls, and became a publisher.
McNAMARA: They really were little girls.
BOYARS: They were tots. It was a difficult life. My husband and I got divorced
in 1962; he remarried almost immediately, but died in 1969. I moved to London and
brought up my children. Later, I met somebody nice — Arthur — and we married in
1964.
In 1960, I went into a business that no woman had ever thought of going into
under her own steam. I was actually the first woman publisher who didn’t inherit her
business or assume it by marriage. I mainly broke the rules because I didn’t know them.
Is There A Literary Culture? If So, What Does It Look Like?
McNAMARA: What is a literary culture? Is there one? Are there many?
BOYARS: Undoubtedly, but it’s too difficult to define. I mean, the non-literary
culture couldn’t exist without the literary culture. Everybody knows about Marx and
Freud, but you don’t have to read them: they’re essential, part of the lifeblood; but you
don’t have to be part of it. Language develops because of literature. It doesn’t develop
because of television.
McNAMARA: That might be argued.
BOYARS: Yes: I know it can be argued; that’s why I say it. I don’t think television
has that much of an effect on “culture,” though it is informative, while literature has a
lot of effect. This is why, when people say obscenity in literature doesn’t “do” anything,
I think they’re wrong. Literature “does” something. I think obscenity and the
forbidden, taboos, as such, are not important in themselves; but they are necessary
subjects. It is the art that is made of them that refuses to allow us to remain complacent.
These things make us reach beyond ourselves, move, grow. They are very important.
And through art, we can actually do something positive. We become aware of life
through it.
McNAMARA: Certainly, not all books are literature.
BOYARS: Certainly not.
McNAMARA: And much of what makes a literary culture—
BOYARS: —is language. It is the use of language, the ends to which it’s put. It’s
how you put it on the page. People write to me and they say, “I’ve written a novel
about a such-and-such a subject.” I’m not very interested in that. I’d like to know how
you’ve done it, what you’ve done. Carlo Gébler, an Irish writer, has a new manuscript.
ARCHIPELAGO 8 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
Let me read you two lines: “My name is Douglas Peter; I am a Russian scholar. I am
married to a Russian woman, and have been for forty years. I’m extremely miserable.”
Wonderful. It’s got everything there. And that’s in the juxtaposition. You
could do the same thing in a newspaper report, but it wouldn’t be the same. I think
this is what writing is.
Subsequently, she bought the book, entitled W9 AND OTHER LIVES; it will be
published early in 1998.
Of course it’s refined, of course it’s shaped: it’s actually a lot of hard work. I
know people who like to say that someday they’ll be a writer. Maybe. You need a lot of
practice.
McNAMARA: A lot of practice, and stamina.
BOYARS: And you know, I just like it, I like books and ideas. They have a habit
of growing. There is a radio program: three people choose a book, often an old one,
and discuss why they like it. I think the one that I would choose, although I haven’t
read it in many years, is TO THE FINLAND STATION. It’s a beautiful book, I remember, but
also it opened my eyes. I’ve never been a Marxist; and I’ve studied political philosophy
and economics, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to become a Marxist, but I never took
to it. But he [Edmund Wilson] tells us how it is possible to become a Marxist, and he’s
the only writer who’s done that. He opened my eyes when these things were very
important, during the McCarthy era, and so really one had to sit up and listen. And I
rejected it. But this book was to show me what was the attraction. And I must read it
again.
McNAMARA: Are there books you think of as a, or the, foundation of a literary
life?
BOYARS: Well, yes; WAR AND PEACE is certainly one of them. Plato’s REPUBLIC,
Shakespeare’s plays. World literature — the Russians; Thomas Mann, Rilke. Poetry.
French classics. Updike, Joyce, Hemingway. There are so many books that have had an
impact on me. — I’ve read all my life. A lot of things had to be crammed down my
throat when I was going through the educational process, but I’m very grateful for it. I
mean, music, literature, poetry become just part of one’s background.
McNAMARA: Do you think there was a time when the readership was more
secure than it is now?
BOYARS: No; no. I’ll give you an example: George Gissing, THE PRIVATE PAPER S OF
HENRY RYCROFT; wonderful book. When it was published, in 1902, it sold sixteen copies.
McNAMARA: When Stendhal’s DE L’AMOUR appeared, it didn’t sell. His publisher
said to him: “This book must be sacred, because no one will touch it!”
BOYARS: I don’t think this age is any less intellectual than any other age; nor do
I think the sensibility of people is impaired. On the Continent, people read more. In
France and Germany, they think it’s part of their culture to read.
McNAMARA: Do they buy the books, as well?
BOYARS: Of course, because there it’s very important to do it. You go into a
German household and they have bookshelves. You go into an English household and
they do not have bookshelves.
My original question continued to disturb her. She thought her comments were
pointless, as no one could presume to “define” a “literary culture.” She spoke about
writers America has produced.
BOYARS: Think of Melville, for instance, and Henry James; think of Bellow,
and Updike. Innovative writers! Nowhere else could their novels have been written,
and they have influenced writers everywhere. Frederic Tuten [VAN GOGH’S BAD CAFE],
ARCHIPELAGO 9 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
who thinks he is a European in spirit, is not: he’s very American. No European could
do what he does. This is where the literary language is developed: in America, with
your wonderful mixture of peoples and languages and different sorts of experience;
more so than in England, where we’re hide-bound by grammar and convention.
I pointed out that, although indeed we have good writers, much debate goes on in
this country about the non-literary, entertainment-ridden, consumerist popular culture
that is now, everywhere, called “American.”
BOYARS: All the Anglo-Saxon countries are unliterary, but they produce
remarkable writers. John Cage [EMPTY WORDS; SILENCE], after all, was a remarkable writer,
though he was a musician. There was Allen Ginsberg (d. April 5, 1997); there were the
Beats: poets who were exceptional in their time. Perhaps the debate goes on because
Americans, unlike the English, have always been self-deprecating.
Obscenity and Taboo. A Book On Trial.
BOYARS: I think there are some really key books — one I think is a key book,
not easy to read, is NAKED LUNCH, by William Burroughs (d. August 2, 1997), although I
didn’t terribly like his later work.
Burroughs was published in England by John Calder and Marion Boyars. In 1963,
Arthur Boyars, who was a friend of John Calder, assembled a collection of Burroughs’
writings for the Literary Annual published by the firm. Calder and Boyars published
NAKED LUNCH the following year. At about that time, the firm’s name was changed t o
reflect their joint ownership; Marion had married Arthur, a translator and literary man
informally associated with the firm, and preferred to use his name to her father’s and her
previous husband’s.
McNAMARA: You said that obscenity and taboo are important to society, and
that it is important for literature to break taboos.
BOYARS: I think every good artist breaks taboos. Because you have to; you have
to: because the writer shows us where we are.
McNAMARA: In America the taboos often center around what is considered sex,
or sexual representation.
BOYARS: Oh yes; it’s very puritanical, provincial. What can you do?
McNAMARA: What significant taboos exist here, and don’t exist in America? Or,
the other way around?
BOYARS: Well, English society is almost impossible to describe, because the
moment you understand it, it escapes. Now, the English are envious, and the taboo
breakers bring this out. Very interesting politics here. We had a Prime Minister [John
Major] who was a socialist under the Tory label, and we have (laughter) a Prime
Minister [Tony Blair] who is a Tory but under the label of socialism. Very interesting.
The Thatcher business was awful: what she did was awful, and it was awful how
they turned against her. She came from a different class, and was ambitious and made
straight for what she wanted. They hated her, because she was a woman, and because
she broke all the rules of the men’s clubs and did things in a different way, and because
she used her handbag as a weapon. But, before she fell, they were all prostrating
themselves. It was disgusting. You attack authority at the time authority is in power;
not when it’s finished.
You’ve heard about the Oz case, from Australia? One of those underground
magazines, put out by four young chaps. They commissioned some kids to do a kids’
Oz issue. The kids broke every taboo, they had no respect for anybody. They had a
ARCHIPELAGO 10 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
Teddy Bear who had an affair with another Teddy Bear. And they were taken to court
over that.
McNAMARA: In this country?
BOYARS: Yes! It went on and on. I was there most of the time. It was fascinating,
of course. They got a highly respected social scientist, and they asked him the serious
question — at the Old Bailey! — “Would you tell us about the sex-life of Teddy Bears?”
You wouldn’t think that such stupidity can be committed by such sophisticated
people, but it can, and they do it. The ‘60s and ‘70s were of course the ground for
breaking taboos.
McNAMARA: You were prosecuted for obscenity.
BOYARS: We [Calder & Boyars] had an exhausting court case, a huge obscenity
case brought against Hubert Selby’s book LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN. It went first to
Magistrates’ Court, then to the Old Bailey, then on appeal. We won the appeal, in 1969,
but we lost twice before that, and we were, for a time, paralyzed.
But I didn’t know we were going to win — we could have been sent to prison.
But it wasn’t we who were in the dock, it was the book. When they prosecuted, the
book was held up in the dock by a policeman. We were too well-behaved, we were
Establishment ourselves. We were not pornographers, we were very respectable
publishers. If we had been pornographers, we, not the book, would have been in the
dock. Yet, we lost the first two rounds; and the lawyers were against an appeal. The
reason they gave us was, we had suffered enough, they wanted to protect us from more
heart-ache. But I think there were several reasons. They just didn’t approve of the
book, really.
But I never considered not appealing. We behaved in a most elegant way: we
withdrew the book from sale; we made it known that we were not going to have the
best-seller we could have had. And they knew that. If we had not been, we would have
been in danger of being sent to prison. In fact, they gave us only a fine: £100 — I mean,
no one gets fined £100; it’s nothing. We didn’t pay the fine and in fact, they paid for
the appeal: if you win an appeal, they pay. So, I never considered not appealing; but we
did something that had never been done before: we actually had our own transcript.
Just before the case started a salesman came to our office and wanted to sell me a
tape recorder; this was the ‘60s. I said, “Hmm, not a bad idea, can you sell me one that
would tape in a large room?” He said, “How large?” “Well,” I said, “I’m not quite sure,
I’ve never been there before.” “What do you mean,” he said, “you want a tape
recorder, you don’t know how big the venue is? Is it a theater?” “No, it’s not a theater.
Well,” I said, “it’s the Old Bailey.” “Oh.” So he sold me a tape recorder. Then I rang my
lawyer, and I asked him if we could bring it in, and he said, “I have to ask the Clerk of
Court.” He called me back and he said, “This is the first request ever; therefore, there’s
nothing against bringing it in.” And so we did. And my assistant and I: we didn’t only
spend nine days in court, but nights, typing it up.
McNAMARA: It’s a job.
BOYARS: It’s a terrible job.
McNAMARA: You couldn’t have gotten a transcript? There would not have been
an official transcript?
BOYARS: Yes, there is an official transcript; but it is not verbatim. It is what the
man who takes it down he thinks he has heard; and the lawyers do, actually, the same.
So, on the second day of the trial, when I came with my transcript and said to the chief
barrister, “This is what happened yesterday,” he said, “Well, I don’t need to read this, I
have my notes.” I said, “Yes, but your notes are not really accurate.” He was very angry
ARCHIPELAGO 11 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
with me. But: they actually withheld the official transcript from us. You have to appeal
within six weeks; and they withheld it, they just didn’t send it. We didn’t need it, on
the strength of our own. We got rid of our lawyers, and I hired John Mortimer, the
novelist and playwright, who was a divorce lawyer and had never been concerned with
this kind of thing. The first thing I did was to play the tape for him for an hour or so;
and from there he did wonderful things.
The transcript, our own, is now in our archives, at the Lilly Library in Ann
Arbor, at the University of Michigan.
During our second conversation, in April, in New York, she spoke by phone to
Hubert Selby’s agent and, upon hanging up, said, pleased, “Well, we have a new Selby.”
She had just bought, in draft, his latest novel, to be called THE WILLOW TREE. “It’s very
good,“ she said, “I read it, and my editor read it. He wrote very long notes, almost a page-
by-page analysis, to help with the editing. And, in fact, the author is feeling very well. He
is starting with those notes: he’s got wonderful editing notes.” “What a dream,” I said, “to
have editing notes.” “A dream to have that,” agreed Marion Boyars. “And then he and
Ken Hollings, my editor, will get together. The agent asked how long would it take him
— six months, a year? ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ll do it this summer. By the end of the summer
you’ll have a manuscript.’”
McNAMARA: Wasn’t the trial of LADY CHATTERLY’S LOVER in 1959? Didn’t anybody
learn from it?
BOYARS: Well, they didn’t actually have any other cases. Oh, there were some
pornography cases, but nothing that was claimed to be literature. And in fact, some of
our witnesses were people who had advised the Director of Public Prosecution not to
prosecute.
McNAMARA: Was there any such case afterward?
BOYARS: Oh, yes, many cases; but none of new works of literature, they have
never done new works of literature again.
McNAMARA: Can you think of books that might have fallen under the category
of obscenity in literature?
BOYARS: Oh, absolutely: I published one of them. I published STORY OF THE EYE,
by Georges Bataille. It’s very short; it’s about children’s sexuality. And Bataille was very
subversive. I didn’t want another court case — you can do that only once in your life,
you can’t do it more than once — and so I put in it an essay by Susan Sontag, called
“The Pornographic Imagination.” It’s marvelous, but very general, not about this
particular book. Roland Barthes wrote an essay which actually dealt with this; it’s called
The Metaphor of the Eye; I had it translated by Jim Underwood. Roland Barthes was of
course very respected.
I then also put in a Publisher’s Note: I took responsibility personally. Then we
sent it to the printer. He called me about two weeks later and he said, “I cannot print
the book.” “Why not?” “Well, you know, the apprentices....” — there’s always an
apprentice. I said, “All right”: because the printer is also the person responsible;
certainly in England. They have got the right to say no; and I think one has got to
respect that. So I said, “I completely understand, you’re under no obligation to print
this book, don’t worry, I’ll find somebody else. — You do realize, of course, that we’re
publishing this book 50 years after publication in France; it’s actually a classic. And you
do realize that Georges Bataille was a Catholic, and a scholar, and he was just — you
know, just one of those people who went against the stream. He was not a nobody, you
know, not a pornographer.”
ARCHIPELAGO 12 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
I saw that the printer knew all this. I talked about the book and its contents, and
Susan Sontag. And he said this, and I said that. And then he called me back the next
day, saying he “couldn’t put it down, and we’re going to print it”; and he did. And
then, about two months later, Penguin bought it for the Modern Classics series.
“Remember,” I said, “it will be a classic.” The printer had said, “I remember your saying
that.” Well I’ll tell you: when I told the printer about Modern Classics, he said, “Oh,
thank God!” It’s fantastic: it has sold thousands of copies.
The Publisher’s Note reads:
The shortness of this important erotic classic — now translated into English for the
first time fifty years after its original French publication — enables us to include in
this volume two essays that deal with the genre and style of STORY OF THE EYE:
Susan Sontag’s essay on aspects of the literature of sex, The Pornographic
Imagination (from STYLES OF RADICAL WILL, 1967) explores a literary form that is,
despite its manifold representation in English and Continental writing, seldom
accepted in our puritan Anglo-American canon. Roland Barthes’ The Metaphor
of the Eye (from the magazine Critique, 1963) discusses in depth the language of
STORY OF THE EYE , a major example of French Surrealist writing, a movement which
is at last beginning to receive serious critical attention in England and the United
States.
Obscenity, Censorship, and the Avant-Garde.
McNAMARA: The first trial of Hubert Selby’s LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN was in 1966.
You published Henry Miller [at Calder & Boyars] before that.
BOYARS: But we were never prosecuted for that.
McNAMARA: Why was that, do you think? Was there a reason?
BOYARS: Well, we did something rather unusual: we wrote the Director of
Public Prosecutions, who in England decides whether a case is going to go forward or
not. We said, “We are going to publish Henry Miller.”
McNAMARA: You had reason to think you might be prosecuted.
BOYARS: Certainly: Henry Miller was very dangerous. There were about five
other publishers who wanted to publish him. The advance was the same from all of
them. We had put in our contract that, if we were prosecuted, we would fight; nobody
else was prepared to do that. That is why we got it.
So we wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions and said, “This is what we’re
going to do.” He wrote back, two days before publication — the book was already
distributed — saying he was not going to prosecute. This was 1963, before the Hubert
Selby book.
McNAMARA: They didn’t give you a reason?
BOYARS: They thought the prosecution was not going to be successful. They
got copies of the book and had a panel of readers, and they wrote their opinion. They
couldn’t prosecute then, because we would have produced the letter in court. And that
was the end of it. We were the only ones who knew, and we didn’t tell anyone. And
then, we couldn’t keep up with the printing!
McNAMARA: Because TROPIC OF CANCER caused such an outrage?
BOYARS: Because we didn’t tell anybody about the letter. They sold the book
under the counter.
McNAMARA: And they didn’t have to?
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A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
BOYARS: Of course not; but they didn’t know that. The book cost 25 shillings at
the time. Thousands of checks were sent us. We lost a lot of money: we didn’t know
how to deal with this avalanche of checks and cash, and in England you have to write
an invoice for each book, otherwise you’d be cheating on tax. We didn’t have the staff,
we had to get people from the street to help us, and they stole money. Still, that was
TROPIC OF CANCER. Then we wrote the same letter when we published LAST EXIT TO
BROOKLYN.
McNAMARA: And they decided to—
BOYARS: No, they didn’t; they said, “We have not decided. Sorry to be
unhelpful.” In the end, it was a private prosecution. A Member of Parliament, Sir Cyril
Black, brought the charge. Private prosecution was then made unlawful by Roy
Jenkins, now Lord Jenkins, who was Home Secretary. He inserted a clause into a
criminal-justice bill. I went to see him: a very elegant man, wonderful, friendly, etc. He
said, “Don’t worry. I’ll put in a clause.” I said, “Are you going to debate this in
Parliament?” “No,” he said, “because there are thousands of clauses; they’re not even
going to notice.” And they didn’t.
The Member of Parliament who brought the charge against the book was the
object of an amusing, and self-defeating bit of mischief made by Maurice Girodias,
publisher at the Olympia Press of literature and high and low pornography.
McNAMARA: You knew Girodias.
BOYARS: I adored him!
McNAMARA: Why?
BOYARS: Oh, he was the most charming man in the world, incredibly generous.
We used to go to Paris from time to time, Arthur and I, and we’d go and sit down in a
restaurant; and we would say, “We’d better leave the third chair empty, because
Girodias is bound to find us.” And he always did! Not always, but many times, many
times. Whereupon the Champagne would flow, and he would pay the bill.
The last time I saw him, he had fallen on very difficult days.
McNAMARA: He also published Terry Southern [as did Marion BOYARS: BLUE
MOVIE].
BOYARS: Girodias was actually a very naive man. He was not very cautious. He
went from Paris — he was thrown out of Paris publishing — and he came to England
and started an imprint here, and was going to publish a book about Moral
Rearmament. The Moral Rearmament Society offered him £50,000 for not publishing
the book. Girodias, being a principled man, turned them down. Thereupon — The
Times ran a whole page of bankruptcies — they printed a page imitating The Times’
bankruptcies page. It was not published by The Times but by the Moral Rearmament
people. It declared him bankrupt and said he was shutting down his business.
Whereupon, he went bankrupt. He was not rich.
Another account of this story, differing in details, but not in essence, appears in
John de St. Jorre’s VENUS BOUND The Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press and Its Writers
(Random House, 1994).
He then went to America and started another imprint there, and somehow
didn’t make it work. One of the things he did was to publish a pornographic book, and
he called it SIR CYRIL BLACK. Sir Cyril Black was the Member of Parliament who had
started the case against us over the Hubert Selby book. The book Girodias published
was not about him, but Girodias called it that. Then he wrote to me about it. I said,
“Argue! (They were bringing a libel case against him.) Why don’t you argue that by
sheer chance this is something you invented? ‘Is there a Sir Cyril Black?’ — that sort of
ARCHIPELAGO 14 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
thing.” “Oh, no,” he said, “I am defending you! I did it on purpose, as a revenge!”
Well. So, he was very naive. Did you ever meet him?
McNAMARA: I’ve only read about him.
BOYARS: You would have liked him. He had a nightclub in Paris — this was
unbelievable. This was very early in our acquaintance — It was a lovely evening, a
private room, and I was a very naive young woman. He told me about flagellating
people, and described all sorts of sexual practices. (Laughs) He was a kitty-cat, he
didn’t try to seduce me. But I didn’t even know about these things, you know, I
thought he was very amusing, to try and frighten me. I liked him very much. And he
was very unhappy in New York. He married a Cabot or a Lodge, can’t remember
which one. [She was a Cabot.] She was a doctor.
He went back to Paris in the end. He said to me once....
We’re not talking business. This is a lot of gossip.
McNAMARA: It is, but we’re getting to issues.
The discussion turned to the internet — she has had some copyright problems
with Microsoft over a book which she had published and which they later re-published o n
CD-ROM without her permission — and various Western governments’ attempts at
censorship particularly in the matter of pornography, which is apparently thought by non-
users to be rife, and available at the click of a button.
BOYARS: It’s the people who like to control things who do this, you know. It
really doesn’t harm you very much. We saw a film in New York called Chasing Amy. It
will never come to England; we have film censorship, and this film is very explicitly
gay, sexually. Every film has to be licensed, you see, before it can be shown. It was true
in the theater, until the 1960s: you couldn’t bring a play to the stage without the
approval of the Lord Chamberlain. It took years to abolish that part of the law; but we
still have film censorship.
McNAMARA: What do they censor for?
BOYARS: Sex and violence, you know: sex and violence. Actually, they are less
interested in sex these days. I don’t know about the United States: is there censorship
there?
McNAMARA: People don’t like to use that word. There is a rating system—
BOYARS: Of course they don’t like to use it, because it’s an explosive word: but
that’s what it is!
McNAMARA: Actually, there is a phrase edging its way around the book-
publishing world: “market censorship,” meaning that publishing decisions aren’t
editorially determined. Indeed, very good books are often turned down, because
editors are basing decisions to publish on estimated “markets.”
BOYARS: I’m a censor, in a way; we’re all censors: we do not publish certain
books. We don’t necessarily not publish them because they are too explicit sexually,
although we have been known to do that. In the LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN case, there were
a number of English publishers who kept their distance. One very kind publisher
actually tried to collect money for us — it’s very, very expensive to defend yourself,
you know — and some very distinguished publishers nearly refused. We were asked by
some publishers to withdraw the book, or not to appeal.
But, an interesting thing happened. The solicitor Lord Goodman, whose firm
defended us in the first two trials, was Chairman of the Arts Council. He convened
over 100 people and proposed a scheme whereby there would be pre-publication
censorship, because he felt that what happened to us should not happen to other
people. I mean, his motivation was perfectly good; and all the people in the arts were
ARCHIPELAGO 15 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
there: the filmmakers, the theater people, the publishers, the writers: it was really a
most distinguished gathering of people in the arts. And they talked — he talked — for
about an hour and a half: about forming a committee of the arts, to censor beforehand,
so there wouldn’t be such a trial again.
Eventually I stood up and said: “It doesn’t matter how benign the censorship
body is, it is still censorship, and that is something we don’t want.” Goodman was a
rather big, bulky, important man, and he collapsed. He was so angry with me he didn’t
speak to me for two years. Because, suddenly, everybody thought about it and said,
“Well, this is in fact pre-publication censorship.” You see, they had just got rid of
theater censorship.
And as a result of my intervention a committee was formed at the Arts Council.
He was so angry about the whole thing that he put the partner who had defended us
in charge of this committee; he had been our solicitor. He was a wonderful man: I’ve
never admired anyone quite as much as him. And, after two years of discussion, he
went against the committee. And so Goodman did not prevail; but he almost did.
Because everybody could see that the publishers were all in favor of it: they didn’t want
to have the enormous expense of defending a book, and they all thought this “pre-
publication review” would protect them. But of course, it would have done exactly the
opposite. And it was very easy to change the feeling of the meeting. I said: “All
censorship is bad, even benign censorship. I’m very much against it, in any form.”
McNAMARA: You’ve said you were an avant-garde publisher.
BOYARS: I’ve said, “I used to be an avant-garde publisher; now, I’m old-
fashioned in my ways, because publishing has changed.”
McNAMARA: You also said, “Language develops because of literature, it doesn’t
develop because of television.” I said that was arguable; and you said: “Yes, that’s why I
said it: because it can be argued.” You were speaking of what is called obscenity and
forbidden subjects, taboos, and about bringing — or not bringing — them into art.
BOYARS: The artist is doing it.
McNAMARA: The artist is doing it. Through art people can be made aware of
these subjects, in a mental context: the artist makes them available through our higher
facilities. Am I overstating the case?
BOYARS: No, not at all. I think art has a way of changing something that could
be very vulgar, into something that is cerebral.
McNAMARA: What if this makes a false change. Is that possible?
BOYARS: That’s bad art. If there is no artistic integrity, I don’t think it’s going
to work, I don’t think it’s going to make anyone aware of anything except what is
disgusting: and that’s bad art.
McNAMARA: You published avant-garde writers, for serious readers. I myself
don’t think there is an avant-garde anymore.
BOYARS: I agree with you.
McNAMARA: And so, if erotica and obscenity were a way of opening the mind to
what it refused to know, as Miller and Selby did; then, that seems not still to be true.
So, what do you think, now, would be our taboo subjects?
BOYARS: War. Suicide. Incest. Racism, in two ways: what’s happening with black
people; the way the Chinese are spoken of, now that they are considered a rival for
markets.
Genocide. There are things going on in the world that are like the Holocaust;
extraordinary cruelty is still going on. The Holocaust literature certainly has shown us
what we must know. But one of the terrible things is that people who are exposed to
ARCHIPELAGO 16 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
genocide now are denied. The plight of the Jews is something that has been told time
and time again, and I still find it shocking. But, if people were really that shocked I
don’t think it could go on, yet it does.
Now, very often we are told about these things in a newspaper article, and then
we seem to forget. Television is too fleeting, as a matter of fact. You see, the goalposts
have been changed. It’s very difficult to shock people these days, except with actual life.
Life is very, very shocking now. I am often very indignant, and that has to work itself
out, somehow. Language should shock.
Commerce.
McNAMARA: What makes a book commercial?
BOYARS: Ah. Ho. I don’t know.
McNAMARA: How do you gauge a market?
BOYARS: I don’t know how to do it — it’s no good, I know, but I can’t gauge a
market. There are publishers, I know, who look at a book and weigh it. We have
published quite a few books that sold well — ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, which is
my all-time best seller, was out of print. I thought it should be in print. I certainly
didn’t know the whole world was waiting for somebody to attack the structure of
asylums; but there it was.
The truth is, I don’t know any other way. I can read a manuscript and love it,
but I cannot tell if it will sell. How do they know; how do they do it? I’d like to know.
There were things I thought should be in print, forbidden subjects. LAST EXIT TO
BROOKLYN was one of those books. I must have published it because I wanted to shock
the world. I was shocked.
McNAMARA: What was your shock?
BOYARS: Well, my knowledge of the Red Hook district of Brooklyn was nil. My
knowledge of homosexuals was nil. This is simply not something I know about. It was
my instinct, somehow, that this should appear, and that it was all very authentic. I
never questioned the veracity of that book. And you know, it was very powerful.
McNAMARA: There is a cohesiveness and an intelligence to your list: it seems to
me the literature of a refined or observant taste.
BOYARS: Well, it has quality. That is always hard. These are things I like;
fortunately, enough readers agree with me. Of course, there have been many failures.
McNAMARA: Esthetic failures?
BOYARS: No: I’m not sorry I’ve published any books that are on the list. I’ve
published books I thought would sell well, and they didn’t: I still find them interesting.
There has been some attempt by me to share something that I like, and shape the
culture.
One of my best authors is Ivan Illich (MEDICAL NEMESIS, etc). He shares my ideas
about authority and responsibility. What he says is not: “You shouldn’t go to the
doctor.” What he says is: “You are responsible for your own health.” He doesn’t attack
doctors, he attacks the medical establishment.
A lot of people minded that he wouldn’t tell them how to live. They came to
him with problems; he said: “You solve it.” That’s all. I admire that, because it was so
easy, so easy, to have done the opposite, when he could have become president of the
world at the time, he was so popular. Extraordinarily modest man. Yet, Cuernavaca was
the most undemocratic place you can imagine. He’s very authoritarian. He’s very
ARCHIPELAGO 17 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
severe, in many ways. But also, the people around him would of course take care of
him, protect him.
We published his recent lectures a little while ago [IN THE MIRROR OF THE PAST].
He’s putting together another volume, and I said, “Yes, I’ll publish it.” He’s such a
beautiful man. And it was a terrific adventure, publishing him in an active way. But it
was also very hard work.
McNAMARA: What is hard work, to a publisher?
BOYARS: In the first place, you are getting involved with money every minute
of the day. I find that such hard work. You have to be careful, but terribly precise, and
there must be no mistakes. And so, we proofread, and proofread.
You have to try and sell the books. That is more work. And I have to do the
money again. Publishing really exists, you know, as a business, and the money aspect I
find wearying. I’ve always found it hard; most people do. You see, if you work for a
large company you don’t have to earn the money first to pay expenses, all you have to
do is have a bloc of money to draw upon in advance. It’s much harder work to own
your own house.
McNAMARA: Do you work with agents?
BOYARS: I understand the agents, and the authors’ going to them. I work quite
happily with agents, because I see them, I have lunch with them, and the whole thing is
kind of domesticated. They think I’m slightly eccentric, publishing books no one else
wants; but they know my word is good.
McNAMARA: How are contracts important? Did you ever do anything on a
handshake?
BOYARS: I don’t believe people have good enough memories for that. It’s got to
be done properly. Though my office doesn’t look tidy, I can find anything in it. I keep
careful records. I know exactly what I’m doing at any time.
But I have superb books coming in. I hope it doesn’t matter that the times are
hard.
I used to have commissioned salesmen. That wasn’t working properly; and then
a firm of representatives, who were part of a huge distribution contract, offered
themselves. I called all my reps and I said: “Look, this offer sounds good,” and they
released me to this new contract. But they’re not selling, either. I asked why, and never
got an answer, after 15 tries. One question, asked 15 times! This is what it means to work
with a big firm.
McNAMARA: How long do you keep books in print?
BOYARS: It’s very rare that we don’t reprint a book. I have an awful lot of books
with very small printings; but we reprint. We re-jacket books, and we paperback them.
It’s very rare that I don’t re-do a book. It’s actually a list that should go on.
McNAMARA: I’ve been told that other publishers admire your books and try to
get the authors from you. Is that true?
BOYARS: Who told you? Yes, it’s true. It’s mostly the agents who do that, but
sometimes the editors, as well. I had published Tim O’Brien: two books, IF I DIE IN A
COMBAT ZONE and NORTHERN LIGHTS . His publisher was Sam [Seymour] Lawrence. Sam
sent GOING AFTER CACCIATO to me. I wanted to publish it and I made an offer. Tim called
me and said: “Marion, please, what did you offer?” “Three thousand pounds.” Not a
fortune, by today’s lights. “Is that all right?” I said. “I swear it will be all right,” he said;
“I don’t want to leave you, but Sam told me he had accepted an offer from someone
else.”
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I called Sam and asked what was going on. “What makes you think that?” “Tim
called me.” “Tim called you? You have no business talking with him!” I said: “Hey, hold
it. You introduced us. I worked with him on NORTHERN LIGHTS. I bought the first book
and the second book: why shouldn’t we have become friends? Why shouldn’t he have
talked to me?” He put the phone down, and I put the phone down.
What Sam Lawrence had done was call Tom Maschler, who was at Jonathan
Cape, and said: “Marion has offered £3,000.” Tom had a lot of money. He said, “Triple
it.”
Sam Lawrence finally said to me, “Will you forgive and forget?” I said, “Forgive,
willingly; but forgetting is impossible.”
Very few authors come back after an event like that. Michael Ondaatje — well,
it’s my fault it happened. He sent me a manuscript of RUNNING IN THE FAMILY. I read it
and thought it was wonderful, though a little precious. So I wrote him a letter, and I
said: “I think you should, etc. ... wonderful, etc. ... be sure to send me a revised copy.”
The agent was very angry, because I criticized. Actually, it didn’t harm my relationship
with Michael very much. He’s a very nice person, he’s got a major publisher now, and
he won the Booker.
So, these things do happen. They’re bound to happen. I don’t like them much.
McNAMARA: How many new books do you publish each year?
BOYARS: About 20. The back list is very long.
McNAMARA: Is there a typical press run?
BOYARS: Well, I don’t do many books under 2,000 copies, and we don’t do
many over 5,000. But COMPUTER ONE [by Warwick Collins], for instance: we’ll probably
print 10,000. Everybody’s very impressed with it. And I under-print, rather than
overprint, unfortunately. So that means that I reprint, and then all the books come
back again. The publishing industry is the only one that accepts full returns. Sheer
madness!
Buying Rights. Selling Books.
McNAMARA: I’d be interested in your opinion about publishing rights on the
internet, generally and specifically. Let’s say a book is published in more than one
English-speaking country, and I want to reprint something from it, an essay perhaps.
I’ve got the author’s agreement; he understands that no money is involved; now I need
the publisher’s permission. I think it good to get permission from the other English-
language publishers, as well as from the U.S., because our readership is international;
especially if the author involved is not American. This is assuming that the publishers
have electronic rights. What do you think about this sort of thing?
BOYARS: Well, I think this whole thing has not been resolved. And when an
exchange of money is involved — not in your case, but in mine, for example [reference
to a pending dispute] with CD-ROM reprints — I maintain that the law has not been
tested. I maintain that it’s like Xeroxing, quoting, etc. I get hundreds of letters about
this sort of thing. They say, “We would like to reprint such-and-such an essay from
one of your books. We will not distribute in England, therefore we want only North
American rights.” I would say, “That’s fine,” and I would quote a fee; and they pay it,
and distribute in North America. On the other hand, they may plan to distribute
world-wide in English. In that case, I say, “Yes, you have permission for world use, and
the permission costs more money than in England only.” Or they say, “We only want
to distribute this in England”: there is an alternate fee for that. Or they say, “The main
ARCHIPELAGO 19 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
thrust is in America, but we want to sell a few copies in England.” “Fine,” I say, “in that
case I will make it cheaper for you than I would if it were originating in England.” And
in my opinion, that is how it should work; but it hasn’t been tested. In other words,
there is no case law. There was no case law with Xeroxing until Kinko’s fell into a trap.
At NYU, professors asked for Xeroxed copies of published materials for the students in
their courses. Kinko’s Xeroxed material without permission and had a huge court case
because of it. They are very cautious now.
We make quite a lot of money, actually, from Xeroxing. The author gets half,
we get the other half. In England, they have two organizations for Xeroxing: one looks
after the publishers, the other looks after the authors. When I first started, I would
divide it and give the author half. The authors just put it in their pocket, until I found
out that actually they had already got their half. So, next time, I only wrote a
statement, no words were exchanged.
But I think one should ask for the rights. Now, the other bone of contention is
that contracts written before, say, 1990, do not specifically say “electronic” rights. And
some agents maintain that, because it doesn’t say so, you don’t have the rights. But I
say, It is exactly the same as reproduction and therefore I am entitled to these rights.
Because the future, in my opinion, is that books will go on, but in much smaller
quantities. There will be smaller print runs, and more CD-ROMs. Or, it will be as you
are doing, publishing on the internet.
McNAMARA: What rights does a publisher expect and feel entitled to have?
BOYARS: We call them “volume rights,” which means “text rights.” You have
the right to publish the text in any form. You can then publish in hardcover, in
paperback, you can authorize excerpts of that text. This is a contentious point. Some
people take the phrase literally, to mean you have the right to publish the text as a
book. But “publish” means “to make public.” The writer creates the text; the publisher
makes it public. I hold that that text is what the publisher should make public, by
whatever means are available to him. The bookseller-publisher once only bought book-
rights. But “volume rights” means, I contend, that the publisher should have the right
to share in the proceeds of that text reproduced in its unadulterated form: as a book,
or a Xeroxed copy, on the internet, or when libraries scan the book. I think that if the
book is read on-line, or is downloaded, somebody should pay for it.
Now, film rights are not an automatic extension of volume rights. Changing the
text is not an extended right. If a novel is made into a play or a film, that is the author’s
right: the text belongs to him; he is in charge of what can be done to alter it. When I
buy English rights, in most cases I don’t have film rights. In the case of this chap [Mark
Fyfe, ASHER], I do even have film rights. And we sold an option on it to a producer:
with, of course, the author’s approval.
I bought this on the strength of, oh, 50 pages, and then he wrote it under my
guidance. I didn’t write it, you know: but we discussed it day in and day out. “This
should stay in, and this should go out. Why not make this a bit more clear,” etc. It’s a
complex process. I wanted clarity; my editorial criterion is clarity. If you want to say
something, say it: don’t expect the reader to put it in himself. A lot of new authors
think the reader should sit down and work it out, and then read it again, and then
read it again. Those days are over.
McNAMARA: Joyce thought that. Faulkner thought that.
BOYARS: Well, a lot of writers think that. But people won’t: if it’s not clear, they
don’t read it.
McNAMARA: What is the job of the publisher, if he buys volume rights?
ARCHIPELAGO 20 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
BOYARS: You have to try to sell the book! I mean, you have to exploit the book;
you have to do something for it. You don’t get response to it for nothing. That stack
next to you is 50 advance copies of the futurist novel COMPUTER ONE [by Warwick
Collins]. We have great hopes for the book, we’re going to pepper the world with
publicity. I’ve already offered it to mass-market paperback publishers, and I’ve taken it
to places like The New York Times Book Review. They need to have the book about five
months before publication. The pub. date is November. It’s ready to go to press; it’s
just that it’s only been announced, the catalog isn’t printed yet, and it’s not in our
current catalog.
I need a lot of lead time, and I’m going to do a lot of things with it to interest
people in it, interest them in the author. I work very much with the author: he has
ideas, I have ideas. One is really trying to make the book known, and so you use
everything you’ve ever done on the book, if you have great confidence in it, which I
do.
McNAMARA: In America, the independent-bookstore structure is so fragile.
BOYARS: It’s even worse here, if you want to know. There’s no “structure” at all.
McNAMARA: Is that because of the end of the net book agreement?
The net book agreement prevented English booksellers from discounting the price
of new books; it collapsed in September 1995, when several large publishers and a major
book retailer withdrew from the agreement; other publishers soon followed. Earlier this
year, suit was brought by the government’s Office of Fair Trading to abolish the
agreement, as it was now ineffective. A defense of the agreement was mounted by a
number of publishing and literary figures, including John Calder. In the meantime,
Waterstone’s and Dillon’s, the two largest booksellers, have launched web sites; a British-
based on-line bookstore now exists, as well as Amazon, the US-based on-line book
service. The British sites will also offer books published in the US, before they appear in
England. In 1996, 101,504 new titles (including 9,209 new works of fiction) were reported
to have been published in Britain, compared to 95,064 in 1995.
BOYARS: The net book agreement has made absolutely no dent. It isn’t that
every book is sold at a discount, it’s that the booksellers want huge discounts. Our
discount structure will change completely. We used to give 25%; we now give 45%. Our
books are not even costed that way.
McNAMARA: Meanwhile, the price of books goes up.
BOYARS: Of course it does, because you have to recoup.
McNAMARA: In the States, the terrible analogy some publishers have made is:
The cost of a book is the same as the cost of three movies. It’s the wrong analogy, from
my point of view, unless you’re interested in Jeffrey Archer or Patricia Cornwell, let’s
say; then, yes: they are the cost of three movies.
BOYARS: Well, I don’t think it’s the price, I think it’s the fact that books are
simply not sold properly. Barnes and Noble have just emptied their shelves — it makes
you despair.
McNAMARA: What would they do if they were selling books properly?
BOYARS: Well, the books are there: I think they should keep them on the
shelves. The shelf-life is so terribly short. If they were only to keep the books on the
shelves. People do go in to the shops to browse.
McNAMARA: I told you about the well-known American novelist whose book
was published in late Spring. Two days after the books appeared in the stores, Michiko
Kakutani reviewed it for the daily New York Times. She had liked the novelist’s last
book — a blurb from that review appeared on the cover of the new book — but she
ARCHIPELAGO 21 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
demolished this one. It was a virulent review and unaccountable. But the novelist is a
pro: she took it in stride. The worse news was this: the day the review appeared, Barnes
and Noble began shipping returns. This she learned from her editor.
BOYARS: It’s a real horror story. If publishing were like any other industry, they
would not have accepted the returns.
McNAMARA: Can they not accept them? The publisher was Knopf, dealing with
Barnes and Noble: large corporation to large corporation. The Sunday Times, on the
other hand, gave the book a good, an intelligent, review.
BOYARS: I would have talked to them, I would have said, “This is not fair, this
represents a lifetime’s work, to become a writer. You don’t treat people like that, you
don’t!” And they might have kept the books, I’m sure I would have prevailed. You
have to be concerned about other people’s feelings.
Barnes and Noble advertised the book in its summer catalogs.
Anyway, you asked me about volume rights. This is what you buy, in theory:
you have total right to exploit anything that you can do with it. We actually have a
clause in our contract about “any means.” This is why I insist on this business about
electronic rights, about “means now invented and that might be invented in the
future”: because things change all the time, and you mustn’t cut yourself off from the
market.
I’m very positive about the internet, electronic bookselling and so on. I can see
there’s future in it, additional markets. And the booksellers are doing badly, on the
whole. The independents are in a dreadful situation. They are being persecuted out of
existence by the chains.
McNAMARA: How will distribution change with the web, do you think? I believe
you mentioned, for example, that Amazon takes a big discount from you.
BOYARS: Not from us! No, no; they make an arrangement with Ingram [the
distributor/wholesaler], but they do give a discount to the customer. You see, the book
business in America is very different from the book business in England. America is a
huge country, and wholesalers are most important. We have wholesalers, too, but
they’re no good. The American wholesalers take every one of our books: such a thing
does not exist that they do not take our books. They may take 5000 copies, or they may
take 500 copies, but they take them. In the first place, they know that they can return
them; in the second, the smaller bookshops buy from the wholesalers, they don’t buy
much directly from us, not in America. But they do take a very high discount. Baker &
Taylor and Ingram [wholesalers] now take 55%.
Now here, it’s completely different. Bookstores buy directly from the
publishers. Baker & Taylor were going to start up in England. I went to the London
Book Fair, and there was a Baker & Taylor stand. I said, “Welcome, welcome, welcome.”
He said, “What are you talking about?” I said: “Well, I publish in America as well, and I
love Baker & Taylor, you’re doing a marvelous job.” He said, “You’d welcome a proper
wholesaler?” “Very much,” I said. But they couldn’t make it. The chains — Dillon’s,
Waterstone’s — deal only with the publishers, the big publishers, and with us, too.
But in America, the scale is enormous, with book warehouses around the
country. The library system is better, also. In England, the libraries have no money, so
they can’t invest. Each county has its central library. They buy one book — one each of
any title — for the whole county; and you’ll be lucky if you get to read it in six
months, because you know there are already 500 people ahead of you who want to read
the same book.
ARCHIPELAGO 22 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
McNAMARA: Libraries now are scanning books, most often older books, into
their systems. The books then can be read on computer, though I don’t know if they
can be printed out. What do you think about that, and how does it affect your
business?
The NY Times, Sept. 2 (after our last conversation), reported that certain
librarians have been consulting the leading American bookselling chains for advice about
buying and shelving books; this follows the lead of several trade publishers, who have been
reported consulting representatives of the chains about contracted books and, in at least
once instance, about a manuscript.
BOYARS: Well, this is of course the whole question of the future. I think
eventually what’s going to happen is that, instead of printing 5000 copies, it will be 3000;
and the rest of them will be scanned or made available by computer. This is why I’m so
keen on this copyright idea. That way, the publishers get paid: because you put just as
much effort into a book if you print 1000 or 10,000 copies. That is why subsidiary rights
are important. There is a financial investment, and there is a moral investment. I have
only 20 new books a year: I’ve got to exploit them, I’ve got to. I don’t forget a book. I
think that’s why authors like a smaller publisher, who’s invested a life in them.
