The Worm in the Book World

I’ve been in the book business for 35 years, although until recently I didn’t know it. I thought I was a writer. Of late, editors, publishers, literary agents and booksellers have set me straight.

This is how it all began:

In the early 1950s, working at the New York Times as a copy boy, I began my first novel, and it was accepted for publication by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. I received an advance of $1,000--I was thrilled. Ted Purdy, the editor-in-chief, took me to lunch at the Yale Club. He said: “We believe in bringing a writer along slowly, book by book. You keep writing what you think is right for you. We’ll keep publishing it. Don’t worry about sales and money. They’ll come to you--and us, we hope--over the years.”

The Yale Club was a properly austere place to voice such thoughts. I was inspired but not surprised, for at Cornell I had studied under Vladimir Nabokov and sat at the feet of Dylan Thomas when he visited to read his poetry and bed the stray coeds. I knew what a noble calling I had chosen.

Blushing, I muttered appropriate vows and shook Ted Purdy’s hand. He was my editor and Putnam my publisher, I believed, in the same way that Maxwell Perkins and Scribner’s had been for Hemingway and Fitzgerald. I was part of a grand tradition. Like every young writer, all I wanted was to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Thirty-five years down the road, there’s still a way to go. And the grand tradition is now exemplified by the following letter of rejection, sent this past summer by the vice president of a major publishing house to the agent of an old friend I will call Mr. X:

“It is with abject apologies that I am writing now regarding Mr. X. . . . He has written such a beautifully executed and highly original novel--and such a terribly difficult one to sell in these absurd times.

“I can see this garnering magnificent reviews and no sales because . . . it has become so difficult to generate a sales momentum on quality fiction. I think this is the kind of book that deserves to be important on someone’s list . . . I would love to know who the clever editor and the smart house are who buy this.”

How did we get from Ted Purdy’s fine cadences in the Yale Club to “these absurd times”? (And why do the times always get blamed for the attitudes of those who inhabit them?)

It didn’t quite work out with me and Putnam. Walter Minton, the publisher, brought out my youthful novel with a bright bold note on the front cover that said: “Guaranteed to please you--or exchange for another book.” Thrilled no more, I had words with Walter. Putnam became my ex-publisher.

I still wanted to recapture the dream and stay with my theoretical latter-day Max Perkins and Scribner’s, but the editors wouldn’t cooperate. They kept moving to other publishers in a quest for more exciting stock options.

With my third novel, I wound up at McGraw-Hill under the editorial wing of a Cornell chum, Bob Gutwillig, but he soon left for a better deal at a paperback publisher. He was replaced by Frank Taylor, a literate man that I grew to love; but he left too. I stayed on against the current, as it turned out, for writers were peripatetic in the ‘60s too, hunting for higher advances and better paperback-royalty participation.

Around that time, literary agents clawed their way to positions of new influence and power. Swifty Lazar, a Beverly Hills-based agent, set the trend with a book by Irving Wallace; Swifty conducted what I believe was the first significant big-bucks book auction among hardback publishers.

In the following years, such auctions, and the multiple submissions that usually preceded them, became de rigueur. One heard, for the first time, the phrase: “a six-figure floor.” We writers and our agents salivated. We didn’t grasp what was to follow.

Conglomerates began buying trade-book publishing houses, although authors and editors never could figure out why; we knew how ridiculous these small companies were as modern business enterprises, for these were the days of the three-martini lunch and that special relationship between publishers and semi-destitute authors desperate to finish their next books.

Indeed, in 1967, after my New York apartment and most of a manuscript about the Six-Day War burned to ashes on a winter night, I hurried to lunch with Frank Taylor, stuttered and finally begged, “Can Mother McGraw advance me another $5,000?” The sub-rights editor soon complained in a memo to Frank, “He’s treating us like a bank!” Frank replied, “I think that’s acceptable in our profession,” and later said to me, “Publishing is still struggling to find a way into the 20th Century, for which we can all be grateful.”

He was fired soon afterward. Disgruntled, I opened myself up to a fantasy named Howard Hughes, and we needn’t go into that again.