It’s an advantage and a disadvantage, this investment. Look at the time I spend
doing things. I mean, look at Selby’s book, LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN. I fought for him,
went to court for him for two years. In the end, we won. We pay him handsomely; his
book still earns well. But I didn’t know we were going to win. He was very grateful.
McNAMARA: What is the best question you were ever asked about being a
publisher?
BOYARS: “What does success mean?”
McNAMARA: Your answer?
BOYARS: “Survival.”
Now I’m not so sure I would say that. That was many years ago. I think you
should have financial success. I’m not commercial. I think it is a very good thing to be:
I’m just not that good at it, and I’m very sorry. Once in a while I see that sort of
success. But the list, which is very difficult, really doesn’t make much money.
I would like to sell the imprint, but there are no buyers. One very large book
company offered to buy my “top 50 sellers.” I said: “What about the others?” “Not
interested,” he said. I turned down the offer.
McNAMARA: But your list sustains itself.
BOYARS: Yes. Oh, it does. I’ve never remaindered, I don’t believe in it. We make
a small profit.
Going to Stockholm.
BOYARS: I published [Elias] Canetti for ten years before he won the Nobel. We
have published a number [six] of Nobel winners. Some of the time there is a change in
sales, but most of the time not, because they are foreign writers. Faber [and Faber] have
all the English and Irish Nobel Prize winners — Golding, Seamus Heaney, and so on.
We have the same number, but in translation.
McNAMARA: What is it like to go to Stockholm?
BOYARS: It’s wonderful. I went for Canetti. Now, Canetti was not a very nice
man. When he won the Nobel he had been trying to get published elsewhere in
England, but nobody wanted him. I was the only one; I wanted to publish him, and I
ARCHIPELAGO 23 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
had three books [KAFKA’S OTHER TRIAL, etc]. He was ashamed of us, I think. He didn’t
want us to come.
It had really never occurred to us to go. Then, at Frankfurt [Book Fair]
everybody said, “Ah, you’re going to Stockholm?” “Of course, you’re going to
Stockholm?” Well, why not?
His main publisher was a German publisher, very good, and a good friend. The
man who was running it then had trained with me as a very young man, and he said to
me, “Why go to Stockholm? It’s not interesting. I’ve been to Stockholm.” Very nicely,
he sort of said, Don’t go to Stockholm as his English publisher.
But I wanted to go, and I told Arthur — you’ve met Arthur, he’s a very sensible
man — and he said, “Fuck Canetti! How do we know we’re going to have another
Nobel Prize winner, ever?” —But we did.
Arthur said to hell with him. He was absolutely right. We weren’t celebrating
Canetti, we were celebrating ourselves. And it’s fun, and it’s very glamorous. We
thought there was just the ceremony and the dinner — it’s a terrific event, everybody
in Sweden is involved. But there was much more to it. We went the week before —
there were parties galore, very nice parties. It was really great fun. I wrote it up for the
Independent.
Then we went for Kenzabure Oe [HIROSHIMA NOTES, etc].
We also published others: Heinrich Böll, Samuel Beckett, Claude Simon,
Eugenio Montale, Oe, of course, and also Canetti. And we published every one of them
before they won the Nobel Prize. Every one. And we nearly got it last year, because
there were three Polish possibilities. The other two were a wonderful poet named
Zbgniew Herbert, and Tadeusz Rozewicz, whom we publish [THE CARD INDEX, etc]. He’s
also a playwright and short-story writer. [Wislava] Szymborska is very famous in
Poland, and has a very nice nature, and cares about the world. And Rozewicz doesn’t
have the large canvas. She has it. They chose the right poet. They are all very good.
I think my Danish writer, Henrik Stangerup, has a very good chance. You said
you read BROTHER JACOB. We have a new novel coming out [THE ROAD TO LAGOA SANTA],
an historical novel about a Danish paleontologist who for reasons of health had to leave
Denmark, and in 1833 went to the jungles of Brazil. He discovered fossils and so on, did
brilliant work on the theory of evolution, but could not go on, because of his strict
religious principles. But he never returned to Europe. Stangerup is fascinated by this:
What really happened to him? Why couldn’t he remain at home?
McNAMARA: You publish a number of translations. Is it a different thing to edit
a translation than to edit a manuscript written in English? Would you describe the
process itself, and the differences?
BOYARS: It’s completely different. Ideally, you have read the original, but very
often, you haven’t. I don’t read Danish, though my father was of Danish origin. I
speak French well, and can read it, and German. I can’t read Danish, Norwegian,
Italian, or Spanish, but you know from the translation what’s wrong with it. I think it is
a question of experience. You look for traps. I have three languages; with three
languages, you have to know something. With German, I can read Dutch, somewhat,
or even Swedish and Norwegian, because they’re very similar. But I also know
something about the structure of the language. You can find certain similarities. So: the
Scandinavian languages have very small vocabularies and very long sentences. You
break them up, and you make the language more sophisticated in English.
It’s completely different when the book has already gone through the editing
process. I publish the translation after an editor has done the work in the original.
ARCHIPELAGO 24 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
Now, with an English writer you ask for something different. My main question is: Is it
clear? What do you intend to do, and have you achieved it? Can you shape it?
You have to choose the right moment; you have to be very tactful; and you
have to do this because you want to do it. No personal vanity. It happens with many
publishers that they feel they have to change things, even though this might destroy
the artistic integrity of the work. That can be very arrogant, very, very disrespectful. I
mean, if you don’t like something, say so. But not for the sake of your authority. You
and the author have to remain harmonious.
McNAMARA: Have you ever gotten to the point where you wanted to publish
the book but what the author wanted, finally, was completely unacceptable to you?
Have you ever given up?
BOYARS: Not many times. I always say to the author, “I will argue till the cows
come home, but it is your book.” And once I have committed myself to something I
will try to help it succeed.
On the whole, I will give in, but it isn’t automatic. And you do a lot of
compromising: “You win this one, I win that.”
Author and Publisher.
McNAMARA: What should an author expect from his publisher?
BOYARS: Loyalty. It’s very important.
You can go too far with your loyalty. You can, you know, bind yourself into a
difficulty with an author, if you find his work is deteriorating, or if he wants more
than you can give.
But you should have a loyalty to your author, which doesn’t mean you have to
approve everything. But I do stand by the authors. I really do have an interest in their
fame and well-being. And it’s good when you like the person. I like my authors.
They are the ones who create. I don’t, and I never will; all I do, after all, is
facilitate, it really isn’t a creative act. I pledge my know-how and give them money to
live. They’re the ones who take the real risks.
I think attention, listening, is part of it, too. Frederic Tuten [THE ADVENTURES OF
MAO ON THE LONG MARCH], for instance, needs to have a publisher who listens to him.
They need that — it’s not like being a mother; it’s a completely different thing.
McNAMARA: And writers are not like children, although they’re often called
that.
BOYARS: No! It’s just that you have to listen to people. I think that much of the
trouble of the world is that nobody listens.
Afterward.
At the end of our third, last meeting, in her London office, as the day was ending,
I was packing up the piles of papers and books she had given me, and we exchanged a few
words about how long this conversation would be, and how I might cut it. I was hemming
and hawing, when she said, suddenly:
BOYARS: Yes, I think one of the great difficulties about having been a publisher
for such a long time — I don’t know if it’s me, or if it’s the general standard of writing,
now — but it’s very difficult to get excited over so many of the books I see, so many of
the manuscripts. And I have a horrible feeling it’s not only me.
ARCHIPELAGO 25 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
A Conversation with MARION BOYARS
Books Mentioned in this Article Published by Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd:
Georges Bataille, STORY OF THE EYE
Henry Miller, TROPIC OF CANCER
Samuel Beckett, (with John Calder)
(with John Calder)
Heinrich Böll, ABSENT WITHOUT LEAVE
Eugenio Montale, POET IN OUR TIME
----, BILLIARDS AT HALF-PAST NINE
Terry Southern, BLUE MOVIE
----, THE CLOWN
Tim O’Brien, IF I DIE IN A COMBAT
William Burroughs, NAKED LUNCH
ZONE
(with John Calder)
----, NORTHERN LIGHTS
John Cage, EMPTY WORDS
Kenzabure Oe, HIROSHIMA NOTES
----, FOR THE BIRDS
----, NIP THE BUDS, SHOOT THE KIDS
----, M : Writings 1967-1972
----, TEACH US TO OUTGROW OUR
----, SILENCE
MADNESS
----, X: Writings ‘79-’82
Michael Ondaatje, COMING THROUGH
----, A YEAR FROM MONDAY
SLAUGHTER
Elias Canetti, KAFKA’S OTHER TRIAL
----, RAT JELLY
----, THE VOICES OF MARRAKESH
----,THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY
----, THE NUMBERED
THE KID
Warwick Collins, COMPUTER ONE
Tadeusz Rozewicz, THE CARD INDEX and
Mark Fyfe, ASHER
Other Plays
Carlo Gébler, W9 AND OTHER LIVES
----, MA RIAGE BLANC and
THE HUNGER ARTIST DISAPPEARS
(forthcoming)
Julian Green, THE DISTANT LANDS
----, THE WITNESSES and Other Plays
----, THE STARS OF THE SOUTH
Hubert Selby, LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN
----, T HE APPRENTICE WRITER
----, THE DEMON
----, SOUTH
----, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
----, THE GREEN PARADISE :
----, THE ROOM
----, SONG OF THE SILENT SNOW
Autobiography, Vols. 1-4
----, THE WILLOW TREE (forthcoming)
Ivan Illich, MEDICAL NEMESIS
----, DESCHOOLING SOCIETY
Claude Simon, (with Calder)
----, SHADOW WORKS
Henrik Stangerup, BROTHER JACOB
----, THE ROAD TO LAGOA SANTA
----, IN THE MIRROR OF THE PAST:
Frederic Tuten, THE ADVENTURES OF
Lectures and Addresses,1987-1990
MAO ON THE LONG MARCH
Ken Kesey, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S
----, TALIEN
NEST
----, TINTIN IN THE NEW WORLD
Julia Kristeva, ABOUT CHINESE WOMEN
----, VAN GOGH’S BAD CAFE
Marion Boyars Publishers, 24 Lacy Road, London SW15 1NL
Distributed by Inbook/LPC, fax 1-800-334-3892.
See also:
Frederic Tuten, Prologue: THE ADVENTURES OF MAO ON THE LONG MARCH , Vol. 1, No. 1.
Endnotes, Vol. 1 , Nos. 1, 2, 3
ARCHIPELAGO 26 Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 1997
ARCHIPELAGO
An International Journal on-line of Literature, the Arts, and Opinion
www.archipelago.org
Vol. 1, No. 4 Winter 1997/98
Fictions: DAVID CASTLEMAN
Three Tales
Conversation: About Publishing
with CORNELIA and MICHAEL BESSIE
Poem: SHI ZHECUN
tr. ZUXIN DING
The Roundtable: In Key West with ANN BEATTIE;
VIRIDITAS DIGITALIS in the Garden
Endnotes: Kundera’s Music Teacher
Printed from our Download edition
INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY
A CONVERSATION WITH
CORNELIA AND MICHAEL BESSIE (1)
KATHERINE McNAMARA
“If you can say to yourself, when that manuscript goes to the printer’s, ‘This is the best book
that this person can write at this time,’ then you’ve done your job.” Cornelia Bessie
“The important question about the publishing industry is: how well does it serve literature?”
Michael Bessie
In this second of my conversations with distinguished literary publishers, the
question of good books recurred as a counterpoint in the discussion of institutional
changes that have taken place in trade publishing. It recurred, I think, because of an
assumption that once could have been made and now, especially at the trade-book
conglomerates, cannot be: that bringing literature into print is the purpose of the
responsible publisher. It has been remarked that “publishing,” in the old sense, perhaps, of
the gentleman’s occupation, began to change about the time the phrase “publishing
industry” came into use, probably in the mid- or late-1970s. If true, it marks nicely the
changes I’ve been interested in tracing.
Substantially,
however,
what
has
been
changed?
Are
there
more
bad,
fewer
good,
books than ever? What has become of the editor’s art? Indeed, what sort of people became
editors and publishers; why? Do the same sort run the business now? I’ve been inquiring
of some notable editors and publishers of an older generation what they thought.
Generously, they’ve told how they entered the profession; spoken about writers
they published and declined to publish; described the class structure of their domain;
talked straight about money, commerce, and corporate capitalism. Without exception
they are serious readers, usually of more than one language. They recognize that times
have changed but do not agree, necessarily, on why and how.
Excerpts of these conversations will continue to appear regularly in Archipelago
and may serve as an opening onto an institutional memory contrasting itself with the
current establishment, reflecting on its glories, revealing what remains constant amid the
present flux. Despite their surround of gentility, these publishers are strong-minded
characters engaged with their historical circumstances. Out of that engagement have
appeared a number of books that we can say, rightly, belong to literature.
KM
Cornelia and Michael Bessie, of Bessie Books
Michael Bessie began his career in publishing in 1946, when Cass Canfield, then
head of the house, invited him to join Harper and Bros. as an editor. Cornelia Shaeffer,
as she was then, joined the firm several years later, as foreign reader; she became an
editor, subsequently, for The Reader’s Digest, Dutten, and, once more, Harper’s. In the
meantime they had married. In 1960, Michael Bessie left Harper and, with Pat Knopf
ARCHIPELAGO 21 Vol. 1, No. 4 Winter 199719/98
CORNELIA and MICHAEL BESSIE (1) On Publishing
and Hiram Hayden, founded Atheneum, a successful literary imprint. Cornelia joined
the firm a year afterward. They remained with Atheneum until 1976, when they
returned to what had become Harper & Row; and where, five years later, they housed
their own imprint, Bessie Books. After Harper & Row was sold to Rupert Murdoch and
transformed into HarperCollins, Bessie Books migrated, first to Pantheon, then to
Counterpoint, of Washington, D. C., where it is presently housed.
(Counterpoint is an imprint backed by Perseus, a corporation whose owner,
Frank Pearl, has recently acquired, as well, the respected imprints Basic Books and
Addison-Wesley and, with the former editor-in-chief of Times Books, has opened
Public Affairs. It looks as if a new conglomerate is in the making, this one devoted, so
far, to literary publishing. We will keep an interested eye on this development.)
Among the hundreds of authors whom the Bessies, together and separately,
have edited and published are (a nearly random selection): Edward Albee, Luigi
Barzini, Justice William Brennan, John Cheever, Cyril Connolly, Jan de Hartog, Len
Deighton, Janet Flanner, Ruth Gordon, Richard Howard, Guiseppe de Lampedusa,
Harper Lee, Nadezda Mandelstam, John McGahern, Nigel Nicholson, André
Schwartz-Bart, Jean Renoir, Peter Shaffer, Saul Steinberg, Joanna Trollope, Peter
Weiss. Among Nobel laureates, they have published Miguel Angel Asturias, the Dalai
Lama, Mikhail Gorbachov, Sir Peter Medawar, Anwar Sadat, Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
James Watson, and Elie Wiesel.
Two years ago I approached Michael Bessie because of his founder’s connection
to Atheneum. A respected literary imprint, Atheneum had been closed in 1994 by its
new owner, Simon & Schuster, itself owned by Paramount, which in turn had been
bought by Viacom, an entertainment holding-company. Atheneum’s last editor and
publisher had been the late Lee Goerner, who was my husband. The reasons given for
the shut-down were appalling. Atheneum did not, it seemed, turn enough profit;
another literary imprint was not needed by the corporation. Viacom, or Paramount, or
Simon & Schuster also owned what used to be Charles Scribner’s Sons, also considered
literary, which survived the corporate in-fights and is now called “Scribner.” What had
such reasoning to do with literature? Yet, in opportune circumstances a writer can
observe the operations of those who hold power, in this case, power over the
disposition of works of the imagination. Observe, closely, is what I proposed to do.
Lee Goerner was praised by his colleagues for publishing good books, books that
appealed to his inclusive, American taste, without considering the so-called market.
From the advantage of obscurity I had supposed this was any editor’s responsibility
and, though deferring to no one in my high regard for him, thought he had been
praised for doing what should have been expected. Gently, Michael Bessie put me
right. Lee, it seemed, had acted as the owner of a house might act, when in fact he had
not owned it. Although he had begun to put Atheneum in the black, his margins of
profit had been narrow: to be expected, but not what the conglomerate desired.
Owning your own firm, said Michael Bessie, keeping it to a reasonable size: here was the
best possible situation of the good publisher. Smaller was better, because more
responsible. “Responsible publishing” was a phrase he used more than once.
For the conversation published here I visited the Bessies twice, in August and
October 1997, at their wooded retreat in rural Connecticut and in their handsome, art-
filled apartment on Washington Square, in New York. Against the fate of Atheneum
Cornelia and Michael Bessie placed the breadth and uninterrupted length of their
involvement with books. Their discussions and disputations were conducted in the
courteous style of long-time partners who believe in the necessity of good books and
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intelligent publishing, yet each of whom holds, nonetheless, a particular point of view
formed by experience, intuition, and educated taste. For this first of two parts, I have
excerpted, chiefly, their remarks about the complex relationship between character,
background, class, and institution as it appeared in publishing; their own entry into
the field; editors and the books they take or let go; the founding and early growth of
Atheneum. Part 2, a conversation about reading, the literary life, the (further)
education of an editor, and structural changes in Harper’s, will appear in our next
issue.
How They Entered Publishing
KATHERINE McNAMARA: We’ve all observed huge structural changes in
publishing — in the institution, we might call it, of publishing books — in the last
decade or two. And yet, the relationship between an institution and its people, their
relative influences upon one another, is complex. I think it just as important to know
who the people involved were, and have been, as the nature of the institution itself.
Amid change, I’m interested in learning also: What continues?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Are you asking, What are the relative influences of
institutions and individuals? Individuals are more apparent, more interesting, more
dramatic, more concrete than institutions; and so the great question that presents itself
to me is, How important is it when Doubleday is headed by Nelson Doubleday, with
Ken[neth] McCormick [1906-97] as chief editor, as it was when I first came into
publishing, as against today, when it’s become an enormous institution headed by an
ambassador, basically, from Germany, because it’s owned by Bertelsmann. So, in the
long run, it has to satisfy German business requirements, although it is theoretically
rooted in the American scene. That’s an extreme example.
How much difference does it make to Harper’s between the long run of
publishing people who ran it [as Harper and Brothers, then as Harper & Row] and
when it gets to be owned by Mr. Murdoch [as HarperCollins]?
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you talk, both of you, please, about how you
came into publishing?
CORNELIA BESSIE: I once had a conversation with a bunch of women friends,
and we discovered, because we happened to be all of us female in that group, that all of
us came in by accident. And, because we had had one salable skill which the gents were
willing to pay for — though not very well. In my case, it was languages. [Wry chuckle.]
It was funny, because we discovered that all of us got into publishing quite differently
from the men, who were generally recruited; and we came to the conclusion, over a
good bottle of wine over a long evening, that we had all sort of fallen in backwards.
MICHAEL BESSIE: May I rudely tell Cornelia’s story slightly differently? As I tell
it? When Cornelia was finishing up at Barnard, she learned something from one of her
teachers that she couldn’t believe: namely, that there were places downtown in New
York that paid you to read! The notion of being paid to read seemed to her a
voluptuous impossibility.
So, she checked into a few places, with the result that, one day, the then head of
reading at Harper, a very New York spinster, who was never seen without hat and
gloves, came into my office and said, “You know, there’s that German manuscript that
you were trying to find readers for?” — because I don’t read German — “There’s this
young girl from Barnard and she says she reads German. She seems very intelligent.
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Should I give it to her?” And I said, “Yes, of course, Amy, why not?” She said, “Well,
Michael, she’s very young.” I said, “Yes? What?” “Well, it’s a biography of Casanova.”
And I said, “Amy, you know, these girls nowadays, they read almost everything. Let’s
try it.” [CB: throaty laugh]
Net result: a week later I got what I still think is about the best reader’s report
I’ve ever gotten, because it was fresh and thoughtful. I said, “Is she there? I’d like to
meet her.” Result: a career in publishing, and a marriage! [CB: hearty laugh] Now: isn’t
that old-fashioned publishing at its best?
CORNELIA BESSIE: I have to tell you, because that was the old-fashioned, 33rd
Street Harper’s [Harper and Brothers, as it had been since 1817], this was in a modest
building where there was no natural light for anybody who spent their days reading, to
say nothing of air or air-conditioning. I discovered, several months later, that I was the
foreign reader, which nobody had bothered to tell me, which I gathered was par for
the course for that Harper’s. I did not know that this had been a competitive thing;
that a number of people had been given the same manuscript. It wasn’t till a long time
later, when they kept sending me checks for $10 whenever I brought a book back, that I
thought, “Well, really!” That’s my recollection.
MICHAEL BESSIE: What Cornelia is suggesting is that I was invited. I had been a
newspaper person and a magazine editor, and at the end of World War II I was at the
Paris embassy. One of my colleagues, indeed my boss, was on temporary embassy
service: Cass Canfield, who had suddenly during the war become the head of the house
of Harper and also one of its principal owners. He asked me what I was going to do
after the war. I told him I was planning to go back to Cowles’s newspapers, whence I
had come. He said, “Well, what about book publishing? What about coming to
Harper?” I said, “Cass, two days after I graduated from Harvard, I went to Harper to
try to get a job, and I was unceremoniously shown the door. The person whom I saw
said, ‘Why should we have a job for you? You can’t know anything, you just
graduated.’” Anyhow, that’s how I got into publishing: I was invited.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And you were invited to do what?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Well, if I may rephrase your question: Why was I invited? I
was invited because, at the age of 29, I had had ten years of journalism in various forms;
I had also worked in the movies; I knew a hell of a lot of people; I talked a lot, had a lot
of good connections among journalists and academics, etc.; and, in a word, because
Cass Canfield said to me one day, “I think you would make a good publisher.” And he
was right: it was good for me.
Now: how important was the fact that I had a good degree from Harvard, that I
knew some of the right people, that I even belonged to one of the right clubs? In those
days that was not without significance. I do remember one delicious example. I had
been at Atheneum for about a dozen years or so, when the leadership back at Harper
was changing, and all of a sudden there was a new guy there, in succession to Canfield.
His name was Winthrop Knowlton. I was having lunch with Cass one day and I said,
“Cass, how did you find Knowlton?” Knowlton had worked for the Treasury in
Washington, and on Wall Street. Cass said, “Well, it’s a funny story, you know. We got
a head-hunter, and he looked all over the place for people who might be the right
person to head Harper, and we saw probably about 50 or 60 people; and then, along
comes this guy Knowlton. We were very impressed with him. It was only after we hired
him that I realized it could have been much simpler, because I learned that he was a
fellow member of Porcellian at Harvard. We could have spared ourselves the whole
search.” Now, that’s an exaggeration, of course, but not by far.
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KATHERINE McNAMARA: For the time, no.
MICHAEL BESSIE: And what about most of the people I later hired? Well, most of
them had a connection of some kind. We hired one person who just came in on the
right day.
I think that two things have changed. One is this string of publishing courses,
summer and graduate programs — NYU, as you know, has a master’s degree in
publishing. But these summer courses [at Radcliffe, Stanford, NYU, Columbia]
produce a lot of people who get a smattering. And the faculty of these courses are all
publishing people, so they—
CORNELIA BESSIE: They also have, in New York, a kind of trade market where
the people who graduated come for cocktails or something, and the people who want
to hire come and look. Apparently, a lot of jobs really are filled there.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: But those jobs are mostly for assistants.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Yes; good point. Because what I’ve been talking about is, by
and large, people who were hired to do editorial duties. What’s also happened
increasingly in publishing, of course, is that marketing and finance, as firms have
grown, have become more and more important, and those people tend to come with
both different backgrounds and training, from business schools.
CORNELIA BESSIE: It’s the marketers that end up being the publishers.
Becoming an Editor
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you tell, Cornelia, how you became an editor?
CORNELIA BESSIE: That’s a nice story, actually. I went straight from college to
Harper’s, and Harper’s was full of hot-shot young men — youngish men — like
Michael Bessie and Evan Thomas and Jack Fisher, and so forth. I was the first reader,
and knew nothing, and nobody spoke to me. What happened, I think, was that
somebody left. I had been an outside foreign reader; I got offered this job; and, once I
was offered the job, they showed me into a cubbyhole and showed me where the
manuscript pile was, and that was it. Then no one spoke to me. But as time went by, I
realized that there was a wonderful person there, whose name was Elizabeth Lawrence.
Elizabeth never went to cocktail parties, or seldom did, and was not a glamorous
hotshot: Elizabeth, basically, did the work. I realized that a wonderful way to learn my
job was to look over Elizabeth’s shoulder; and, happily, Elizabeth was a wonderful
teacher and enjoyed having someone to teach. So, for about a year, that’s what I did. I
realize, in retrospect, that I learned from one of the great old editors.
MICHAEL BESSIE: She made books.
CORNELIA BESSIE: She made books. I’ve had this conversation with young
people in various New York publishing houses: what Elizabeth gave me is no longer
being given.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And what was that?
CORNELIA BESSIE: What you do with a manuscript.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What do you do? Can you speak of it? Because I think
there is much about editing that can’t be spoken of.
CORNELIA BESSIE: There is. A lot of it is that you develop instincts. One of the
instincts you develop, for example, is for the book that will never be finished: how do
you know this? Somehow, you feel it in your bones. What you develop an instinct for
is, what the writer really meant and what is not on the page. I leave aside the writing
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problems — unclear thoughts, repeats, this kind of thing. But that sort of sixth sense
which a good editor has: that’s something you really pick up as you go along. But you
pick it up much faster if you see somebody, as I saw Elizabeth, who did it superbly,
and whose queries in the margins were just about publishable. They were a publishing
course, Elizabeth’s margins. She had a kind of generosity, she really, literally, sort of
took me on.
MICHAEL BESSIE: She really taught us all, because she was also a senior editor
when I came. She was not a sort of outside person; but several agents had come to
realize her value. She made person after person. She was a specialist in taking on
somebody who had had an interesting life or experience, somebody like Jade Snow
Wong, for example, who wrote that marvelous book SIXTH CHINESE DAUGHTER; or Santha
Rama Rau, whom Elizabeth edited. The only wonder about Elizabeth was that she
didn’t write: because she could.
I’d like to go back to the question that you asked Cornelia. What you’re really
asking is: “What’s the job? What’s required?”
I think two forms of either sensitivity or awareness are needed. One is, What’s
in this? And two is, What can I do, what can be done, to help the writer get it as good
as that person can get it?
CORNELIA BESSIE: You see, the end result is, if you can say to yourself, when
that manuscript goes to the printer’s, “This is the best book that this person can write
at this time,” then you’ve done your job. It’s as simple as that. Maybe in three years
there’ll be a better book; but this is the best, now. And not to stop until you’ve reached
that. And, since one of the things we’re discussing is the changes in publishing, to do
that, you have to have the luxury of no time constraint. You have to be able to say,
“No, that will not make this list; it will make the next list.” All these things have become
either more difficult or impossible.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What kept you going in publishing, and in editing;
and is there is a distinction?
CORNELIA BESSIE: Hmmm, not from my point of view. What kept me going
was the same thing that kept me reading clockwise around my father’s library when I
was a kid: love of books!
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And they kept sending you those ten-dollar checks....
CORNELIA BESSIE: I kept getting these ten-dollar checks, and one day I was
terribly rich and had about $200 and went to Europe [laughs], and when I came back, I
met this man in the street. And he said, “Well, we have a job to fill: how would you like
to come and work?”
How Publishing Has Changed
MICHAEL BESSIE: Let me illustrate the change. My first round at Harper went
from the end of 1946 until we started Atheneum, in 1959. During that period, and
previous to it, the phrase “P&L” was unknown at Harper, and probably at any other
place. There was no such thing as a P&L statement—
CORNELIA BESSIE: “Profit and loss.”
MICHAEL BESSIE: It was not known. When you came upon a book manuscript
you wanted to publish, what you did was this: you had to explain to the chief editor
why you wanted to publish it. You had to give a notion of what you thought it could
sell, and maybe how it could be sold. But that was likely to be conversational; or, maybe
a memo was exchanged. Okay. Sixteen years pass between 1959, when I leave, and 1975,
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when I come back from Atheneum. The P&L is regnant; it runs things. You’ve got an
idea for a book, or you’ve got a manuscript, you have to fill out a form which is full of
numbers. What you have to do is, you have to consult with the marketing people, the
sales people; you have to get their take on it, until you’ve gotten to the point where
now, in many places, that judgment, the sales and marketing judgment, and/or the
financial judgment, are the prime.
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that when I was president of Atheneum during
those years, and was responsible for what we took and didn’t take, that I didn’t consider
sales or marketing. But I didn’t pretend that it was an exact science, and that the
numbers could predict anything. What I did pretend was that there was still a crystal
ball, and that there were some things you had to see in the crystal ball; but you couldn’t
do it on an adding machine. That’s one of the big changes in publishing.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Between when you left Harper and when you
returned, how had the ownership changed?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Well, the ownership hadn’t changed very much; but the
nature of the beast had changed enormously.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Who owned it when you began?
MICHAEL BESSIE: When I began, and until 1975, Harper was owned in effect by
itself. It had gone from the Harper family to a series of stockholders. When I joined
Harper, in ‘46, there were about eight or ten principal stockholders; and that was the
condition during the time that I was there — we all had some stock. We bought it; or
you were given an option. It didn’t go very deep in the organization.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You said, for example, that Cass Canfield had bought
into Harper.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Oh, yes. He had, Cass and his family had — he was the largest
single stockholder — he had about 20% or 22% of the stock. There was a board of
directors, which included the principal stockholders. It was very closely held during
this time.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Were they also an editorial board?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Not in any sense of the word! Cass presided over the trade
department editorial board — he didn’t preside over the editorial board of college
publishing, school publishing, medical and so forth — because he was particularly
interested in trade. Cass was, basically, a trade-editor. He ran the house, but he edited
and published a good number of books. Indeed, he published the principal authors of
the place, the E.B. Whites and the Thornton Wilders and so forth; they regarded Cass
as their editor and publisher. He might get somebody like Elizabeth Lawrence, or me,
or somebody, to read it and counsel with him about it. But in any event, the corporate
change that took place, happened during the time that I was at Atheneum.
Harper discovered that it didn’t have a school department. It had had, but had
sold it. During this period, the 1960s, was an enormous increase in government
investment in education, under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. A
publishing house that didn’t have school books — that is, a big house; and Harper was
one of the biggest — knew it needed them. And so, Harper bought Row, Peterson [&
Company], which was a large school-book publisher, in about 1962 or ‘63, and with
that, went public: issued public stock, for the first time, and was listed on the NASDAQ,
and, subsequently, on the Big Board. So the Harper that I returned to, in ‘75, was a
publicly owned corporation with the stock listed on the Big Board.
What does that mean? That means you have to issue quarterly reports. That
means, four times a year you’ve got to look good. That means that you’ve got to
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jimmy the numbers. Simplest example: the fiscal year of Harper then ended on the
30th of April, which meant that, during the month of April, we emptied the
warehouse: we shipped out everything, so that the numbers for that year looked good.
Now, mind you, many of those books came back in May, June, and July. Returns have
been a problem for American trade publishing ever since, oh, somewhere in the early
part of the 20th century, when it was decided that—
CORNELIA BESSIE: Only in book publishing is it “Gone today; here tomorrow.”
MICHAEL BESSIE [chuckles]: That’s right. [Seriously] Last year returns were
averaging about 40 to 45%, which means almost one out of two books were sent back.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Even with marketers in charge.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Well, it’s really a function of the growth of the big chains. The
point that I’m trying to make, Katherine, is that the Harper I returned to was
dominated by numbers — P&Ls, numbers — and by marketing, in the sense that the
firm I had left 16 years before was not.
What I’m not describing, of course, is what I see as an institutional change. By
the 1970s, trade book publishing, and indeed, education publishing, was increasingly
dominated by a small number of firms. There are two elements to this, institutionally.
One is the five, six, seven large firms, which now account for, oh, about 25% of the
trade books published; and then there are somewhere around 1200 or 1500, maybe
almost 2000, small firms publishing anywhere from two to 30 or 40 books a year. And
they’re regionally dispersed; there are 400 publishing firms on the West Coast. So you
see, where the subject gets complicated is, the important question about the publishing
industry is, how well does it serve literature? And you’ll have to conclude that, while a
small number of big firms has become increasingly dominant, this large number of
small firms makes it possible for almost anything to be published.
Now, that brings you to the distribution problem: how well can the small firms
market and distribute their books in a wholesale/retail area which is itself increasingly
dominated by a small number of firms? Our present firm, Counterpoint, is distributed
by PGW, Publishers Group West, which distributes independent publishers. Jack
Shoemaker [the publisher, formerly head of North Point, which now is owned by Farrar
Straus & Giroux] goes through the books with PGW before he finalizes the list; but he
doesn’t change that list. The big houses have pre-publication conferences with the big
wholesalers before they make up the list! They have what they think the list should be;
they go through that stuff for two or three days, with three or four of the big chains;
and if the big chains don’t react properly to the list, if it doesn’t look as though the
chains are going to take thousands of copies of that book, they [the publishers] may
not put the book on the list.
Turning down LOLITA and Frantz Fanon
KATHERINE McNAMARA: When you read a book while trying to decide whether
to publish it, are you affected by other things than the quality of the book itself?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Let me tell you my LOLITA story.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Please tell me your LOLITA story.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Scene: I’m in Paris. [Maurice] Girodias [founder of the
Olympia Press], who was a pornographer extraordinaire but also a real publisher, gives
me a manuscript by Vladimir Nabokov. Harper had published several of Nabokov’s
previous books, which was why he gave it to me: because I was the young fellow from
Harper. And I started reading it. I went to bed that night thinking to myself, “This is
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wonderful.” I had read maybe 75 or 100 pages. Then I got up in the morning and went
back to it. As I went on, I thought, “It’s getting repetitious. I can see what’s coming.
This is really a short story or a novella, reconstructed as a novel. And Nabokov is too
good a writer for this.” None of the so-called pornographic aspects of it disturbed me,
but I thought it inferior Nabokov. So I let it go. Six months later, I picked it up,
because it’s been taken now by Putnam’s, and I can’t believe that I had let that book go
out of our hands. It’s a great book.
Now: what does that illustrate? It illustrates the point I think we’re trying to
make: One is not always the same person. One reads under different circumstances. I
have now re-read LOLITA several times since, and I cannot reconstruct the S. M. Bessie
who sat there in a hotel in Paris and turned that book down! But I did.
Cornelia and I had an argument once about [Frantz] Fanon, whom she wanted
us to publish, and I was against. We were reading him in French, and she wanted us to
publish it, and she was absolutely right.
CORNELIA BESSIE: It was a great book: LES DAMNÉS DE LA TERRE [THE WRETCHED OF
THE EARTH]. I also heard from friends that Fanon was dying, and it was important that
at least the book be taken. But mainly, I thought it was a good book.
MICHAEL BESSIE: I can’t believe that I turned it down.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Oh, I remember your arguments. “There isn’t a decent
bookstore in Harlem” — which probably was true at that time — and—
Some embarrassment follows, as changes in time and mores are considered.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I’m not making a personal point here. What I’m
inquiring about is ways of thinking.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Memory is fallible, Katherine, as I have increasing reasons to
understand. I’ve searched my mind on this one, and I haven’t said this to Cornelia
because it’s a confession of stupidity which I’m loathe to make, but I’ll make it now. As I
reconstruct my response to that book: I disliked it. I disliked it because I’m against
violence, and it’s a book that preaches violence. It says, in effect, “We have to liberate
ourselves — violence has been practiced on us, we can’t liberate ourselves without it.”
And I really think in retrospect, painful as it is, that I was against doing that book not
for that reason which Cornelia says I gave, which I’m sure I did, but because I didn’t
like it.
CORNELIA BESSIE: I know you didn’t like it.
MICHAEL BESSIE: And I didn’t want it to be true.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Also, you didn’t like Sartre’s preface.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Well, I think I was right about that.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Why? Because he praised it in the usual—
MICHAEL BESSIE: Because I thought it was a parlor pink saying “You go kill
‘em.”
CORNELIA BESSIE: Which, incidentally, is not what Fanon was about.
MICHAEL BESSIE: No, it was what Sartre was saying.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: He was still a Stalinist then, surely.
MICHAEL BESSIE: But in any event, I was wrong. Because Cornelia was right
about the merits of the book, the importance of the book — and the timing!
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you speak to that — what you thought the
merits were?
CORNELIA BESSIE: Yes. I had just come back from the Sorbonne, where I had a
number of North African friends. I wasn’t, as the French so nicely say, dans le vent.
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But I was plugged into that mind-set; and also, it’s a very strong book. And a beautiful
one. I thought it was an important book. Now it’s a classic.
MICHAEL BESSIE: The circumstances are interesting in this case. Cornelia had
never been in Africa; I had lived in North Africa before the war; I was there for a year
and a half during the war; I was very interested in North Africa in particular, but Africa
in general. Cornelia had had a different form of African experience. Although I had
been there and seen it, she knew more about it than I did. She was more aware of what
was going on. And I was wrong.
But: Is what I said reasonable? Should you publish what you like, or, more
importantly, should you not publish what you don’t like? Well, there are a lot of books
out there, and I’m kind of opposed to publishing a book I don’t like. I used to do a
session at Stanford: I’d give ‘em a list of books, saying, “Would you publish?” One of
the books on the list was MEIN KAMPF: would you publish it? When I got into
publishing, at the end of the war, this is the thing that young editors like me would sit
around arguing about. And my own feeling, about myself, anyhow, as a publisher is: I
don’t want to publish things I don’t like. I don’t want to publish things which add—
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You mean this morally and—
MICHAEL BESSIE: Authentically. You think it will affect—
CORNELIA BESSIE: Also, you live with a book for months and months: you
don’t want to live with a book you don’t like any more than you want to live with a
man you don’t like.
Collegiality and Paul Flamand
MICHAEL BESSIE: We mentioned his name, Paul Flamand, and that Editions d u
Seuil was an example of, what shall I say, of almost everything about publishing and the
difference between small and large publishing firms.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: We were talking about competition and collegiality. I
remarked that competition, as you describe it in publishing, sounds very much like
what they always did at, say, Harvard: they’d hire five young assistant professors for
three possible tenure-track positions.
MICHAEL BESSIE: “On, man; on, bear!” In other words, let’s see who kills whom
first.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Exactly. And it seems to me that that was part of a
certain kind of education, wasn’t it: to learn to compete?
CORNELIA BESSIE: It was. Remember, this was the early 60s, and the women’s
movement was really not yet born; and so, this was a very masculine point of view. [To
MB:] Do you remember Papa Knopf’s phrase, which was printed somewhere, which
was: “Women should pay to be in publishing, they shouldn’t expect to be paid.” He
said this in the 50s, on record. Nobody else would have dared say it; but they would
have acted on it. At that time, Papa Knopf could say that, cheerfully, and the women
in publishing were quite aware of it. Certainly, that was true of my time at Harper. But
that kind of competitiveness was bred into the situation; it was unspoken, but felt.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you speak about Paul Flamand and his spirit of
collegiality?
CORNELIA BESSIE: Shortly after I joined Atheneum, I had this vision of the
perfect publishing house, which would of course be small enough to be manageable,
and which would have the kind of atmosphere which I had seen in France at Les
Editions du Seuil.
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MICHAEL BESSIE: And uniquely there.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Uniquely there. I remember various times at Atheneum
when I talked about this, saying that we had a vision of a publishing house where part
of the pleasure was intellectual stimulation. After all, you don’t go into publishing to
make money; you go into publishing to do what you love—
MICHAEL BESSIE: And to make a living.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Yes; and, you hope, for the pleasure of the kind I once saw in
France. I guess we tried at Atheneum to recreate that. But it’s very difficult in America.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Yes. But remember the origin: Paul Flamand and his wife and
his partner, before World War II, were members of the group centered around
Emmanuel Mounier, called the Esprit group. They were liberal Catholic intellectuals.
And the house, Le Seuil, was formed with a deep spiritual agreement of purpose,
which animated it. [Turning to CB:] Is that fair?
CORNELIA BESSIE: Yes.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Were they part of Catholic Action?
CORNELIA BESSIE: Not really. They were too independent. Later on, Paul had
actual arguments with Rome; he was liberal to that extent. But the original Seuil, that
group, was more interested in the process than the result. What they wanted was a
certain kind of group, with certain moral imperatives and certain goals. In fact — but
this was way back, in the beginning—
MICHAEL BESSIE: And they weren’t all Catholic.
CORNELIA BESSIE: The house was known to be Catholic. Yet, his successor was a
Muslim, and the current head of the house is a Jew. Le Seuil means “the threshold.”
MICHAEL BESSIE: And that expresses it very well.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You said that it’s difficult to have an intellectual,
collegial atmosphere in American publishing; and you said also that Paul Flamand was
paternal. Are these things related, do you think?
CORNELIA BESSIE: He was paternal; he is a very strong person. He had
something which is so missing in today’s American publishing world: he was never in
competition with his editors. He edited books, secretly, really; but how he conceived of
his job was to encourage all those people to go out and do their jobs.
MICHAEL BESSIE: He cherished his relationship with authors!
CORNELIA BESSIE: He had wonderful relationships with authors, and still does;
but there was no competitiveness. The place was, intellectually, enormously
stimulating, and, sure, there were disagreements, but they were family fights. That sort
of organization takes a strong, sensitive hand at the helm.
Now, as we’ve discussed, you often have the feeling in the big houses that the
editor-in-chief resents any “big” authors going to other editors. Paul was non-
competitive. He was extraordinarily supportive in that paternal way of his. But he was
no patsy; and when he thought something was getting out of hand.... He would not
tolerate certain kinds of behavior. The rules were clear. He would tolerate any kind of
intellectual discussion, and relish it. But he wouldn’t tolerate in-fighting. No office
politics.
MICHAEL BESSIE: He also had a wonderful, subtle sense of organization in the
real sense, so that senior editors had clear-cut domains. Didn’t mean they were
restricted to them, but everybody had an area of responsibility.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Yes. Also, everyone had a stake in the company, in real
financial terms.
MICHAEL BESSIE: That’s right.
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CORNELIA BESSIE: When he proposed his heir apparent, and the troops said
“No, we don’t want this guy,” he said: “It’s your house.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Why do you think it is so — different, let us say,
intellectually, between the publishing environments in France and America?
CORNELIA BESSIE: As you know, having lived in France, it’s getting more
similar everywhere.
MICHAEL BESSIE: I don’t think it’s different today at all.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: But it was.
CORNELIA BESSIE: It was, in certain places. As Michael has said, Le Seuil was not
typical for France; it still isn’t.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: But Atheneum was meant to be a literary house.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Yes.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And you wanted a certain kind of environment there,
that you knew in Europe and didn’t see so often in America; is this right?
MICHAEL BESSIE: I think that is true, although I think that the publishing
world that I entered, at the end of ‘46, had a number of places that operated with a
measure of collegiality. You see, I’m obsessed with numbers, and I think that the much
larger number of people around the table is not likely to be collegial any more. That’s a
change, institutionally, in American publishing. Also, the kind of people who run
publishing operations — this is beginning to be true in France, also —
CORNELIA BESSIE: —and in Germany, and in Italy—
MICHAEL BESSIE: —are not, essentially, literary people: which, whether we were
right or not, we considered ourselves to be.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Also, it has to be said, again, that at that time, at Atheneum,
there was no such thing as a P&L. There were very few of us. We all knew each other
well. We didn’t always agree. But we could work together....
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You had a protocol for disagreement, I’d presume?
CORNELIA BESSIE: Yes; an understood one. And to take or not take a book,
which is, after all, the prime publishing decision, was done very casually, was done by
persuasion. If Michael and I disagreed, I would attempt to persuade him of why he was
wrong.
MICHAEL BESSIE: We gave each other room, which was important; we didn’t
crowd each other. I’m not saying we were angelic, but Cornelia has a story which
illustrates this very well.
CORNELIA BESSIE: What suddenly comes to mind is this: I had read a play in
German, which I thought was very interesting and which I wanted to do. And,
because, occasionally, the devil gets into me, when we were for once having a sort of
formal editorial session, for the fun of it I told the plot of this play to Hiram Hayden.
After I finished, there was dead silence, until Hiram said, “You’re seriously considering
this?” I said, “Hiram, I just bought it.” And that was a play called Marat/Sade [by Peter
Weiss] [general laughter]. But you tell the plot of Marat/Sade, and people will say: “Are
you serious?”! [More laughter] That’s an example of how casual it was at the time; you
couldn’t do that today.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Maybe at a few places; but it’s not to be expected. The point
that could be made is that you could induce an atmosphere, as Cornelia described how
Flamand did, and which I think was done in a few places in this country for a while. For
example, the young house of Simon and Schuster was a mad place in many ways. For
one thing, the two principal partners, Dick Simon and Max Schuster, were bright
people themselves, and they acquired a lot of very bright people; the place was a
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maelstrom of activity. They published almost everything, but also a lot of good books.
But there was an atmosphere of — it was febrile, the place was astir.
CORNELIA BESSIE [to KM]: You’ve brought Paul Flamand up. I think you realize
that, of all the publishers I’ve known, he’s the man I’ve most admired. He ran for
many years a largish publishing house and, so far as I know, never compromised his
principles. Paul has two gifts: one is literary, the other is with people. He took a very
disparate, gifted, contentious group of people and really made a family of them, and
made a family of them during those famous Fridays. Michael mentioned them, I think;
I was invited to them several times. It was a great experience, and when Atheneum was
founded, I kept saying to Michael, “If we can have anything like Seuil, we’ll be doing
well.”
You know, we were starting from scratch, we were small, and I saw no reason
why we couldn’t do something like that; but we never really managed. I think part of it
is that the culture of the business and the times were agin’ us.
THE LAST OF THE JUST
MICHAEL BESSIE: When we started Atheneum, in the spring of 1959, we decided
we would publish nothing for a year. We needed a year to collect a list. I went off to
Europe, and circulated in France and Germany and England and Italy, buoyed by the
wave of enthusiasm for the new publishing house. We were really the first literary
publishing house to start up since Farrar, Straus, and that was 15 years before; and I
had published a lot of stuff from Europe; and so there was a great deal of good will for
us.
When I got to France, the last stop, I met with my old friend Paul Flamand and
begged of him something for the new house. He said, “Well, we’ve got one thing here.
It’s not finished yet and it’s very strange, and I don’t know what your reaction to it will
be; but when we get it in finished, which we should in a month or two, I’ll send it to
you.” And along in August came this manuscript, in French, which was a novel, a
Holocaust novel. It began with a pogrom in England in the 12th century and ended
with the gas chambers at Auschwitz. I read it all night and went into the office the next
day, and said to my colleagues, “I’m going to describe the book briefly. I’ve already
called Paul Flamand and said that we want it, and I’ve committed us to pay” — I think
it was — “a $2500 advance for it, which is what he asked for.” I described it to them,
and they said, “Are you sure?” I said: “Yes.”
Because by this time, in 1959, anybody would have told you that we were fed u p
to the gills with the Holocaust! You know, starting in 1945, ‘46, there was a great flood
of books, some of them wonderful books, about the Holocaust, the Jews, etc.;
understandably, my partners were very suspicious. All I said was, “This book moved
me deeply,” and I was in a position to say we wanted to publish it. [The book was the
beautiful THE LAST OF THE JUST, by André Schwartz-Bart.]
That goes back to your question a while ago about the Fanon—
KATHERINE McNAMARA: My question was this: You said that, à propos
publishing Fanon, or not publishing him, you might have made a different decision at
Atheneum than you did at Harper’s. Why is that?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Quite simply because at Atheneum I would have had nobody
to answer to for that decision except myself. You know, the real reason that I wanted to
start Atheneum — aside from the adventure of starting your own publishing house —
was that, after 13 years at Harper, there was a question in my mind: “Could I do it if
the buck stopped here?” Every book I published at Harper had Cass Canfield or
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somebody else as the ultimate authority. I had to get his agreement, his approval. It
wasn’t difficult. There were a certain number of things under those circumstances that
he would just say yes to, because I put it to him strongly. When he was dubious about
it, he would say, “Would you be really miserable if we don’t publish this?” Talk about
collegiality: that was his way of running the place.
Anyhow, THE LAST OF THE JUST: I had no hesitation in saying to Pat and Hiram,
“We must publish this book. I don’t think,” said I, genius that I am, “that we’re going
to sell very many copies; but I’ve only had to pay 2500 bucks for it, and I’ve got an idea
for the translator, if he will do it.” They couldn’t say no. Three weeks later, the book
was published in France, created a sensation, became the number-one best-seller in
France, got the Prix Goncourt; so, who looks good?
Next miracle: we get a really good translation. It’s a book written by somebody
whose first language is Yiddish. Schwartz-Bart’s first language was Yiddish; French was
his third. He was an Auschwitz child who ended up in France, and it’s hard to describe
the French in which that book was written; so the problem that it presented to the
translator! The good Lord presented me with Steven Becker, then just emerging from
an iron lung. At the age of 29, after publishing two or three books and starting a family,
Steve got Landry’s paralysis, which is rarer but more fatal than polio. Steve had a
Jewish background, had religious parents. He was a miraculous linguist. He was still on
his back! I sent him the book, and he said, “I will love to do it.” And he did a miracle in
translation, partly because he was just back from the dead himself. You know, those
things sometimes combine; and in this case, they did.
Go back to your question about the Fanon book [WRETCHED OF THE EARTH]: if
Cornelia had brought in the Fanon at Atheneum, for two reasons I think I would have
said yes. One is because I would have been in a position to say yes without contradiction
from somebody else; I wouldn’t have had to justify that decision.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: But did you have to justify the “no”? Well, to Cornelia
you did.
MICHAEL BESSIE: No: to myself. Yes, to Cornelia, and to myself. And that’s the
difference. Look, when we started Atheneum, I found myself saying to myself, “You
can’t call yourself a publisher until your decision is the last one.” Nobody else to lean
on. Pat [Knopf — Alfred A. Knopf, Jr.] always had his parents, and I always had Cass
Canfield or somebody else. Now, I’d got a whole series of people on whom I placed
responsibility or shared judgment with. And the great trick in publishing — which is
why, by and large, small publishing is, what shall I say, the more responsible act — is
doing it to one’s satisfaction. And I’ve done it, for the most part, to my own
satisfaction.
Atheneum
MICHAEL BESSIE: I became friends with Alfred Knopf Jr. — Pat Knopf — who
was essentially the sales and marketing manager of his father and mother’s house; and
in the course of a lunch one day, Pat said to me, out of the blue: “I don’t suppose
anything would ever persuade you to leave Harper.” And I, without forethought, said,
“I’m happy at Harper; good job, decent pay. But there are two things that would cause
me to leave. One is an opportunity to join you at the house of Knopf, where somebody
is now badly needed. Your father and mother are getting old. They don’t admit
editorial authority to anyone else.” The chief editor was a fellow named Harold Strauss.
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The Knopfs were merciless in their way of dealing with other people, including their
son. And I said, “You will need a chief editorial person.” He said, “Do you really mean
it?” I said, “Yes, I do.” He said, “What’s the other thing that would cause you to leave
Harper?”
I said, “Sounds crazy, but the opportunity to start a house of my, or our, own.”
About a week or ten days after, he came back to me and said, “I’ve talked to my
parents, and they entertain the idea; let’s talk about it.” In a series of discussions, we
outlined an arrangement under which I would come to Knopf. I would be, at the
moment, the editor-in-chief; and I would become Pat’s partner on the retirement of
his parents, by the acquisition of a sufficient number of shares to bring that about. I
wasn’t going to despoil him of his inheritance. And it was all agreed. Then one day, I
get a note from Pat that says, “This is most difficult note I’ve ever had to write. My
mother’s just come back from Europe, and she won’t have it. She has told my father,
‘You mustn’t do this.’” He said, “I am miserable; I don’t want to talk.”
Several weeks later, came a call from Pat saying, “Were you serious when you
said that you might be interested in starting your own publishing house with
somebody, specifically me?” I said I didn’t think it was a possibility but, yes.
“Come to lunch today,” he said.
Third person at lunch was a fellow named Richard Ernst, who was a classmate
of mine at Harvard, who was a cousin of my then-wife, and who had had the good
sense to marry a woman whose maiden name was Bloomingdale; and who was trained
as a lawyer, and who was investing good Bloomingdale money in enterprises that his
friends started. He was a benign investor. The year was 1959.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: He wanted return, but not a hand in it.
MICHAEL BESSIE: He wanted to smile upon it. He didn’t want to play a role in
it, not at all. So, we had lunch, and Ernst said, “You guys serious about this?” We said
yes, we were. He said, “Okay, give me a plan. I’ll put some money in it, and we’ll find
some other investors.” So we did a plan; and what it came down to was finding four
people, each of whom would put in 250,000 bucks. They had to be rich, and not care
what happened to that sum of money, Ernst being the first. Among us, we found three
more. That’s how Atheneum started.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That was real money then.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Well, we checked around, and people said, “What you need
to get started on a small scale, you need about seven or eight hundred thousand
dollars.” So we said okay, and got a million. In actual point of fact, we had to make a
second call.
Two extraordinary things about Atheneum: the people who put up the money
— Pat and I didn’t put up a cent — the people who put up the money gave us 51% of
the vote. We could do anything with the firm except sell it; and that, you may be sure,
is very unusual. 1959 was a glorious time in many ways; it became so. That’s how
Atheneum started. I suppose I could say I owe it to Blanche Knopf, who couldn’t stand
me.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And you and Cornelia were both at Harper. Did you
go to Atheneum, Cornelia, as well?
CORNELIA BESSIE: I went when they were ready for me. I had a job that was
really an interim job [at The Reader’s Digest; see Part 2, next issue], and a funny job,
which in its peculiar way taught me a great deal; but I really was biding my time to join
Atheneum, which I did.
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KATHERINE McNAMARA: What did you do at Atheneum? And what did you
intend to do at Atheneum?
CORNELIA BESSIE: Edit.
Atheneum, 2
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Atheneum had what you called “luck.”
MICHAEL BESSIE: Sure did. How many publishing houses that pretend to be
literary have a number-one best-seller on each of their first three lists?
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And those were?
MICHAEL BESSIE: The first was the Schwartz-Bart. Second, the first THE MAKING
OF THE PRESIDENT 1960, by Theodore White. And the third was THE ROTHSCHILDS , by
Frederick Morton, which sold very well. The timing was right, as we said before, and,
to a certain extent, as Mr. Dooley said, “The victor belongs to the spoils.” Cornelia will
tell you about what young Roger Straus told us when he went back [to Farrar, Straus &
Giroux] — for the second time, I guess — after they’d had that terrific success with
that novel by the lawyer, what was his name, Scott Turow. Roger said, “You know,
everybody’s now got to have an assistant.”
CORNELIA BESSIE: Young Roger, whom I’m very fond of, has a marvelously
clear and keen view of publishing. He once said to me, “The most dangerous moment
in a publisher’s life is after the first big success.” It’s a very smart observation.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: But you didn’t bobble it.
MICHAEL BESSIE: In a sense, we did.
CORNELIA BESSIE: All of a sudden, there were 60 people on the payroll.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: When was this?
MICHAEL BESSIE: In the course of two or three years after our start. We had to
make a second call on our investors; we collected another almost a million, because we
needed it.
Look, we were determined, Pat and I, at the start, that we would publish
children’s books and we tried to get Margaret MacElderry to come with us, but she was
tied to Harcourt [-Brace, Jovanovich], she thought, and so she couldn’t. I said,
“Margaret,” — she’s one of my oldest friends — “you’ve got to find somebody for us.”
And she did: she found an absolute genius in Jean Karl, who was then working for the
[United] Methodist Publishing House [/Abingdon Press]. Jean came; and we had set
aside 250,000 bucks out of our kitty to start children’s books. With that 250,000 bucks,
and a little bit more, Jean within a couple of years was profitable. She was beginning to
get Newberrys [awards given for children’s literature]. We subsequently got Margaret
because the idiots at Harcourt fired her. They told her that her books weren’t
adequately “course-adjusted” for the children’s market.
Atheneum, 3
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You were not there for the whole life of Atheneum?
MICHAEL BESSIE: I was there the first 16 years.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You were an owner and a director, and your backers
would not allow you to sell Atheneum.
MICHAEL BESSIE: That was the only restriction. Pat and I divided the majority
shares when Hiram left; they were originally divided three ways, then two ways.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: When he left, his shares reverted?
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MICHAEL BESSIE: We bought them back. In any event, we started publishing in
1960, and everything was glorious, for just about ten years. We prospered; we were
profitable. We weren’t profitable the first year or two, but we became so by the third
year. And we grew — too much, I think — but anyhow, we grew, we were a presence.
As a symbol of it, I was the only person, to this day, from a small publishing house who
became chairman of the Publishers Association. There’s never been another: there
wasn’t before, and there hasn’t been since. As a general rule, the chairman of the
Publishers Association is the head of one of the five or six big houses, for obvious
reasons: pays the most dues; swings the most weight.
Why did they make me the head of it? Maybe because I’m a stand-up Jewish
comic, and they needed one.
In any event, those ten years were glorious. But by 1970, Pat, in particular, and I
began to get the wind up. We were both now well into our 50s. We had 60 employees.
Our backlist had not grown sufficiently to be a real cushion. And also, the publishing
business turned down in 1970. And we, particularly Pat — Pat got scared. The
responsibility of it weighed on him very heavily. And so, he decided, and I agreed, that
we had to do what everybody else was doing. By “everybody else” I mean Knopf,
Viking, Little, Brown, you name it: they were all getting under the umbrellas, they
were all selling to Random House or Simon & Schuster or Time, Inc.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Is there a “why” behind that?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Yes: capital needs. Business was becoming more expensive.
Authors were getting larger advances. You had to compete in marketing. Advertising
became more expensive.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: The large companies were publicly owned? Random
House, for example?
MICHAEL BESSIE: They were either publicly owned — Random was owned by
RCA, for a while, though now it’s privately owned, by the Newhouses — or private.
And Pat and I got worried, vis-à-vis our employees. If either Pat or I had died at that
point, our estates couldn’t have coped with the tax burden on our Atheneum shares,
which had appreciated sufficiently in value, and yet there was no market for them.
Successful small business in America — you see it happening now in the computer
field: as soon as a small computer firm is successful, Bill Gates or somebody buys it. And
the reason for this is because they can’t compete in the big market, unless they grow
the way Microsoft did.
Anyhow, we got scared, because all of a sudden, we were nearly alone. Farrar,
Straus was holding on, but then Roger Straus and his wife both are wealthy people. Pat
and I were not. And so, Pat gave me the assignment, as the sort of outside person, to
find somebody to buy us. And the first person who showed up and was interested was
from, of all places, Raytheon. Raytheon then owned [D. C.] Heath, the academic
publishers.
CORNELIA BESSIE: We ought also to speak of the time. Of a time when big,
really very business-oriented companies, felt rich. You remember, in the 19th century
when a rich man was really rich, he kept a danseuse in a garçonnière. The big
companies wanted their “danseuses,” which were these small, stylish imprints.
MICHAEL BESSIE: We did sell part to Raytheon; Raytheon bought 10% of our
stock. We needed some cash at that point, and that’s how we devised it. Those of us
who sold our stock put our money back into Atheneum.
In any event, I spent four years, from 1971 to 1975, trying to sell Atheneum, and
I had the same response almost everywhere.
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KATHERINE McNAMARA: How could you sell by then? Your original backers had
made it a condition that you couldn’t.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Well, we had gone to them and said, “We’ve got to get under
the umbrella.” They were delighted at the idea because they would have made a lot of
money out of it. Two of them had put in $250,000 and two of them had put in $500,000.
They had gotten a fair part of their money back, because we were a Subchapter S
corporation, which meant our first two years’ losses came off their tax returns; so their
actual out-of-pocket investment in Atheneum was less than what they had put in.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Inflation was growing then.
MICHAEL BESSIE: A problem — also, the Vietnam War, the atmosphere of the
country.... I really covered the waterfront, and everybody said the same thing. Kay
Graham [owner of the Washington Post and Newsweek] said, “Oh, absolutely, we’d
love to own it!” And then, their accountants would take a look at our books and say,
“Wellll, a very distinguished imprint, but....”
So, after several years of trying to do it, we found two possible buyers. One was
the Los Angeles Times-Mirror, which was quite big in book publishing then; still is.
They made us an offer, actually: a little bit more than book value. The other, in a sense
more serious, purchaser was my old firm of Harper, then being run by Win[throp]
Knowlton, who was beguiled partly by me — let’s see, 1975 was the year that I was
elected chairman of the Publishers Association, so that I was, in the publishing world, a
fairly public figure. Knowlton offered to buy us, for a little bit more than that. I was for
it, and Pat was against it. Pat was against it for very good reasons: he couldn’t see
himself working for anybody else, anyhow; but he really couldn’t see himself working
for Harper, or for me. The deal with Harper was that Harper would buy Atheneum
and I would be made publisher of the house.
In the end, Knowlton bought me and not Atheneum. In one of those marvelous
board meetings, our board of directors voted not to accept the Harper offer. I had told
them I didn’t want to put a gun to their heads, but that if they didn’t accept the
Harper offer, I was going to leave. As I put it openly to them, “Atheneum has a
problem that I can no longer solve.” This is partly a function of my own inability, for
example, to attract and publish commercial fiction. By this time, Atheneum needed
blockbusters, needed a couple a year — everybody does, but Atheneum really did. I
didn’t feel I could do that. And I had gotten Herman Golub as chief editor, and he was
good — he had brought [James] Clavell [author of TAIPAN] and several other
blockbusters — but more was needed. And also, I had been there 16 years, and I was no
longer interested in being president of a publishing company. My principal interest
was books and writers, and I wanted to stop pretending to be a corporate officer, which
I didn’t succeed in doing, but which I tried to do.
Knowlton offered me a good deal: go back to Harper; specifically, to be senior
vice-president until I became 65, and then Harper would finance Cornelia and me in
Bessie Books: which was the deal, and which I wanted. I don’t think either of us foresaw
the problems that we would have at Harper.
CORNELIA BESSIE: We didn’t foresee the problems. The atmosphere in
publishing had so changed in the years between when we signed the agreement and
when we wanted to start Bessie Books — the agreement was that we could have Bessie
Books on demand — that when we demanded, we thought, “Are they going to honor
their agreement?” Because, by then, the atmosphere in publishing had greatly changed.
But to our pleasure, they did.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: This was between 1975 and—
ARCHIPELAGO 45 Vol. 1, No. 4 Winter 1997/1898
CORNELIA and MICHAEL BESSIE (1) On Publishing
MICHAEL BESSIE: 1975 and — I became 65 in 1981.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What had changed?
CORNELIA BESSIE: Well, these had been boom years, and it was during those
boom years, really, that the agreement was made. Money then disappeared on the
education side. All kinds of financial things happened.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: The economy started to change about 1972.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Well, it was an entirely different publishing atmosphere; so it
was honorable of them to keep to their agreement.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Book-publishing is counter-cyclical, it reacts slowly and late to
changes in the economy, and therefore is in recession after the recession is over, and
doesn’t get into it until it’s been on for a while.
And so, the board of Atheneum bought back my stock at a calculated value,
which didn’t make me a rich man but gave me some money, and I went to Harper, to
be joined subsequently by Cornelia. Pat, within two years, merged with Scribner’s. It
wasn’t a buy, either way; they merged the two firms. Scribner’s was private, I think,
owned by the family.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: This must have been about 1978?
MICHAEL BESSIE: It was ‘77 or ‘78; I think it was consummated in ‘78. With the
Scribner-Atheneum merger completed, it was less than two years before Macmillan
bought the combo. That was a very successful operation, because Macmillan paid quite
a lot for it. [Macmillan was then publicly owned; afterward it was bought by Robert
Maxwell, the late English media baron who thus acquired Scribner’s, Atheneum, the Free
Press, and Collier Books and formed a conglomerate he called Maxwell-Macmillan.]
So, that’s how Atheneum came to its ante-penultimate situation. Have I
explained why that happened? I think so. I think it happened partly because of the
changes in circumstances, partly because small publishing firms were having an
increasingly difficult time surviving as independent entities, because they couldn’t
have the capital to compete, (a) for authors, and (b) for a place in the market. And
also, I’ll admit that I, too, got the wind up a bit. A bad year would have been bad for us;
two bad years would perhaps not have been fatal, but would have been pretty close to
it. There is a very low ceiling on profitability of quality publishing. If the firm makes
more than 4% or 5%, it’s because of blockbusters; otherwise, the cushion is not there.
And the same thing was operating everywhere. Why did Random House sell to
RCA? Just a little before that, Random House was a prosperous firm. Bennet Cerf was
no longer head. He had brought Bob Bernstein from Simon & Schuster: and then Bob
subsequently brought [Robert] Gottlieb [later head of Knopf; afterward, editor of The
New Yorker], Tony Schulte, and Nina Borne: a trio. By the time of the sale to RCA,
Bob Bernstein was head of the house. I don’t know what the price was; and of course,
subsequently, RCA sold it. Why? Because RCA discovered that you can’t make as much
money in book publishing as you can in TVs and radios.
Jews and Publishing
KATHERINE McNAMARA: We talked a bit earlier about about Jews and
publishing. Would you say more about this?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Well, yes; it’s a subject of interest to me, and I’ll tell you why.
Harold Guinzburg was the founder and financier of The Viking Press, and he
inherited a sizable fortune from the dress-goods business. In fact, it was said that the
important publishing houses, American publishing houses, founded in the 1920s, were
ARCHIPELAGO 46 Vol. 1, No. 4 Winter 1997/1898
CORNELIA and MICHAEL BESSIE (1) On Publishing
almost uniformly products of the dry-goods business. Knopf was started by Knopf
money: Alfred’s father made his money in textiles. Simon and Schuster were two guys
both of whose parents were in the dry-goods business; and so on, and so on.
When I came back from the war, I had in effect been invited to join a couple of
places, Harper being one of them. Harold Guinzburg had become a good friend, and
suggested that I might want to join Viking. I was attracted to Harper for a variety of
reasons, one of which was Harper’s Magazine. It had interested me a lot and was then
an integral part of the house. I called Harold to tell him I was thinking about going to
Harper, and what did he think? He and Cass were very close friends. He said, “I think
it’s a great idea. It’s time that Harper had a Jewish editor. It’s time that Harper had a
Jewish person in the hierarchy.” I was surprised by that. And, indeed, it was accurate,
because when I came to Harper I was the only Jew at that level. But I wasn’t ever made
to feel that.
Shortly after I came to Harper I began to get to know the agents. One of the
most important of them was a woman named Helen Strauss, who was the literary
department of William Morris, and she and I became friends. She said to me one day,
“You know, you’re really very bright, and you’re going to be a real success, but you’ll
never be president of the company.” I said, “Why not?” She said, “You’re Jewish.”
I cite that because that’s the way the world was. And had been. Now, I think it’s
no longer true. I think a somewhat similar thing has happened as far as women in
publishing are concerned, though I think the Jews are doing better than women, by
and large.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Was Atheneum considered a “Jewish house”?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Well, Hiram Hayden proudly informed us one day that he
gathered he was known as our “golden goy,” which he was—
CORNELIA BESSIE: No, he wasn’t!
MICHAEL BESSIE: I don’t think— But by that time, namely 1960, things had
changed.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And so, that was, in a sense, a left-over joke.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Yes. What I described as true in 1946-47 really ceased to be, in
the 1950s. In the course of the 50 years I’ve been at it [publishing], I really think there
has been a very considerable change. I don’t think that what was essentially a segregated
publishing world in America, and also in England, still exists.
(End of Part 1)
In Part 2, (Vol. 2, No. 1) Cornelia Bessie talks about editing, reading, and how she discovered THE
LEOPARD; Michael Bessie talks about Atheneum’s failures, and the evolution of Harper and Bros. into
HarperCollins.
Cornelia and Michael Bessie can be reached at
Bessie Books
296 Joshuatown Road, Lyme, Ct. 06371
(860) 526-2486
Some Books Published by Michael and CORNELIA BESSIE:
Edward Albee, WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, and others
Robert Ardrey, AFRICAN GENESIS; THE TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE, and others
*Miguel Angel Asturias, EL SEÑOR PRESIDENTE
Marcel Aymé, URANUS, and others
ARCHIPELAGO 47 Vol. 1, No. 4 Winter 1997/1898
CORNELIA and MICHAEL BESSIE (1) On Publishing
Luigi Barzini, THE ITALIANS, and others
Georgio Bassani, THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI CONTINIS, and others
Daniel Boorstin, THE IMAGE, and others
Peter Brook, THE EMPTY SPACE, and others
John Cheever, THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE, and others
Richard Crossman , et al., THE GOD THAT FAILED
*The Dalai Lama, FREEDOM IN EXILE
Jan de Hartog, THE PEACEABLE KINGDOM, and others
Freeman Dyson, DISTURBING THE UNIVERSE, and others
John K. Fairbank, THE GREAT CHINESE REVOLUTION, and others
Janet Flanner, PARIS JOURNAL, and others
*Mikhail Gorbachev, PERESTROIKA
Yoram Kaniuk, ADAM RESURRECTED, and others
*Peter Medawar, THE LIVING SCIENCE, and others
Nadezhda Mandelstam, HOPE AGAINST HOPE and HOPE ABANDONED
Alan Moorhead, GALLIPOLI, and others
Frederick Morton, THE ROTHSCHILDS
Grandma Moses, MY LIFE'S HISTORY
Nigel Nicolson, PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE, and others
Harold Nicolson, DIARIES
*Anwar el-Sadat, IN SEARCH OF IDENTITY
André Schwartz-Bart, THE LAST OF THE JUST
Peter Shaffer, AMADEUS
Ignazio Silone, FONTAMARA, and others
*Alexander Solzhenitsyn, THE OAK AND THE CALF, and others
Saul Steinberg, THE ART OF LIVING, and others
Alice B. Toklas, THE COOKBOOK
Kenneth Tynan, CURTAINS, and others
*James Watson, THE DOUBLE HELIX
Theodore H. White, THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1960, and others
Peter Weiss, THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF JEAN-PAUL MARAT AS
PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER
THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE, and others
*Elie Wiesel, THE CITY BEYOND THE WALLS
*Nobel Prize
ARCHIPELAGO 48 Vol. 1, No. 4 Winter 1997/1898
ENDNOTES
Kundera’s Music Teacher: Variation on a Theme,
with Two Short Texts
Several editors and publishers left us recently, among them Catharine Carver,
editor of such good and varied writers as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, John
Berryman, Richard Ellmann, William Gaddis, Flannery O’Connor; Gila Bercovitch, a
splendid woman who was until recently editor- in-chief at the Library of America, a
press which restores our literature to us as its authors meant us to read it; Kenneth
McCormick, generous of spirit even in physical decline, who in the 1960s held the post
of chief editor at Doubleday, then owned by the Doubleday family; and James
Laughlin, founder of New Directions: the man who published the first Modernist
writers Americans read, and the first serious books many of us when young bought for
ourselves.
One quality these people shared was caring about books, in the sense that I grew
up with: real books, the kind you kept and reread, probably in paperback. Who could
afford hardbounds? Books were precious not as objects, but for what they contained:
what mattered. “News that stays news,” as Pound said famously. When young no one
thought about publishers, for what was their purpose if not, as Michael Bessie says
elsewhere in this issue, “to serve literature”?
On the other hand, the agony of writers is always an interesting subject, is it
not? The real drama of any author’s life is unseen, however extravagant his or her
public behavior might be. Talking with publishers I’ve often thought about a particular
infliction of theirs: the rejection letter. Publishers may hope to serve literature; writers
write it. Gila Bercovitch, who was forthright and minatory, used to remind me how
stupid editors could be, and have been, in the history of American letters.
Perhaps the French best understand the tragicomedy of rejection, for they
comprehend perfectly, as well, the grandeur of the writer’s undertaking, as shown in
the following exchange between Margaret Duras and her interlocutor:
Q: What is the common trait of all literature, good and bad?
A: The fact that writing is a fierce need, a tragic need, in all writers, often
more so in bad writers than in good ones. It is an undertaking that in some cases
requires extraordinary moral courage. The writer sacrifices not only leisure time
but also work time in order to write his novel. He is always alone, especially if he
lives in the provinces, in which case he writes in order to avoid asphyxiation.
Needless to say, rejection is always devastating, sometimes tragic. To reject a
manuscript, especially a first manuscript, is to reject the whole man, to impugn
his being.
Yet, during his simplest, most transparent hours, if he is granted them, a writer
may smile at his human foolishness and return to the real work. Occasionally I reread a
passage by Milan Kundera in which he recalls an incident from his youth. He writes:
When I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I used to take lessons in
musical composition. Not because I was a child prodigy but because of my
father’s quiet tact. It was during the war, and a friend of his, a Jewish composer,
was required to wear the yellow star; people had begun to avoid him. Not
ARCHIPELAGO 49 Vol. 1, No. 4 Winter 1997/1998
Endnotes
knowing how to declare his solidarity, my father thought of asking him just
then to give me lessons. They were confiscating Jewish apartments, and the
composer kept having to move on to smaller and smaller places, ending up, just
before he left for Theresienstadt, in a little flat where many people were
camping, crammed, in every room. All along, he had held on to the small piano
on which I would play my harmony in counterpoint exercises while strangers
went about their business around us.
Of all this I retain only my admiration for him, and three or four
images. Especially this one: seeing me out after a lesson, he stopped by the door
and suddenly said to me: “There are many surprisingly weak passages in
Beethoven. But it is the weak passages that bring out the strong ones. It’s like a
lawn — if it weren’t there, we couldn’t enjoy the beautiful tree growing on it.”
A peculiar idea. That it has stayed in my memory is even more peculiar.
Maybe I felt honored at getting to hear a confidential admission from the
teacher, a secret, a great trick of the trade that only the initiated are permitted
to know.
Whatever it was, that brief remark from my teacher of the time has
haunted me all my life. (I’ve defended it, I’ve fought it, I’ve never finished with
it); without it, this text could very certainly not have been written.
But dearer to me than that remark in itself is the image of a man who, a
while before his hideous journey, stood thinking aloud, in front of a child,
about the problem of composing a work of art.
KM
Works cited:
Marguerite Duras, OUTSIDE, selected writings
Milan Kundera, “Works and Spiders,” tr. Linda Asher
from TESTAMENTS BETRAYED
ARCHIPELAGO 50 Vol. 1, No. 4 Winter 1997/1998
ARCHIPELAGO
An International Journal of Literature, the Arts, and Opinion
www.archipelago.org
Vol. 2, No. 1 Spring 1998
Five Poems: MOSHE BENARROCH
tr. from the Hebrew by the Author
Conversation: About Publishing,
with CORNELIA and MICHAEL BESSIE
Part 2
Fiction: VICTORIA SLAVUSKI
tr. from the Spanish by EDITH GROSSMAN
from MUSIC TO FORGET AN ISLAND BY/
MÚSICA PARA OLVIDAR UNA ISLA
Three Poems: HEATHER BURNS
In the Garden: VIRIDITAS DIGITALIS
Endnotes: Fantastic Design, with Nooses
Recommended Reading: Jim Crace, Jeanette Watson,
Joan Schenkar, Odile Hellier, George Garrett,
Sarah Gaddis
Letter to the Editor: Benjamin Cheever
Printed from our Download edition
ARCHIPELAGO 51 Vol. 2, No. 1 Spring 1998
INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY
A CONVERSATION WITH
CORNELIA AND MICHAEL BESSIE (2)
Katherine McNamara
In this, second, part of my conversation with Cornelia and Michael Bessie,
publishers and editors of Bessie Books, now associated with Counterpoint, they told me
about an event which took place more than a decade ago but which turned out to have
contemporary, even immediate, resonance. The event they recount — their publication
of Gorbachev’s memoirs, in 1987 — involved (incidentally) Rupert Murdoch, then the
new owner of Harper & Row. Michael Bessie, on the board of Harper, had opposed the
sale. Murdoch had also bought William Collins Publishers, the distinguished English firm,
combined it with Harper, and retitled the combination HarperCollins. The publishing
house now sounded like an advertising agency. At the time of sale, Harper had a signed
contract with Gorbachev for his political memoirs, negotiated by Michael Bessie. Murdoch,
the neophyte publisher, was known to be strongly anti-communist, and he told Bessie he
was “crazy” for publishing the book. The book appeared nonetheless; not long ago,
Murdoch even took credit for it. But lately, Murdoch’s heavy hand has fallen on another
political book, and dropped it. In London in January, his courtiers, (as the English press
likes to say) anticipating his disapproval of the political memoirs of Chris Patten, last
(Conservative) governor of Hong Kong before its reversion to China, broke their firm’s
signed contract with the author. The erstwhile anti-Communist has huge business
dealings with China, where “making money” is the order of the new day, while Patton
had criticized the Chinese government. Nervous, Murdoch’s managers provoked the
“principled resignation” of the young senior editor who refused to go back on his word
and abandon the book he had already praised in public. (See also, “Endnotes.”) A
number of prominent authors published by HarperCollins roundly denounced Murdoch,
to no apparent effect.
The Bessies talked about the Gorbachev book late last summer, long before the
scandal in London, when we met at their country retreat near Lyme, Connecticut. It is a
pretty, book-filled farmhouse and separate office situated amid tall old-growth trees on a
sloping back lawn, where they’ll offer a visitor an afternoon drink. Michael Bessie is an
open-handed host and worldly raconteur, while Cornelia, though more reticent, when
amused laughs knowingly. Her handsome, blonde beauty, in no way masking a sharp
intelligence, must often have been a trial to her inside the masculine offices of publishing.
When she spoke about books and the surprise and pleasure of finding literature —
Lampedusa, Harper Lee — her face lit up. Michael, the “outside person” at his old
company, Atheneum, spoke with zest about the rough and tumble of publishing during
the time when it was run by book men till the time — the present era — when it changed
to something else.
Before this issue went on-line, I asked Michael Bessie if he would care to comment
on the matter of the Patten book and Murdoch’s getting rid of it. He declined, saying that
on the one hand, this was hardly the first time a book had been in effect suppressed by the
head of a publishing company; and on the other, that, at that moment, all he knew was
what he had read in the papers, though he was acquainted with and thought well of the
ARCHIPELAGO 52 Vol. 2, No. 1 Spring 1998
CORNELIA and MICHAEL BESSIE (2) On Publishing
editor in question, who had done the honorable thing by leaving. In his voice I detected a
certain dryness. Perhaps he was recalling the ambitions of young men and old men and
the lay of once-greener playing fields; and, having had a long good run there himself,
perhaps he wasn’t sorry to be watching this one from the sidelines.
KM
Art and Commerce
MICHAEL BESSIE: Up to now, I’ve been talking about what I’m not so much
interested in; I’ve not talked about what I am interested in, which is literature and how
does it get published?
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Let me quote from an article you wrote for the
Virginia Quarterly Review1: “If the publisher were simply a commodities salesman
concerned solely with profit and loss, he might say, ‘There it is. Fiction is down, so we
concentrate on other lines, and the public be served. But of course, life is never this
simple.’” And then you go on to say why life never is this simple, concerning the sales
of fiction. But my question is: What does it mean to “serve the public”? Who is “the
public”?
CORNELIA BESSIE: “Who is the public?” The public are all those people with all
those different tastes, some of which may not be yours. You may not think that reading
romances is the way you want to spend your evenings, but there are readers out there
and they should be served.
What it means, in our lives, is the challenge of the book that may not have the
audience, that may not have the obvious audience, but where you say, “This is very
good, I want to do this.” It comes down to great simplicity, for me. It comes down to
whatever you think quality is, and have the arrogance to think that your notion of
quality may have some validity.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Basically, of course, what you do, I think, is acquire along the
way your likes and dislikes, and your own sense of how widely shared those likes and
dislikes are. Give you a simple example: when I started Atheneum, one of the things I
knew about myself, and said to Pat Knopf [Alfred A. Knopf, Jr., co-founder of
Atheneum] — because it was originally just Pat and me — I said, “You know, I have an
outstanding weakness: I have no real appreciation or appetite for commercial fiction. I
wish I had. And there certainly is some commercial fiction which I enjoy; but I don’t
have any gift for it.” And Pat had already had the notion of inviting Hiram Hayden to
join us, because Hiram had already demonstrated not only his commercial skills, but
had published people like William Styron. A few years later, we got Hiram to join us.
One of Atheneum’s failures during the time when I was in charge was the
failure to develop commercial fiction. Now, I say this despite the fact that we published
two or three of the most successful commercial books — James Clavell’s TAI PAN:
Herman Golub [an editor at Atheneum known for his strength in commercial fiction]
brought that in.
The thing that you learn from, mostly, is your mistakes. Cornelia and I muse
from time to time over the books we’ve published — and I can certainly illustrate this
— which we were certain were going to be commercially successful, and weren’t! That
doesn’t teach you how to avoid such mistakes, but it gives you a notion.
1Michael Bessie,"American Writing Today: A Publisher's Viewpoint," Virginia Quarterly
Review, 34:1 Winter 1958, p. 4.
ARCHIPELAGO 53 Vol. 2, No. 1 Spring 1998
CORNELIA and MICHAEL BESSIE (2) On Publishing
I’m not blaming other people for the commercial fiction, or non-fiction, that I
published that didn’t succeed: I can’t do that, that’s undercutting my own judgment.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Do you mean, to succeed esthetically?
MICHAEL BESSIE: No, no, I mean, succeed in sales. Because, you know, if a book
gets a half a dozen reviews, one or two of ‘em are bound to be good, and if you forget
the others, why, pronounce it a success.
Timing is such an important thing in this domain. There’s such a thing as being
ahead of the moment. For example, I would never have thought that any of these far-
out, other-world, New Age fiction things would have gone, 20 years ago.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Sonny Mehta [president of the Knopf Group, part of
Random House] said, about ten years ago, that perhaps the next big subject would be
the failure of people who had made it in the stock market, then lost it all. He might
have had a sense of “failure” as a coming topic.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Editorially, it’s very hard to do things that way. For one
thing, every book is unique.
The most frequent question you’re asked by non-publishing people is, How do
you decide what to publish? How do you choose? My answer has become simpler and
simpler over the years. I say, “Well, I tend to publish something that I would like to
read.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What is “commercial fiction”?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Most simply, it’s fiction that —
CORNELIA BESSIE: Jacqueline Susanne.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Jacqueline Susanne?
MICHAEL BESSIE (chuckles): I’m tempted to say, anything that sells over 100,000
copies; but that’s a cop-out. Commercial fiction is something that, I think most people
would agree, does not have any abiding value, any literary value. There are a lot of
ways of describing it: formula fiction, cookie-cutter fiction, fashionable fiction, fiction
of the moment. There are a lot of borderline cases. In the eyes of some, W. Somerset
Maugham was commercial fiction; but I think that’s wrong, I think that he had value
longer. The fact that he is now hardly read at all doesn’t prove that he won’t come
back. Is Patrick O’Brian [the celebrated series of Aubrey-Maturin sea-novels]
“commercial” fiction?
I guess the standard of it is, if it sells enough copies.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Is THE ENGLISH PATIENT [by Michael Ondaatje] commercial
fiction?
MICHAEL BESSIE: You’ve read the book; I haven’t.
CORNELIA BESSIE: I loved the book; it’s a very good book. It’s an interesting
book that, thanks to a movie and a sales push, has had a lot of readership.
MICHAEL BESSIE: I liked the movie a lot, and on the way out I said — I like to
talk about things afterward; Cornelia doesn’t — I said, “What’s the book got that the
movie hasn’t got?” and, without hesitation, she said: “Words.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: It was Lawrence Out of Africa.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Exactly.
CORNELIA BESSIE (regretfully): Hmmm.
MICHAEL BESSIE: It was; but it was beautifully made.
KATHERINE McNAMARA (laughing): How can you miss with sand dunes and
gorgeous haircuts?
MICHAEL BESSIE: I assure you that a lot of movies get made with sand dunes
and girls with gorgeous haircuts, but have failed. (Laughter from all) Anyway, my
ARCHIPELAGO 54 Vol. 2, No. 1 Spring 1998
CORNELIA and MICHAEL BESSIE (2) On Publishing
answer to that knowing question is, try to publish what you would like to read,
yourself! Now, for some people, that’s an indulgence.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Do you speak about what commercial fiction is? When
you read manuscripts, do you sort of divide them, or sort them, into categories?
CORNELIA BESSIE: No. Because, like Michael, I’m not good at commercial
fiction, it bores me.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: So, you know what commercial fiction is when you
read it.
CORNELIA BESSIE: I know what it is when I read it. To be honest, it’s not a
problem we tend to have, because it doesn’t tend to come our way. People know we’re
not interested. We can occasionally tell that something’s going to be successful but that
we want no part of it.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Also, there’s a momentum for commercial fiction. If
somebody’s novel number one or number two or whatever has sold very well, that
becomes almost guaranteed reading, because people who enjoy the first book will buy
the second. They may be deceived by it, or it may not satisfy them, and that certainly
has happened, but—
CORNELIA BESSIE: Ondaatje is a good example of the other, which is that the
first books didn’t sell.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: No, but they were terrific books.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Terrific books.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: RUNNING IN THE FAMILY is delightful; IN THE SKIN OF A
LION is—
CORNELIA BESSIE: Is wonderful.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I couldn’t read THE ENGLISH PATIENT; I thought it was
too fine; and yet, I think he writes the most sensuous, and sensual, masculine poetry in
North America.
CORNELIA BESSIE: I read THE ENGLISH PATIENT under very special circumstances.
I read it in central Italy while one of my best friends was dying, and so it had an
enormous effect on me. I can’t divorce my response to the book from that.
Harper’s, Gorbachev’s PERESTROIKA, and Rupert Murdoch
MICHAEL BESSIE: Is what I said reasonable? Should you publish what you like,
or, more importantly, should you not publish what you don’t like? Well, there are a lot
of books out there, and I’m kind of opposed to publishing a book that you don’t really
like. I used to do a session at Stanford: I’d give ‘em a list of books, saying, “Would you
publish?” One of the books on the list was MEIN KAMPF: would you publish it? When I
got into publishing, at the end of the war, this is the thing that young editors like me
would sit around arguing about.
My own feeling, about myself, anyhow, as a publisher is: I don’t want to publish
things I don’t like.
An example of how this came to roost: During the first round that I was in at
Harper, Canfield was, as I was, a liberal Democrat. We had a problem, which was that
we had virtually become publishers to the Democratic party. Canfield had published
Roosevelt, Mrs. Roosevelt, Roosevelt and Hopkins. He and Jack Fisher and Evan
Thomas and I all had friends in the liberal Democratic camp. The house was being
increasingly characterized by it; so we consciously set out to find some Republican
books. That’s why we competed vigorously for Eisenhower, but didn’t get it —
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Doubleday got it — and I think the reason we didn’t get it, probably, was the
reputation.
Now, interesting example of the opposite: It’s a long story as to how we came to
publish Gorbachev. Because it really started with an idea which I gave to a Russian
friend at the embassy in Washington. It took a couple of years to come about. The year
I’m talking about was 1986; it was at Harper and Row; we had not yet sold the firm to
Murdoch. I had gotten this idea, and then all of a sudden it began to happen. [Bessie
Books was then an imprint financed by Harper & Row.]
So: in April of 1987, the Gorbachev thing is cooking, very secretly, and Harper
is sold to Rupert Murdoch.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You were on the board of Harper and you opposed it.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Yes; but I lost. But profited financially. Now Rupert Murdoch
suddenly is the owner; and Brooks Thomas, who was then the head of the house, said,
“You know, I think you ought to tell Murdoch,” who is very conservative, an anti-
Communist. “I think you should tell him about this deal with Gorbachev.” So I did; I
called Rupert on the phone and I described to him what the situation was. He said,
“You mean you’re going to give Gorbachev $500,000 for a lot of Communist
propaganda?” I said, “Rupert, I’ll remind you: the understanding is that we don’t sign
the contract until we have a manuscript; and we don’t give him a cent until we sign the
contract.” Believe it or not, that was the situation with the head of the Soviet Union!