Onward into the ‘70s, when there was big money around for everybody in the book trade, especially writers who were willing and able and crazy enough to dash from one end of the country to the other on “the tour,” hawking their wares on radio and TV. Paperback houses began to resemble high-rollers at Las Vegas crap tables; the Micheners, Robbinses, Ludlums and Krantzes raked in the chips. Publishers merged, gobbled up their kin, were in turn gobbled up by more of the conglomerates. Buyers for the burgeoning bookstore chains began to speak of a writer’s “track record”--can she break 50,000 (copies) this time out?

The ruler of one major publishing house convened his Tuesday editorial meeting and said, “I have an idea for a blockbuster Mafia novel based on ‘Macbeth.’ Which of our saleable authors is between books and can do it?” An entire publisher and divisions of a few others were founded to churn out romantic fantasy novels, and Xeroxed “bibles” (lists specifying what the hero and heroine could and couldn’t do, by what page they take off their clothes, etc.) were handed out to the creators of such bilge.

By the ‘80s, a new word began to be heard: midlist . “It’s a midlist book” was publishing’s equivalent of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s “Point of order!” back in the ‘50s--its utterance could cast a pall over a lunch taken even at the Four Seasons. Midlist meant, “Not imitative or mundane enough to qualify as a popular best seller, not literary or pretentious enough to qualify as a succes d’estime , and not written by a celebrity.” If you were a writer and heard the word “midlist,” or glimpsed it unsaid in your agent’s compasionate eyes, you could start hunting for a teaching job or elect to live in the mountains of Mexico.

And so we come to the ‘90s, when the book business, nee publishing, has solidified its foothold in the 20th Century and become a mainstream industry. Not only is a publisher’s sales department usually consulted before an editorial decision is made, they also often cast the decisive vote. Quo vadis, litterae scriptae?

Last year I read a first novel of such philosophical and narrative muscle that at times, literally, it took my breath away. I was so moved by it that I wound up marrying the author, an Englishwoman named Maureen Earl. And of course I began recommending the manuscript, “Gulliver Quick,” to publishers.

All rejected it. A veteran editor at Houghton Mifflin said, “I love it. I want to do the book, but it’s a non-category novel and I can’t convince the powers-that-be.” From Putnam: “. . . it does not slip easily into a likely category. While that mold-defying aspect is to its credit, I’m afraid it presents some problems in trying to position it for publication.” An editor at Zebra lamented: “I’d like to take this book to my writing class to show them what good writing is,” and her co-editor explained: “The only fiction we’re doing this year is by Steve Allen.”

I sent it to my English publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, since in my experience the English rarely seemed quite as commercial as my countryfolk. But this disease also had leaped across the Atlantic. “We’re enthusiastic,” Hodder’s managing director said on the telephone from London to Mexico (on my peso, no less), “but it’s awfully difficult these days to launch a first novel. Our sales force isn’t keen.”

“Who’ll be writing our literature in the 21st Century,” I asked, “if no first novels are published in the ‘90s?”

Apparently he didn’t think that remark was cricket. He faxed back: “The enthusiasm that we have must not delude us into thinking that, irrespective of quality (sic), that can be converted into strong sales . . . . Admiration does not mean that we have an obligation to publish.”

I have a new English publisher now.

Are publishers satisfied only if they can publish in categories, or promote solid sellers like Danielle Steel, Elmore Leonard, Scott Turow, John Updike and their equivalents? Is the new publishing slogan to be “Millions for Cosby and Not One Cent for Tribute”? That’s the feeling one has here in the trenches of the book business, where, like it or not, I now realize I am.

Well, I don’t like it. I dreamed of better. I think we all did.

The infection is deep, in the body of society. The book world should be battling it, not helping it propagate. If the novel is on its way to becoming a commodity, like a new dog food, or an entertainment product, like a sitcom, and if that troubles you--book reader, editor, writer, reviewer, critic, get up on your hind legs, bark and snarl, before we become one with the disease.