CORNELIA BESSIE: And we got world rights.
MICHAEL BESSIE: World rights: I mean, I’ve occasionally been very lucky. And
so, Rupert says: “Well, I think you’re crazy. Are you committed to it?” I said, “Yes.”
Meaning, are you and the house of Harper committed to it? Yes. “Well, I think you’re
mad.”
CORNELIA BESSIE: Just to interject: I think — we don’t know this — but I think,
also, that was a different Rupert Murdoch. He was, then, a book publisher for two
weeks.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Trying to be, anyhow.
CORNELIA BESSIE: He was a neophyte.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Cornelia and I go to Russia, and we get the manuscript,
finally, in English; and we like it; and we sign the contract.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: He [Gorbachev] had had it translated? You had it
translated?
MICHAEL BESSIE: He had had it translated. That was, again, one of the
conditions.
CORNELIA BESSIE: He had had it translated in a week, by five people, in Russia,
into something that resembled English.
MICHAEL BESSIE: It wasn’t really too bad. Cornelia did a very fine editing job on
it, which he asked us to do. I don’t know how I lucked into this understanding.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: He had done other things in life; he hadn’t dealt with
publishers. (Chuckle)
CORNELIA BESSIE: That’s true! As you’ll see, when the story goes on.
MICHAEL BESSIE: So now, as Cornelia said, she takes the manuscript back to
New York, and I take it to London, where the person running HarperCollins—
CORNELIA BESSIE: Let’s do some of the in-between.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Yes; do.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Well, what’s interesting is what happened in Russia, then the
Soviet Union. Our cover was the Moscow Book Fair, which meant there were a lot of
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foreign publishers there — German, English, French — and as our negotiation went
on, the book fair ended and people started to leave. We suddenly realized that the
apparatchiks who were going with us for one reason or another, had put all their eggs
in one basket, and we had not yet said yes. That they were, in a sense, committed to us
because they had said, “This is our choice.” If we had said no, it could be very difficult
for their careers. There were a lot of things going on at the same time. There was a day
when we were told, “The manuscript has left the place where he is vacationing.”2
KATHERINE McNAMARA (laughing): It sounds like a code!
MICHAEL BESSIE: The whole thing was like Le Carré.
CORNELIA BESSIE: It was Le Carré. Gorbachev had a code name: “The Man,” as
in, “The Man has finished the manuscript” — that sort of thing. And so, we were told,
“The Man has finished it, it is in a plane on its way to Moscow. We will put it in
translation; you will have it in five days. Where will you be in five days?”
We said, “Er, um, in Leningrad.” I wanted to see The Hermitage. They said,
“You will get it in Leningrad in five days.” Now, we had thought that the time would
come when we would get the manuscript, sitting cheerfully in our office in New York,
so that if we said no, we would be there. We had not thought this would happen. There
were these good scenarios we told ourselves — “Taxi accident on the Nevsky Prospekt.”
(Laughing) Anyhow, we got the manuscript; the manuscript came in two copies. We
read it; we decided it was certainly good enough to publish; and the contract got
signed. And then came the phone call that said: “Do you have any editorial
suggestions?” Which we never thought would happen. We had one day before the
plane left. So we did something we’ve never done with any other book: we divided it in
half, and we each edited half, and sent him those suggestions. We never thought the
day would come when he would say, “Do you have any comment?” We were
unprepared for that.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Neophyte author.
CORNELIA BESSIE (chuckling): Yes.
MICHAEL BESSIE: To finish with the Murdochian point: the head for Murdoch
of HarperCollins was Ian Chapman, in London, and he happened to be in London
then. I took the manuscript there because it was Sunday, and Ian and a couple of other
of the people who ran things were excited about it. The big thing in London
publishing for a book like that is to sell serial rights, because that’s big money; and so,
we had to decide by Monday morning what we were going to do about serials. Rupert
Murdoch owned the London Times. There were four big Sunday newspapers; Ian had
decided we should show it first to the Sunday Times. He had also decided, knowing his
way around those things, that we were going to ask £200,000, which was a lot of money.
So he told the editor of The Times on Monday morning, “We’ve got this very exciting
manuscript: we want to give it to you on first offer, not simultaneously with the other
papers.” So the guy comes over and spends the day at the office. He read it and was
sufficiently impressed to say, as he went back to his office, “I’ve got to call Rupert.”
(Chuckling in the background.) And Ian said to him, “I remind you: you love an
exclusive, and we’re asking £200,000.” So the guy goes back, and a little while later, calls
Ian, and says, “I am authorized to offer you £75,000.” Ian says, “Uh-uh.” “Well, Rupert
thinks you’re all out of your minds. A book by Gorbachev can’t possibly be worth any
more than that, and I’m not authorized to go beyond £75,000.” We say, “Well, that
means that, tomorrow morning, we’ll offer it to the other three Sunday newspapers.”
Which we did. And got three offers, of which the highest was £175,000, and that’s what
it was sold for.
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Now: why do I enjoy the story so much? Because, about three or four or five
months ago, there was a long story about Rupert Murdoch in The New Yorker by Ken
Auletta, and Rupert tells this story entirely differently: he had the idea for the
Gorbachev book! So you see, history corrects itself.
KATHERINE McNAMARA (laughing): The first time as tragedy; the second time,
as farce?
MICHAEL BESSIE: And either time, it’s profitable! (General laughter.)
CORNELIA BESSIE: You hope.
MICHAEL BESSIE: That book was an immense success, it made a lot of money. It
made millions. We had enormous foreign rights — it was an immensely successful
book. It was more than a book, it was an event.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Is this the moment for comic relief?
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Yes, it is.
CORNELIA BESSIE: He [indicating MB] is still in London—
MICHAEL BESSIE: Collins [respected British publishing house bought by Murdoch
and merged with Harper & Row] had the printing plant in Scotland—
CORNELIA BESSIE: What Gorbachev wanted: he didn’t argue about money; the
one thing that he really wanted was to have it published on the 70th anniversary of the
Revolution.
MICHAEL BESSIE: So it had to be published on November 1.
CORNELIA BESSIE: And this was September, October—
MICHAEL BESSIE: And I said it couldn’t be done. And he said, “Well, it has to
be.” So we called London, and Ian Chapman said, “Of course it can be done, in our
plant here.”
CORNELIA BESSIE: Actually, that was fudged; but that’s another story.
Officially, we published on the day we had promised.
So: he is still in London. I’m in New York. They’ve had these excited calls from
London, so they’re now, more or less, paying a little bit of attention. There’s a meeting.
There was a changeover in the head of the trade department at that point; and there
are these guys who have to throw their weight around. The first thing is: “Perestroika:
who knows what that means?” We’ve got to change the title. I said, “That is the title.”
“Well, we’ve got to change it.” “You can’t change it: that’s the title.” “Well, who knows
what it means?” I said, “Two months ago you didn’t know what glasnost meant. It’s
now part of the American language.” Finally, I lost my patience. I said, “Fellows: have
you noticed: he’s a head of state!” (Laughs.) Silence in the room.
Later, since the press couldn’t reach the author, the calls from all over the
world came to us. This started during the time while Michael was in London, and I and
my assistant were the full might of Bessie Books. We got very good, very quickly, at
handling the hard questions. On the one hand, we wanted it to have as much exposure
as possible; on the other hand, we didn’t want to give away the book. What we were
doing was presenting it as an event, which indeed it was.
This is, again, comic relief: When we were sitting in that plane as it took off
from Leningrad, I said to Michael, “You know, we won’t get lucky twice. We had one
bit of luck when we had Sadat’s book3 in proof when he went to Jerusalem—”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Oh!
MICHAEL BESSIE: Which is to say: we had not known he was going; we had the
book.
CORNELIA BESSIE: We had it, and so we could publish at that time. I said,
“Gorbachev won’t come to America. We won’t get lucky twice.” Well, that was exactly
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the time when he came and when there was ‘Gorby-mania’; do you remember when he
was getting out of the limousine in the middle of Washington and shaking hands?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Footnote: we tried to figure out — obviously, a lot of other
things happened in this story — we tried to figure out why we were selected; indeed,
we asked the Russian ambassador in Washington. He said, “Partly because it was your
idea, you were first.”
But in the back of my mind was that we had published a lot of Russian stuff up
until then: Solzhenitsyn, Mandlestam, all dissident literature. I thought this was going
to queer us for the Gorbachev book; but quite the contrary. Nobody could say we were
captive publishers.
Education of an Editor
KATHERINE McNAMARA (to CB): What did you do, from the time Atheneum
was being sold [see Part 1] to the time you joined Harper’s?
CORNELIA BESSIE: I worried. I went to India.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: But when did you know, in fact, that you were an
editor, and even a publisher?
CORNELIA BESSIE: Ah. Interesting question. To go back to the then-Harper’s,
the “Canfield Plantation”: one of the things that was very obvious was that I had had a
very sheltered life as far as the business world is concerned. My father wasn’t really a
business man. I’d not heard business discussed, I had no business sense at all. My father
was an art dealer, but he was an independent spirit, and what was talked about at table
was never business. So, I came to Harper’s really very naive; and also, as far as the
female side goes, it was “pre-feminism.” There came into Harper’s, at exactly the same
time I did, a young man who was a Harvard graduate, who came from the right kind
of family, who, I think, was Porcellian, probably — if he wasn’t, he should have been —
and, because we happened to come in at the same time, I was quite aware that he was
being groomed and I was not. If he hadn’t been there, I would have been quite
unaware of what was going on.
And I left several times. I was fed up; I was depressed — well, what I was is, I
was a reading machine.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You were then in your twenties.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Yes. So I left all the time. I went off to Spain once... I went to
a lot of places; I supported myself by translating, which is a wonderful trade; it’s like
being a carpenter, you can do it anywhere. And so, that’s when I did my traveling. —
Actually, because this is a nice kind of a story: as you know, there is what publishers call
the “slush pile,” the books that come in over the transom; and once in a blue moon,
one of these things is good. Nowadays, incidentally, among the changes in publishing is
that these things don’t get read.
MICHAEL BESSIE: In many places.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Almost every place. If things don’t come in agented or as
“Friend of” somebody you know.... But at that point, if anything came up in the pile, it
was then given to the lowest guy on the totem pole, which was me. I found a book, and
worked with the author, and it became a book; and I was really in one of my I’m-sick-
and-tired-of-all-this moods, when I was called by The Reader’s Digest. They said, “We
would like to take this book as a condensed book.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you like to say which book it was?
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CORNELIA BESSIE: It was a book called EPITAPH FOR AN ENEMY, by a man whose
last name was Barr: George Barr. He never wrote another book.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Very nice book.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Yes, very nice book. Because, when that call came in from
The Reader’s Digest, had I not been in one of my I-hate-you-all moods I would have
gone to the nearest handy male and said, “Will you handle this for me?”; but because
that day I was sick of them all, I did it myself. And from that came, to everyone’s great
surprise, an offer of a job at the Digest; and the job they offered me was very
interesting. It was a job that didn’t exist; it didn’t exist after me, either. It was that I was
the liaison between Europe and America, for all of Condensed Books.
I was hired in Spring. I said, “Can I start in Fall?” And so, I went to Europe, of
course — and there was a day when I was visiting my future colleagues. Reader’s Digest
had an office on the Boulevard St.-Germain. While I was in the office of one of them, a
man, there was a parade, one of those Sixties parades from the Sorbonne. I was fairly
recently out of the Sorbonne myself, so, suddenly, I disappeared out of the window.
There was my head out the window, and my ass in his office, with shouts back and
forth between me and people in the street. When I reappeared in the office, my future
colleague looked at me and said, “They hired you at The Reader’s Digest?” (Laughs)
That was the beginning.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What was the real situation; what had the man in
Paris told you about why you were hired?
CORNELIA BESSIE: Because the European editions wanted their independence. I
was the stop-gap measure.
As a result of this funny incident, he then told me the truth about what was
really going on, which was very useful: why I had been hired, what the real problems
were, and so on. He was amused by me, and so he was willing to talk. If there hadn’t
been that parade under his window, he probably wouldn’t have. — But, in a serious
sense, what Michael was getting to, is: I learned more. I got the publishing reports from
all over the world. I learned more about publishing in that one year — that was while I
was waiting for Atheneum to be able to put me on a salary — and it was a marvelous
teaching experience. It also was a very interesting experience as an editor, because the
people who condense those books, some of them, were extraordinary editors. The
technique that they had evolved was a very sophisticated technique, which, once again,
I learned from an older lady, and which served me in very good stead, in some ways.
They had an eagle eye for the fat on a manuscript, that was a very good thing to learn;
and I learned it there.
I also got a very good overview of world publishing that I could have gotten
from no place else. After a year, I got an offer from Atheneum, and left. But I learned
more in that one year than in any year before.
She Reads THE LEOPARD
CORNELIA BESSIE: I also had a wonderful publishing experience.
First I should say that Michael and I always had a game that we played when we
were bored. This game was as follows: “If you had read WAR AND PEACE in manuscript,
would you have known it was a great book? Or would you have said, ‘We’ll do this, Mr.
Tolstoy, but would you please remove a hundred pages of manuscript?’“
So: on my second or third day I’m sitting in this office, looking out at the green
fields of Reader’s Digest in Pleasantville, and there is on my desk sat an almost
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impossible-to-decipher typescript. I started reading, and on page five I thought, “I
don’t believe this. I have spent years in a first-rate publishing house and have almost
never met literature.” And then, at The Reader’s Digest, on my second day, there it
was: literature.
It was Lampedusa’s THE LEOPARD.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: My God. And it was condensed?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Well, not yet.
CORNELIA BESSIE: I knew nobody. There was this odd thing: I had been hired,
and was hired by seeing everyone, including both Wallaces [Dewitt and Lila Atcheson
Wallace, owners] separately. I mean, here I was, not a very high-up person. I went
down to see my boss, who was a lovely man, and said, “This thing has happened. Here’s
literature.” And he smiled and said, “Don’t give it to anyone else. Give it to me.” He
took it home, came back in the morning, and said, “Come into my office. I’m going to
give you a lesson in publishing.” He called the Book-of-the-Month Club and said,
“Have you seen this book?” “Yes.” “Have you declined it?” “Yes.” He said: “Recall it.”
He could say that to the Book-of-the-Month Club; and he did. They recalled it; they
did it; we did it, and the book took off.
Now, The Reader’s Digest Book Club polls its readership on what they like and
they don’t like. Just before I left, a year later, my boss and I had a giggling fit: because
THE LEOPARD polled third from the bottom of Reader’s Digest books! But he and I were
very proud of ourselves for having done it. (Laughs)
MICHAEL BESSIE: Let me intrude here just to say that Cornelia’s had the
experience, and I’ve observed it also: if the Reader’s Digest did nothing else, it
developed skills, as Cornelia has said. I have yet to see any book that I’ve had anything
to do with that wasn’t, if not improved by the condensation, at least not destroyed.
CORNELIA BESSIE: They have a really extraordinary technique. You don’t get
the book: any more than the movie The English Patient is THE ENGLISH PATIENT; but you
get a smell....
She Reads TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
CORNELIA BESSIE: There was another moment. I went to my then-boss and
said, “I’ve just read a very pretty book. It’s quiet, it’s charming; it probably won’t do
anything in the trade because it’s quiet, but I like it a lot: will you read it?” He read it,
and said, “Yes, let’s do it.” It was a book called TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD [by Harper Lee],
which sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
I read the book in manuscript — you got them in proof or in manuscript, so
you had to make up your mind before you knew anything...
KATHERINE McNAMARA: There’s a very nice expression on your face as you tell
that story.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Well, it was fun. (Laughs) “It’s a very quiet book, it won’t go
anywhere, but it’s nice.” (Laughter)
KATHERINE McNAMARA: After THE LEOPARD, it’s a one-two punch, isn’t it.
CORNELIA BESSIE: It does show you that there is something, whatever that
instinct is, that is the “editorial instinct.” You know. It’s like falling in love. You know
when you’re barely into the book that something special is going on.
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What Is a Literary Culture?
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I asked Marion Boyars [Vol. 1, No. 3] this question:
“What is a literary culture? Do we have one?”
CORNELIA BESSIE: Very good question.
MICHAEL BESSIE: I don’t think there is anything in our society that can be
addressed in so general a fashion. For example, I don’t think we have a literary society:
I think it’s a mosaic, and is constantly shifting, like a kaleidoscope. I think we have
literary cultures. I think as in all culture, literary culture essentially consists in “high”
and “pop,” by not being all that clear and distinct.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Is “pop” different, do you think, than what “popular”
used to be?
MICHAEL BESSIE: In a sense. “Pop” is short for “popular” — it implies a lot of
people. It also from a highbrow point of view implies cultural inferiority, or artistic or
esthetic inferiority.
CORNELIA BESSIE: There are these weird phenomena, however. This is not
answering your question, but it’s an interesting insight: When [Bernard] Pivot’s book
program [Apostrophe] became so popular in France, the concierges were watching
Apostrophe.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Prime time, Friday night.
CORNELIA BESSIE: In other words, there was a culture that could go from the
concierge to the most high-brow author. I mention this because it is an unrepeatable
phenomenon. We can’t even, in this country, have a television books program that
people are really aware of.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: There’s Brian Lamb, on CNN, with Booknotes.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Which is on at a time when no one watches [Saturday and
Sunday nights], and in a place with fewer viewers. Pivot was on prime time, and
everyone watched. It was what was discussed the next morning with the taxi driver and
with the colleagues in the office.
MICHAEL BESSIE: And it was a program that did not condescend.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Absolutely not. Thus, it’s a cultural phenomenon. It’s an
aside to your question, it’s not an answer to your question. The fact is that we have no
equivalent, and that there’s no equivalent anywhere else in Europe — he is, he was a
phenomenon —
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Melvyn Bragg [of London Weekend Television, seen in
the US on the Bravo channel] is in no way in comparison?
MICHAEL BESSIE: No, he isn’t bad.
CORNELIA BESSIE: He’s not bad; and he gets good people. It’s interesting, you
know, that we do have a national public television, and that there is no equivalent to
these programs.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Not since [Robert] Cromie stopped doing his book program
out of Chicago. For years, he did a book program on radio and television, and it was
quite popular. He was good at it, but never got the mass audience.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Which Pivot did.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Do they have a mass culture in France?
CORNELIA BESSIE: Oh, sure. Every country publishes its trash and gobbles it
up, like we gobble up junk food.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: On the way here, I was listening to a public radio
program called “The American Musical Theater.” What was being played was a concert
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version, done in England, of Cole Porter’s Nymph Errant. It was quite charming. What
occurred to me was that Cole Porter and the American musical theater, which we can’t
talk about anymore except in retrospect, I think, were a variety of what properly was
called American popular culture. And I think that is what I mean when I suggest there
is a distinction between popular culture, framing it in time, and pop culture, that is,
our media-oriented culture.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Exactly. Porgy and Bess is not junk!
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Alternatively, jazz is deeply popular, in every sense;
but it’s not pop. And Ellington is arguably one of the two or three great American
composers of the century.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Jazz cannot be classified either as highbrow or lowbrow
culture.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: No. But it is deeply popular.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Yes, right. And it crosses borders.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Is there any equivalent, or analog, in the world of
books?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Yes: mysteries.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That’s nice.
MICHAEL BESSIE: But that’s not the only one.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Is Simenon “popular culture” to you?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Why did we make the decision, at Harper’s, way back when
Joan Kahn built the mystery department, to call them neither “mysteries” nor
“detective stories” but “suspense novels”? — starting in the latter part of World War II,
and, largely, with English authors. For example, I don’t read mystery stories, I never
have, but I’m an absolute devoté of mystery stories on television. Show me a Poirot,
and I’m there.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: On public television, you mean—
MICHAEL BESSIE: Well, yes.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: —or, now, A&E.
CORNELIA BESSIE: There are those things that cross boundaries — THE ENGLISH
PATIENT, for instance. Or M.F.K. Fisher, who wrote about food, but really about life.
MICHAEL BESSIE: The lines are wavy, just as they are in high culture.
CORNELIA BESSIE: At this point, in America, “elite” is a dirty word. But, when
you talk about a literary culture, you’re talking about an elite, always. And that’s very
hard to do in America.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Nonetheless, although we don’t like to talk about class,
we operate on the basis of class — even, I would say, often when we believe we’re
talking about race.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Very much. Also, as Peter Finlay Dunne once said: “It’s no
disgrace to be poor in America, but it might as well be.”
Cornelia, Reading
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Here is a question to braid into the one about literary
culture: Is there such a thing as “illegitimate” reading?
CORNELIA BESSIE: What do you mean?
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I’m not sure, but let me try to approach this. Literacy
volunteers like to say that reading anything at all is important. They mean to
encourage people to read. It is said by teachers, and becomes common thinking, that
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“Whatever they read doesn’t matter: get them to read, and they’ll go on to something
good.” People say this, knowing that in their childhood they had read what would
have been called bad books, and yet that, for some time, at least, they had gone on to
read good books.
MICHAEL BESSIE: They acquired reading.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Yes. But I’m not necessarily convinced it happens
easily. Of course, anybody can go on to read good books. But I wonder if there is a sort
of “trash” reading that only leads to more trash?
CORNELIA BESSIE: I think that, as so often, both things are true. I think there is
junk-reading that leads to more junk; and, occasionally, to the opposite.
I taught, briefly, in a community college; and the best student I ever had was a
mail carrier, who came from an illiterate household, who was semi-literate himself for a
period of time, and who told me the following story. One day he was delivering mail.
The windows were open in a house, and music was coming out. He found out, later,
that this was Beethoven. It transfixed him, and he decided that a world that included
Beethoven could include other things, as well, and he started to read.
Any kind of anecdotal evidence is nothing but that: anecdotal; but if an adult,
like the mail carrier, can be turned on by Beethoven, there will be, out there, somebody
or other who can be turned on to Shakespeare.
MICHAEL BESSIE: It occurs to me that there is a perfect paradigm for this.
When I was young, the reading of comics was banned in a lot of houses.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: It was banned in my house.
CORNELIA BESSIE: In mine, too. And everybody else’s.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: In the fear that the child would grow up into “pop”
culture. And it’s happened. It did happen.
MICHAEL BESSIE: There was no notion that comics were “real.” Well, we are
now living the apotheosis of the comic: MAUS.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: They call it a “graphic novel.” Although there were
brilliant graphic novels in the 30s, for instance: the Germans were very good at them...
(to CB): You read several languages: would you say which ones?
CORNELIA BESSIE: French, German, some Italian.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: When you came to Harper’s, what had you been
reading?
CORNELIA BESSIE: I was an only child and a bookworm. There was a time, early
on, when I read my way through my parents’ library, just going counter-clockwise.
And amazingly, in this way, when I was about 13 or 14, I discovered Ezra Pound for
myself, and was mesmerized. We then lived in a suburb, and my parents went to New
York. The first time I ever asked them to buy me a book in New York was when I
wanted another Ezra Pound. This was right after the war, and my father came home
snorting, saying, “The first time she asks for a book it’s by a famous traitor!”
(Laughter)
Anyhow, that was the background: I had read everything I could get my hands
on. I think if you don’t read those classic texts at a certain age, you’re unlikely to, later.
By that, I mean, probably before college, and certainly before the end of college. In
order to have what we call “taste,” you have to have been exposed to, and, hopefully,
set on fire by, the great readings, and if that doesn’t happen at a time when you’re
ready for them, it probably won’t happen.
As you know, my secret sin is riding horses, which means that you’re usually
riding with some teenaged female companion. I was constantly riding through the
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woods where I live in Connecticut saying to some damsel, “There is, you know, life
after horses.” (Laughter)
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And you’re met with skepticism. (Laughter)
CORNELIA BESSIE: Oh yes! My favorite of those incidents was: one day, I was
riding through the woods with a 14-year old, and she said, “You know Hemingway?” I
said, “Yep.” She said, “Well, you told me he was good, but you didn’t tell me he was
cute!” (Laughter) She’d just run across a photograph! But she was exactly at the age
when she should have been reading Hemingway, and I guess, trotting through the
woods, I put something into her head that made her go to a book. The really sad thing
is, when I look at the kids around me, is how few of them go through that marvelous
stage of reading everything and devouring everything and finding things you love.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I asked this of one of my assistants, and she said she
used to read everything when she was a kid: Wheaties boxes, comics: anything that
came across her eyes, she’d read. Because of that, she read everything, including good
books. But she noticed that people who didn’t read good books, didn’t read everything:
they didn’t read Wheaties boxes, they didn’t read newspapers; they just didn’t read.
CORNELIA BESSIE: I’ve watched several kids at a very young age, particularly if
it was at a house I was supplying with children’s books, read with great pleasure; and,
suddenly, in about the fifth grade, they stop. I don’t know whether this is because —
for the males — sports suddenly become all-encompassing; or whether it’s because they
encounter a computer for the first time...
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Is this true of girls and boys?
CORNELIA BESSIE: When I’m thinking of several kids who were wonderful
readers... I think it is true of kids, particularly now that there’s equality in sports, which
means the girls are being pushed as much as the boys.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: If you were to think of a foundation of reading, or,
your foundation of reading, what books would you name?
CORNELIA BESSIE: I fell in love with Shakespeare at a very early age, which
amused my father because he was persuaded that I couldn’t understand what I was
reading. What he didn’t understand was that I probably didn’t understand, in his
sense, but I was set afire by the beauty. I could understand the beauty, if I couldn’t
understand any more.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: When I was a kid, there was so much I didn’t
understand that it gave me a large desire to learn. That was very exciting. I understand
children now are often discouraged by teachers and librarians from reading books that
are considered too hard for them.
CORNELIA BESSIE: I think that’s true. In fact, no one was encouraging me to
read, which is probably one of the reasons why I read so much! (Laughter)
KATHERINE McNAMARA: They weren’t discouraging you, however.
CORNELIA BESSIE: They weren’t discouraging me, but they certainly weren’t
encouraging. I don’t know why.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Your father was an art dealer. Was he a reader? He
had a library.
CORNELIA BESSIE: He was; he was. He had a Classical background. He was
German; and not only German, he was Prussian. So there was a lot of this: “How can
you read Shakespeare when you can’t understand him?”! And of course, I was too
young and too naive to answer. But now that you bring it up, I remember this scene:
he was laughing, because he had a big, one-volume edition of Shakespeare, and I was
reading my way through it. I was very offended!
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KATHERINE McNAMARA: How old were you: 10, 12?
CORNELIA BESSIE: Must have been. And I actually didn’t understand, but the
love of that has stayed with me, and the love of poetry, which started at a very early
age. Poetry and music. If you love one, you often love the other.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Did you have the third in the trivium: mathematics?
CORNELIA BESSIE: No. No, I’m the genius who failed Math I twice. (Laughs) In
fact, at the last school I went to — you know, they give you these aptitude tests, and I
had just been thrown out of a school, so getting into a school was quite a thing — the
headmistress, who later became a friend, said, “We’ve seldom seen such a disparity:
such a low math aptitude and a high English one. We’ll take you, but we will not
attempt to teach you math.” (Laughs)
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And so, Shakespeare and Pound.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Well, Pound, whom I discovered for myself, as I’ve said,
reading along the family shelves; Shakespeare; all poetry; and then, all those things
everyone falls in love with: LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR, D.H. Lawrence—
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Did you read Stendhal in French?
CORNELIA BESSIE: No, I didn’t; not the first time. We used to do something
called Woodrow Wilson Fellowships, where we’d go to a college and teach for a short
time. Michael and I did it together. You were supposed to talk about what you did, and
I decided I would be happy to talk about what I did, but I’d also like to teach
something, and I chose LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR. So I sat under a tree down South and
reread it, which I hadn’t done since I was a kid, and it was amazing how that book had
grown up! (Laughter) The questions you ask yourself, such as, What choices did
Mathilde de la Môle have? you of course don’t ask yourself the first time through.
I talked to you earlier about my experience with THE LEOPARD. My experience
with reading it in manuscript was that you knew on page five of the very faint
typescript that you were in the presence of literature. But to explain to somebody how
you knew this is like explaining how you know you’re in love.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Can you think of any other books?
CORNELIA BESSIE: WAR AND PEACE.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Were you a Tolstoyan or a Dostoyevskian?
CORNELIA BESSIE: I was first a Dostoyevskian. I didn’t read WAR AND PEACE
until I went to Oxford, because I’d always saved it. I said I wasn’t going to read it until I
could read it through. While you’re in school, you don’t have that kind of time. I read
it at Oxford shut up in a flat for the better part of a week, at the end of which I almost
married the wrong man, since I thought I was in 19th century Russia. (Laughs) A 19th
century character came down the pike, and I didn’t realize till later that he was a 19th
century character but he was also a son of a bitch. So much for the dangers of reading.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Was Harper’s good for you?
CORNELIA BESSIE: No, because Harper’s was so totally sexist. That was at a time
when Papa Knopf could say, in print, “Women shouldn’t expect to be paid in
publishing, they should pay to be in publishing.” And he could say that without
blinking, and was quoted in a magazine. Harper’s was super-sexist, which is why all
those wonderful women were under-appreciated; and it was the women who did most
of the work and had, I thought, the finer taste. Not that some of the boys didn’t have
it, when they could sit still for long enough. Already then, you were being rewarded
for beating the bushes rather than for publishing good books. And I think that’s still
true; it’s more true.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Yes, is more true; but it hadn’t been true before?
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CORNELIA BESSIE: Oh, I don’t know. By the time I appeared, it was true. I
suppose the question is, when did commercialism start? It was always there.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You said that one of the jobs of the editor is choosing
books well. For what purpose do you choose a book? It seems that now, books are
chosen for marketability, for adding to the bottom-line; but I think that is not your
purpose.
CORNELIA BESSIE: No. I have never been editor-in-chief or publisher of a large
list, so I’ve never had the responsibility of making a viable list, which means that you
have to balance off a few of the things that will pay the light bill with the things you
love.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Those are almost always in opposition?
CORNELIA BESSIE: Mostly. I’ve bought a few books that I didn’t dislike, and
certainly didn’t look down on, but that I sure didn’t think were great literature,
because I knew that they would do well. It’s rare that I’ve had to do that. If you have a
responsibility, as Lee [Goerner, 1947-95, the final publisher at Atheneum] had, for
making a place live, then you have to have those thoughts. I’ve had the luxury of never
having had to do that.
Whatever that book you take on is, you have to live with it. On one occasion
there was a book that I really thought was quite remarkable; but the book was so
horrifying, it horrified me so much, which meant it was so well done, that I suddenly
thought: “I can’t live with this.” I couldn’t see myself presenting it to the sales force. So
far as I know, the book wasn’t published.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: When you read now, do you think you know when a
book is commercial?
CORNELIA BESSIE: Yes, and I’m so often wrong. I think it is commercial, and it
isn’t. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t have that set of instincts.
I’ve been working for a couple of years with somebody who’s never written a
book before, and who comes from another part of the forest; who doesn’t know about
book publishing. One day I said to him, “There aren’t that many people who would
spend two years with you doing what I call an elementary writing course.” He happens
to be a very smart fellow and caught on immediately, and it’s been a great pleasure
working with him because he is so smart. But, you know, he thinks this is what
publishing is like! And it’s not, to a great extent, that way anymore.
And then the New York Times runs a piece saying, “How come we can’t find
any young people who will edit books?” I don’t know if you’ve had any experience with
cybernetics. In that field, they talk about “the payoff.” Now the payoff is in the wrong
place: I think that’s one of the intrinsic problems with publishing now, that the payoffs
are all in the wrong place. What do people get rewarded for, or get raises for? What do
they get secure places in the system for? It’s not for doing the grubby work late at night
with a pencil. Not only that you don’t get rewarded: people are absolutely not
rewarded, they’re told they’re wasting their time. The pay-off work goes into making a
best-seller.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Have you never considered writing, yourself, nor
been drawn to it?
CORNELIA BESSIE: I’ve performed small acts of the dread deed, yes.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And are those available to be read?
CORNELIA BESSIE: (Laughs.) No.
I did do a lot of translating; my translations paid for my travel. Oxford I paid
for with Simenon, believe it or not. And I’ve done one book which was a pure act of
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love. I announced at the time that it would be my first and last German translation,
and it has been: it was a book by a well-known writer there called Ilse Aichinger. She’s a
lovely writer, and I fell in love with this book.
I met her again by chance about two months ago, and it was quite wonderful:
we had the same sort of magical, instant communication we had had before. In
German, the literal translation of the title is, “The Greater Hope,” which doesn’t work
in English, and so I called the book HEROD’S CHILDREN. She’s a great lady and, now, an
old lady. The book is about a group of Jewish children in Vienna during the war. In
each chapter their world grows narrower, smaller, as the Nazi edicts about the Jews
progress, until the only place for them to go is up, into their imagination. It’s both
very real and a blessedly imaginative work of fiction. It still moves me as much today as
it did when I worked on it, when I woke sometimes in tears in the middle of the night.
—And here’s a book I did that was great fun to do.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Oh, this is marvelous. [BESTIARE D’AMOUR, Jean
Rostand, Doubleday 1961, tr. Cornelia Schaeffer]
CORNELIA BESSIE: He was still alive when I did that. That was fun. I paid for
my travels and studies — at one point I did anything anyone would pay me to do.
Most of it was from the French,
The Simenons — you know, he wrote them all in 11 days, and so, my point of
pride was that I translated them in 11 days! (Laughter.) (Except that I used the 12th
day to revise. Maybe he did, too.) So, 24 days of work paid for a year at Oxford. That’s
not bad.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Not bad at all.
CORNELIA BESSIE: Mind you, I was paying £5 a week for my room.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Even so. Are the titles still available?
CORNELIA BESSIE: I don’t have them in the house. He wasn’t a bad writer, you
know. At that time, he was married to a Canadian woman. The publisher was
Doubleday, and she had editorial rights, and her notion of a good translation was that
the words appear in the same order in the English sentence as in the original. I refused
to sign the translations, because she mangled them. But they paid for my education.
What Happend to Harper & Bros.?
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What happened to Harper & Bros.?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Oh, lots of things. It depends on when you want to start the
story?
KATHERINE McNAMARA: From when you were there till when you left.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Well. When I joined, in the fall of 1946, it was 130 years old; it
had started in 1817, and had been, in the latter part of the 19th century, the largest
English-language publishing house in the world. It published books and magazines,
lots of them: Harper’s Bazaar, Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Monthly, and so forth. But,
shortly after the turn of the century, it was going bankrupt; it had been bled by the
various partners, a characteristic thing of a family-owned business.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: By then, the second or third generation?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Oh, yes: at least third. Four brothers started it, four brothers
from a farm on Staten Island, like the Vanderbilts. It was saved by Tom Lamont, who
was then the partner of J. P. Morgan, I think for the total of, I don’t know, two million
bucks, which then was a large sum. And it went through various hands; and in the
middle of the 1920s was joined by a fellow named Cass Canfield, who came from a
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wealthy family, and who actually joined it to run the London office. Harper’s at that
time, and from early in the 19th century, was Harper and Brothers, New York and
London, publishing in both places. Then Canfield came back to America, and he wasn’t
head of the house, but he became so in 1944; he might as well have been, he was the
principal stockholder by that time. The stock wasn’t listed, it was privately held; he
bought the largest part of it — he had about 22, 24% of it.
Anyhow, when I joined it, he was then the head of the house and principal
stockholder. And, in addition to being an able businessman and administrator, he was
also a publisher, a person who knew about and cared about books and edited a lot
himself. Indeed, the jewels of the Harper 20th century list were his: Aldous Huxley
and all the English, Thornton Wilder and that generation of Americans: they all were
people whom Cass personally published, something which is rare in our time.
In any event, what was the house like then? It was one of the two or three —
along with Doubleday, and Macmillan, maybe — largest diversified publishing houses.
It published all kinds of books: medical, school, college, religious; and its trade
department was certainly one of the two or three dominant trade departments. It had
begun to seem predictable, by comparison with the new generation of the 1920s and ‘30s
houses — Knopf, Simon & Schuster, Random House, and Viking, etc.: they were
brighter; the scene was brighter. They were more contemporary, although Harper still
had great strength. Cass, for example, had an almost proprietary relationship with the
New Yorker, because he had published the Thurbers and the E.B. Whites and so forth.
He didn’t maintain that monopoly, because it got passed around; but when I joined,
most New Yorker writers published still with Harper’s. The staff of the trade
department was essentially Ivy League. Not everybody came from Harvard, Yale, or
Princeton, but most did. Women were beginning to play a role editorially, though they
tended to be assistants — not in the role of secretaries. The place had a singular
advantage in Harper’s Magazine, which brought in young writers and gave us first
crack at ‘em. We got a lot of people that way
Anyhow, that was the house that I joined in ‘46. And I was there for 15 years,
and then came the Atheneum adventure.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What became of Harper’s?
MICHAEL BESSIE: I left in ‘59. In about 1962 or ‘63, Harper & Bros. became
Harper & Row, because elementary and secondary publishing became enormously
expanded in those years, and there Harper found itself, in the early ‘60s, without a
schoolbook department. [So it bought Row Peterson, a textbook publisher, and added
the new firm’s name.]
The Harper that I left in 1959 was doing about $20 million worth of turnover a
year, which was about as much as anybody else. The Harper I returned to, in 1975, was
doing nearly $100 million. But in the meantime, Harcourt Brace, for example, had
gone to about $300 million. Subsidiary rights had become considerably more
important: book club, paperback, movie, etc. So, the things that we are now so aware of
were beginning to develop. The increase of money, in every sense: Capitalization.
Money needed for marketing. Money needed for advances. Everything got more
competitive, more expensive. General publishing became more closely allied to show
biz. The Harper I returned to was dominated by numbers: P & Ls, numbers, and by
marketing, in the sense that the firm I had left 16 years before was not.
When I returned, as the senior publisher of the house and one of the corporate
triumvirate who were supposed to run the place, I had to go through about a three-
week indoctrination, because I had to learn a new business. I learned what had
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happened to big publishing during that time. Of course, it happened to every other
one of the big places: it had become “corporatized.”
I went back to Harper — I was then 59 — under an arrangement in which I
would be senior vice-president, publisher, etc., until I was 65, and when I was 65,
Harper would set up Bessie Books for Cornelia and me, as an imprint under Harper’s
aegis, independently. We would own it, but we would have publishing and money
arrangements with Harper.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What did Cornelia do in the meantime?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Cornelia had been working for Atheneum, actually, until we
were married; when Pat Knopf, who saw his mother in Cornelia, became impossible for
her to work with, she went off to Dutton. But when I went back to Harper, she came
into Harper; or shortly thereafter.
So that was the deal. And for the next — well, from ‘75 to ‘81, I was at Harper.
In ‘81, we set up Joshuatown Publishing, a small corporation which is ours, which is
Cornelia and Michael Bessie Books. They kept me on the Harper board. I was on till ‘87,
when we sold to Murdoch and the board disappeared.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And you weren’t in favor of that sale.
MICHAEL BESSIE: I was very strongly against it.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Why were you against it?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Because I liked Harper independent, and also because I didn’t
like Murdoch. The easiest way to answer your question is, Because I foresaw what has
happened.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And what has happened, that you foresaw?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Harper has become, or, starting in ‘87, became, huge. It
became a minor interest, namely a cash cow, for Murdoch. See, he bought it for two
reasons: he wanted a publishing house; he by that time had 40% of Collins [William
Collins Publishers], in England.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Which was a respectable firm as well.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Oh, it was a great firm. It was a great old publisher, and a
printer as well, Scottish printer. But under English law, once he acquired 40% he had
either to stand still or take on the whole shebang. But he had a vision of a world-wide
English-language book-publishing enterprise. I think at the time he had that dream
first, he didn’t realize that his real dream was going to be movies and television. He also
suffered, as did many another — why did Paramount buy Simon & Schuster? — from
“synergy.” It was a widely-spread notion.
So, I was opposed to it, as were almost but not quite half the board. Harper was
being headed by a fellow named Brooks Thomas, a lawyer by training, but not a book
person. The firm was having a hard time adjusting itself to the situation that has since
developed in big-time publishing. It was still, in the view of Wall Street, bound to the
old-fashioned notion that you published books because you liked them, and so forth,
and so forth. And it was beginning to have cash problems: it was profitable, but at too
low a level.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Ah, yes; that dreaded notion.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Well. RCA became disillusioned with Random House and sold
it because they realized, as others have, and I suspect Mr. Newhouse [S.I. Newhouse,
head of Advance Publications, a family-owned company which owns Random House,
Knopf/Pantheon/Vintage, and other imprints, as well as The New Yorker, Vogue,
Vanity Fair, and a number of other glossy publications] now has, that book publishing,
even under present circumstances, is very unlikely to return more than five or six
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percent net profit. In a very good year, you might; but almost nobody does. It’s certain
nobody does over a long period of time. Almost anything else in media can and does
do better. They’re also capable of generating larger losses. But, you know, they gamble
for bigger stakes.
You know what the economics of trade publishing are: about two-thirds of the
books that you publish don’t make a profit. So if you’re good, the loss is smaller; the
loss narrows. About a third of the books that you publish make a profit; and if you’re
good, some of ‘em make a big profit. That’s the economics of trade publishing. And in
most instances, year in and year out, now, the profit comes from subsidiary rights. You
may break even on the sale of books, but it’s book club, paperback, movie and
television, foreign rights, etc., where you make money. And one of the effects of the
increased power of the agents is that publishers have a smaller and smaller share of
subsidiary rights. For example, in the new world, the electronic world, agents of
popular authors don’t give book publishers an inch of electronic rights.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: They think there’s going to be a windfall there.
MICHAEL BESSIE: They think that there may be, and they’re negotiating from
strength. And you know, when people start paying five, six, seven, eight, nine million
dollars to acquire a popular author, as they do, there’s a competition set up, and so,
one of the first things the agent makes clear is this.
Now, just as in the old days — by which I mean, before my time — publishers
would have 50% of movie rights, or more. It was then reduced to 10%, and then
eliminated. That’s, by and large, what’s happened.
It’s amusing that what’s left of Atheneum [the imprint, except for children’s books, was
closed in 1994 by its newest owner, Simon & Schuster, itself owned by Paramount, which
is owned by Viacom] — since that’s one of the things we share — is children’s books,
and they’re doing quite well.
What we’ve been talking about is obviously important. There has been a spate,
as you know, recently in the Times, and elsewhere, of writings about the terrible
troubles of book publishing. At various times during these 51 years since I got into this
business I’ve had to give lectures and write about book publishing. So I’ve got a slightly
tired but still not-bad research file on this. There is, in effect, nothing that’s being said
about the troubles of book publishing in the Computer Age that wasn’t said about the
troubles of book publishing in the Movie Age, etc., etc. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, when I was
doing all this talking and writing — there’s nothing new under the Sun, or Mars, or
Jupiter, but it takes different forms. I’m evenly divided between concern that, when I
look at publishing and feel disoriented, feel a stranger in a strange land, it is more a
function of my age than it is of real change. That’s one side of it.
The other side says, “Boy, it sure was a hell of a lot better.” And, for the likes of
me, it was. I’m one of those rare people in publishing who had the rare opportunity to
do what many people would like to do, but almost nobody gets the chance to do, which
is: start a new firm. And then, have it work. And have it publish a lot of good books.
We were very lucky.
ARCHIPELAGO 71 Vol. 2, No. 1 Spring 1998
CORNELIA and MICHAEL BESSIE (2) On Publishing
Bibliography
Michael Bessie, articles and books:
—, JAZZ JOURNALISM (E. P. Dutton, 1938; Russell and Russell/Atheneum, c.1969) a history of
the tabloid newspapers
—, Alan Gregg, Hiram Hayden, Matthew Huxley, Alain Locke, Walter Mehring, Arthur
Slesinger, Jr., Frederick A. Weiss, “Changing Values in the Western World,” The
American Scholar, 20:3 Summer 1951
—, “Quality or Survival? Or Both?” Wilson Library Bulletin, 43:1 September 1968
—, “American Writing Today: A Publisher’s Viewpoint,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 34:1
Winter 1958
—, Stephen Becker, Ralph Ellison, Albert Erskine, Hiram Hayden, Jean Stafford, William
Styron, “What’s Wrong with the American Novel?” The American Scholar, 24:4 Fall 1955.
Cornelia Bessie, translations (selected):
Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, FOOL O’PARADISE, tr. Cornelia Schaeffer (Harper & Row, 1959)
Igor von Percha, PRAYER FOR AN ASSASSIN, tr. Cornelia Schaeffer (Doubleday, 1959)
Jean Rostand, BESTIARE D’AMOUR,tr. Cornelia Schaeffer (Doubleday, 1961)
Ilse Aichinger, HEROD’S CHILDREN, tr. Cornelia Schaeffer (Atheneum, 1964)
Bessie Books at Counterpoint:
W. Michael Blumenthal, THE INVISIBLE WALL Germans and Jews: A Personal
Exploration (May 1998)
Peter Brook, THREADS OF TIME Recollections (May 1998)
Paul Ferris, DR. FREUD A Life (June 1998)
David and Marshall Fisher, TUBE The Invention of Television
Michael Foot, H. G.: THE HISTORY OF MR. WELLS
Jean Lacouture, JESUITS. Tr. Jeremy Leggatt
David Lambkin, THE HANGING TREE
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, INVISIBLE ALLIES. Tr. Alexis Klimoff and Michael Nicholson
Counterpoint, Washington D. C. <npagano@counterpointpress.com>
Distributed by Publishers Group West 800-788-3123
Articles and Books mentioned, by other writers:
Ken Auletta, “Annals of a Communications Demolition Man,” The New Yorker, November 17,
1997
Guiseppe di Lampedusa, THE LEOPARD, tr. Alexander Colquhoun (Random House, and Wm.
Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1960; Pantheon, 1960)
Harper Lee, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (J. B. Lippincott, 1960;Warner Books, 1982)
Michael Ondaatje, THE ENGLISH PATIENT (Knopf, 1992; Vintage, 1993)
Art Spiegelman, MAUS A Survivor’s Tale (Pantheon, 1986); MAUS II: A Survivor’s Tale/And Here My
Troubles Began (Pantheon, 1991)
ARCHIPELAGO 72 Vol. 2, No. 1 Spring 1998
ENDNOTES
***
My novels are based on the fantastic designs made by real human beings
earnestly laboring to maladjust themselves to fate. My characters are not slaves to an author’s propaganda. I
give them their heads. They furnish their own nooses.
Dawn Powell
***
FANTASTIC DESIGN, WITH NOOSES
1. Making Money in China
A Chinese friend who is an antiques dealer in my town is doing very well, she notes
wryly. Sotheby’s comes regularly to select from her stock. As I write, she is on her way home
from China, importing an enormous shipment of furniture and domestic accessories. For the
last decade the peasants of China have been enjoined to “make money,” and so they are selling
off their households. Rivers of furniture are draining off to the West. My friend, in position
to divert a wide stream of these things into her own warehouses, says this massive selling-off
causes great pain to intellectuals, among whom she would rather be located. She is bored with
making money — it takes no thought — and spends her days reading philosophy. However,
the practical study of Chinese furniture has revealed to her marvels of her great civilization
that she had never been taught on the Mainland. She is aware of the irony of this, and of her
own position.
Rupert Murdoch, the naturalized American media baron, is said also to be making
money in China. We presume the Chinese government, if hardly the peasants, is also
benefiting greatly, as its leaders have given Murdoch rights to loft an exclusive satellite
network across the Mainland. It is expected that this access will open China as a vast
“market” to Western material and psychological goods. “Making money” replaces all previous
slogans and spurs men to frantic destructive new activity. My friend the antiques dealer
reports sadly that (in China) only good people are not making money, precisely because they
are good people and don’t know how to cheat, lie, and do the unethical things necessary to
manage in the new economy.
2. I’m shocked. Shocked.
Last June Britain handed Hong Kong back to the Chinese. Via CNN we watched the
last British governor leave: Mr. Chris Patten, late an advocate of democracy for the soon-to-
be former colony, critic of the Chinese government. Soon after his departure several
publishers, including Mr. Murdoch’s HarperCollins in England, signed contracts for Mr.
Patten’s political memoirs. Several months ago, Mr. Patten delivered the first 70,000 words to
his editor, Stuart Proffitt, head of trade publishing at HC, who wrote back with enthusiasm
that these were very fine political memoirs, so exciting as to quicken his blood, and certain to
become a best seller. In late January Mr. Proffitt introduced Mr. Patten to the press as a
coming author for HarperCollins and once again predicted great commercial success for the
book.
But as we soon read in the papers, Murdoch wouldn’t cotton to the plan. At least, so
his minions worried. Patten had criticized the Chinese government. What would the boss
think? Consternation followed, we infer, and down through the levels of Upper Management
came the word: Drop the book. (Had Murdoch murmured, “Will no one rid me of this
priest?”) Stuart Proffitt, we read, was called into the office of a Senior Manager and told to
take back what he had already publicly announced. He refused; was handed a gag order, then
ARCHIPELAGO 58 Vol. 2, No. 1 Spring 1998
Endnotes
sacked (in effect, a “principled resignation,” said Patten’s agent, an old hand at the publishing
game); and promptly sued his former employer for breach of contract. “It would have meant,
in short, both lying and doing enormous damage to my own reputation,” Proffitt said in a
legal affidavit.
I acknowledge a certain bias, being acquainted with Stuart Proffitt. I’ve thought well
of him as the editor of very good books by writers I care for: Patrick O’Brian, Doris Lessing,
Penelope Fitzgerald, Richard Holmes, John Hale, among others. He acted as anyone would
have expected of a serious editor and honorable person. I think as well that the very British
elements of this tale are more complex and interesting than have appeared in the media. Chris
Patten was, after all, once chairman of the Conservative Party; Proffitt also published the
memoirs of Margaret Thatcher and John Major; Murdoch was long known as anti-
communist (as noted by Michael Bessie, in our conversation, elsewhere in this issue).
HarperCollins, like most major publishing conglomerates, is rumored to be on the block.
The Financial Times said reasonably, yet with underlying horror, that Murdoch’s
dropping the book was a “business decision.” HarperCollins is a small part of the man’s
media/entertainment conglomerate [which now includes the Los Angeles Dodgers, and cable
stations to broadcast their games]. It wasn’t worth antagonizing the Chinese over a book; the
possible “harm” to HarperCollins’s “reputation” and “standing” was a price easily affordable
for continuing good relations with the Mainland. Thus supposed the Financial Times. No
doubt HarperCollins has a better reputation in England — in good part, because of an editor
the caliber of Proffitt, who also led Flamingo, HC’s literary imprint — than in the U. S.; but
surely this is a relative statement.
In an earlier Endnote I quoted Steve Wasserman, editor of the Los Angeles Times
Book Review, who said, naming companies like HarperCollins, with memory recent of the
publisher’s arbitrary canceling of contracts with a hundred-odd writers, that after the
conglomerations of the last decade, most of the publishers “left standing” have “debased the
imprints started by their founders.”
It’s worth recalling Michael Bessie once more on the matter of Murdoch, big
publishing, the stock market, and real profits to be expected from publishing books:
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And you weren’t in favor of that sale.
MICHAEL BESSIE: I was very strongly against it.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Why were you against it?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Because I liked Harper independent, and also because I
didn’t like Murdoch. The easiest way to answer your question is, Because I foresaw
what has happened.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And what has happened, that you foresaw?
MICHAEL BESSIE: Harper has become, or, starting in ‘87, became, huge. It
became a minor interest, namely a cash cow, for Murdoch. See, he bought it for two
reasons: he wanted a publishing house; he by that time had 40% of Collins [William
Collins Publishers], in England.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Which was a respectable firm as well.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Oh, it was a great firm. It was a great old publisher, and a
printer as well, Scottish printer. But under English law, once he acquired 40% he had
either to stand still or take on the whole shebang. But he had a vision of a world-wide
English-language book-publishing enterprise. I think at the time he had that dream
first, he didn’t realize that his real dream was going to be movies and television. He
also suffered, as did many another — why did Paramount buy Simon & Schuster? —
from “synergy.” It was a widely-spread notion.
So, I was opposed to it, as were almost but not quite half the board. Harper
was being headed by a fellow named Brooks Thomas, a lawyer by training, but not a
book person. The firm was having a hard time adjusting itself to the situation that has
since developed in big-time publishing. It was still, in the view of Wall Street, bound
ARCHIPELAGO 74 Vol. 2, No. 1 Spring 1998
Endnotes
to the old-fashioned notion that you published books because you liked them, and so
forth, and so forth. And it was beginning to have cash problems: it was profitable, but
at too low a level.
What interests me about this most recent act of bad faith in publishing is the public
response of some notable British authors. It was grand, conveyed with the gravity and yet
volume we desire of writers and intellectuals. The historian Peter Hennessey is quoted as
saying, “I am appalled by this...HarperCollins has quite simply ceased to be a member of our
open society and no one in their right minds of any worth will ever give them a book again.”
Doris Lessing called Murdoch “unprofessional” (of all things): “It is so shocking I can’t find
words for it.” These writers, estimable without question, are published by HarperCollins. It is
as if they had never considered the kind of man who owned the company whose name
appeared on the spine of their books. How is that? The writer’s conscience, speaking
historically, is a subtle, poised instrument and skillful at locating distinctions we might not
otherwise have noticed.
3. Two Mortal Men Deciding Fate
MICHAEL BESSIE: [Harper] was still, in the view of Wall Street, bound to the
old-fashioned notion that you published books because you liked them, and so forth,
and so forth. And it was beginning to have cash problems: it was profitable, but at too
low a level.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Ah, yes; that dreaded notion.
MICHAEL BESSIE: Well. RCA became disillusioned with Random House and
sold it because they realized, as others have, and I suspect Mr. Newhouse now has, that
book publishing, even under present circumstances, is very unlikely to return more
than five or six percent net profit. In a very good year, you might; but almost nobody
does. It’s certain nobody does over a long period of time. Almost anything else in
media can and does do better. They’re also capable of generating larger losses. But, you
know, they gamble for bigger stakes.
You know what the economics of trade publishing are: about two-thirds of
the books that you publish don’t make a profit. So if
you’re good, the loss is smaller; the loss
narrows.
Michael Bessie, speaking last Autumn, was not prescient, I ‘d say, merely acutely
observant, being a man who knows the territory. The landscape of European and American
conglomerate publishing is being paved over. His “Mr. Newhouse” is S. I. Newhouse, whose
huge family-held company owns “big” Random House, covering “little” Random House,
Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, Villard, and so on, and several English imprints. Bertelsmann, an
immense German media corporation represented by Mr. Thomas Middelhoff has just agreed
to buy all of Random House from Mr. Newhouse for a very great deal of capital. Mr.
Middelhoff approached Mr. Newhouse with the offer, it’s said, on the latter’s 70th birthday.
Interested readers have seen media reports of the scale of this transfer of ownership.
Bertlesmann is the Xth largest media conglomerate in the world, and holds Bantam Doubleday
Dell, part of American On-Line, plenty of other entertainment companies, and, amusingly,
RCA Records. Random House is the Yth largest publishing corporation in the U.S. and
England, and publishes serious literature as well as lucrative high trash. Agents, always
preferring the status quo, said glumly that now there would be fewer imprints and not as
many editors to read their clients’ work. Editors are holding their breath waiting to be fired,
or scurrying about looking for likely mega-sellers. Everyone is fearful; no one will speak for
attribution. Etc. Etc.
ARCHIPELAGO 75 Vol. 2, No. 1 Spring 1998
Endnotes
What interests me about this development are two things. One, “no one” inside or
outside Random House seemed to know the deal was in the works. Wonderful, when the
gossipy publishing factories can be surprised. Two, once again the ground has been shaken
underneath us who are writers and serious publishers. The quake isn’t even a natural disaster
or some great historical cataclysm, merely the banality of capitalist dealings and their
unintended consequences. The Random - Bertelsmann deal: two mortal men deciding fate.
Feeling portentous, I e-mailed the last few sentences to a Contributing Editor of this
journal, a novelist who replied sensibly:
“Serious writing is always a little unnerving. Or that’s my experience. It’s great,
though, what’s happening in publishing these days. At least if we write seriously, we don’t
have to worry about having anybody read it. But God reads all books.”
4. Perspective
R. B. Kitaj, the painter, has moved to Los Angeles. The jingoist treatment of his superb
retrospective at the Tate in 1994 by English critics caused him to leave London after decades of
residence. He was interviewed before the show by Richard Morphet:
“Oh, I see myself in most exalted lines of descent of course, among those mad scribblers
Delacroix, van Gogh, Gauguin, Whistler, Sickert, to name just five. The collected writings of
Matisse and Klee are also favourites on my shelves, and I’ve already mentioned the crucial
books written by Mondrian and Kandinsky in another context. Painters who write are also
enacting a kind of play within a play... the larger drama is the work of the great confessional
writers for me... Rousseau (a discovery of my old age), Proust, Montaigne, Kafka, Gide, the
Russians, Canetti and the like. I came upon the confessional mode quite young. In the army, I
read Gide’s superb Journals on guard duty in the Fontainbleu forest. Kafka’s Diaries changed
my life later on, and Robert Lowell’s poetry also helped lead me to think an autobiographical
art of painting was not only possible but deep within my bones. But painters have always
written. Picasso wrote a lot of Surrealist stuff. At the top of the heap was Michelangelo.... He
inspired me to try to write poems about my own pictures, to somehow extend the life of a
painting while I’m still alive, maybe because I don’t want to die yet and poetry is a special
life-force after the painting has been taken out of my hands. I’ve failed so far because my
poems seem poor, but I’ll keep trying. Meanwhile, I’ve written some short stories or prose-
poems for some of my pictures, as you know. I like the idea that they have no life apart from
the picture. They illustrate the picture the way pictures have always illustrated books in our
lives.”
KM
R. B. KITAJ: A Retrospective, ed. Richard Morphet. London: Tate Gallery, 1994
ARCHIPELAGO 76 Vol. 2, No. 1 Spring 1998
ARCHIPELAGO
An International Journal of Literature, the Arts, and Opinion
www.archipelago.org
Vol. 2, No. 4 Winter 1998/99
Essay: ANNA MARIA ORTESE
tr. HENRY MARTIN
Where Time Is Another
Poems: MARIA NEGRONI
tr. ANNE TWITTY
from LA JAULA BAJO EL TRAPO/
CAGE UNDER COVER
Conversation: WILLIAM STRACHAN
About Publishing
Three Poems: DANNIE ABSE
from ARCADIA, ONE MILE
Invention: BENJAMIN H. CHEEVER
Come Here, I Want You
Endnotes: A Flea
Recommended Reading: Susan Garrett, Elizabeth
Benedict, Katherine McNamara, Robert Kelly,
John Casey
Printed from our Download edition
INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY
A CONVERSATION ABOUT PUBLISHING
with WILLIAM STRACHAN
Katherine McNamara
“I come back to this: the writing. You’ve got to look at the writing.”
In this third conversation with literary publishers, I talked with William Strachan,
director of Columbia University Press, formerly editor-in-chief at Henry Holt, who had taken
the rare step of crossing over from trade to academic publishing, and who thought in an
interesting way about those two not wholly compatible domains: about what they had in
common and what they did not. Furthermore, Columbia had taken up e-publishing, producing
several CD-ROMs and sponsoring the first of what it hopes will become a series of scholarly
journals published on the internet. Yet, while technology entered the discussion of institutional
changes in publishing which has been the theme of this series, it did not dominate; as would be
expected, the making of good books — writerly writing, editorial acuity, the publisher’s
willingness to take a chance, and readers wanting to read — was the real subject.
It has been remarked that “publishing,” in the old sense, perhaps, of the gentleman’s
occupation, began to change about the time the phrase “publishing industry” came into use,
around the mid-1970s. If true, it marks nicely the beginning of changes I’ve been interested in
tracing. Substantially, however, what has changed? Are there fewer good books, more bad, than
ever? Is the art of editing no longer widely practiced in the trade? How can we speak of
publishing “houses” in this era of conglomeration? What sorts of people became editors and
publishers; why? Do the same sorts run the business now? I had been inquiring of distinguished
representatives of an older generation what they thought; now, a fellow member of the baby
boom, generation of the Sixties, had something to say.
Generously, these persons have told how they entered the profession; spoken about
writers they’ve published and declined to publish; described the (changing) class structure of
their domain; talked straight about money, commerce, and corporate capitalism; preferred
“responsible” publishing: the mid-sized company that may, increasingly, be a “refuge.”
Without exception, they are serious readers, usually of more than one language. They
recognize that times have changed. They speak with wary-friendly observation of the
generations coming up.
Excerpts of these conversations will continue to appear regularly in Archipelago and
may serve as an opening into an institutional memory contrasting itself with the current
corporate structure, reflecting on glories of its own, revealing what remains constant amid the
present flux. Despite their surround of gentility, these publishers are strong-minded characters
engaged with their historical circumstances. Out of that engagement have appeared a number
of books that we can say, rightly, belong to literature.
-KM
A Conversation with Marion Boyars, Archipelago, Vol. 1 No. 3
A Conversation with Cornelia and Michael Bessie, Archipelago, Vol. 1 No. 4 and Vol. 2, No. 1
ARCHIPELAGO 78 Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter 1998/99
A Conversation with William Strachan On Publishing
WILLIAM STRACHAN, Director, Columbia University Press
WILLIAM STRACHAN said of himself, with the self-effacement of a certain sort of
editor, that he had joined “the accidental profession”; an amateur in the good, old
sense? No, a generalist educated in the liberal arts, characteristic of a good part of a
generation for whom schooling was not job-training. He graduated from Carleton
College, an excellent small college in Minnesota, then took the Radcliffe Publishing
Course, from which he emerged, in 1970, as an editorial secretary at Anchor Books.
Having discovered what kind of books he wanted to publish, he moved on to various
houses, was editor-in-chief at Henry Holt, and joined Columbia in mid-1998. He is tall
and looks fit, though his once-lanky frame (you feel) is filling out with middle age, and
dresses in not-too-new, tweedy-casual clothes. The offices of Columbia University Press,
where he is director, are located in utilitarian rooms in a college building undergoing
renovations, on W. 113th Street in Morningside Heights. The receptionist reports a
visitor and, when she hears footsteps pounding lightly downstairs from the second
floor, says, not wholly approving, “That’s Bill: never takes the formal way” (i.e., the
elevator) “when he can run.” Seated behind his desk, his back to the distractions of
Broadway below the window, he is cordial, discreetly gossiping (has recently returned
from the Frankfurt Book Fair), very much the director (still testing his way) of a very
respectable publishing company. His speech evokes distant seminar rooms and is
without personal reference, respectful of its elders, perceptive, aware of what it now also
knows, sounding with a modesty that is never false.
Several themes recurred during our two conversations in New York, last October
and November: writerly non-fiction, its importance and nourishment; how one tried to
make sense of the great shifts in the culture; e-publishing (novelty for a former trade
publisher); and, unexpected pleasure, the tastes of generations, ours-in-common in
particular. “Writerly non-fiction” is Strachan’s admirable phrase, neatly leaping over
reams of self-involved “creative” genres; privately, I thought it worth stealing. Aloud, I
wondered how the transition from trade to university press impressed him and asked if
he would begin by describing the differences between those two kinds of institutions.
For a certain kind of publishing, this may be a refuge
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What do you do as a publisher: what is the job of a
publisher, as you conceive it?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Well, I think you run a publishing company. First and
foremost, we have to remember that we are publishers. Some of publishing is printing,
some of it is distribution and the like; but, by and large, it means finding the books that
you want to publish, then making sure that they are seen all the way through to
publication, and then giving them full service.
My role as chief executive is to make those decisions about the company. There
are all sorts of decisions you make, because there are a lot of ways to spend your money,
and a lot of priorities. Most of what, I guess, falls to me is to establish those priorities, the
hierarchy of those priorities: to make some decisions, not only about what comes first,
but how we go about doing something, what the strategy might be. Where you’re going
to go with the press down the line. Are we going to go wholesale into electronic
publishing? or are we going to say, “No, that’s not what we want to do, we don’t have
that sort of money, or go into those areas of publishing.”
ARCHIPELAGO 79 Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter 1998/99
A Conversation with William Strachan On Publishing
KATHERINE McNAMARA: So you came over here.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: So I came over here, and here we are.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Maybe the topic is culture shock.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, I went from seeing this as not so different, to seeing
this as a completely different world, to saying, No, this is different and this isn’t. Part of
the confusion, if you will, in my mind, is the fact that I am still living in New York City.
The people I see at the cocktail parties, the people I fraternize with, are those I used to
see. And so one is tempted to think there isn’t a difference — “Oh, I just needed to
change offices.” That, of course, is not true. The adjustment would have been greater
had I left; as Peter Gazardi left Crown, to go to Duke: he went to become the editor-in-
chief at Duke, and was out of the realm. But suddenly you are really in the world of a
university press community. I’m not sure I would have gone to any other university
press.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I’ve been interested in the view, from inside, of the
institutional changes in publishing over the last decade: what they are; how they affect
the work you do; and, equally, how the work you do affects the institution. That is, how
do people act in and upon the institution of publishing? Would you talk about your
own experience, having gone from trade publishing, or what might be called corporate
publishing now, to the university press?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Sure. For me, the switch from trade or commercial
publishing — better put, from corporate publishing — to a university press was an idea
I had, to somehow recreate what trade publishing was when I started in 1970. I am now
working, at Columbia, for an independent publisher which is owned and operated
without conglomeration with any other publisher.
That used to be the case all around this town of New York. What are now
different imprints within houses, were, once, publishing houses, free-standing and, in
most cases, independent. That’s been a rather remarkable change in publishing, though
maybe necessary. Actually, I guess I should back up a little. That has been a change in
New York publishing; I don’t think it’s been quite the case outside this city. But if, as
many people do, you define commercial publishing by what goes on in New York, then
that’s the change in publishing.
People are fond of pointing to all the new independent publishers that have
jumped up. That being the case, I don’t think for the most part they have had the
effect on book publishing that commercial publishing has had on the general trade. I
don’t think there’s the replication of what existed here. And that’s interesting, because,
given the way business has changed, they should have had an effect. But the distribution
system is concentrated; it’s much easier now to get to all the different book outlets than
it ever was 20 years ago, when you had so many independent bookstores. You now have
Amazon.com. You have all these wide-angled changes in distribution, but I don’t think
the small publishers have the penetration that they might have risen to have. What I
hope we have here is a sort of moderate or smallish independent publishing house. I like
that scale of operation; it works for me; and I like to see what we can effect with that. For
a certain kind of publishing, the kind I’m interested in, this may be a refuge.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Will you say more about the kind of publishing you’re
interested in?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I was raised up in non-fiction, basically. I started at
Anchor books in 1970, which Jason Epstein had started, back in the ‘50s. At that point, it
was still one of the few trade paperback publishers, along with the Vintage list; and it
was fun, because that was the ‘70s, and it was the turn of the paperback revolution. It
ARCHIPELAGO 80 Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter 1998/99
A Conversation with William Strachan On Publishing
was going to change the world; half of our list was academic publishing, in a sense, and
half of it was ‘cutting edge’. What was new went into trade paperbacks.
I cut my teeth on non-fiction, and I stayed with that throughout my career,
going from Anchor books in 1980, to what was then The Viking Press. The desire there
was to move into hard-cover publishing, and what I looked at changed. At Anchor, you
thought up ideas for books, or people came to you with one-shot books, and you did
them in paperbacks, and you sort of went on to the next book.
But at Viking, what I hoped to do was to develop some of the writers who had
been doing non-fiction, book in and book out. Alan Williams, who was there at the
time, said we published authors, not books. That was the philosophy of The Viking
Press, and it was a nice change. It had recently been sold to Penguin — what was then
Penguin — although at that point it was a separate entity. Well, the twain met, a little,
but they were editorially independent even though they worked under the same roof.
Penguin then was owned by Pearson, and it still is. [The publishing conglomerate is
larger and now called Penguin Putnam Group.] But at that point, curiously, Penguin
wasn’t as renowned in this country as it was in the U. K., and it was still growing up
under Kathryn Court, who was the editorial director then. So I stayed with non-fiction.
I can count on maybe ten fingers the number of novels I’ve done over the history of my
career. That’s what interested me about Columbia, and about university presses, which,
by and large, are non-fiction publishers.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Who are some of these authors you published with
Viking?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Witold Rybczynski, whom I first published at Anchor
Books, in a paperback original, and then brought over to Viking, where I did his next
several books. I edited people like Marc Reisner (CADILLAC DESERT) and Gretel Ehrlich
(THE SOLACE OF OPEN SPACES). Writerly non-fiction.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I like that: ‘writerly’ non-fiction.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: So. I went on from Viking, to Houghton Mifflin, in the
new York office [corporate headquarters were in Boston], to what was then Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, before ending up at Holt, in 1990, where I was editor-in-chief. And now this.
The idea that university presses publish non-fiction is interesting; and I think, you
know, we can bring some of my trade there, although running the press leaves much
less time to be an editor, which is a change.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: But you do still edit?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, and probably once I settle into this job a little bit more
— I came over to Columbia in June 1997 — I might have some more time to do it,
rather than to figure out where everything lies in the hierarchy.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Holt was going through some changes as well, when
you left. [It was bought by the German publishing company Holtzbrink.]
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Holt has gone through some changes, and continues to go
through some changes, yes. That company is part of Holtzbrink, the German
publishing conglomerate, which here owns Farrar, Straus and St. Martins, Scientific
American, and a number of other outfits. I think they have to figure out where Holt fits
into that conglomeration.
We don’t have those confusions here, which is very nice.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: A look of relief is on your face.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Well, I’ve seen this time and time again with my colleagues
in publishing, where you sign on to do a certain kind of publishing, and the house is
going in a certain direction, and over the years the changes haven’t come at the bottom,
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they’ve come at the top. A new administration, or a new ownership, or whatever, comes
in and, suddenly, what you were supposed to be doing, or what you were doing, very
happily, is no longer very desirable or wanted or rewarded. That makes it very hard to
make a long-term commitment to writers. I think it’s the longer-term continuity that
works best for writers, and for publishers, as well. Obviously, there are exceptions; but I
think that is how a publishing house gets its character: how it builds a stable and works
with writers: over a long period of time.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: If they still care about that.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: If they still care about that. I don’t know that they need
to. I think they do. It works better, I think, if you push a house: “This is what we know
to publish, and this is who we publish; and therefore, if you’re a kindred spirit, or you
like that, then we know how to publish you well.”
The business has changed, but so has the culture
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I was trying to place a book, a non-fiction narrative,
and asked a poet for advice, as I had had some difficulty with it. I carried on for quite a
while about this, until he said, very simply, “Why don’t you just give it to a good
publisher, and let it go?” I stopped in my tracks. There was nothing I could say. Books
are turned down all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with literature as I
know it. He was from two generations before me and had no idea of the kinds of
difficulties serious writers face now from publishers.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: No, the business has changed a lot: but so has the culture,
and that’s what’s hard to figure out in publishing today. I’m not sure where you place
yourself in the culture — I was thinking about this — because the idea of reading and
books, if you will, used to be kind of divorced from other parts of the culture. You had
movies, you had books or literature, you had drama, and increasingly—
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And there was a hierarchy.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, and increasingly these things are blurred. There’s
plenty of book stuff on TV. There is plenty of book stuff on the internet, god knows,
and there are wonderful magazines. All this blurring, or mixing, we’re still sorting out,
but it’s had an enormous effect on what you publish, and how you publish it. I think
the books published by the larger commercial publishers are seen now as entertainment.
I mean that not just pejoratively, because the best, most wonderful book in the world is
supposed to be entertainment, you know, the highest literature is wonderfully
entertaining to a certain audience. I haven’t sorted it out yet. I don’t think anybody
really has, and can say, “This is why we’re publishing” this or that book. What is getting
drowned out is the idea of quality entertainment, if you will; but, again, I say that too
quickly, because the flip side of it is that, actually, what’s succeeding in the trade is
either a very high quality in books, still, or a kind of mass-marketing entertainment.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: So once again the mid-list...
WILLIAM STRACHAN: The middle falls away. People don’t know quite what to
make of it. It’s not either literature or, quote, entertainment, unquote.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And the difficulty abut the shrinking of the mid-list is
that was a standard of good writing.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, it was, and is, a standard of good writing. It’s also the
kind of proving ground, or developing ground, for many writers. You do one book;
you do another; you keep writing, you keep publishing, you suddenly have an oeuvre,
something’s going on. People don’t know what to do about that right now.
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KATHERINE McNAMARA: You mean, publishers don’t.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Publishers don’t. They don’t know how to support it. You
as a writer have to make it very quickly, in a book or two, so that you’re not consigned
to the scrap-heap. In today’s climate, it’s harder and harder to get attention for that
mid-list; it just goes unappreciated, it’s not championed and it’s not recognized. Even if
you get good reviews, the response is, “So what?”
But that’s conglomerate publishing, too. One of the changes in the book world is
that, when the houses were independent, you saw yourself saying: “This is the list, this is
what we’re publishing; and we’ll make some money off of these books, and that will
allow us to publish others.” It sounds strange, now. But it was thought of that way.
When I started at Doubleday, which Anchor was part of, we had the same publishing
board. It was one of the first corporate publishing boards; you went to it every week.
But you still said about a book, “This is part of the list.”
I watched that change to P&L [profit and loss] statements. Suddenly, there was
this idea that every book had to be profitable! No longer was it that you balanced the
list; now you balanced the profitability of the company not on the back of a list, but on
the back of every book! If you look at it that way, it won’t work: I mean, 90 percent of
books still lose money. Even if you were trying not to, that practice changed the way
you looked at books. Completely. You didn’t say, “Yes, but it fits in, we just have to
publish this writer because it’s part of our commitment to him,” or “part of the list,” or
whatever. That affected the mid-list as well. You had people kidding themselves, either
knowingly or with rose-colored glasses, saying, “Oh this isn’t a mid-list book,” when
everybody should have admitted that it was. I think that changed things too. Very odd,
but true.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: An English editor told me he showed the conversation
I had with Michael and Cornelia Bessie to several of his colleagues, and they were all
amazed: Michael talked about how they used to publish books with no P&Ls.* You don’t
have to have them here at Columbia?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: We do P&Ls at Columbia. But as a tool, a sort of snapshot;
that’s how they started out, of course. The interesting thing about a P&L is that it will
reveal to me, sometimes, that, for all this sturm und drang, all this effort, at the end of
the day we’re going to make 35 cents. Well, maybe it’s not worth all the effort. Or, at
least, you’re thinking: “Just what we are getting into?” What we do here is, after you’ve
done a P&L, if it doesn’t work, you still have the right to say, very nicely, “Yes, we know
it doesn’t work financially, but we wanted to publish this book,” for whatever reason.
Commercial publishers do this as well, of course, sometimes. We have another
advantage, however, which is being a not-for-profit organization. It’s easier for me to
say that here than at some other places.
Categories, ‘product’, and the economics of independent publishing
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Now, I wonder if we can think in two directions for a
moment. They’ll have to be serial, not parallel directions. One is, your very interesting
statement about seeing a book differently once a P&L is attached to it: what does that
mean for reading and for readership; even, if you want, for the work of the
imagination? — We won’t touch the writer’s imagination here; let’s say, for the
imagination as it makes it way through the trade editorial process.
*A Conversation with Cornelia and Michael Bessie, Archipelago, Vol. 1 No. 4.
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The second is, What does it mean to be an independent, not-for-profit, but also
academic press?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, which is a very different structure and with different
constraints. Well, in a trade situation, with a work of imagination, you’re trying to catch
that handle that will allow everyone to catch the same magic, the high concept that you
see in it throughout. If you can get that, then there is no barrier to what you can do. I
don’t think trade publishing is that tricky, and, in fact, sometimes it’s easier to do. An
editor can say, “Oh boy, you just have to read this, it’s wonderful, it’s totally unique.”
Or, “It’s just like something else that’s wonderful.” That’s fairly easy to do.
When you work for a publishing corporation or a publishing company that does
things pretty much in lockstep, though, that is when you have to be able to categorize a
book, because “we have to be able to sell it in a certain way,” or: “Where does it go in the
bookstore?” This is not a bad question to ask yourself: “Where am I going to put this in
a bookstore; how is the sales rep going to sell it?” But most of those aren’t surprises,
you’ll have pigeonholed them very neatly. Again, a good editor can pigeonhole a book
very neatly and sell it that way; and that works, but it’s harder.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: In its way, it’s another kind of mid-list.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes; yes, it is. Very much. Because if it’s not bought as a
bestseller or a blockbuster — because then you can do these rote things for it — but
rather, it’s interesting, then it makes you concentrate more, as an editor, on how you’re
going to publish the book; not simply saying, “Well, we’ll just put ‘em out there and see
what happens.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Is that the old way they did it?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I think there was enough of it that we just didn’t have to
worry, because certain automatic mechanisms could take over. A certain number of
books would be bought by the public libraries, which would snap up three to five
thousand copies no matter what you did, if you had a good library sales force; and then
you got more on top of that, and it just rolled along. Those days are over, forever:
sadly, in a way, because the library system isn’t capable of supporting the vast output of
the trade anymore; but it does leave you, then, to think more carefully about what
you’re publishing, and how you’re publishing it. And everybody still says too many
books are published. That’s probably still true; but who’s ox are you goring when you
say, “Cut this back”?
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Do you, in your mind, distinguish between what you
think of as books and what you think of as...
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Product, if you will? No, yeah, I guess. Yeah.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Books, presumably, are what you want to publish,
whereas product is what there is too much of.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: But someone’s books are someone else’s product; and vice
versa, I guess.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That’s not entirely true
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I don’t think it is, but when you turn a corner and you
just say, “Product is book-selling; I know how to sell this book regardless of what’s in it,”
or, you could sell it because it’s a genre, or because it’s a ‘brand name’, that sounds like a
“product” to me.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Were book salesmen, though, like that when you knew
them? Sales reps?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Sure. When I started at Doubleday, the idea was to have a
bestseller every month. I mean, they did. They had Arthur Haley one month, they had
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Irving Stone the next; they had Phyllis Whitney; they had Allen Drury. That was a very
profitable publishing company.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And as those things went then, that was not bad
writing.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: No. It was the bestseller house. Betty Prashker was then
the editor-in-chief; Ken McCormick had just stepped down. The Doubleday family still
owned it. It was a publishing Behemoth, on one hand, and a very savvy publisher, on
the other. We used to joke then: if this company weren’t so busy making money, it
would go out of business.
I think it’s come back to that in a way: you’ve got a machine that drives certain
bestsellers, best-selling writers, and then everything else needs to catch on in their wake,
or distinguish itself from them. Maybe we have come full circle. But it’s hard to
distinguish the others from them, even though there are all theses new avenues in
which to do so. The sound of the larger books drowns out the voice of the smaller ones.
(pause)
We were talking about the idea of agent and submissions. Yes, we do get
submissions from agents. I lost a book last week to Harvard, which Oxford, Columbia
and Harvard were all considering and bid on. Harvard won out.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You started out at $5,000 and went up to $20,000. What
kind of advances are you able to pay?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Not what I once paid in the trade, clearly; but that
removes a certain amount of pressure or expectation from the publication of the book.
What I was going to say was, certainly we want to sell every copy we can, for both the
author’s and our sakes. But I think expectations about what is going to happen when
the book is published are kept within a certain frame. Scholarly people — most
scholarly people — have a day job. Publication is not everything, or that “everything”
that as a writer you’re riding on, with the disappointments, expectations, and the like;
and that fact insulates everything a little bit. We pay advances, and we pay royalties,
which is very nice.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Which means the advances are earning out.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Right, the advances are earning out, which is another side
of the world it’s nice to see. Royalty checks were few and far between after a certain
point in trade publishing, because the advance had been all.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: When did you notice the advances starting to rise?
And how did you stay in that game?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I think the advances probably always rose. Look back at
legendary stories of old: you know, the million dollar advance, back when. When I was
at Doubleday, in the ‘70s, I think the change came more or less then. In the early ‘70s,
Betty Prashker [then editor-in-chief] was fond of saying that the change came in when
the Xerox machine came in, because that allowed multiple submissions.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Ah, of course; and, there were still plenty of
publishers.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I remember talking to Cork Smith [Charles M. Smith, a
respected literary editor] about this at Viking in the early ‘80s, and he said that old idea of
actually “earning out” was being replaced by the phrase “You’re buying a book.” That’s
what you’re doing now: you’re buying that book. It’s no longer, “Oh, we’ll give you an
advance.” That changed drastically, and that really happened in the early ‘80s. There
was more money. The chains had expanded, so that you could sell many, many more
copies of a hardcover book then you ever had before; this is still true. Doubleday was a
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house of bestsellers: 60,000 copies was a big sale. Now you’re looking at initial print runs
of two million copies.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: But often, huge returns follow.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, but you’re capable of selling in excess of a million
copies. Charles Frazier [COLD MOUNTAIN] sold a million and a half hardcover copies!
That’s remarkable these days.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Or John Berendt’s MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD
AND EVIL — whatever that’s sold!
Do you have a problem with returns?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: No, we don’t. We are affected by returns, we have returns.
The problem is ameliorated by the nature of what we publish. The good news is we
don’t get returns; the bad news is that we don’t get that many books out, because
bookstores buy in ones and twos, for representation, and then reorder; much more so
than for trade books. Because we publish reference works, and expensive reference
works, that keeps our rate of return down. You’re not going to order a $750 copy of THE
COLUMBIA GAZETTEER on spec. You’re going to say, “We have a customer for it, we’ll
order one.” That affects the percentage of returns. We’re running, oh, 18 to 19 percent,
which is about half of what trade or commercial publishers are getting.
You’ve got to look at the writing
KATHERINE McNAMARA: How is university publishing different than you
thought it would be?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: One of the big differences is, the writing; and the fact that
we don’t publish fiction. But that’s peculiar to Columbia, because some other university
presses do publish fiction. But the fact that you don’t have that writerly aspect around
as part of the fabric of the house affects your non-fiction as well.
Again, I come back to this: the writing. You’ve got to look at the writing. That,
partly, is what people are looking for. Part of it, too, is just that scholarship can carry
the day, rather than, simply, the writing. So that’s one aspect that’s very different. I
think the other aspect is this notion of peer review. The publications committee is a
wonderful sounding board and helps us constantly, not so much as checks and balances,
but by saying: “This is not, I’m here to tell you, the cutting edge!” That’s a very helpful
expertise. Or, “If you’re going to do this, be aware of this, that, and the next thing.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Because you expect to publish the top of the list.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes; and that’s great. What I am not used to, or in full
adjustment to, is that is that we can’t publish something that doesn’t have the stamp of
approval of the publications committee. I’m just not used to operating that way as an
editor. That was on your shoulders in commercial publishing. But when people say,
“How do you get used to it?” I answer, “Yes, but you have to go ask your sales and
marketing department. Can you publish something without having your sales and
marketing department signing off on it?” Increasingly the answer to that is, “No.” I say,
“Well, I can; but I have to go ask my publications committee.” That’s a different side of
the process. I’d rather ask a publications committee.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You’re in the same arena.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, it’s an editorially-inclined committee. I think that’s
one of the nice things about this university press: it is still an editorially-driven
publishing company. The genesis of what you’re doing springs from the editorial
matter.
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He fell into publishing; it was the accidental profession
KATHERINE McNAMARA: There is another way of looking at this question I
haven’t quite formed, which has to do with imagination and, perhaps, mid-list writers. I
suppose the question behind it is, what took you into publishing? What made you want
to be an editor, or a publisher? That is, What did you want to be able to read, as
opposed to what you did get to read? Or, is writing as good as it was when you started?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Oh, I think so, yes; I think writing is as good as when I
started. I fell into publishing; it is the accidental profession and everybody practices it.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Did you write a novel and...
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I didn’t; no, no. I was an English major. “Gee, what are
you going to do with your life? Well, have you thought about publishing?” No, I
hadn’t. “You know, well, you might.”
So I came to New York. I went to the publishing course at Radcliffe, and it
seemed interesting, and I came down to New York and knocked on doors, and got a job,
and, as it turned out, it was interesting. You sort of have a knack for it, or you don’t;
but what always interested me was writing. I don’t know that it’s still the case, but by
and large, that’s why people got into publishing. You liked writing, and you liked
reading. I think that’s very pleasant; and I think the writing is as good today as it ever
was. And, maybe, today it is stronger in non-fiction. There is more non-fiction; either
it’s replacing fiction, or it is what people are writing, or I’m more aware of it now, and
less aware of good fiction. Although, god knows, there’s tons of it.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: But you were always more interested in non-fiction.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: This is a certain professional bias. On the other hand, for
pleasure I read only fiction.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What do you read?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: The last two novels I read, were Don DeLillo’s
UNDERWORLD and Robert Stone’s DAMASCUS GATE , so I now have the luxury of not
reading these in manuscript. Actually the DeLillo is funny, because when I was at Holt,
we were the underbidder for UNDERWORLD. I read it in manuscript, but I read it as an
editor, which was to read it very hard for 150 pages, and then — it’s a long novel —
start ‘kangarooing’ through it.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: A thousand-plus...
WILLIAM STRACHAN: ...manuscript pages. I was having a conversation about the
novel. Someone started talking about a scene I had no recollection of, and I thought, I
bet that was that 100 pages between such-and-such and such-and-such. So I went back
and read the whole novel right through. Now I feel on a firmer basis with it....
KATHERINE McNAMARA: How do you read it differently now? You’ve read it
now, as a finished work.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: You do read differently as an editor than, I think, most
readers do, because you’re looking for “what’s going on here, what is the writer trying
to do and is he doing it well; if not, can you help him or here?” Maybe you can; maybe
it’s just fine and this major flaw is just part of the work, and you live with it. Novel falls
apart in the middle, but goddam he picks himself up and goes on with it and there you
are at the end, loving it. And I’m sure that’s said often about what we now consider
classic works of fiction. Anyway, I like reading and think you have to stay with it.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: How old were you when you knew you liked to read?
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Well, as a kid I read constantly. That was what I enjoyed
doing, it was fine for me, not just an escape, but for when you found yourself with free
time. That’s not all I did, but I would be as happy reading as doing anything else.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Do you remember the earliest book that affected you?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I don’t, Katherine. I can’t say, “Oh boy, from there on it
was good.” I remember having very good English teachers, who affected me. Maybe it
was because you were sympathetic; but they remained focused, certainly; they made it
interesting.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: When you joined Doubleday, what did you start as?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I was Doubleday’s first male editorial secretary.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: So you opened manuscripts, and...
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I did the whole thing. I was an editorial secretary at
Anchor and was, literally was, their first male editorial secretary. Men, at that point, got
into publishing as sales reps, and then advanced to editorial; having sold books, they
would come in and learn, then, from outside, how to put books through the editorial
process. But you got your background from the field rather than from the publishing
house. I was a change from that. I sat there and typed rejection letters just like
everybody else, and came up that way. It quickly broke down thereafter, that was the
nice thing. I can remember the personnel director at the time being worried. He said,
“Well, you know, you’re the first male secretary,” and asked if that was going to be a
problem. And that was not: it was a job.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You said you went to the Radcliffe course.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I went to the Radcliffe [publishing] course in 1970. It was
the second or third year that they admitted males; it had started as an all-female course,
as a way to bring women with degrees into the professional world, as publishing was.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Do you think the publishing courses are still useful?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I do. We hire regularly out of there; my current assistant
is a graduate of the course. I think they’re useful as a kind of pre-screening for
employers, to sort out those who are really serious about this as a career. What the
students get is a good overview, an exposure, so they come into the job understanding
what the big picture is, and having a network, that is, your class and those teachers who
were there. I think the courses work.
At a big publishing house, where you sort of get pitched into a corner of
Editorial and wonder, “Gee, what do subsidiary rights do?”, if you hadn’t had that
overview, you’d feel a bit lost. That’s why the course is useful. I know it’s changed, even
from when I started, but at least you knew, the first time, when you were a secretary
and they put those long white sheets of paper on your desk: you knew those were
galleys. You didn’t say, “What’s this stuff?” That was a big difference, you knew a little
bit how it works.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: How did you become an editor: when did you know
you were an editor: a real editor, engaged in a book?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: People say you’re doing the job before you get promoted
to the job. I think that’s probably the case. I thought, Oh I can be an editor, I’m doing
the rote. That was useful at Doubleday, where there were so many routines and regimes,
because if you learn the system, you could actually operate within it before you actually
knew why they did it that way. Later, when you discovered “Oh, this is why,” you’d
think, “Wow, get me out of here!” So it was probably after I became an associate editor
that I really thought, “Oh, gee, I get this, I understand this. I can now distinguish good
from bad, possibility from hopeless: you know, ‘This is not going to go anywhere.’” And
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I could see a different idea of what you want to publish, to identify what you wanted to
publish. I would say, probably, you’re not born with that insight; but it’s a quality of
being a real editor, that you know what you want to publish: not just what you can
publish, but what you want to publish. That’s a big distinction. When you ask the kids
who are coming up now: “Well, what do you want to publish?”, they haven’t got a grip
on it, yet. They say, “Well...” In the corporate ethos as well, they say, “Well, whatever
the board lets me buy!” Yeah, but do you want to publish it? Sure, they’ll let you buy it.
If you want to publish it, what can you do for it, what do you want to do about it?
That’s part of what’s changed.
He wanted to publish writerly non-fiction
KATHERINE McNAMARA: When you knew what you wanted to publish, what
was that?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: That was writerly non-fiction. I thought, “Oh, boy, you
can find these people and develop them.” The model at the time was John McPhee. You
saw somebody who had started here, and worked on that, and developed the craft, and
you wanted to read him regardless of what he wrote about; and you saw that with other
writers, and in certain areas. I was always a sucker for natural history and history; I liked
them very much. History and a kind of biography. “Okay, those are the kind of books I
like to publish and think I can make something go with that; and I sort of understand
how to publish them, as well, develop the network.” It’s kind of a hierarchy of writers,
those whom you admire, whom you would like to publish. You ask, “Who’s writing
what?”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: How did you find writers?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Reading, going out with agents, all the usual efforts. You
read magazines, you read periodicals. For instance, I wrote — god, I can count on two
fingers the number of times this has worked in my history, but I wrote Witold
Rybczinski, who had written a review, or an opinion, for what was then Co-evolution
Quarterly. It was on appropriate technology. He had had a lot to do with appropriate
technology, and he said, I don’t believe in appropriate technology. I wrote him a letter:
“That’s very interesting, do you think there’s a book there about this?” He wrote back
saying, “I’ve actually been thinking of a short book on this.” He said that appropriate
technology existed very neatly in the minds of a lot of people, and on paper, but did
not exist in the real world as a viable alternative to the present situation, and that the
people who had set it up were paper heroes. Like “paper tigers.” The result was a book
called PAPER HEROES.
That was 1975, something like that. I think I published that book in ‘78. Then the
next book was TAMING THE TIGER, which we did in the early ‘80s at Viking, which was on
the idea: If you invented a technology, did you have to use it? How do you control it?
That sort of thing. Then he went on to HOME, which was a bestseller. That was one way
you developed writers.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You said it worked twice in your history. Who else did
you find that way?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Chris Camuto [A FLY FISHERMAN’S BLUE RIDGE], who’s a very
good natural history writer in your part of the world. He had written such an
intelligent book review in, I guess, Sierra Magazine, that when you read it you said,
“Boy, this guy can write.” I wrote him a letter: “Are you working on anything?” I think
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you find writers by reading. Even if you’re having lunch with an agent, and they’re
telling you about a writer, you still have to go back and read what he or she has written.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Are there writers whose work you didn’t take, that you
regret not having taken?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Oh, I’m sure there are. I’ve learned from not publishing
certain books: “Oh you just approached that wrong, where you didn’t see the
possibility,” or, “Something was wrong with it when you were looking at it and didn’t
think, but if you only just fixed that, then it would be just dandy, wouldn’t it?” There
was a book a couple of years ago called HAUNTS OF THE BLACK MASSEUR [by Charles
Sprawson], which was on swimming. Pantheon published it; it was by a British writer. I
remember reading it and thinking, “Oh, well, this starts so well,” and then it went in a
direction that I wouldn’t have gone with it, and I thought, “Oh, well, too bad!” What I
should have done was, I should have published it anyway, because it was better than
anything else I’ve seen since on swimming.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Having come here now to Columbia, do you find that
there are authors who come to you even here?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, though the playing field is a little different here, one
of the differences being that, in fact, we are a university press; and like most university
presses, we have to have our books reviewed by a publication committee; and they have
to go through a process of peer review; and so, some of my writers in the past, who are
wonderful writers, would not pass muster in terms of scholarship, and don’t have
“peers,” as such.
But certain writers whom I have published in the past could easily come aboard.
I signed one of them here, an historian, Charles Alexander, who writes on baseball. The
sort of travel writers whom I’ve published over the years won’t come, because what they
do is not scholarship. I would hope that our vision would expand to include some of
the natural history writers, like Stephen Pyne [BURNING BUSH], or Ellen Meloy [RAVEN’S
EXILE]. John Mack Faragher [DANIEL BOONE] or Greil Marcus [INVISIBLE REPUBLIC] would
also fit.
Stephen Pyne is not going to come over, I don’t think, but he is interesting
because he originally had been published by university presses; and then I took him on
in the commercial world. Viking just published his most recent book, HOW THE CANYON
BECAME GRAND , which is a very nice book. I don’t know that he will ever go back to the
university press, although he’s doing some books on fire [most recently, VESTAL FIRE,
1998] with University of Washington Press.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you have done the fire book?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, absolutely. There is that kind of writer who the trade
may not support any longer. If it does support them, I think those people are better
published in the trade, because it’s a wider exposure; but, whether the trade will
support them, I doubt. I don’t think the trade supports books such as VESTAL FIRE. They
are probably better off at a university press. The book on the Grand Canyon is probably
better off with commercial publisher, so Stephen Pyne may have a foot in both worlds.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you, do you think, edit differently here than
you would at Holt?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: No, I don’t think so. Again, it depends on what you’re
working on. What I have found in editing some writers here is that, where I would have
simply drawn a line through things before, for the sake of the writerliness of it, I will
now query, to say, “Is this important scholarship?” and I would explain that “for the
sake of just the flow of this book I don’t think you’d need it, but if you feel if you have
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to get this in for the scholarship, then I understand.” But I wouldn’t have even asked
that before, in the trade, because the writing would have been primary. And they might
have asked, “Gee, why’d you cut that? Because of the flow?” and they would work it in
some other way. But that’s a different way of approaching it.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: How did your writers tend to respond to your
editing?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Well, I think that as long as it’s clear why you’re doing
something, and you’re consistent about it, it’s either: “Yeah, we’ll go along with this,” or
“No, what have you done!?”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would the writer have the last word?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes; absolutely. It’s their work. My name’s not on the
book: they’ve got to live with it. But I think a good editor has just sort of gone into the
writer and said, “I think I know what you’re doing here and we’ll go along with that.”
And of course, there are writers with whom you practically don’t touch a word, you’re
reading along just to make sure they’re not tripping over themselves.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: But that would be the ideal thing!
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, yes. But that’s a little different in approach than what
we do here. I think that, when push comes to shove, writing is what carries the day in
the trade, again because of the entertainment value, good, bad or otherwise... Here,
scholarship can be enough to qualify you for publication.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: About four years ago, an Italian publisher remarked to
me that, while the best fiction was coming out of New York, much — even most — of
the best non-fiction was coming out of the small presses, away from New York: because,
and I infer some of this, because the complexity of non-fiction was being edited out
here, in New York, and the tone, the quality of the work, was becoming broader and
thinner.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: That might be true. People say, “Well, this has to be a
book about this, not have all those other sides into it.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Editors here have difficulty with complexity.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, very much. I remember when I published THE
MEADOW, James Galvin’s book, he sent in about half a manuscript. Do you know the
book? It’s a very unusual form for non-fiction. Jim called it “weather.” When I read it, I
called the agent and asked, “Can I talk to him about this?” I said, “Well, you can go one
of two ways with this book. You can be conventional; but if you actually think you can
pull off what you’re doing now, you’ve got something brilliant.” And he said he
thought he could do it; and he did! He said, “I was surprised that you asked if I could
do it in the kind of non-linear way that I’ve been working out. Because I thought
somebody would say, ‘Yeah just put this in order, and here we go, and tell the story.’”
Initially, the interest in that book was very much grass-roots, in the realm of the
small presses. I remember getting a call from a small press to ask if we were selling the
reprint rights for the book. I said, “No, we’re doing it ourselves in paperback.” He said,
“Oh, are you the editor? Oh, then you know. I thought you guys wouldn’t know what
you had there. You know that sort of complexity,” which is very flattering. But it may
be a way of saying that small presses are more attuned, or have time, or make the effort
to go that way.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Could you have published that book now?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I think so. At good publishing houses, people still say,
“Sure!”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Are there particular editors you think of?
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Not any editors, in particular. What you’d have to have is
the sort of climate where, when an editor says, “You’ve got to give me one: just trust me
on this,” somebody will. That sort of situation does come up — should come up — at
least once a year. I think the hard side of it, for an editor, is not whether the
corporation will let you publish the book you want, but whether it will then embrace it;
say, “Let’s go!”; and not just, finally, say: “Print it, I just don’t want to hear about it
again.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That makes me think of the famous Alfred Knopf
story...
WILLIAM STRACHAN: THE MOVIEGOER!
KATHERINE McNAMARA: It is it’s a great story. Would you like to tell it?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: As I understand this story, THE MOVIEGOER [by Walker
Percy] was taken on by an editor at Knopf over Alfred’s objections, over his dead body
practically.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Apparently, it was during a brief bout of ‘democracy’
on the editorial staff.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: And Alfred walked out of the meeting, turned to an
assistant, and said, “Fine, we’re going to do this, and nobody is ever going to hear about
that book again!” When the judging came up for the National Book Award that year,
some one of the judges had been sent a copy...
KATHERINE McNAMARA: It was Jean Stafford, who was married to A. J. Liebling.
She went home and said, “We can’t find anything.” He said, “Well, I’ve been reading
something interesting,” and gave her his annotated copy. That’s how I heard it.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I heard that they then said, “This is great. Can we call the
publisher and get some more copies?” The warehouse said, “We’ve never heard of the
book.” So they circulated that one copy among the judges, and it was voted the winner,
and there goes a career; and it is a great book too, just wonderful.
Changes coming: contraction; e-publishing
KATHERINE McNAMARA: There’s been much discussion, in the trade, about
university presses. Publishers Weekly occasionally runs pieces about them. What do you
see happening on the ground in university presses that we ought to pay attention to?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I think several things are happening. The world of
university presses is going to go through some contractions, in the same way as the
trade publishers; a kind of Darwinian change. I would say there are going to be several
of the smallish university presses over the next several years that are either going to
combine or go by the wayside.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: As University of Arkansas Press almost did, until they
were reprieved, at the last moment.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Exactly. We are not immune from the same pressures the
commercial book publishers are. But, university presses are going to succeed in a kind of
regional publishing. That’s what saved Arkansas, in the end: it is the only publishing
company in the state of Arkansas. If you want representation, I think that’s very nice;
it’s not quite the WPA, but it is a regional interest, and a base and should be part of
your mandate. If I were sitting in Arkansas I’d be damn sure that part of my mandate
was to be publishing the regional materials. And, certainly, Oklahoma and Nebraska and
others have made fortunes doing that. I think, more and more, that that mandate will
be embraced by the university press communities around the country.
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KATHERINE McNAMARA: What, then, if not regional publishing, is your
mandate?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Well, we are given the mandate of publishing scholarship.
I said at the AAUP [American Association of University Presses] convention, in June of
this year, that in being given a mandate we were given a niche, and that that’s what
everybody is looking for in publishing: “Get niche, or get out,” as they say. We’ve got a
niche by definition; it’s what we all need, a niche to try and exploit. So our mandate is
publishing scholarship; but also, defining that, and seeing how that fits, and “Don’t kid
yourself about being what you aren’t!” That’s the sort of thing I said, using sports
metaphors: “Are you going to go the net, or you’re going to play baseline? Well, if you
go to the net, you’d better be able to serve and volley. I can’t serve and volley with what
I have, so I’m going to hit from the baseline for a while.” That is what I think we can
do; but you just have to know what kind of player you are, what kind of niche you’re
in, if you’re doing that.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You’ve become an e-publisher here at Columbia.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: On the electronic side of publishing, university presses
are light years ahead of the commercial world, partially because they’re connected to
libraries and to the internet, and the commercial publishers aren’t. And, partially,
because being, by-and-large, not-for-profit or underwritten organizations, they don’t
have to make a profit off what they’re producing, not as quickly. And so they can
afford to try some experiments. Certainly, CIAO is a great experiment for us.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What is CIAO?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: It’s Columbia International Affairs On Line, a repository
of on-line publications for material about international affairs. It’s part of an
experiment being underwritten by the Mellon Foundation. We’re interested in
developing a self-sustaining on-line publication which would augment what we publish
in the field of international relations, and would lead to some other things.
CIAO is full texts, abstracts, working papers, proceedings of symposia, the like,
working with different organizations to be content-providers. The idea of it — this is
why it’s an experiment — is that everything that goes up on it is peer-reviewed. If we
can establish a viable model for the publication of material in this arena, will it later
count for tenure, promotion and scholarship? But you have to have a viable scholarly
model operating, to see if you do it, and that’s what we’re trying to provide with CIAO.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: It is available by subscription?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: It is by subscription. There are a couple private scholars
who subscribe, as well. Something we’re looking at now, is to try to enlarge the bases.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Say, for American libraries abroad?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: There are 145 USIA centers around the world. If each of
them had some sort of access to CIAO, I think that would be interesting; as well as the
business journals and business press, which would also have use for it. That’s part of the
marketing outreach. What we’re interested in learning is, what works, what doesn’t?
What do people use it for, and how do they use it? What we find about scholars is, they
like it not only as a ‘one-stop shopping center,’ especially in smaller universities which
couldn’t afford access to all these things for whatever we’re charging for it; but also,
that scholars like the idea of works-in-progress: that you can kind of try out ideas,
rather than have only what is has traditionally been the final publication after peer
review. This kind of gray scholarly material.
We’re also going to try and do a another on-line publication in earth sciences,
called Earthscape.
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KATHERINE McNAMARA: You also publish some CD-ROMs.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: We did do some CD-ROMs in the past, and we will in the
future. Again a learning process: we were successful with some, we were less successful
with others.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: THE CLASSIC HUNDRED POEMS is enchanting.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: That is a wonderful CD! It is something that we developed
out of an existing project, the GRANGER’S INDEX TO POETRY; but this has a life to its own.
We’ve been most successful with so far with the reference-works: GRANGER’S INDEX TO
POETRY, THE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS, the database-type CD-ROMs. Next spring, we’re
going to try putting the GRANGER’S INDEX TO POETRY, which has previously existed in
print and in CD-ROM, on-line. The other CD-ROM we had a great deal of success with
was Diana Eck’s project, on religious diversity in the United States, ON COMMON
GROUND , which has to do with religious diversity in America. That has been a great
success for us. We’ve sold it to institutions; we will also sell as a textbook for students.
KATHERINE McNAMARA [reading from the brochure]: “Geographic courses.
America’s many religions, Fifteen Religions in the U. S. Diversities, Pluralisms.” This
looks interesting. Essentially, it’s a kind of ethnographical approach.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, and a kind of advocacy as well.
So we’re experimenting with what we can’t make work, and what we can. The
real scholarly monograph, which is fading from the shelves because libraries have no
space for it, and fading from publishers’ lists because you simply can’t afford it, but
which is the backbone of scholarly publishing, might have a future on-line or in
electronic form. This doesn’t save you any of the peer review in the process, but does
save you printing, paper, and binding, which is not inconsiderable; and also may allow
you to publish, in the sense of disseminating it, more widely than the 300 copies that sit
on library shelves somewhere. That’s why we’re interested in e-publishing primarily: as
a future mechanism for a distributing network.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: In that regard, you’re also doing a Lightning Print
Book. [Lightning Print Inc. is a subsidiary of Ingram, the wholesale book distributing
company bought in November by Barnes and Noble; it provides what it calls “‘on demand’
printing and distribution services to the book industry,” by storing and printing books
electronically, one at a time, as ordered by bookstores and libraries, through book
wholesalers. It is a development of e-publishing which raises important questions about
authors’ rights and publishing economics.]
WILLIAM STRACHAN: We are. We have one National Book Award winner in our
history, THE BLUE WHALE, by George Small, which is based on research done on the blue
whale in the early ‘60s. The research is out of date, and, therefore, the book is out of
print; but for those people who like a copy of every National Book Award winner, or
just want to see what this was about, we licensed to Lightning Print the right to produce
bound copies on demand, from our edition. I think, more and more, that this approach
will be a certain salvation for the life of books. I think it’s an intermediary technology, if
you will: from digitizing to print, or from digitizing to downloading from our site, or
whatever. I don’t know that Lightning Print, itself, will be necessary as an intermediary
after a while. It may be that that is the service they provide, and we won’t want to be in
that business, which is something I think they’re banking on.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That you don’t want to print per se?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Either we don’t want to print per se, or we don’t want to
be the intermediary. If somebody calls us up, even if we have it digitized, is that how we
want to spend our day, filling telephone orders for a digitized version and downloading
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them? That is the job of a publisher; but maybe there’s a distributor that could do the
job better than we can as a publisher.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Right, and then you could do the real work of a
publisher, which is making...
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, making the text available, and they can do the rest. I
think that that is where all things are possible in this Brave New World. It’s another
question people have to ask themselves: “What business are you in, and what is your
role in the dissemination of information?” Because you can be in almost any area now.
It’s very easy to become preoccupied with something that you probably shouldn’t be
doing, spending your time on; that’s not what you’re on earth to do.
Academic writing and peer review
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Since you’re an academic press, how does the peer
review process alter the work of the editor, compared to how that work was done in the
trade world?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: It alters it a couple of ways. Quite often, the peer review is
used by editors here as a sort of stage of editing. We get all sorts of peer reviews,
ranging from “This is a wonderful manuscript, you should publish it,” to almost line-
by-line critiques of a manuscript. It’s very interesting when those instances arise.
Both forms are a form of editing. I think peer review helps an editor with
shaping a manuscript. There is, quite often, less hands-on editing here than in the
trade, although everybody decries the end of editing in the trade; who knows? And
because you have a publications committee or peer review that has to approve what you
publish, there is some deference to the opinion of others, rather than to your own
opinion about what you want to publish. That’s overstating it: but, sometimes, the
decision to publish is left in others’ hands. You may think, “This is a perfectly good
project, but we’ll see what somebody else thinks.” It goes back to what I said earlier: I
think the role of the editor is to decide what you really want to publish; and, sometimes
— I wouldn’t say this role is abdicated, in scholarly publishing, but — there are other
reasons for publishing than your own judgment.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: It has a different weight.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: It has a different weight; it does. The decision to publish
something is not wholly your own. If that is still the case! Arguably, with the publishing
committees in trade publishing, the decision there isn’t your own.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I’m curious about whether you’ve found, on the
academic side, that the integrity of the manuscript is important. That always should be
a very large issue, don’t you think, the integrity of the manuscript?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, the integrity of the text.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What happens, for example, when the review comes in
and demands a change in the manuscript, which perhaps the author disagrees with?
This can happen, too, with dissertations. What if the review goes against what the
author wanted to do? What do you do when there is that sort of conflict?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I think you have to decide whether or not to publish. The
writer would certainly have a rebuttal to the review. In that case, you have to not-quite
arbitrate. Either the reviewer has a certain axe to grind, or the writer says, “That’s not
what I’m writing.” Just as a reviewer in the media quite often goes wrong on a book:
“Well, that’s not the book I wrote, you know, you’re not reviewing the book I wrote.” I
think, there, you decide who you’re standing by. And, most of the time, you come
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down on the side of the author, rather than the reviewer. That’s been the experience
I’ve seen here, unless someone is being accused of completely sloppy scholarship, or is
just wrong about something. We rarely arbitrate. You’d go with the author who said
“No, this is what I mean, and that’s what I want.” I think that integrity of text is
respected all the way through.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Have you noticed a change in tone or texture of the
writing?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, the writing is looser. Because things could be left
mutable till the end, people tended — I don’t know, this may be slightly unfair —
tended not to figure it out at the outset; it wasn’t as tight, thinking you could go back
or change this later, not having thought it all the way through on a first draft. The
differences are odd. I remember talking about this to Witold Rybczynski, years ago,
when he first started writing on the computer. For him, it almost restored the silence of
writing. You didn’t have an electric typewriter you felt you had to keep up with, that
clack clack clack. It almost took him back to longhand. I think there are all sort of
aesthetic advantages, as well as, god knows, the practical ones.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You can write as fast as you can think.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: You can write as fast as you can think; you can change
things very easily. Just the factor of time: that’s a wonderful boon.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Have you found any differences between on-line and
print publishing in terms of procedure and so on? Or are they simply technological?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Actually, there is a difference. In print publishing, quite
often, you are not publishing speculation. You don’t get to try out ideas in print;
they’ve got to have been through all the review process, whereas on-line there is a kind
of gray area, sometimes. “I’ve researched this, and this is where I’m going, and I don’t
know that this is where I’m going to end up. And could I have your feedback? And,
what else is going on?” That’s what — we find — scholars like about CIAO, the ability to
try things out before they are, if you will, committed to paper.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That is what the internet was for, when it was started.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: And it’s been very nice. We’ve got a couple of things that
we think will end up in print, after they’ve been through a number of stages on the
internet.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: So, it’s a kind of editorial process. And that raises, for a
writer, at least, an interesting question about drafts: not just about preserving them, but
having material out there before it’s in the final version. You must have some sort of a
protocol for marking, and also for downloading and printing; do you? Do you restrict
access and accession?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: No, you can download and print, in certain areas, but
you can always block anything you want to block, so that certain things can’t come
down, while other things can. By and large, CIAO is pretty ‘downloadable,’ as I
understand it.
Persuading Readers to Read
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I was thinking about your being drawn to non-fiction,
that it is what you love. Very often, it also is the domain of the intellectual. We are all in
a little discussion, or a cultural argument, that goes on here and there, about the matter
of the ‘public intellectual.’ Where are our Edmund Wilsons, we ask? That sort of
criticism also is the realm of serious non-fiction. You published such work at Holt,
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surely. I wonder if you find that trade publishing is less receptive to the sort of serious
writing I’m referring to, here?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I think the culture is less receptive to it, in a way. You
don’t have, well, I don’t know if you have public icons like Edmund Wilson, or the like,
whose opinion on something mattered across the board to society. I think it’s much
more factionalized now.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: It’s a small group of society, still?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes. On the other hand, this sort of discourse still exists.
Certainly, if you read the New York Review of Books, one sees that this is a community
of ideas, and thought; that discourse does go on. I don’t know that it ever was seamlessly
integrated into society. Now, I think, it is more of the two cultures: the popular culture
here, and the intellectual culture over here, rather than their crossing back and forth.
But you see very serious books published constantly. People are seeking them out and
making successes of them: books that deal with issues, that are issue-oriented, which is,
theoretically, the hardest kind of book to publish successfully.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And you still see, to your satisfaction, books like that
being published?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes. Princeton has this book called THE SHAPE OF THE
RIVER, by William C. Bowen and Derek Bok, that has to do with the long-term
consequences of race and affirmative action. They are pushing that book hard, not only
to the academy but to the trade. Princeton’s not a trade publisher; they are a university
publisher acting like a trade publisher, for this book. They hired a freelance publicity
group in New York to promote it, and they are trying to tour the authors. They feel the
book has a trade audience, as well as one in the academy.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That leads us to the matter of readership, rather than
market, although I’m sure everyone uses the word “market.” But doesn’t a book like THE
SHAPE OF THE RIVER , along with the sort of books you’re interested in as well, appeal to a
readership? How is it now more nearly the job of, say, university presses and small
presses to find that old, perhaps legendary, serious readership? Publishers used to
attach numbers to it, do you remember?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: “Seventy-five readers.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I even heard someone say, 60,000. “There are 60,000
serious readers in the U. S., period.”
WILLIAM STRACHAN: The question is, how many readers are there: serious
readers? It was always a great debate in trade publishing, and it is still such a debate,
because when you look at a serious novel, or a work of fiction everybody agrees is serious
— look at Don DeLillo, for instance — and you can sell 75 to 100 thousand copies of it,
you say, “Well, is that the upper reach?” Or is the typical sale, 7500 to 10,000 copies, the
real readership, and you somehow magically, with one book, expanded it? Or, are you
just capturing ten percent of the total each time with all these other serious books? It’s a
remarkably small number, whatever it is, in comparison to the total population of the
country.
But that has always been the challenge, reaching an audience, and I don’t think
that’s changed. The challenge is now harder than ever, for trade or academic
publishers: either to capture that audience, or to create an audience, in the sense of
convincing those people who might be interested in reading, to actually spend their
time reading this book, as opposed to spending their time reading something else, as
opposed to spending their time doing whatever. That’s increasingly the challenge.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Is to persuade readers to read....
ARCHIPELAGO 97 Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter 1998/99
A Conversation with William Strachan On Publishing
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes: persuading readers to read. It used to be, calling
readers’ attention to a book. There’s been a subtle change. We used to say, 25 years ago,
that publishing was recession-proof; that, historically, there was always a certain
population that would rather spend their money on books than on food; that there
were always the sort of ‘poor’ readers to march us through. I don’t know that that’s
case anymore; or, that there aren’t so many other sorts of intellectual distractions, or
just distractions, that you don’t have to pay attention to convincing people they have to
read. It’s the peril of non-fiction. Once someone summarizes a book, the reader can
think, “Well, now I’ve got the information, why do I need to read it?” You either have
to give it a better context than the summary, or write it so it’s worth spending the time
reading! The ongoing information stream is part of our challenge: “Okay, stop. Read
this. Don’t just consume the information.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I overheard a funny little conversation in a new
restaurant. A woman was telling about a friend of hers who had recently been fired
from her job: one of the middle class, the New York middle class, which means
reasonably literate and reasonably well-to-do. This woman, now out of work, found that
her day was different than it had been, because she was no longer a “consumer”: she
now had to think about what she did, what she bought, what she ate, what she read,
what she paid attention to. And so, she found herself becoming more of a “customer,”
and she was becoming more — the dread word — “creative” about what she chose,
rather than being caught in a kind of consumer-rut.
I thought it an interesting conversation for all sorts of reasons, most of which are
ironic. But it might be something like that which you refer to, that subtle change of
difference: not so much persuading the readers to read this book, but persuading the
readers to read!
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, in terms of trying to figure out what’s shaping
everybody, that “consumer rut” is a good example. “I’m on this sort of treadmill, not
that I can’t get off, but....” You know, the urge; there’s such an automatic, ongoing
situation that you can’t stop. That I spend x hours every day reading what I think I
have to read to keep up with the industry, the trade journals, or review media, or this
that and the next thing. So that you, perforce, are not reading for pleasure or the
cultivation of intellect. Whereas, “maybe if I didn’t have that job, maybe I’d switch over
and do this.” Yeah, the consuming side of it is interesting — I mean, going back to
books as entertainment.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That analogy makes me flinch. Books are overpriced, is
my notion, because I think they ought to be free as air, though that’s another question,
isn’t it? But books are very expensive. So, I’ve heard publishers and editors say
something like this: “Well, the cost of a novel is the cost of two and a half movie tickets!”
It’s a bad analogy, I think, because books and movies are not comparable; and when you
make them comparable you remove the unique quality of the book. There is nothing
else like it. It can’t be compared, and it oughtn’t to be treated frivolously.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I think that’s true. I don’t know the answer to the
problem of the price of books. Because I’m quite sympathetic. On the one hand, they
are cheap by comparison to what other things cost, as well as what goes into the
manufacture, the time of everyone involved to bring the book out. Here’s a unit, for
$25. It’s almost like food: you can’t believe food is so cheap, even though we’re decrying
it, after, my god, this farmer raised it, transported it, took it to market...
KATHERINE McNAMARA: It’s not like the farmer gets much return on
investment.
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A Conversation with William Strachan On Publishing
WILLIAM STRACHAN: That’s part of it too. Nonetheless, you’re still convincing
someone to part with $25 to $30 of their hard-earned-money, for this object.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Well, I’ll ask you a question: Why publish in
hardbound editions? Why not do as the French do, or as the old North Point [a
defunct, once highly-regarded small press; its name is now an imprint of Farrar, Straus]
did, and publish in handsome soft-bound?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Many people have done it. I mean, having been born and
raised up in paper books, we thought hardbacks were going to be dead tomorrow, back
in 1970.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: They’re so heavy and they’re so expensive.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: The only answer I have to this is the old cultural
prejudice: It’s not “real” in paperback; if this were truly valid, truly good, it would be in
hardcover first. In many respects there is validity to that, because publishers say, “Well,
then, it’s true, and we put our best stuff in hardcover.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: A certain pat decree/pedigree there.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: We perpetuate it ourselves. But paperback publishing has
been tried.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I wonder what generation started buying hardbound?
Ours? When we finally got jobs with tenure?
WILLIAM STRACHAN [grinning]: We have.
KATHERINE McNAMARA [laughing]: We don’t have to mail our books now from
one temporary address to another. We’re not grad students; we’ve even got gray hair.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Well, it’s not only that. I found this fascinating: when I
was at Holt, we bought Thomas Pynchon’s novel, which turned out to be MASON AND
DIXON. When we bought the rights to publish the book, we were counting on a certain
sale in hardcover, but a kind of annual ‘annuity’ in trade paperback, based on the sales
of GRAVITY’S RAINBOW. And while I think that’s true, what took everyone aback last year
— I was gone, but I looked at this somewhat carefully — when the trade paperback
came out, it didn’t suddenly rocket onto the bestseller list. In fact, what everybody said
was that maybe Pynchon’s audience had grown up, and were buying in hardcover, and
were not interested in the trade paperback anymore. I mean, our generation, that was
raised up with trade paperbacks, may now have turned their back on them.
Our generation, those before, and the next
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Do you think about generations of book buyers?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yeah, I do.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: How do you think about them?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I think about them in terms of a kind of taste in what’s
represented. When I worked at The Viking Press, Elisabeth Sifton was our editor-in-
chief. This was in the early ‘80s. I said, “This is a really wonderful publishing house,”
and she said, “Of course,” and I said, “One of the reasons is that you have these various
generations of editors.” At that point, Malcolm Cowley was still coming in once every
other week. Then it dropped down from Malcolm to Cork Smith and Alan Williams,
who I guess were both in their fifties. And then to Elisabeth Sifton, who was a decade
younger. And then down to Amanda Vaill and myself, who were a decade younger. She
said, “You know, this isn’t an accident.” I said, “Oh?” She said that if you looked at the
history of Viking Press, you saw a certain generation of editors that bought D. H.
ARCHIPELAGO 99 Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter 1998/99
A Conversation with William Strachan On Publishing
Lawrence and a number of other people. And then you went maybe a generation later
and you had Steinbeck, and you had a couple of other writers that came in.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That would be under?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: That was Pat Covicci, and Marshal Best, and a number of
other people. Then you had them picking up Bellow and the like in the ‘40s. But, she
said, if you look at the history of The Viking Press in the ‘50s, you don’t have the new
generation of writers coming in. You have Steinbeck continuing to publish; you have
Bellow continuing to publish; you have a number of other people they’ve always
published. There was no new editor brought in from 1948 till Cork Smith got there in
1962. She said, “We missed a generation of writers, not having that generation of editors
to represent the taste of a generation. We don’t have the history from the ‘50s.” I know,
when I read submissions or look at editors who are in their late ‘20s, that it’s a different
taste. You need that. And, you know, they’re probably looking in abject horror at
somebody like Don DeLillo. Maybe, I don’t know; I’m making this up.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Actually no, they’re not, they’re looking at him with
some respect. “Content” is why. Somebody told me this about the internet, too: it’s now
chic to have “content.”
WILLIAM STRACHAN: But I do think about generations of readers, what is
attractive to them, stylistically, in content, themes, etc., changes.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Do you find yourself able to read younger writers?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: I can’t, you know, say “This interests me,” as often as, “I
don’t get it,” or, “This doesn’t speak to me.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: So, yours is a sort of sociological reading.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes; or you can say, “This is a technically skilled writer.”
When I see what they’re up to, it’s not of remote interest to me, but I see what they’re
trying to do, and I try and do a clinical reading, rather than an interested reading.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Do you find yourself noticing that kind of response
more, are you tracking it, when you look around you at your colleagues in the trade?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Only to the extent that I read the gossip columns in the
trade papers about the hot deals. At cocktail parties or in the trade journals, I am
continuously aware that another generation is in place, that people who are from 25 to
35 are making a huge impact. And I’m aware of that, constantly. I don’t see it as much,
interestingly, in what is actually published, and I don’t know if this is my radar, or what
channels you tune to, in the trade reviews, or the papers: I don’t see that as much is
cracking into the establishment in the way that it used to. I mean, in some ways the
writers that I’m aware of—
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Are not taken so seriously?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: No, they are taken very seriously. I’m not aware, when I
read trade reviews or reviews in the Times or the like, of the younger writers. Maybe I
just read over them. When I was a kid, as an editor, people like Ann Beattie or Lorrie
Moore were the young people rising then. And you were a contemporary of them as an
editor, as well. There’s very much a tie to that generation.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: In terms of the kind of non-fiction that you like, do
you see anything interesting happening in the younger generation of writers? Do they
know enough to write about?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Hmm, yes; yes. Well the ‘memoir’ thing, that’s another
story. But the writers that I worked with who were coming up and who were writing,
they were very concerned with place, a great many of them. Not just their place, but
physical location, or detail or history: local place.
ARCHIPELAGO 100 Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter 1998/99
A Conversation with William Strachan On Publishing
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That was very much of our generation.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes; maybe I’m just drawn to those writers who were
exploring these themes when they were younger. But beyond that I don’t know. The
memoir, if you will, the self-absorption, or the that old “figure out life through me,” is
certainly part of the landscape now.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What is called “creative non-fiction.”
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, exactly.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Maybe the ‘memoir’ is a sort of sub-genre of fiction,
but that’s somebody else’s argument.
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, I’m not going to go on with that one.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Do we have a literary culture? If we do, what does it
look like?
WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, I think we do. There are a great many good books
being published that count as literature, and are being talked about, and appreciated. I
guess in some ways it looks more fragmented, for many reasons, than it ever did before;
is maybe not as homogenous — although maybe it is, because it’s linked up in ways that
we never saw before. Suddenly, you’re getting books on the internet, you’re getting
books on TV. The book culture exists in many different areas, other than just in a
bookstore, or just on the page, which made it seem neatly compact before. Now, it looks
diffuse and fragmentary, but maybe it’s just an expanded circle. It may be illusory that
it’s more fragmentary. Maybe there is a wider dissemination of material than ever
before. I think a lot of people are reading, and care about books. Certainly, the numbers
prove it, whatever they’re reading. And they are certainly talking about books: all those
readers’ groups and the like.
So the book culture has become more a part of the culture than, maybe, it was
before. Maybe the change is in the literary part: is it is more communal than the solitary
life that it used to be? That may be a change. Or, the change is in what people want:
they don’t want to lose themselves, or bury themselves in a book. They don’t say, “Stay
here; I want to be alone.”
&&&&&&
William Strachan, Director, Columbia University Press
562 West 113th Street, New York, New York 10025
A Selection of Books and Writers Edited or Published by William Strachan:
Witold Rybczynski, HOME: A Short History of An Idea
TAMING THE TIGER: The Struggle to Control Technology
PAPER HEROES, Appropriate Technology: Panacea or Pipe Dream?
Gretel Ehrlich, THE SOLACE OF OPEN SPACES
Marc Reisner, CADILLAC DESERT: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
Christopher Camuto, A FLY FISHERMAN ’S BLUE RIDGE
Charles Alexander, OUR GAME: An American Baseball History
Stephen Pyne, BURNING BUSH: A Fire History of Australia
Ellen Meloy, RAVEN ’S EXILE: A season on the Green River
John Mack Faragher, DANIEL BOONE: The Life and Legend of An American Pioneer
Greil Marcus, INVISIBLE REPUBLIC: Bob Dylan’ s Basement Tapes
James Galvin, THE MEADOW
ARCHIPELAGO 101 Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter 1998/99
A Conversation with William Strachan On Publishing
Books Mentioned during the Conversation:
Charles Frazier, COLD MOUNTAIN
John Berendt, MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL
Don DeLillo, UNDERWORLD
Robert Stone, DAMASCUS GATE
Charles Sprawson, HAUNTS OF THE BLACK MASSEUR
Walker Percy, THE MOVIEGOER
William C. Bowen and Derek Bok, THE SHAPE OF THE RIVER
Stephen Pyne, HOW THE CANYON BECAME GRAND ; VESTAL FIRE
New /Noteworthy Publications from Columbia University Press (Selected):
Columbia University Press <http://www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup>
Multimedia:
THE COLUMBIA GRANGER ’S WORLD OF POETRY on CD-ROM 3.0. ed. William Harmon.
ON COMMON GROUND , Diana L. Eck & the Pluralism Project at Harvard University. CD-ROM.
“ Multimedia introduction to the changing religious landscape of the United States.”
Reference:
THE COLUMBIA GRANGER ’S INDEX TO AFRICAN-AMERICAN POETRY, ed. Nicholas
Frankovitch and David Larzelere.
THE COLUMBIA GUIDE TO ONLINE STYLE, Janice Walker and Todd Taylor.
However, the authors don’ t hypenate “ on-line.”
THE COLUMBIA GAZETTEER OF THE WORLD, ed. Saul B. Cohen.
THE COLUMBIA DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS, ed. Robert Andrews.
THE COLUMBIA READERS ON LESBIANS AND GAY MEN IN MEDIA, SOCIETY, AND
POLITICS, ed. Larry Gross and James D. Woods.
THE JAZZ CADENCE OF AMERICAN CULTURE , ed. Robert G. O’Meally.
General:
SERENDIPITIES, Umberto Eco, tr. William Weaver.
THE RISE AND FALL OF CLASS IN BRITAIN, David Cannadine
THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST : Popular Uses of History in American Life. Roy Rosenzweig and
David
Thelen.
VILLAGE BELLS, Alain Corbin, tr. Martin Thom.
THE WORK OF POETRY , John Hollander.
Related Sites:
Lightning Print <http://www.ingram.com/Company_Info/lpihtml/>
Ingram <http://www.ingram.com>
Bookwire <http://www.bookwire.com>
National Writers Union <http://www.nwu.org//book/pubdemnd.htm>
Institutional Memory:
A Conversation with Marion Boyars, Archipelago, Vol. 1, No. 3
A Conversation with Cornelia and Michael Bessie, Archipelago, Vol. 1 No. 4 and Vol. 2 No. 1
ARCHIPELAGO 102 Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter 1998/99
ARCHIPELAGO
An International Journal of Literature, the Arts, and Opinion
www.archipelago.org
Vol. 3, No. 2 Summer 1999
Story: ZUXIN DING
Young Mrs. Wei
Four Poems: EVA HUNG
Letter from Japan: RALPH E. PRAY
Transformation
Letter from Greece: SANDRA CUSHMAN
An American Traveler in the Balkans
Natural History: CORAL HULL
December 7, 1997, The Rattle Snake
Poem: SIMON PERCHIK
Institutional Memory: SAMUEL S. VAUGHAN
and the Editor of Archipelago
A Conversation about Publishing
Conversation: GEORGE GARRETT
and the Editor of Archipelago
Whatever He Says Is Gospel
Poem: ERROL MILLER
Endnotes: On Memory
Recommended Reading: James Wintner,
Michael Rothenberg, Odile Hellier
Printed from our Download (pdf) edition
INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY
A Conversation about Publishing
with SAMUEL S. VAUGHAN
Katherine McNamara
“ I think the reader has rights.”
It has been remarked that book publishing as a so-called gentleman’s occupation
began to change about the time the phrase publishing industry came into use, around the
mid-1970s. If true, it marks nicely the beginning of the kind of change I have been
interested in tracing in the business of making and selling books.
Is it true, however: has the gentleman’s occupation changed so much, so quickly?
Perhaps my assumption is faulty? An editor and publisher of long experience told me that
he’d like to take the notion of “gentleman’s occupation” and kick it in the head. I liked
this and asked him to say more. He did, and a lively conversation ensued.
Substantially, however, what has changed in the business of making and selling
books? For I think it can be agreed that enormous change has occurred. What sorts of
people went into publishing then? Are they a different sort now? Are there fewer good
books, more bad, than ever? Is the art of editing no longer practiced well in the trade?
How can we speak of publishing “houses” after conglomeration? Do conglomerate
managers know anything about books? I have been inquiring of distinguished
representatives of an older generation, and of my own generation of the Sixties, what they
thought about these questions.
Generously, these persons have told how they entered the book trade; spoken
about writers they’ve published and declined to publish; described the (changing) class
structure of their domain; talked straight about money, commerce, and corporate
capitalism; described their way of practicing responsible publishing. Without exception,
they are serious readers, usually of more than one language. They recognize that times
have changed. They speak with wary-friendly observation of the generations coming up.
Excerpts of these conversations will continue to appear regularly in Archipelago
and may serve as an opening into an institutional memory contrasting itself with the
current corporate structure, reflecting on glories of its own, revealing what remains
constant amid the present flux. Despite their surround of gentility, these publishers are
strong-minded characters engaged with their historical circumstances. Out of that
engagement have appeared a number of books that we can say, rightly, belong to
literature.
-KM
See also:
A Conversation with Marion Boyars, Archipelago, Vol. 1 No. 3
A Conversation with Cornelia and Michael Bessie, Vol. 1 No. 4 and Vol. 2, No. 1
A Conversation with William Strachan, Vol. 2, No. 4
“What He Says Is Gospel,” George Garrett, in this issue
ARCHIPELAGO 104 Vol. 3, No. 2 Summer 1999
SAMUEL S. VAUGHAN On Publishing
Samuel S. Vaughan, Editor-at-large, Random House
Former Editor-in-chief, President, and Publisher, Doubleday
Samuel S. Vaughan entered the publishing trade in 1951, as a desk man for King
Features Syndicate. The following year he joined the syndication department of
Doubleday, where he learned the craft of cutting books into serials, then selling rights
to newspapers. He was promoted to advertising manager (1954-56), then to sales
manager (1956-58). From sales he moved to editorial, becoming a senior editor in 1958.
Ten years later, he was made executive editor of Doubleday. In 1970 he was named
publisher and president of the company and remained so for the next twelve years.
From 1982 till 1985 he was editor-in-chief of Doubleday. The list of titles (it is
incomplete) should indicate that he learned the art of publishing books from the
ground up. He has done nearly every job in the trade, he supposed, except printing.
“The equation of the publishing business is what I think I understood, and what the
publisher is asked to understand and to deal with,” he said. “It is the major elements
that the publisher can affect. I liked all parts of publishing. I like the editorial job; I like
the publishing and promotion, the advertising job; I like the sales jobs. It was important
to me to give everybody a fair shake.”
Sam Vaughan is known as a man of his word. “You can take what he says as
gospel,” the novelist George Garrett told me. A woman of wide experience in the
business, whose first job had been as his assistant, said simply, “He is a great man.”
Sam Vaughan, though claiming to be semi-retired, is at present editor-at-large
at Random House, once a competitor of Doubleday; now both large companies are
owned by the same German publishing company. A visitor to the Random House
skyscraper signs in, is given a badge, and takes an express elevator to an upper floor,
where she is met by a tall, courteous man resembling James Stewart in aspect and voice,
who apologizes (unnecessarily) about his small, book-filled office. Thoughtfully, he has
provided coffee. He is interested in what the other publishers have had to say, seeming
to converse with them as much as with his caller. He takes issue with received ideas, and
he is careful about facts.
I spoke with Sam Vaughan in the Spring of 1999; twice we met at his office, the
third time at the august Century club, where he gave me a pleasant luncheon. He
expressed interest in the theme of “institutional” memory, while commenting wryly on
the capacity of his own. His is a fine, dry humor, without irony but rather, enlarged by
compassion and honest indignation.
A gentleman of contraries
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You’ve, very engagingly, called yourself a
“contrarian.”
SAM VAUGHAN: It’s a stock market term, and I’m not much of a financial
wizard, but I just don’t agree with much of the conventional current comment about
publishing. Although in the beginning I did, because I was learning. Now I’m beyond
learning.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What are you contrarian about?
SAM VAUGHAN: Well, we’re still selling trade books by the pound, pricing them
according to weight, not intrinsic value, or the limits of the presumed market or
audience as reflected in the first printing, or their likely ability to pay. Publishers are
still letting untrained, inexperienced people loose on books, refusing to train or
ARCHIPELAGO 105 Vol. 3, No. 2 Summer 1999
SAMUEL S. VAUGHAN On Publishing
develop them except by the ancient system of an unstructured apprenticeship. And,
we allow myths to perpetuate. For example, I’m trying to write an introduction to a
new edition of a fairly well-known publisher’s memoir — that’s an oxymoron — called
AN OCCUPATION FOR GENTLEMEN, by Frederick Warburg. I want to talk about the impact
of the title, because people have picked up on it: that this was such an occupation.
What I’d like to kick in the head is the idea that publishing was an occupation for
gentlemen. It has led to many misconceptions about the origins and nature of
publishing.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Why do you say this?
SAM VAUGHAN: The word gentleman, it seems to me, doesn’t have a precise
definition, but it implies a person of independent means, who doesn’t really have to
work. In the Warburg memoir, the title comes from an anecdote. He was in
conversation at a party with a man who was the head of Marks & Spencer, the big
retailer. When Mr. Warburg said he was in publishing (after the usual ‘What do you
do?’ kind of thing, which was not so common in London then) Mr. Marks-&-Spencer
said, “Is publishing an occupation for gentlemen or is it a real business?”
I don’t mean to say that there never have been gentlemen, by whatever
definition, or gentlewomen, but the history of books and publishing is not a history of
gentlemen dabbling in a pleasant occupation. As far as I can tell, the first books were in
the hands of literate elites, meaning the church and high priests, scholars and scribes,
who despite their exalted position were not exactly gentlemen. Then, following
Gutenberg, publishing was often in the hands of printers and ultimately booksellers.
They were tradesmen, sometimes middle-class. That’s what we came out of, in large
part.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Do you think the term “trade publishing” began, in
fact, with the jobbing printers?
SAM VAUGHAN: As far I know, it begins with publishing for the retail book
trade, as opposed to publishing for schools. A big part of publishing, now and for a
long time, has been for schools and colleges and for libraries. I think the reference was
to the book trade, i.e., booksellers.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: When would that have come about?
SAM VAUGHAN: I don’t know that. English publishers in the 1920s and ‘30s had
what they called a “trade counter” in the publishing house. The trade counter was —
I’m laughing because of the contrast with the current scene — where the ‘trade’ was
supposed to come and pick up their books. In a really aggressive house the publisher
might have a person or two who took books out and carried them to the booksellers.
English publishing, when I first started to visit London, in the 1950s, was sort of
frozen, en gelée. I remember an English publisher who did a lot of visiting back and
forth. We were each doing the same book. I said, “Our jacket for the book is just ready,
would you like to see it?” He said, “Well, yes, that would be very nice.” We got the
jacket out for him to look at. I held it up. He stared at it for awhile. I said, “Like it?”
“Yes,” he said, “but don’t you think it’s a little ‘market-seeking’?”
That was a leftover attitude. In any case, I don’t know whether the English were
ever so uncommercial as they appeared to be.
On the other hand, German publishers tend, by-and-large, to be well-trained for
business. My young assistant, Mr. Ulf Büchholz, is a case-in-point. He was trained by
Bertelsmann [owners of Random House, Inc. and Doubleday/Bantam/Dell] in Germany. I
once was one of the authors of a report for the Publishers Association, which I titled “The
Accidental Profession.” In Germany, publishing is much less accidental. The bookseller is a
ARCHIPELAGO 106 Vol. 3, No. 2 Summer 1999
SAMUEL S. VAUGHAN On Publishing
professional, trained in a sort of guild-fashion. The relationship between the bookseller and
the publisher is one of mutual respect.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: So, the phrase “the accidental profession” is yours?
SAM VAUGHAN: Yes. We found that almost none of us had set out to be in book
publishing — but were.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: How, then, did you come into this trade?
SAM VAUGHAN: I was like Mr. Marks-&-Spencer: I had never thought about
book publishing as an occupation. I had thought about magazine-, but not book-,
publishing.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: How were these different, would you say?
SAM VAUGHAN: Well, I’d been an editor as an undergraduate of a magazine, a
humor magazine first and a literary magazine second. And therefore I wanted to work
in magazines; it was a form I thought I knew. But, fortunately for me, I didn’t work in
magazines. Of course, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, mass-circulation magazines were about to
encounter very heavy weather, and some disappeared.
The interesting difference, from the point of view of the writer, between a
magazine- and a book-publisher is that, when you write for a magazine, the magazine
owns the piece. You’re writing in the magazine’s voice, or you’re at least being edited
by the magazine, and it tends to have a certain style. When you write a book, you’re
really writing for yourself: you lease what you write to the publisher. So when
publishers say, “I bought a book,” they misstate the case slightly. What they do is make
a contract that gives them the right to vend the book in various forms, for a period of
time. The author, always downtrodden and always fragile, is nonetheless the owner of
what he or she created.
Learning the business
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you talk a bit about your background, where
you were raised and educated?
SAM VAUGHAN: I was raised in Philadelphia, in the city itself, in the section
called South Philadelphia. And my wife was born a block away. Well, Jo is half Italian
by ancestry and I’m not at all Italian by ancestry. My folks were leftover WASPs, and so
I had the delightful experience of learning how to be a WASP minority. With a name
like Sam, and a long nose, and a Welsh surname, going to school was quite colorful. But
because my parents spoke English, I had a head-start program of my own, and,
therefore, my teachers treated me very well, and I got the idea I was smart. And,
despite the evidence of later years, I never quite gave it up. I went to Penn State, and,
as I said, I majored in putting out undergraduate magazines. Terrible student in high
school and in college. But I did learn something about pasting up off-set proofs, selling
advertising, and trying to get writers — people who said they were writers — to write.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You read, though; a lot?
SAM VAUGHAN: I’m poorly-read. I suppose a number of people in publishing
secretly feel that, because we’re surrounded by books. We had some books in my house,
and my parents were readers; but I’m not well-read in any formal sense. I’m a person
who needs a Great Books curriculum. When I got to college they tested us in English
and I was put in an advanced-placement freshman class. All the teachers of advanced
freshmen decided they were sick of the classics, and they taught, instead, off-beat
books. Instead of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, they taught Olive Schreiner’s THE STORY OF AN
AFRICAN FARM —
KATHERINE McNAMARA: A wonderful book….
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SAM VAUGHAN: Yes. Well, I read EYELESS IN GAZA, when I might have been
reading WAR AND PEACE. Not to say that one book is bad and the other book is good; it’s
just I missed a lot.
After an interlude in the Marine Corps, I got out of college. There was only one
place for me to work — an idea planted in my head by my peers — and that was New
York. I came here and got a job, through a college-magazine friend, at King Features
Syndicate, a Hearst organization. The big business there was comics. I had the most
minor of editorial jobs, called, according to the union, a “desk-man.” I did proof-
reading and the preparation of boiler-plate, the stuff that was sent out to small
newspapers that couldn’t afford to compose their own Sunday puzzle pages. I wrote
Minute Mysteries, in one of which the bad guy’s name was Italian. My boss rapped my
knuckles; even back then he said: “You can’t do that.” That was a lesson in what’s now
called political correctness: or, simply, avoiding stereotypes.
My boss was a good guy named Clark Kinnaird. He was very concerned, when
he hired me, about whether or not I could, as a married man (I was married as an
undergraduate, and had a child), make it in New York on $77.50 a week. I assured him I
could; and did; and three months later, he was even more appalled when he fired me.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: A man with a heart.
SAM VAUGHAN: Well, it wasn’t his doing. William Randolph Hearst had had
the bad taste to die right after I was hired, and right after he died they started to clean
house, and so, last one in, first one out. There was nothing unfair about it; I mean, they
got rid of lots of people.
But Mr. Kinnaird did his best to help me find a job. After I had shopped
around for awhile he said, “Would you like to have a job at the Washington Star ?” I
said, “I’d love it.” He sent me out to Washington, New Jersey, to a paper there at that
time, for a job that I, in turn, didn’t get. In any case, I made the rounds for months,
and, meanwhile, delivered the mail in Washington Heights, and got a job at
Doubleday, in a small arm of their rights department they called the Syndicate. I came
in at the tail end of the time when books were fairly widely syndicated in newspapers in
this country. The papers carried books in serial form. Doubleday had books that had
made a lot of money by licensing them to outside syndicates, books like Fulton
Oursler’s THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD. The money had to be divided 50/50 with the
syndicate, and then 50/50 with the author, so the author got 25%, the publisher got
25%. Then Doubleday, in its wisdom, decided to do it themselves. So, I got this job
preparing books for syndication; also traveling to sell them. I wasn’t notably good at it,
but I got to see the country.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: How did you prepare them? Did you actually do the
editing, divide them into usable chapters, and so on?
SAM VAUGHAN: You would cut them into a week-long series, or a twelve part
series, and it was learned by doing. It was surgery on the helpless body of the author.
But I think we showed the cut versions to the authors, and they were usually happy to
have some extra readership, publicity, and income.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Just for curiosity’s sake, what was the money like?
SAM VAUGHAN: It ranged from $50.00 to a couple of thousand. A paper would
buy a series from us. A big paper in Chicago might pay $2,000; a small paper anywhere
might pay $50.00. You had to give them territorial rights, because big papers tended to
claim everything.
But one of the books my boss got interested in, when I was first there, was one
by a young Dutch girl. He sold it to the New York Post for a small amount of money
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before publication. But what we got out of it was that the Post did its own version.
Every day I went down to the Post and got, hot off the press, their installment. I came
back and typed it on stencils. Then we went on the road to sell it. My boss sent me,
naturally, to Philadelphia. I sat down with a man named Stuart Taylor, of the Bulletin.
He was an elegant fellow; newspapermen could be elegant in those days. Thinking back
to what I had told my boss, I said: “This isn’t exactly good newspaper material, it’s a
diary of a young girl who was a real pain in the ass. Who could love a teenage girl? I
mean, that’s the worst time of life to love someone.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And the book was—
SAM VAUGHAN: THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL, by Anne Frank. That was its first
title, I believe. —
Stuart Taylor listened to my story and bought it from me on the spot, for very
good money. I almost fell off the chair. We in fact only sold it to about ten or twelve
papers; but it was part of the publication “buzz,” as they would call it these days. I had
no idea that the book would last forever. I guess I had certain sympathy for what we
knew of Anne Frank’s life and death, but I just didn’t ‘feel the mystery’ at that point.
That was my first observation of a publishing phenomenon. It’s an interesting study, a
publishing phenomenon. I don’t mean ‘bestseller,’ I mean books as phenomena. That
was also my first example of a book that passes from the intended audience to an
incidental audience, one of which happened to be young women.
I don’t mean that they’re incidental, but that nobody said, “This is a book for
young women.” Nobody said, “This is a book for Jewish people.” In fact, you didn’t say
that in those days, not out of any sensitivity, but because that was before the revolution
in which Jewish writers became some of our most interesting and important writers.
We published EXODUS [by Leon Uris] in that period, which we called “the story of the
birth of a nation.” We published [Herman Wouk’s] MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR, which we
described as a “love story of a young girl in New York,” never saying the word “Jewish.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Indeed, I remember hearing about those books when I
was coming up, and it never even occurred to me that they were, as it were, separate
from me.
SAM VAUGHAN: Well, “Anne Frank” was published as an adult trade book, and
it sold extremely well as such, but then passed on, over the decades, into the hands of
young people.
That’s a good topic to explore, sometime: the book that, published for one
presumed audience, transmutes itself for another. For example, the book that is
published as an adult book, and gets taken up by kids. Or, the book that is published
for children and gets taken up by adults. There’s a history in that.
Selling books for Doubleday
KATHERINE McNAMARA: There you were in the syndicate department, selling
syndicate rights; but that didn’t continue. Something changed.
SAM VAUGHAN: “Corporate culture” is a phrase used with a sneer, but any
organization worth a damn has its own culture. Doubleday was proud of the fact that it
trained its people well. It believed in certain sporadic attempts at formal training, but
mostly, it trained by letting you move from job to job. In the first six years, I had three
jobs, along a curious path. None were in Editorial. Well, the syndicate, in a minor way,
was editorial. But all were in publishing.
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Then I was promoted to become advertising manager. I did that for a couple of
years, and loved it, because I thought that the book advertising was terrible, stodgy,
and still do. Routinely, book advertising today is no better than it was then. It’s what I
call “the parade of the rectangles.” Run a picture of the book, write a headline, quote
some reviews, and get it out. It’s a very limited view of what you might say about a
book and how to present it.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What is an expanded view?
SAM VAUGHAN: Well, I tried to show books in context. I tried to show that
books didn’t float in air, they existed somewhere: in your hands, in your home, in your
travels, or wherever. I spent a lot of money on photography. I suppose the peak of all
that was when we got a Publisher’s Ad Club award [1956] for an action novel called MR.
HAMISH GLEAVE, by Richard Llewellyn. A wonderful novel, I fell in love with it, and I
probably spent too much money on it. But I got a photographer to go down to Wall
Street. I said: “The character in this book is a member of the British Establishment, he
has been spying for the Russians for a long time, he’s about to leave the country.” And
I had some idea of a situation, but the photographer came up with something much
better. He photographed our guy in his Homburg and his dark suit and his tight
umbrella, running down a very long flight of steps outside one of those Wall Street
buildings. You just don’t see a man dressed like that running; it was a marvelous piece
of work. I wrote some short copy to go with it, and it was a very effective ad. That’s the
kind of thing I thought should be done, and still do. There’s one consistently brilliant
advertising manager, Nina Bourne, at Knopf, who can make an ordinary review ad
look extraordinary. She never stops amazing me, and amusing me, with variations on
that theme.
A so-called company man
KATHERINE McNAMARA: When you look back over the works you’ve published,
do you find continuities; do you find themes?
SAM VAUGHAN: One of the virtues of growing older is that you find the themes
and the connections of your own life. I came of age as an adult in the ‘50s. One big
question at the time was conformity, and therefore conformity is important to me still.
Or, perhaps, non-conformity, while pretending to conform. Books like BABBITT and
THE ORGANIZATION MAN were formative books for me. They had a lot to say to me. I’ve
always worked for organizations, fairly sizable ones, so the question of whether you
become a so-called company man or not was somewhere in the air. I’ve been a bit of a
fraud because I’ve “passed.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Speaking metaphorically.
SAM VAUGHAN: Yes. I guess I looked the part. Once, a woman came up to me at
a party and said, “Did you go to Princeton?” I said, “No.” She insisted that I did.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Recently, I read an article about changes in publishing,
with a similar theme. The author talks of a moment when publishers actually hired people
who didn’t have a ‘good’ college education, because they wanted to sell to the mass market. The
claim he made was that, instead of the ‘old school tie,’ they used some other kind of criterion.
I’m interested in that, because you very nicely go around that whole issue of class, while at the
same time almost alluding to it in several of your pieces, as you did just now.
SAM VAUGHAN: Mike Bessie [see Archipelago, Vol. 1, No. 4] and I belong to an
informal group of editors who meet for dinner six or eight times a year. The great Cass
Canfield, who was the head of Harper for so long, once said to Mike, as we were sitting
around the table: “Well, there’s nobody here who hasn’t gone to Harvard or Yale, is
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there?” Mike had to point out, gently, that there might be a few who hadn’t. But that
expectation may have been typical of the sort of people they let into publishing then.
Doubleday was more democratic than some houses, in that it was more accessible as a
place to work. They published a lot of middle-brow stuff, and they had a more
national view. It was not a New York house, although it was owned by an old New York
family. I used to say to people who lived in Manhattan, because I lived in New Jersey,
that I lived “on the mainland.” Doubleday was interested in publishing for “the
mainland.” We had a bigger sales force than most, and we thought that St. Louis and
Detroit and Houston, and so forth, were important.
So, there was, I suppose you’d call it, a democratic moment, which was good for
people like me — and also for women, ultimately.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: People “like you” meaning, you went to Penn State
instead of an Ivy League school.
SAM VAUGHAN: Sure. Periodically, we were assigned to read an out-of-town
paper, to see what was going on. I love that expression, “out-of-town,” as if everything
outside of New York were “elsewhere.”
Popular literature
KATHERINE McNAMARA: When you joined Doubleday, it was still owned by the
Doubleday family. Why do you say it wasn’t a “New York house”?
SAM VAUGHAN: Well, their interests were not confined — I’m exaggerating, of
course — but their interests were not circumscribed by the Hudson River, as some
houses’ seemed to be. There were some houses which were very “New York.” They
seemed to cultivate the high opinion of literary persons in New York, they thought
most of the important reviewers and critics were in New York, and that most book
readers were, too. It was a sort of Lincoln Tunnel vision. At Doubleday, we liked
popular fiction, we liked popular history, we liked politics, all sides — I was going to
say except for extreme radical stuff, except that, in the ‘60s, we got radicalized, too, to
an extent. The house was what they called “Establishment” — we liked to publish ex-
presidents and such — and, at the same time, not an elitist house. The house had a
healthy attitude towards the rest of the country, which wasn’t charity: it was good
business. The Literary Guild, which Doubleday owned and ran, was not famous for
biographies of Joyce and Eliot; that was not their fare, while the Book of the Month
Club might take on such substantial works.
It was also a family-owned house, and it tried to instill, loosely, and with some
success, a family-feeling among the employees who stayed there. We had a sense of who
we were, and what kind of things we wanted to publish, and also, importantly, what
kind of things we didn’t want to publish. There were some popular books which we felt
happy to leave to others.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: For example?
SAM VAUGHAN: Once, when John Sargent was our chairman, we were at
Frankfurt [Book Fair], and he said, “I received some information that suggests that” —
I think it was — “Jacqueline Susann is winking at us. What do you think?” I said,
“John, do you really think she’s someone we want to publish?” That ended the
conversation, and ended the pursuit, at least on our side. Here I was being a snob; but
it was the kind of book that wouldn’t have done well on our list, handled by our
people.
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One book that somehow got on our list was based on conversations with
prostitutes; this was in the early ‘60s, I think, and, although the author was given a
contract, that book hit an invisible wall inside the house, so it was as if it didn’t get
published.
Now, Doubleday has one blot on their escutcheon that I know about, and
anyone who knows literary history knows about, and it’s this. SISTER CARRIE was under
contract to Doubleday; but the then-Mrs. Doubleday objected to it on moral grounds,
and so it was what a friend of mine, the publisher-author Dick Grossman — I think he
invented the term — called “privished”: that is, it wasn’t fully published.
And some of it was edited out, apparently. The nice irony was that, decades
later, a university press, I think it was, re-published the novel, un-Bowdlerized, or in
the original version. That rare person, a wholly objective critic, writing in The Nation
or The New Republic, perhaps, said it was better as first published. Dreiser may not
have had a cloven hoof but he did write with both feet.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You had a feel, surely, for what then was popular. Was
what you meant by “popular” then, what “pop” means now?
SAM VAUGHAN: Well, you’re on to one of my favorite subjects. It wasn’t exactly
what pop means now, because pop now may include the avant-garde — and, after all,
there’s Pop Art, which is not art for the masses, in a way. So I don’t think it means the
same thing. I meant that Doubleday lived for the most part on fiction by Herman
Wouk, Arthur Haley, Leon Uris, historical novels by Irving Stone, and the women
novelists with three names who wrote clean romances.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That brings to mind Edna Ferber. Did you publish
her?
SAM VAUGHAN: Yes, we did. We published Ferber, referred to around the
house as “Miss Ferber.” When she died she left her desk and typewriter to us. It sat in
the hall for a long time, until we couldn’t stand it. We finally donated it.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: She was a presence, was she?
SAM VAUGHAN: She was a presence, and so were some of the other house
authors. I never met Somerset Maugham, but Maugham was a presence. The house’s
first lists were built on a consummate Anglophilia: Conrad and Maugham and Kipling
and any number of people came to the list from England. Mr. Maugham, as he was
called, was a real presence, as if he had an office there.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You said that it was because of him that Ken
McCormick was named the editor-in-chief? [Kenneth McCormick (1906-1997) was
editor-in-chief of Doubleday from 1942 to 1971.]
SAM VAUGHAN: That’s the story. It wasn’t only because of Maugham, but his
endorsement couldn’t have hurt.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: May I return to my question about popular writing?
What would you consider “popular literature”? Did it feel as if you, at Doubleday, were
speaking with your readership? Because I suspect that there was a relationship, there,
between publisher and readers.
SAM VAUGHAN: I once had a conversation with the great Bob Gottlieb [former
editor-in-chief at Knopf, then of The New Yorker] — and I mean great. We were in a
cab going somewhere and he said, “Tell me about popular fiction: I really don’t
understand it.” And he was one of the great editor/publishers of fiction, who was
candid enough to admit that he didn’t understand popular fiction.
I ‘inherited’ Arthur Haley as an author. Now, when I came out of college, I was
like any other smart-ass entering publishing: I was in love with prose style. If you could
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write well, it didn’t matter to me what you wrote about. I learned at Doubleday,
because of feeling respect for popular writers, a decent respect for the well-written,
straightforward sentence; for the well-plotted, sturdy novel of the sort that Arthur
did. At first I was contemptuous of it, I mean silently, secretly; but as I got to know
something of the people who wrote those books, and something about the readers who
read them, I dropped all that nonsense. What I would read for my own pleasure was
one thing. Popular non-stylists could flourish: and why not? They had something that
people wanted to read.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I asked the late Marion Boyars [Vol. 1, No. 3] this
question: What is commercial fiction? Her answer was, “I don’t know!” But I would
guess that it’s not the same as what you mean by popular fiction; or, not wholly.
SAM VAUGHAN: Well, it’s wonderful when a book that you and I might easily
agree is beautifully written becomes popular. And that happens often enough to not be
an aberration.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you give some examples of books that you
consider such?
SAM VAUGHAN: COLD MOUNTAIN, recently; or SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS. But
there are certain authors of whom it can be said that there is not much chance they will
ever lapse into writing a ‘popular’ novel: they are too demanding of the reader. Now,
some readers love to be demanded of. But, in general (if you can make a statement
about a large group of people), they mostly just don’t want to be taxed heavily. Now,
there are degrees of difficulty. John Le Carré is popular but not an easy read, because
he writes in a style that holds back information with English reticence, but he certainly
is a commercial author, and he sells like a mass-market author. There are gradations of
difference between popular and mass-market. Our tendency to divide everything into
this or that annoys the hell out of me, but we find it inescapable. The Europeans love
to refer to publishers as “serious” or “not-.” We know what they mean, of course. But
it’s such a damning indictment that any publisher would not be considered “serious.”
One of the things I dearly love about book publishing is its pluralism. I used
what I call the “stewardess test.” When I was flying somewhere I would ask the
stewardess what she was reading, because they have a lot of down time, sitting in those
fold-down seats. She would usually say something like: “I’m reading Taylor Caldwell,”
or Danielle Steele, or Barbara Taylor Bradford. But she might, instead, be reading Ayn
Rand; or she might be reading WAR AND PEACE. Without meaning to, she refused to sit
in a category. I have a file at home bigger than you are on the issue of what I call “pop
and lit.” It’s an old argument that should have been resolved a long time ago. On the
other hand, it fuels a lot of cocktail party conversation and reviews, so maybe I’ll
subside.
I remember a list we published at Doubleday, in the 1950s, when I was
advertising manager. It was a very important list to us because it had four big books on
it: Truman’s memoirs; Robert Ruark’s novel SOMETHING OF VALUE; André Malraux’
VOICES OF SILENCE ; and THE COLUMBIA HISTORICAL PORTRAIT OF NEW YORK. That’s
pluralism; that’s diversity in publishing. That’s why I’ve never wanted to be known just
as a literary editor: because I find it too confining.
The mid-list
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Hovering, then, is a discussion about the mid-list.
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SAM VAUGHAN: Yes. “Mid-list” is as imprecise as the expression “non-fiction,”
which, too, embraces everything from the Bible to Peanuts. It’s the dreaded equivalent
of “middling.” Still….
The new chairman of Random House, Inc., Peter Olson, was nice enough to
take me to lunch recently. He was speaking with an almost embarrassed smile about
having taken over when the business was going so well. That doesn’t mean that
everything works, or that every division is doing well, but it means that, all over, the
company is doing very well. “And,” he said, “it’s not only phenomenal books, the books
like THE CENTURY, by Peter Jennings, and the Tom Brokaw book [THE GREATEST
GENERATION], it’s a lot of the mid-list.” I was so delighted to hear a well-trained
publishing executive speak affectionately of the mid-list. I’ve had other conversations
with other publishers. When they start in on the mid-list, I’ve said to them: “If you
published 500 books a year, 350 of them would be mid-list.” We once published 500
books a year.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That’s extraordinary, isn’t it?
SAM VAUGHAN: Well, it was extraordinary. But if you published five books a
year, three of them would be mid-list. There’s no escaping the mid-list. The fact is, the
mid-list is the place where you lose the most money, and it’s also the place where you
make the purest profit when a book works. That’s because you usually don’t have so
much money invested.
An editor named Tom Congdon, who had been at The Saturday Evening Post,
told me one day his editor used an expression which haunted Tom ever afterward. He
said: “I don’t want a lot of little gray articles.” There are little gray books: which doesn’t
mean they have no value or virtue. It means that a mid-list can be cluttered. Every
book has a reason: a reason why the author wrote it, a reason why somebody decided it
should be published. But it can also choke you, like too much wheat. On the other
hand, there may be a baby in the bulrushes; you don’t know.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Can you give a sense of the texture of a mid-list?
SAM VAUGHAN: No, I can’t. A mid-list is the most assorted list. Books are
graded in some kind of crude sorting. As for “mid-list”: all that means is that the book
is not an obvious candidate for super best-sellerdom; or it’s not a first novel destined to
be published merely because it should be published.
ROOTS was a mid-list book. ROOTS was not conceived, ever, by us as a
blockbuster, as a phenomenon. You don’t predict phenomena: that’s why they are
phenomena. But that book was signed up and written in the period when the attitude
of the book trade was, “We’ve had enough black books, we’ve had a lot of them in the
past decade, they’re over.” The book trade gets like that from time to time. Booksellers,
in their wisdom, and in their sincerity, and in their dopiness, will make statements like
that, and so do we. But what we couldn’t see coming was that this book, which was not
bought for no money — there was money put into it, over and over — was going to
strike a nerve: we didn’t see that. And, we didn’t see the effect of Alex Haley’s constant
traveling and speaking to groups. There was an audience clamoring, practically hitting
the door down, when we published. That had nothing to do with television. When the
television series came along it multiplied the effect. Now, that’s not a typical mid-list
book, but it came out of the mid-list. After all, Alex had done an earlier book, THE
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOM X.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That’s right. Had you published that book at
Doubleday?
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SAM VAUGHAN: Doubleday had it under contract and gave it up. It helps to
recall the atmosphere at that time. Before the book appeared, Malcolm X was
assassinated. Nelson Doubleday became concerned that, because of Doubleday’s nearly
unique situation — only Scribner had the same one: we had people working at street
level in the Doubleday bookshops. There was real fear in the air. He became concerned
that it might result in some broken glass, and people getting hurt. And so — I wasn’t
in the middle of this — we told Alex to keep the money we’d paid him and he was free
to publish elsewhere, which he did promptly. It became a classic and sold forever, and
nobody got hurt; but that’s why, I was told, we gave it up. We managed somehow to
keep on with Alex, and did the next book.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That’s interesting. He wasn’t ‘your’ author.
SAM VAUGHAN: No; we became friends but he was first Ken McCormick’s, and
then Lisa Drew’s author. Alex has a remarkable persistence. He wasn’t what I would call
tough-minded, because he did some things that showed he was soft; but he was durable
and persistent. That book: again, I only brought it up because it came out of the mid-
list; but all ‘phenomena’ are interesting to follow.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Is it a canard that the mid-list is shrinking? We know
that publishers are cutting back their lists.
SAM VAUGHAN: I hear it everywhere, and it’s probably true. There are a lot of
canards in publishing; but even fewer facts. I do think that the annual count of books
published in the U.S. has declined or has held steady at a lower level than it might have
been assumed. I think we were headed toward more than 50,000 new titles a year,
though I don’t think it’s gone much over that. That’s got to affect the mid-list, since
the mid-list books are most books. But I don’t know the facts. I know that the questions
are asked: Who are we going to sell it to? Do we really need this book? — questions
which, one way or another, have been asked for a long time, but are perhaps being
asked more often than they were. I’m amused by the question: “Who’s going to read
this book?” because we know so little about readers. So it seems like a sensible question,
but it’s largely unanswerable.
Who needs this book?
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Your other question though, also is interesting because
of all the directions it goes in: “Do we need this book?” Who’s we? What does “we”
mean?
SAM VAUGHAN: Yes, you’re right. The editor may say, “We certainly do.” It
may mean that she needs the book, or he needs the book, as an ornament or as a
potentially profitable part of his own individual list; or it may be that she sees a
palpable need for the book out there. For example, Larry Ashmead, my friend at
Harper, has always edited a differing stream of books, including books on what I call
“popular diseases.” I would first hear about a disease from Larry, and I would take his
word for it that there was a need for a book to help people who had it, or thought they
had it. Many books are done that way, because there is a real need. You may be
premature; very often you are late in the field.
The question of need for books is interesting because there are so many books
for which there really is a need. A lot of reading, a lot of bookselling, a lot of book
publishing, is composed of utilitarian books. My favorite example is a book near the top
of our back-list — which was a 4,000-5,000-title back-list for years — called THE ASHLEY
BOOK OF KNOTS . Now, the ASHLEY was a big, bulky book with, I suppose, every knot ever
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devised by man. We used to speculate about who was buying it. Somebody would say
“Boy Scouts,” so we’d take that as part of an answer. I was very pleased to find that
Annie Proulx used a quote from THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS for an epigraph in a chapter
of THE SHIPPING NEWS, a most distinctive novel.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Or, it could be a book like GRAY’S ANATOMY. You see it
everywhere, and all sorts of people buy it. I had a copy for years. Why? Because you
might need it.
SAM VAUGHAN: Sure. We all tried to get the distribution of the MERCK MANUAL,
for example. The RED CROSS HANDBOOKS are eternally useful. There’s a real, not very
mysterious need for so much of publishing.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I’d like to put in a word, although I’m sure I don’t
need to, for the serious or literary writers: people who write out of that other kind of
need: because there’s no help for it. They themselves say that they need to write. Or,
you’ll read a book and know that this book has to be in the world. It’s that other kind
of need, a metaphysical need, if you like.
SAM VAUGHAN: So many books are, or seem to be, written out of a need to
communicate with another human being. We all know that there’s a meeting of at least
two minds in a good book. There is so much loneliness in the world. It’s one of my
favorite themes. If a book has loneliness at its heart, it stands a good chance of finding
an audience eventually.... After all, we go through life alone. Whether we’re lucky
enough to have people around us whom we love, and vice-versa, or not, every person
walks alone. Think of the loneliness of Lindbergh, of Anne Frank, of what someone
recently observed as “the magnificent loneness” of the principle figure in THE STORY OF
O, of Quixote. THE LONELY CROWD was a work of sociology which sold rather well; but I
don’t think it was an accident. It was inspired.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: It was a late-’50s kind of book, if you want, appearing
at the end of a time, but also becoming the mark of a time. And that would be, I think,
your kind of book. It was ‘your’ book. Yes, I know you said that; but I can see why,
now, in retrospect, having learned some of the themes that interest you.
SAM VAUGHAN: I guess what we’re talking about is the need to write, and the
need to read, which are not very well summed up into simple statements. Many of the
alarms about publishing are just that: alarms. I don’t think we generally realize that
reading is not a passing fancy or an idle diversion. Reading, I really believe — or let me
say, storytelling, one kind of story or another — is a human need as basic as bread. You
don’t have to go far down the list of human needs: there’s something about the need
for story that is immense. That doesn’t mean that people have to get stories in book
form; but that’s one way to get them. As people will get stories, in whatever form they
choose to get them in, whatever form they’re available in, some will tend to move in
cyclical ways from books to movies to television to theater, and back again. We haven’t
gone back to sitting around a campfire, but nevertheless, all the traditional means of
telling stories are available. It’s only the illiterate who are really poor, in that sense.
The editor’s work
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you talk about the experience of making a
book: finding the author; having the author find you; and, if you would, describe that
whole adventure?
SAM VAUGHAN: It is that. If I liked fishing, I’d say it was like fishing. Where do
the books come from? They come from writers. One of the great sources of finding
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writers is other writers. Probably the most efficient source, because there’s less waste
when a writer recommends a writer. If your insurance man recommends his adolescent
son who has a gift for verse…. Know what I mean?
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Right.
SAM VAUGHAN: Another source, of course, is — these are all very obvious —
reading. You have the greatest excuse in the world to read all the time. You can read
anything. It’s one of my challenges to myself, still, although I should get over it: when I
pick up a magazine or a journal or a newspaper, I want to see if there’s something in
there that would lead to a writer or a book.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You have attached yourself to writers who write across
a broad range of subjects. Do you find that still true? Have you narrowed your
interests, or focused them?
SAM VAUGHAN: I’ve never wanted to be typecast as a literary editor, or a public
affairs editor, or a history editor. It’s very different than being a textbook editor, where
you’re expected to be, partly, an expert. I represent the ‘great unwashed and
unknowing.’ I cherish my amateur standing. Also, it keeps refreshing itself more that
way. I’ve often counseled younger editors who set out to be known as a literary editor
not to put too much coal on that fire alone — be it, don’t say it. Everybody has to be
economically justified, sooner or later, and you have a better chance of doing it if you
handle a range of books.
At times I’ve fallen into pockets of specialty. I did a lot of books by political
figures, for a while, not by design but because that’s the way it worked out.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: For example?
SAM VAUGHAN: Early on, I handled one of the books written by a man named
Ezra Taft Benson, who was Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture. I ‘inherited’ a
contract with him, from Adam Yarmolinsky, who was, briefly, an editor with
Doubleday. It was for a staff-written book called FREEDOM TO FARM, I believe. The book
was dull, and I’ve never been terribly interested in agriculture; but I got to know him a
little. He decided, at the end of his time there in Washington, that he would write a
memoir, which he did, because he was the only cabinet member to spend the full eight
years with Eisenhower. So I went into that Mormon household a number of times.
Mrs. Benson fed me, while I worked down in the basement on the manuscript and
photographs. We got a rather good memoir out of it, because Secretary Benson, who
was a church elder and became head of the Mormon Church, was a good storyteller.
We also got some news out of it, in that he recommended the ticket of — I think it was
— Nixon and Rockefeller, at the time: anyhow, it was a peculiar, or surprising, pairing,
because he was more conservative than anybody else in the Eisenhower administration.
I went from there to doing a book by a man named Lewis Strauss, who was the
chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and had been nominated by Eisenhower
to be Secretary of Commerce, and, for almost the first time since the Civil War, had
been denied that innocuous post by the Senate. I pursued him for a book.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Was there a reason he was denied? It was just a little
before my time.
SAM VAUGHAN: Yes. The reason was that he was a powerful friend and a
powerful enemy, and he had become an opponent of Robert Oppenheimer, and thus,
the fans of Robert Oppenheimer in the Senate. He believed Oppenheimer to be a
security risk. Oppenheimer’s principal defender was a senator, from New Mexico, I
believe, and he collected all his due-bills from his colleagues, and they denied Lewis
Strauss the nomination.
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Strauss wrote a book called MEN AND DECISIONS. It was reviewed on the cover of
the New York Times Book Review, was taken seriously, sold very well, and exposed me
to a kind of mind, and kind of person, that — again, I was about as likely to become
friends with an ex-Kuhn, Loeb banker as I was with a farmer. I liked that about politics:
it made me open my cheerfully-closed mind.
And then, it turned out that we got a contract for Eisenhower’s post-
Presidential memoirs. Ken McCormick had been the editor of CRUSADE IN EUROPE, the
book published after the war. But he was the chief editor and couldn’t spend the time
required to do these two volumes; so I got posted to Gettysburg, at age 28. It was a good
assignment. It taught me the usual lesson, which is: There are not two sides to every
story, there are 24 sides. And it exposed me to a seemingly-genial, seemingly-bland,
likable individual who had been turned out of office the way we send most of our
presidents out of office, which is, in tatters, at a low point in public esteem. He was said
to be the “chairman of the board” and “didn’t really know what was going on.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: It was not long after the U-2 incident.
SAM VAUGHAN: Not long after. And of course, he turned out to be a lot more
complex than that. I watched the process go on, which still goes on, which is: the
Eisenhower reappraisal industry. It’s become a major activity in academia. It happens
with other presidents, too.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Truman, for instance.
SAM VAUGHAN: Sure. So, that’s the kind of thing that got me into politics. I
worked with Republicans for a long time, because I was the only editor of my age and
stage who spoke Republican. Most editors were liberals and left, to whatever degree
they were left, and Democrats therefore; and so, there weren’t many editors in our
place, as middle-of-the-road as it was, that you could put with a Republican. I enjoyed
myself. I had fun.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Are you saying that you were a Republican?
SAM VAUGHAN: No. I wasn’t a Republican. And I’m not. Although my wife
thinks I am.
Eventually, I came to work with Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie, and
others; and I liked them, too. But, the experience of working on the other side of the
street, politically, was very good for me. It is the dark side of my personality that I like
politicians. How could you resist a guy like Humphrey? He overflowed with ideas and
energy and invention and compromise and ideals, and all that stew! But then,
eventually, when I edited a book for Senator Muskie, published on the day he
withdrew from the presidential race, the book not only sank like a stone, it sank
without a trace. And I’m afraid I burned out at that point. I’ve been less eager to get
back into it, and have not done much in that line.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you say more about the adventure of finding
and working with writers?
SAM VAUGHAN: When you start out as an editor, you don’t have writers. You
don’t have what they used to call ‘the following.’ All the senior editors have all the
writers, seemingly, and all the agents go to them, seemingly. But if you put out your
lines, and you exert yourself — you read a lot, you write a lot of letters, and you make
a lot of phone calls, and you see a lot of movies; you go to agents’ offices and you try to
get established, in their eyes, as a person — you eventually begin to see proposals and
manuscripts. And it becomes cumulative, so that, when you’re really an established
senior editorial person, you’re still looking, but things do come to you just because
you’re there. You get to be known for handling certain kinds of books well. Or, simply,
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because you and the agent like each other; or you like a kind of writing, and when the
agent turns up a writer in that category, you may get a shot at it. That part is fun —
sort of disorganized; not measurable.
I have some good friends among the agents, but I’ve never been quite as
dependent on agents as many editors. Not by design; it’s just the way it is.
And I love the business of commissioning a book, when you have the idea for
the book and you go out to find the writer who might want to do it.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you describe such a book or situation?
SAM VAUGHAN: When I was in the political stream, it occurred to me that the
great unwritten presidential memoir was FDR’s. And so, I talked to a friend, who was
working part-time as an editor for us, named Eric Larabee. We’ll come back to him,
because he had a wonderful expression I want to tell you about.—
Anyway, I said to Eric: “Find me somebody who might take this idea up, if it is
an idea.” He introduced me to a writer named Bernard Asbell, who had written a book
about the end of FDR’s life. We had a drink one day, and after we skirmished around
politely, Asbell said, “What do you have on your mind?” I said, “I want you to write
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s memoirs.” He said, “He’s dead.” I said, “By God you’re
right, he is.”
I said, “It seems to me that any president trying to write a memoir has to do a
certain number of things in preparation. Why don’t you just do that?” Well, Bernie
Asbell is the kind of writer who is an editor’s dream. He always gives you more than
you asked for. He did this as a kind of report to Roosevelt, saying he’d been hired to
help prepare for the memoir, and had taken the liberty of drafting some chapters.
That’s the way he got into it. He had captured the voice immaculately.
Turned out, he could only do the New Deal years; he couldn’t do the whole life
because it was just too full. So we did that book, which, thanks to Asbell, was a real tour
de force, subtitled “A Speculation on History.” What didn’t happen was what sank the
chance of doing the sequel. I expected the idea to outrage historians — and it didn’t.
They didn’t get ruffled at all.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: They probably loved it, especially the younger ones.
SAM VAUGHAN: And several senior ones, too. Well, let me tell you about
Larabee’s line, because I think it bears on so much. It has to do with, well, the
readership and, quote, marketing. He wrote an essay once called “The Imaginary
Audience.” Part of the argument was, The audience does not sit there fully assembled,
waiting for the performer. The performer assembles the audience.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That’s nice.
SAM VAUGHAN: That, to me, is a mantra. The idea that the audience is sitting
out there saying, “Send me a book about a Civil War soldier walking home from the
war, or a story about the relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II” is,
by-and-large, nonsense. The author assembles the audience; the artist does; the
musician does.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: The word of the moment, the one that goes along with
“sell,” is “branding.” It seems to me that it’s a sort of rubber-stamp idea, “branding.”
Well, Eric Larabee wasn’t talking about something like “branding,” was he? And you
aren’t? You’re talking about the artistry of it.
SAM VAUGHAN: If ‘branding’ would work in the case of books, all you would
have to do is do the same book over and over again, with variations. Some of that does
happen. Some people would say John Grisham does it, or Stephen King does it. But
that’s to underestimate the writers. Their books are never quite alike. They assemble an
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audience with certain predilections. But they’re both adventurers, in a certain way, and
they don’t get credit for taking risks. They get credit for being acts, and formula
writers, and pop stars. So, I don’t think ‘branding’ works for human beings the way it
does for soap or corn flakes.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: There’s an awful lot of talk about it, though, in
publishing, as if they think it might work.
SAM VAUGHAN: In publishing, there’s always a certain amount of rueful envy
of other businesses which are, seemingly, so logical.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And that make ‘product.’
SAM VAUGHAN: Yes, and that make ‘product.’ Ken [McCormick], the gentlest
of men, would throw a man out of the room who said “product.”
George Garrett
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You’re a senior editor; writers come to you—
SAM VAUGHAN: Yes; meanwhile, you continue to ‘trawl.’ You never give it up,
really. And that becomes so satisfying, in a way. Although publishing means having to
say you’re sorry, quite a lot. But the only thing worse than having to say you’re sorry is
having nothing to say anything at all about.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: One of the writers who came to you was George
Garrett. Would you talk about George Garrett, who, I want to say, is an American man
of letters, the genuine article, in a time, perhaps, when that occupation is under-
appreciated.
SAM VAUGHAN: It certainly is; and, to be literal, in George’s case, he’s a man of
letters written on long yellow pads with a Mont Blanc fountain pen. When you take on
George, as a friend or as an author, or both, you have to put a wing on your office to
file the letters in. They’re wonderful to have: scurrilous and libelous and funny and
generous. I don’t recall quite how we got together. The first manuscript I had anything
to do with was DO, LORD, REMEMBER ME. But I can’t tell you, at this moment, how I got to
see it.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I think he told me it was rather by accident.
SAM VAUGHAN: My facts are no more reliable than George’s, so take that into
account. [See comments from George Garrett, following.]
I think I got that manuscript in the mail, from an agent. It was kind of tattered,
beat-up. There had been no attempt to pretend it was a virginal submission. I liked
what I read, but I was uneasy about it. And then, before I did anything, which always
takes time, another version of the manuscript arrived which was just as clean and
presentable and dressed-up as I could imagine. We went ahead and published it.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You’re saying he’d done something more than erase
the marks and—
SAM VAUGHAN: I’m not even going to attempt to say what he did, because I
just don’t know.
I remember the first book in the Elizabethan trilogy [THE DEATH OF THE FOX; THE
SUCCESSION; ENTERED FROM THE SUN ]. I heard about that; not from George, I think, but
possibly. It was under contract, or under option, to a company like Appleton-
Century-Crofts, which was busy going out of business at the time. They not only
didn’t offer him a contract, they didn’t have anybody there to read it. So, it came over
to me.
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It was intimidating, because it was in three bright-orange boxes that took up
half the office. I began to read it and of course was swept away, and still am. I got in
touch with George, and we made a contract for it. I said, “George, the only editing I’m
going to do on this” — because it’s long — “is, I’m going to draw a pencil line in the
margin of any page where I fall off the rails, or fall off my chair, or fall asleep, whatever
kind of barometer: because only you know what’s really important in this book, and I
don’t know nearly as well.” So that’s what we did, apart from little dinky stuff like
chasing the inevitable repetitions, and so forth.
I had the great fortune: I knew that it was a wonderful book, and it should look
wonderful. The company I was with was not known for producing wonderful-looking
books, because a lot of books were made close to book-club specifications, cheaply-
made. Our printers had two kinds of paper. One was the cheap paper, and one was
Bible paper. If a manuscript was beyond a certain length, it got printed on Bible paper.
George’s manuscript was beyond all lengths, so we got it printed on Bible paper, which
had some finish, some feel, texture. It looked like the goods, and it was the goods.
We did the second novel in a couple of years, and the third Cork [Corliss]
Smith did, at Harcourt. I don’t know whether I had left Doubleday at that point, or
whatever had happened, but in any case, the trilogy was finished with Cork, elsewhere.
Speaking of writers as a source of writers, George is a great friend to writers.
He’s spent more of his life writing for little magazines and going to writers conferences
than almost anybody I know. He has 10,000 friends and 10,000 due-bills, things owed to
him which he doesn’t invoke very much at all. His wife, Susan Garrett, is good writer,
too.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Yes, she is: a very good writer. I loved TAKING CARE OF
OUR OWN. A fine book; and the newer one [MILES TO GO] is, also.
Hannah Green
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You are the editor of Hannah Green’s posthumous
novel. Would you speak about that?
SAM VAUGHAN: It’s not a novel, but it has a novelistic quality. Hannah Green
wrote one of the most admired novels of the time, THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE. The
posthumous book she left is quite different. For some reason, she never quite finished
it: which is part of the challenge of the moment. It was finished; but she didn’t think it
was finished, and she kept delivering it to me and taking it away. I used to talk and
commiserate with her friend and teacher Wallace Stegner about Hannah. We both
wanted to kick her hard in her fanny, because she would never finish the book. I didn’t
think she was going to die before she did: that came out of nowhere, and should have
stayed nowhere.
Anyhow, it’s a book about one day out of many seasons spent in a small village
in France, called Conques, which sounds like the conch shell: apparently, the village is
shaped like one. In that village reside the bones, or the relics, of Sainte Foy. Hannah
and Jack Wesley, her husband, an artist, used to spend part of the year in that village.
Hannah entered into a relationship, you’d have to say, with Sainte Foy; that is, Sainte
Foy was a living presence to her. Now, this was a Protestant girl, from Ohio, I think,
who was having a sort of Roman Catholic experience.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Initiation into the mysteries.
SAM VAUGHAN: I think you’re right. Actually, her love has no denomination.
It’s a total immersion into the life of a little girl who lived a long, long time ago and was
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a martyr to her faith. And so, Hannah’s written this book which is partly meditation,
partly poetry; has, I said, certain novelistic aspects; and, finally, is a love song to the
village and the people of the village. The problem — I’ve never faced it before — is, I
know how much Hannah resisted editing. Not that I edited THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE, but
I was around the publishing house [Doubleday] when it was done; I think Ann
Freedgood was the editor. But I know Hannah was very skittish about editing; polite
but nervous; and therefore, I don’t feel that I have a free hand. So, what I’ve done is
this. There are two people involved with Hannah, out of many who liked or loved her.
One is her husband; the other is a writer named Sarah Glasscock, in Texas, and whose
first novel I edited [ANNA L.M.N.O.]. I think Hannah sent it to me. So, it’s a love affair all
around. I like Jack, and I like Sarah, and I liked Hannah; and vice versa.
Sarah helped Hannah with her book by typing endless drafts or versions, and if
anybody on earth knows what Hannah’s intentions were, it’s Sarah. Having the
widower and the colleague, or amanuensis, to rely on, I did some work on the
manuscript. Then I gave it to a copy editor, named Virginia Avery. I gave her the
background of the book and said, “I don’t know how much you or I should be allowed
to do. Why don’t you edit a piece of it the way you would any other book? We’ll show
it to Sarah; we’ll show it Jack Wesley; and, if they have no problem with it, we’ll go
ahead.” And that’s where we are. Because, on the one hand, I owe it to Hannah not to
over-edit her writing. On the other hand, I owe her the duty of getting the best book
out of it that we can, which is the task of the editor of any book. Having these other
people helping to mediate the whole thing eases me immensely.
Economics of publishing
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Bill Strachan, the director of Columbia University
Press, talked to me earlier about how things have changed. [see Archipelago, Vol. 2, no.
4] Trade houses, as they really could be called once, used to build their lists from
editors’ recommendations; but now, he said, perhaps bitterly, that method has
changed. Now, in conglomerate publishing, marketers can have the final say about the
list; and in academic publishing, peer-review committees, rather than editors, can
reject books.
SAM VAUGHAN: I’m interested, as you know, in the overlap and merging of
what were once the duties and standards of university presses with what were once
trade standards, and how their borders are as shaky as the Balkans’. It works in
different ways in different houses and among the various kinds of publishers. At
Random House, the marketing people do not have the final say on which books we
publish, by and large. The editor proposes and the Publisher disposes, i.e., says yes or
no. At other houses it works the same way; at still others, the marketing voice is loud,
and in some cases decisive.
I’m not against the latter, by the way, depending on what kind of book is being
considered. With a novel, or a book of poetry, the marketing director should not
decide. Where a marketing person becomes publisher you have quite a different
situation, of course. But as publisher, a marketing person should not be only a
marketing mind, but should take the larger view. If the book at hand is a reference
book on trees, say, or Italian cookery, the marketing voice should well be quite strong,
especially when you know there are dozens of competitive titles in the marketplace
already. I’m surprised, in fact, that the marketers don’t come into the act earlier than
they do, at least here.
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But, a university press has obligations which a privately-held trade house
doesn’t have. As Bill said, I believe, some university presses publish a certain number of
regional books to pay their debt to people of the region. That’s an honorable thing to
do, and sometimes makes money. But much publishing goes unplanned. The irony is
that editors, in the conversations of others in publishing, are usually considered to be
not very businesslike, to be a bit crazy, not to be able to add up a column of figures.
That’s how we’re stereotyped.
Nonetheless, despite what is said about editors, we take full responsibility for
negotiating contracts; for working out the economics in advance, projective economics.
As for the list itself: unless there is some directive — “we will do this kind of book,” or
“we don’t do that,” which is rare — the list represents the combined interests, contacts,
and, sometimes, friendships, of the editors. I think there could be a bit more planning
involved, but I hesitate to say it, because maybe that day is coming. Many kinds of
publishing you do in a general house, for example, like tending to the back list, are
often honored in conversation, but not given very much attention. If you have four or
five good gardening books, then you ought to have a couple of gardening books in
development at all times, because if you’ve begun to publish in that niche, you want to
add to it. And it makes sense to have strength in certain categories, if not in others. So I
do think a measure of planning could be introduced in some houses. — But editors
fight organization. We’ll always think of ourselves as grossly underpaid, overworked,
misunderstood, and downtrodden. Or if not downtrodden, half-trodden; and yet
editors, like authors, like poets, are durable.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Well, poetry is durable. Editing is durable.
SAM VAUGHAN: Editors feel constantly under attack — but don’t quite get
wiped out. They go through convulsions at times, but they are like the theater: Always
dying, never quite dead.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You said a smart, interesting, amusing thing in your
Daedalus piece, about the conglomeratization of publishing. You wrote: “It seems to
me that the real risk when ‘nonbook’ people come into publishing is not that they
know so little about books, but that they know so little about money.” Would you speak
more to that?
SAM VAUGHAN: Well, an example is Harold Geneen, whom I became friendly
with when he did a book called MANAGING. Harold Geneen was the principle exponent
of conglomeratization. When he ran IT&T he owned several hundred companies. He
would meet in Switzerland, monthly, with the heads of his companies, because it was
the only way to get them together. He had a brief case for every company. Hal Geneen
said to me that he had sold off his book publishing company, because he didn’t
understand it.
Now, I don’t know who advised him on the purchase in the first place; but,
when you look at the financial history of many publishing houses, it’s no secret that, as
we are fond of saying, you can usually do better by putting your money in the bank.
Some of the great owners have been asked, in the course of their lives, “Why do you
invest your money in book publishing?” The answer is, “Because we want to invest our
money in book publishing.”
That’s a statement of a willful, independently wealthy capitalist. And if such a
one of them really wants to be in book publishing—
KATHERINE McNAMARA: —he damn well will!
SAM VAUGHAN: I had a boss once, when I was in my 20s. I got promoted. He
took me to lunch. He said, “Now, what makes you think the Doubleday family is going
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to want to be in books, ten years from now?: And I said, “Because they want to.” I was
grateful to him for making me try to think ten years ahead. I was accustomed to
thinking about ten minutes ahead.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: The conventional wisdom is that people don’t think
ten years ahead. They think two cycles ahead.
SAM VAUGHAN: That is something I’m not terribly cheerful about. The up-
and-at-’em, rattle-dazzle publishers who want to produce a good balance sheet for the
next quarter, or the next year, are thinking short-term. They’re not thinking about
whether they’re going to leave behind a publishing institution that’s worth more than
it was when they found it. And since publishing doesn’t usually respond, even
economically, to what you do in a year, or a couple of years, it’s a form of short-term
thinking in what is, at heart, a long-term activity. I think there’s a dangerous tendency
to want to make this year look good, and next year look good; and not to worry about
the people who may have to tend the garden, five or ten or twenty years from now.
That may be a sea-change in publishing. I think it probably is.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: That people are looking at the short term rather than
the long term.
SAM VAUGHAN: Yes. Not that they’re looking at the bottom line. There never
has been a time when they didn’t look at the bottom line, more or less severely, or more
or less myopically. But by putting seed-money down, it will reward you in some years
to come, not in the next quarter. Partly, the situation is aggravated by publishing
companies going public, where you have to keep an eye on the value of the stock. And
as an author once said to me, the stock market is really a paranoid schizophrenic.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: A paranoid schizophrenic gambler.
SAM VAUGHAN: Yes, right. A Barthelme.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Two Barthelmes. (laughter) [see The New Yorker,
March 8, 1999]
SAM VAUGHAN: I’ve had the luck in working for family companies, never
having to worry about what the stock was doing.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Is that true also of Bertelsmann?
SAM VAUGHAN: It seems so. Families are quirky in their own way, but, for
example, if publishers were as rapacious as we are often held to be, if we were as money-
minded as we are now held to be, books would be published much more quickly.
Because if you’re putting out millions to invest in a new list of books, you would think
you would want your money back as soon as possible. But publishers insist on taking
nine months, or ten months, or twelve months, or five years, to do a book. That’s not
very smart, economically, but it’s part of the practice of the business. I can’t
understand why someone hasn’t come in on that problem: that you can improve the
cash flow by getting the books out sooner. Authors would like it. At least at first. But
the books might get under-published, for there are reasons why the process takes a
long time, and maybe should.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I think there is a certain pressure in some quarters.
Not long ago, an editor of my acquaintance, who is young, beautifully educated, smart,
publishes very serious books, and runs the adult trade division of a far-flung
conglomerate, told me (because I asked him), that he could bring a high rate of return
— I think he claimed 15% — while publishing very good books. He did indeed publish
very good books, many of which I read. However, the question I didn’t ask, and should
have asked, was: “What books have you turned down that you would have liked to
have to have taken, because you didn’t think they would earn enough money?”
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I suspect this is a more important question, even, than I think it is. It is the sort
of question that might have to do with the mid-list authors I hear about so often,
whose third or fourth book isn’t being taken by their erstwhile publishers.
SAM VAUGHAN: It is a good question. I’m thinking about the DeLillo novel
[UNDERWORLD]. I know an editor who read it in manuscript. She said, “It’s really a very
ambitious novel, he’s really out to scoop up a whole handful of this society and culture
at this time.” You could tell that she really was quite taken by it. She is one of the very
best editors I’ve ever known. And at the end, she decided not to encourage the house
to pursue it up the auction ladder. It wasn’t because she was afraid it wouldn’t sell: she
was afraid that she might have a lot of trouble selling the book in the house after we
bought it.
You see, in effect, a book gets bought by a house more than once. The first time
is when the contract is offered. Then it goes off everybody’s screen except the editor’s,
for the year, or two years, or five, or ten, it takes the author to write it. It comes back,
and, despite the fact that you have a contract, and that the contract may be big, it has
to be sold again, in a psychological way. Now, if you’ve put out a lot of money for a
book, and everybody knows it, it makes the editor’s task a bit easier. All the flags fly
when the book comes through. But that’s for a very few books. The other books have
all cost money. But whether the book costs $50,000 or $200,000, that fact, by-and-large,
does not persuade anyone in the house. They’ve got to be persuaded by example, by
the manuscript itself, ideally. Anyhow, she was concerned that the task of selling it a
second time might not work, and she didn’t want to go through that. Scribner’s
bought the DeLillo. I think they made something of a success of it. I don’t know
whether they made of it a publication commensurate with what it cost them.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And, they don’t have a backlist of DeLillo’s books.
Everything he wrote is in print, but not at Scribner.
SAM VAUGHAN: That’s a very good point. But on the other hand, it may have
been an investment beyond the book itself, to persuade everybody that Scribner is alive
and well. There are, sometimes, those extra considerations.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Do you think that New York trade publishing is more
oriented toward, more interested in, more attentive to, the big book than it used to be?
SAM VAUGHAN: I don’t think so, Katherine. At least, not for so long as I’ve been
around. I’ve just described to you a publishing list of the early 1950s: I mentioned four
big books. I’m a typical publishing animal, so I can remember that kind of event. I had
instructions from my boss; there were two things I had to do: Get along with the sales
manager, and not overspend. I went into see my boss at the beginning of that year, and
I said, “There is no way we can do these four books, to say nothing of the rest of them,
and not overspend. So, I just want you to know.” He took that all right, because he
knew we couldn’t publish a recent ex-president, or couldn’t publish André Malraux,
or couldn’t publish a big, important book like the COLUMBIA HISTORICAL PORTRAIT OF
NEW YORK , and he couldn’t put the Ruark novel over without—
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Right. Without investing—
SAM VAUGHAN: — further in publicity, promotion, and advertising. So,
chasing the big books at some risk to the others is far from over. On the other hand, if
you don’t do that successfully often enough, you don’t have a publishing house to
include the other books. It’s commonly thought that the other books pay for the big
books. It also can be argued that the big books pay for the other books. Certainly, it can
go either way.
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In a smaller house, public or private, if they have to put out several big authors
in a hurry, the question is, how much money do they have to work with? In a bigger
house, there is seldom a real shortage of capital; but there may be constrictions on what
you can do in any year. Fortunately, not every book has to be pursued to the same
degree. You couldn’t get most authors to agree about that, of course.
The question implied is: What is publishing, if it’s not working hard to make
people know about the book? The definition of publishing Marion Boyars used, and
that I use, is: “to make known.” It’s not, To make better; it’s not, To make money: it’s to
make known. But there are ways of “making known” that don’t cost a great deal of
money. They usually cost a lot of time and effort. Because you know there are books
where you can hear the jungle drums beating, and it’s not a result of advertising.
Marketing, or selling books
KATHERINE McNAMARA: When the English publisher said, “Oh, aren’t you
market-seeking?”, were you? That is to say, I hear the word “marketing” and I roll my
eyes. Is marketing different than, say, advertising, or simply selling? What’s the
difference, now, between that, and what you were doing, when you worked for
Doubleday selling books?
SAM VAUGHAN: That’s splendid. We share the same annoyance at the word. It’s
an attempt to make grandiose what was formerly known as a series of separate
functions called selling, promoting, publicizing, advertising, packaging. The use of the
word “marketing,” I think, must have been the way, at one point, to get a raise. So, if
you’re a marketing manager, you think of yourself as much more than a salesman, or
saleswoman.
To give it its due: part of the idea behind the word “marketing” was, in its finest
manifestation, to think, not of what you have, or what you are, but: what does the
customer need, or want, or can be helped by, or provoked into needing or wanting?
That’s a perfectly decent idea; but much nonsense goes on under the heading of
marketing. It’s the subduing of importance, in a funny way, of the salesman. I’m using
“salesman” as a narrow term.
I used to know the names of all of our sales reps at Doubleday. When I started
there, we had ten or 12. We went to 30 or 35; we went to 80 or 90. I don’t know how
many they have now; but now they’re corporate sales forces: they sell for the
corporations. Therefore, editors have much less contact directly with the sales reps;
from the point of view of the editor, contact has been cut off, or cut down. We go
through what they call marketing people; and the marketing people speak to the sales
people for us, or for themselves.
The old way had its abuses. In that smaller world, you’d go into a room for a
sales conference with your reps, and you’d present the books directly to them. It used
to be said that a book could be made, or killed, in that room. There was some truth in
that. Certainly a book could be made. I saw books made, regularly, by an impassioned
presentation, or by a very good one. Whether a book could be killed: I suppose that
some books were really damaged by the process; but on the other hand, there was a
natural limitation on how negative a sales rep could be, because if he only opened his
mouth to say “The book won’t sell,” eventually, he wouldn’t be selling it, or any others.
Now I will join the chorus of the complainers. Our principal form of contact
with the sales reps is in the form of the written fact-sheet, which as somebody said, has
to be revised four times, and the audio cassette.
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KATHERINE McNAMARA: The fact sheet is not the same as the P&L, the profit-
and-loss statement?
SAM VAUGHAN: No, the fact sheet is a basic house description of the book.
Calling it a fact sheet, basically, is to glorify it, because editors don’t deal with “facts” so
much as hopes, dreams, wishes and lies. It’d make a good movie title, wouldn’t it?
That basic house description is circulated to just about everybody. We also do
an audio presentation as a supplement; but that’s all. There are meetings in which we
may be in a room with one or two or three marketing people, of whom a couple may be
in direct contact with the trade. I think something is lost there. It was a two-way
education: we learned from the reps, and they learned from us. They had the smell of
the road on them, they came into the room and slapped the dust off their chaps and
tied up their horses, and said, “The books on such-and-such are not selling.” We
might or might not accept it, but we would take it as a piece of important information;
and we were performing the traditional rite of the history of the traveler who would
come back and tell you what was going on in China.
On the other hand, some editors were wizards at presenting. There’s a
perception in publishing, now, that to present a book, they should be polished and
accomplished speakers. Well, there are a few editors who have leaped through the
barriers, to talk directly at the sales conference. But some of the best presentations I’ve
ever heard were by people who weren’t so terribly good at speaking, but who knew a
lot about the book they were doing. Jason Epstein, an editorial genius, is in many ways
a terrible presenter, but in many ways a wonderful one, because he knows what he’s
talking about and he has such strong opinions.
I remember when Jason started The Anchor Review at Doubleday, in an attempt
to run a journal along with the new line of paperbacks. He hired a couple of editors.
One of them was Nathan Glazer. I had read THE LONELY CROWD. Glazer came in with his
wild, woolly hair and his horn-rimmed glasses, and he sat up there and presented a
book. He used phrases like “wrought-iron culture.” It was like a graduate seminar, and
I was dazzled. He was the prof. I never had. And it was all part of the ferment. Nathan
Glazer wouldn’t stand a chance at a sales conference today.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Do you notice that the marketing people have come
from some place that was not devoted to books?
SAM VAUGHAN: When you work in a place like this, you notice that the
marketing people are really good readers. There’s a perception that all sales people care
about is discounts and commissions and bonuses. But I don’t know many who survive,
at least, not in a house like this, who aren’t readers, and who don’t have some basis for
their opinions. I’m not saying that all are well-read: I’ll say, They read.
Now, in the old days, sometimes the rep could be negative. But he couldn’t
make a living being negative. He might be wrong about the book, but if there’s anyone
forgiven for being wrong about the book, it’s the editor. There’s no business that’s so
forgiving of mistakes as this one.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Why would you say that?
SAM VAUGHAN: Well, how long would you last in television, or movies, or
magazines, if you make as many mistakes as we make over the course of a year or two?
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Do you mean that in editorial or commercial terms?
SAM VAUGHAN: All kinds. If you make a big, noisy mistake, say, getting a house
to pay too much for the book, that’s an obvious mistake. If you publish ten promising
first novels and none of them rise to the point of ever being more than promising,
that’s another kind of mistake. Now this is, or certainly has been, a very forgiving
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business. Everybody’s worried about profit/loss statements being shown to editors and
lashed over their bare backs. I’ve been shown profit/loss statements about my books, I
think, twice. They’re used a lot; but I haven’t had them used on me, so to speak. But
many editors will talk as if they had been routinely beaten.
Now, I don’t know about all houses. I’ve only worked really, for two. I’ve done
some books for other houses, though not from inside. If anything, publishing is really
lax, in that regard. I find it interesting, if bracing, and a little chilling, to read the
profit/loss statements on the books I’ve handled in any given year. Some books you
think have made money, haven’t; some books you think haven’t made money, have.
But you get to see the economic components of what went into publishing the book.
Doubleday used to own its own presses, still does, and, periodically, we’d be
encouraged to fly down to the plants, supposedly to see how the books were being
printed. The subterranean motive was to have us see the remainder pile. They used to
say, “Well, her novel really did pretty well, it sold 5,000 copies, and we only took 3,000
copies back.” If you walk by 3,000 copies of a book, sitting on skids, you see a lot of
paper and glue and press time, to say nothing of the author’s life. It’s a chilling
experience.
Closely-held corporations in the history of publishing
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You’ve spoken about the differences in working for
those three family-held publishing companies that were held, in fact, by different
kinds of families: the Doubledays, the Newhouses [former owners of Random House,
Inc.], and now — is Bertelsmann A.G. [present owner of Random House, Inc] a family-
held corporation? Closely-held, in any case. I’ll suggest that, possibly, the family-held,
or the closely-held, corporation is a sort of third entity, in publishing. There is the
non-profit, effectively no-profit, press. There is the publishing conglomerate. But the
third kind of publisher, the privately-held corporation, is also an interesting kind of
entity. It is larger, let’s say, than an independent press; it is a corporation rather than a
small company.
SAM VAUGHAN: I think most of the history of the two or three centuries of
American trade publishing will be spun out in the story of publishing houses which
were privately-held or closely-held. I don’t think publishers became public property to
any degree until fairly recently. Even now, I think they’ve become attractive to the
investors because they see us as being part of the media world. While we are, to an
extent, we also are not; we are related to but don’t quite blend in with the other media.
The virtue of working for a privately-held company is that you don’t have to pay
attention to the day-to-day or month-to-month vicissitudes of the stock market. This
just doesn’t enter into your thinking. But if you’re working for a big publicly-held
company and you’re watching stock prices every day, or somebody is, it does get into
your thoughts.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Or they’re watching return on investment.
SAM VAUGHAN: Yes. And, as I said to you before, it, if the acquiring company
has done their homework, and they’ve really used due diligence, they could have seen
that almost no book publishing has produced the kind of return on investment that
they desire.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And it doesn’t change. No matter what anybody does.
SAM VAUGHAN: Hasn’t for a long time.
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KATHERINE McNAMARA: What you say also implies a necessity of a very good
back list.
SAM VAUGHAN: Yes, it’s a really big part of it. Year after year, with a good back
list, the work of authors and previous publishing people shows how we go on selling
those books, and creating a cash flow irrespective of what the new books are doing,
which help you to weather the inevitable ups and downs of the charts.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you speak about your editorial relationship
with Doubleday? It was a large corporation, wasn’t it, but, also, it was owned by one
family?
SAM VAUGHAN: Yes. It was both, in a funny way, a mom-and-pop shop and a
large “impersonal” corporation. It wasn’t impersonal, but people thought it was. I saw a
piece in The New Yorker recently, about Goldman, Sachs, one of the great Wall Street
houses. A woman said to her boss there, “Look at what I sold this week.” He said to her
something like, “We don’t say ‘I’ sell things.” That’s exactly the way it was at
Doubleday. I tried never to say I published anything, because I didn’t really believe I
did. It was a collective act; but it was also part of the house culture to be respectful of all
of the other people involved in publishing, from the printers to the assistants to the
sales reps. It wasn’t just the ownership, or the editors.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Broadly speaking, do you think that’s changed? That
is to say, respect is a difficult attitude to come by, now. The notion of dignity seems to
have gone away. Do you have any thoughts about this?
SAM VAUGHAN: I admire your announced theme, or inquiry, of “institutional
memory.” Mine is as shaky as most, but I had lunch last week with Eric Major, who is
the director of religious publishing at Doubleday, which has always been an important
part of our publishing there, as it is not here [at Random House], for example. Eric
came to the States from Hodder & Stoughton in London, a house once somewhat
similar in makeup to Doubleday. I said to him, “I suppose every evidence of the old
Doubleday is gone.” He said, “Yes, it has really changed — but there are traces of it in
the corridors.” You don’t eradicate the traces very easily.
I think one of the most profound changes in publishing is, in effect, the
disappearance of family names, the name that meant a family, from the spine of the
book. Usually, when a book said Harper it meant Harper, and therefore, a kind of book;
not a rigid category, but a kind of standard. Or there was Lippincott, or Scribner’s, or
Doubleday. Lists had a shape and a coloration. Harper in the Cass Canfield-Mike
Bessie-Evan Thomas heyday had a lock on public affairs books: they published a lot of
the Democrats in office, because Cass was an important Democrat. Doubleday insisted
that it didn’t have any politics, or any religion, meaning any single one, but you could
tell the lists had a certain distinction, along with a great deal of out-and-out
commercial publishing. Nowadays, we’re all after the same books. Again, I’m over-
generalizing.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You mean you’re after the same types of books?
SAM VAUGHAN: Types of books, and, sometimes, literally the same books. You
can’t tell much about who the house is, and much about the general run of publishers,
with distinctive exceptions: New Directions, Farrar, Strauss, and, to an extent, Knopf,
but I’m still not getting at what really counts. With the disappearance of the names —
well, the names may remain but the people who bore them are not there. All of the
standards and fancies and prejudices of the people who owned the name are gone. It
used to be that, as I say, a house wouldn’t do a certain kind of book because it wasn’t
“us.” These days, I don’t see that happening. Also, there was an air in the well-known
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houses of — I don’t know if noblesse oblige is the word or not. We felt we had a duty to
publish poetry, for instance. We might or might not have had certain editors who
loved poetry, but the attitude of the house was that we published some poetry; I don’t
see that, currently, in many places.
The Publisher
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you talk about your term, or your stay, at
Doubleday? You were not only an editor, but also editor-in-chief and publisher. What
did you do you, how did you manage, that triune obligation?
SAM VAUGHAN: I think I told you I worked in several departments before I got
to editing books. I wanted to edit books; but I’m far from sorry I worked in other
departments. And, eventually, I was executive editor, which meant, in those days,
number two. I thought in due course I could become the editor-in-chief. But when the
general manager of the Doubleday division left to go to Houghton Mifflin, a man
named David Replogle (like the globes), I inquired of his superior the names on the list
of candidates. I wanted to see whether they included people I could live with. He
showed me the list and asked, “Do you want to be on it?” I said I hadn’t thought of
that. He put my name on the list, and they offered me a job as publisher.
Nicely enough, the title of publisher had not been used since the time of the
original Frank Nelson Doubleday, who founded the company. The term “publisher”
was not commonly used in trade publishing at that point, though it’s now used
everywhere. To be called a publisher was kind of an honorific; it was something people
said about you, rather than what you said about yourself. But it was so nice of them
that I accepted. It pleased the ham in me. But I said, “I will only do it if I can continue
to edit some books every year, because I don’t want to be divorced from editing. I like
the craft part of it.” So, that was the deal. I did it for about a dozen years, and then I
did become editor-in-chief, which was really a lateral move, but they wanted to get me
out of the chair I was in. And I did that for a couple of years, until I decided to leave.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I will quote to you from something you wrote:
“Among the roles of the publisher are to help console the author during the temper
tantrums, to soothe his paranoia, to stimulate him when he is blocked, and so on.”
SAM VAUGHAN: I resisted the title of publisher in part because I always felt that
the publisher was the person who put up the money. Somebody has to pay for all of
this exercise. Then I came to realize that that power or authority could be delegated to
you, so I was really delegated to spend Mr. Doubleday’s money, or the family’s money,
by investing in several hundred new books each year, and tending to that big back list I
mentioned. The way I saw the role was like how Fitzgerald, in a wonderful passage in
THE LAST TYCOON , understood the studio system. He said something like this: “You can
take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we
reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood, too, but only dimly and
in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of
pictures in their heads.”
And the equation of the publishing business is what I think I understood, and
what the publisher is asked to understand and to deal with. It is the major elements
that the publisher can affect. I liked all parts of publishing. I like the editorial job; I like
the publishing and promotion, the advertising job; I like the sales jobs. It was important
to me to give everybody a fair shake. I used to have a weekly publishing meeting, which
I was asked to run, because Mr. Doubleday wanted to be sure that everybody’s point of
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view should be represented who had a right to be heard. I had no trouble with that.
That’s the way Eisenhower ran his cabinet, and the way I don’t think a cabinet has been
run since, which is: everybody has a right to speak on any aspect they want, but in the
end, you know where the buck stops, and where you say yes or no. I liked the power, if
you will, of saying yes more than anything else about the job. I was willing to use that
power to say no. I tried to say it as rarely as possible, but you had to, sometimes. I also
liked the chance to let everybody be heard. Because when you have six or seven or
eight departments represented, you’re beginning to get a little cross-section of
America. As Mr. Clinton would say, “It’s inclusive.”
The publisher has to have some role in maintaining standards. That is, is the
book good enough of its kind? Now in a big house you can’t know all of the books, so
you have to bet on the people rather than the books.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: “The people” meaning, your people.
SAM VAUGHAN: Right. There were some people, some editors, say, who were
sponsoring books whose word I would take absolutely; and there were others I might
have some question about. But if the house has standards….
We were once confronted with a proposal to publish, or reprint, the official
Nazi Party handbook. It was so banal and so bureaucratic, so much a run-of-the-the-
mill sort of document, that it was chilling. What really pleased me was that a young
editor came into my office after our meeting. He was steamed! I thought he was going
to take my head off. He said, “You can’t publish that book!” I said, “Why not?” And he
said, “It’s a terrible book! If it gets into the wrong hands it would—” His name was
Mark Haefele. I explained to Mark that the question of that particular grotesquerie in
history had been much discussed at the time of MEIN KAMPF, when Houghton Mifflin
was offered it. They had decided to do it, but I think not without a lot of debate. I said,
“We’ve decided not to publish this Nazi Party handbook, but not for the reason you
give. Yes, it might fall into the wrong hands, but it will also fall into the right hands,
and it will show how bureaucratically, how systematically evil can be organized.”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: And why did you decide not to do it?
SAM VAUGHAN: It was a question of a crowded list, and how much attention
would we have to give it? You’d spend a lot of time explaining it away, I guess. But I
was pleased with him for caring.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Along that line, are there books or authors you passed
on that you later regret having lost, or not having chosen?
SAM VAUGHAN: Sure. I’m afraid the list would be longer than I care to
remember. One of them was just a simple business decision: I was friendly with a writer
named Jim Fixx. I knew him when he had just been fired as the editor of Life magazine.
I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “Not much, I’ve joined Mensa just for the hell
of it.” I said, “What’s that like?” And he said, “It’s not too tough. You don’t have to be
all that smart.” So I said, “You know, Jim, if you have nothing to do, we have some
interesting books on back list involving games. You might do a book of games for
super-intelligent people, who are really smart, and believe it.” He did that. He wrote a
little book called GAMES FOR THE SUPERINTELLIGENT. It sold a lot of copies, and so we did a
second.
Next, he sent a proposal for a book about running. His agent wanted some
outrageous sum of money, $25,000 or $35,000. As it happened, I knew something about
running. Now, a publisher should guard his ignorance; but I had a friend who was an
expert in running and track and field; I’d been hearing about running for years; and
therefore, I thought the running wave had come and curled and crashed. So I decided
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not to put the money up. The book became a number one best-seller for Random
House. I wrote him a letter saying, “It looks like I goofed.” That’s the type of book that
you turn down with no great issue involved. But I think you want something more
profound than that.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I am thinking for example about Mike Bessie turning
down Frantz Fanon’s THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, which is still a bit of a scandal, I
suppose, in that household. [See Archipelago, Vol. 1, No. 4] He also turned down
LOLITA . You didn’t turn down LOLITA ; or did you?
SAM VAUGHAN: LOLITA was, in effect, declined but I didn’t personally do it. Did
I tell you it had been previewed by Jason Epstein in the Anchor Review? Well, it is
interesting, because it does reflect on that “house culture” business. I first heard about
LOLITA from Jason; I think I was in sales then. He gave me the Olympia Press edition. I
read it over a weekend. I thought it was pretty interesting, not very pornographic,
certainly not terribly erotic. But the talk about it was, it was dirty. Jason was doing a
periodical then, a journal called the Anchor Review, in the Anchorbooks format. He
put a piece of it in the Anchor Review, I think to sort of test-fly it. But it didn’t succeed,
because the word had proceeded the book that it was really dirty or pornographic, so
he wasn’t allowed to do it.
Now, you take that decision for what it is; but there’s also background. Not
many years before, the same house [Doubleday] — I wasn’t there then — published
Edmund Wilson’s MEMOIRS OF HECATE COUNTY, a novel which was also accused of being
scandalous or pornographic. The house defended it in the Supreme Court, I think, or
the Supreme Court of New York State; and lost. They lost in court, and, I guess, lost on
appeal, or couldn’t appeal, I don’t know which; but the book couldn’t be sold in New
York, for quite awhile. I think that experience soured the chairman, who was himself a
lawyer. I think he had gone to the mat for the earlier book, and he didn’t want that
exhaustion and expense, and also, being typecast, again. Now, I’m giving this to you
secondhand. So, you see, there was a context for the declining of LOLITA.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: What comes to mind is that book by John de St. Jorre
about the Olympia Press, VENUS BOUND. A little sideline: I remember when The New
Yorker published the chapter from that book about Dominique Aury as being the real
author of THE STORY OF O. My husband [Lee Goerner, late editor and publisher of
Atheneum] and I were having dinner with an Italian publisher, who said, “ Why did
they publish that chapter? We all knew she was the one.” Lee and I looked at each other
and looked away. We didn’t know.
SAM VAUGHAN: I loved working with St. Jorre on his book because it was
written in so cheerful a manner. It was great fun; it was full of publishing lore. I didn’t
think it would sell very well, because the number of people interested in the backstage
lore of publishing did not seem to be enormous.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I notice that readers do seem to follow this series in
Archipelago of conversations with publishers; so I think, yes, there is some sort of
interest. I can’t put my finger on it, except that people want to know how things work.
Not necessarily technically — they want to know who these people are.
SAM VAUGHAN: I think you’re right. It’s become much more so as publishing
people get to be much more visible. It used to be part of the compact that you stayed
out of sight, that the “gentlemanly” publishers didn’t care to be identified. You were
publishing your authors; they were the ones who went public. But that has all gone by
the board. The celebrity editor is a feature of the current scene. Michael Korda’s book
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[ANOTHER LIFE] is coming out here [at Random House], and the expectation is that he
will sell very well, because he’s a good storyteller.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: He is, in a certain way, a popular writer.
SAM VAUGHAN: Yes I think that’s true, and I don’t think he is striving for any
more than that.
The editor, “retired”
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you repeat what Jason Epstein said about
retiring?
SAM VAUGHAN: The reason we were chuckling about Jason was, he said “in
retirement” he only wanted to do about eight or ten books a year. Well, if you want to
have eight or ten published books a year, you have to be working with 30 or 40 or 50
authors, because they don’t all deliver at the same time. Some authors take a year to
write a book, and some take a lifetime. Your network, or your stable, or whatever
unlovely image you use, has to be fairly sizable. This has nothing to do with the things
that come in under the heading of serendipity.
Throughout most of my working life as an editor, I felt I should produce
between ten and 20 published books a year. Some years more, some years less.
Increasingly, it’s become a matter of doing less, partly because the amount of
preparation time each book takes is much more than it used to take. You want to
produce enough books to pay your way; but you also cannot produce as many books as
you might, say, edit, because editing is not the sum total of what you do. You have to
reserve part of your time and energy for the promotion of that book, and the author
of that book, within the house, and then a certain amount of it outside the house. At
the moment, I’m only working on three or four books actively, which are in some stage
of publication or other. Ordinarily, it would be many more.
I had a book a couple of years ago by a super photographer, on pickup trucks.
If the agent had sent it to me six weeks before, I would have sent it right back. But in
the intervening six weeks, I had been West with my sons, and my youngest son was
crazy to have a pickup truck, and that dialed me into the American love of that
particular kind of vehicle. And so we did a book which was a-typical for me, and it sold
extremely well, which is a-typical for me. That’s strictly serendipitous.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: This is worth saying, too: you’ve talked about how
authors really don’t like to know that their editor is working with other writers.
SAM VAUGHAN: Ideally, not. The writer wants to think that he or she is the
editor’s—
KATHERINE McNAMARA: —the editor’s only love!
SAM VAUGHAN: He might have a couple of others, in principle. But, as one of
my authors, Fannie Flagg, says: “Don’t tell me about the others! You may have other
people, but I don’t want to hear about them, or their work!” That’s understandable. A
writer wants almost exclusivity. The writer wants prompt response, which I’ve never
been good at, but the editor who reads the manuscript overnight is beloved by his
author. There are some, like Bob Gottlieb and others, who will do that, or will do it on
occasion.
What I try to practice is what I call the ‘slap-and-pat’ theory of editing. Almost
everything that’s written needs some criticism. Almost everything that’s written needs
some praise, or deserves some praise. So you try to mix praise with criticism. Ideally,
you do it sincerely. That is, you don’t praise what you really don’t like; but you praise
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what you really do like. You don’t write 12 pages of things that are wrong, without
remembering to find something else you like, that is already right. There’s a theory of
editing that says you should read with a pencil in your hand; and there’s an opposing
theory which says you should put the pencil away. I do it sometimes one way, and
sometimes the other.
Occasionally, there is a manuscript which doesn’t need a thing. That has
happened, in the years I’ve been doing this, two or three times. I wish I could retrieve
the authors’ names: they deserve to be enshrined. There is a kind of writer who is
thoroughly professional. One of my mentors, Lee Barker, really admired the
‘thoroughly professional writer.’ The one who doesn’t whine. The one who delivers on
time. The one who delivers a clean manuscript — which used to be more of a problem
than it is now. The one who doesn’t need a lot of line-by-line work. I’ve had the happy
experience of reading something and saying, “This will do fine.” But most things —
some of the best things — do deserve some talking over and/or working over.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: In one of your pieces, you quoted Robert Giroux on
the difference between line editing and book editing. Giroux said: “The truth is that
editing lines is not necessarily the same as editing a book. A book is a much more
complicated entity and totality than the sum of its lines alone. Its structural integrity,
the relation and proportions of its parts, and its total impact could escape even a
conscientious editor exclusively intent on vetting the book line by line.”
SAM VAUGHAN: I’m still a little shocked by the fact that some editors,
apparently, feel that they only have to do the big stuff, and they leave the lines for
somebody else. You can leave it for the copy editor. I have great regard for copy
editors: they make the author and the editor respectable. But I don’t leave anything
undone on a manuscript that I think I can do, even if I overlap with the copy editor.
Now, my sense of punctuation is as erratic as the next guy’s. But some other things I
think I know something about.
One colleague of mine, Betty Prashker, said she likes to edit the author’s head:
by which she means, the kind of editing she enjoys is talking over the manuscript with
the author. That’s distinct from laying a hand on the manuscript. And I like that, too,
although I’ve never found it wholly satisfying; but it’s terribly important, and there are
some editors who seem to practice their trade that way.
Some editors are demon line-editors. The danger Bob Giroux speaks of there is,
you can spend a lot of time in the trees, and miss you-know-what. I’m beginning to
edit a novel right now. I’ve talked it over with the author. I’m now going to write him a
ruminative kind of paper, and talk it over further, because talking with him at first has
clarified his intentions, and therefore, my thoughts; and so, I’m going to do a gabby
paper which will go further with that process. Then, he will revise and extend what
he’s done, and he’ll give it to me again, and I’ll begin to edit, coming in closer on lines.
It’s kind of a long way around, but it works for him and me. I will edit it several times.
And he is a famous, very professional writer.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I can imagine how many writers will read what you’ve
just said, and sigh.
SAM VAUGHAN: There is a lot of useful wasting of time between the writer and
the editor. I told you we went last night to see this tribute to Mike Nichols, at the
Lincoln Center Film Society, and they were talking about how effective he is as a
director. He uses a lot of metaphors, he quotes from a lot of other people, and he
quotes from a lot of movies. He doesn’t tell actors how to act: he tries to put things in
their heads which will bring out the best in them. That’s analogous to a certain part of
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editing. You just have to talk for a while; or, if you can’t get together, write back and
forth, and see what erupts. By the way, the art of letter writing is not dead; it’s alive
and well.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: You like writing. It’s clear in the publications you’ve
been good enough to send me: there’s an obvious pleasure in the sentences.
SAM VAUGHAN: I do find pleasure in the play of language and ideas. I also
write, as many people have said before me, to find out what I have to say. I write to
clarify my own thoughts, or to bring some order to them. Recently, I sent a young
scholar-writer an e-mail letter, talking about her book; and, 24 hours later, sent her
another one, which turned out to be the one I should have written in the first place.
But having written a decidedly imperfect one the day before, that second one helped
me to crystallize what I really wanted to encourage her to do. And she said so; but that
was fine — she was ready to quit after the first letter, and she was happy after the
second.
The community of the book
KATHERINE McNAMARA: I’d like to ask the question, “Do we have literary
culture?” But I think I’ll alter it because I like very much your expression “the
community of the book.” Would you speak about that?
SAM VAUGHAN: Well, I don’t want to grapple with whether we have a literary
culture. It usually satisfies a need, speaking of needs, of certain writers and publishing
people to think we have a culture that is antagonistic to the writer, to the poet or
painter. But, quite apart from that, to whatever degree it’s true or false, we do have a
community of the book. If you take the librarians and the teachers and the booksellers,
and the writers and the editors and publishers of all stripes, and the people connected
with the process at one remove, the printers or sales reps: they all, when you press
them against the wall, would say they are in favor of the book. There’s a kind of
friendliness toward the book; there’s still a kind of respect that the book doesn’t always
deserve. Even though we don’t elevate our writers to the status of the National
Academy of France very often, there’s still a kind of automatic respect for the book —
which I think we are eroding, by the way, with promiscuous publishing and
promiscuous writing. But it’s still there.
KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you illustrate what you just said?
SAM VAUGHAN: Well, at the moment, I’m very conscious about having read last
week a book-industry study-group report which says that the sales of the general trade
books are off by three percent from the previous ye
