The Thinker and the Doer

It works like a normal kitchen--the refrigerator and dishwasher are where they ought to be. But Bram and Sandy Dijkstra also have a few extras--a solid wall of oil paintings above the stove.

“It’s the result of our needs as collectors to find places to put things,” says Bram, 58, heating up coffee in an actual pan in their rebelliously microwave-free zone. “One thing we did was put a huge suction thing on the stove that zaps everything out, and we turn it on when we cook.”

Bram’s wife, Sandy, calls their home a salon refusee because of their thrifty taste for representational paintings jettisoned by museums.

“American museums have this fascination with what’s in, so inevitably what they do is collect certain things that are in at a certain time,” Bram says. “And when it goes out of fashion, they sell it again.”

“We just really follow our own eye,” Sandy says. “That’s how I operate as an agent.”

Sandy, a literary agent known for discovering big-name talent such as Amy Tan, and her cultural historian husband Bram would rather not surf the prevailing waves around Del Mar, their home for 25 years. Indeed, they’re still fighting the good radical feminist fight in an era and area where even “liberal” can be a four-letter word.

Erstwhile Berkeley activists, Sandy shepherded Susan Faludi’s “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” (Crown, 1991) to the marketplace, as well as Bram’s latest provocative entry to the field of women’s mythology, “Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood” (Knopf).

“I’m interested as an agent in sponsoring books that have humane values, and which are pro-life in the best sense as opposed to pro-death or pro-repression,” Sandy says, an acolyte of New Left political philosopher Herbert Marcuse when he was at UC San Diego. “Unfortunately, because I think publishing has come closer and closer to entertainment, all of us are in some sense guilty of seeking what is hot, and in the interest of hot, oftentimes the anti-humane, the shocking, the ugly, the grotesque is what we’re encouraged to bring to market. And I try to resist that.”

Berkeley historian David Reid, Sandy’s client, says she still wears her political colors despite her foray into the big leagues of publishing.

“She was a firebrand during the ‘60s,” Reid says, “and I don’t have the impression that worldly success has in any way moderated her political views, to which I say, good for her.”

But Sandy’s firebrand personality has also earned her a double-edged reputation in publishing. On the one hand, she’s regarded by many as the most powerful literary agent on the West Coast--a laurel New Yorkers nonetheless regard as “like being the best Ivy League football player,” in the words of Dan Max, former publishing columnist for the New York Observer.

On the other hand, she got there in part by being a pushy, hard-driving West Coast outsider unafraid to rewrite the rules. Some agents say Sandy is known for being difficult to deal with. One writer briefly represented by her, Kate Braverman, says Sandy’s brusque manner has verged on “cruelty.”

Some rally to her defense, such as HarperCollins Executive Editor Larry Ashmead, who says, “I have high regard for Sandy, although I know other people might disagree with me. I have always found her very inventive, creative, original and fair to deal with.”

Max says fewer publishers are gnashing their teeth about Sandy these days because her success has aligned her with the status quo.

“She has been mainstreamed, whereas several years ago she was kind of a guerrilla fighter on the margins,” Max says. “Now the kinds of things she used to do have either become more commonplace or she has ceased to do them.

“One thing about publishing is that with each generation of new agents, the rules change. People yell about how they’re behaving--not just her but also [maverick agent] Andrew Wylie. And then the industry moves with them. Because if you have the writers you can make the rules.”

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Interestingly, Bram’s book, in sandblasting the roots of gender stereotypes, takes on the culture’s hostility to strong women. “In almost every instance,” he writes, “contemporary male attitudes hostile to successful women still express the convenient premise that such women resent being castrated males. Women who . . . try to do a ‘man’s job’ are disparaged as ‘ball breakers.’ ”

Did he have any particular beleaguered successful woman in mind?

“Moi?” Sandy pipes up, perched on a beige leather couch in their airy art-lined living room. A petite woman with a short shock of graying hair and a crisp manner, she bolts from phone call to phone call before settling in for the interview.

Bram, a comparative literature professor at UCSD since 1967, is totally nonplused. “In financial terms, I’m completely nowhere,” he volunteers matter-of-factly, mere steps from the swimming pool Sandy has dubbed her “Joy Luck Pond.” “I’m nonexistent compared to Sandy.”

“Publisher’s Weekly just gave him the ultimate challenge,” Sandy says. “The cover line on Publisher’s Weekly for the profile of him was ‘Bram, the other Dijkstra.’ ”

“Things like that don’t faze me at all,” says the soft-spoken Bram.

Indeed, the couple of three decades seems comfortable with their untraditional division of labor, with their swapping of prescribed doses of yin and yang. They call theirs a marriage of opposites. Sandy says Bram is calm and she’s volatile (later she amends that to passionate). He’s a loner. She’s a schmoozer. He’s a thinker. She’s a doer.

Bram: “I would characterize myself as someone who thinks about things and ponders them and. . . .”

Sandy: “Before he’s finished the sentence, I’ve sent the fax.”

Bram: “Here’s a great example. I’m still formulating the sentence, and Sandy has already finished it.”

Beyond the differences are the similarities, their shared appetite for ideas, politics and art, which sends them on vacation hunts for obscure galleries.

“They went from Berkeley in the ‘60s to Del Mar in the ‘90s while continuing to share the same passions and interests,” Reid says. “That’s one thing that’s kept them close.”

*

They were graduate students when they met at Berkeley in 1963. Sandy, born in the Bronx, was studying French literature. Bram, born in Indonesia of Dutch parents, was an aficionado of American pop culture, from jazz to comic books. They met at an English department party, even though Sandy was in comparative literature.

“I crashed,” she says.

Bram pretended to think she was French. What he really thought was that Sandy was a flirt and that he would never call her.

“I came home, called my sister and said, ‘I met the man I’m going to marry,’ ” Sandy says.

She was right, as it turned out.

“I told him on our first date that we would get married,” Sandy says. “It’s truly amazing. We knew each other for two weeks. I went off to Mexico with my sister, and I returned on New Year’s Day and he proposed. And we married a month later.”

Bram had always been surrounded by strong women growing up in Indonesia. His father, a tin mining engineer, was imprisoned in a Japanese-run concentration camp for Dutch colonials during World War II, and he lived only a couple of years after his release.

He grew up in “a house full of women,” his mother and three sisters, to whom he dedicates his latest book--they “taught me early that to underestimate women is to play the fool.”

“It never even occurred to me that there would be a difference in valuation between what women or men did,” Bram says. “So when I got to be a teenager I got to see all these anti-feminine prejudices among the boys I was growing up with” in Holland, where his family moved when he was 10.

As an academic years later, Bram decided to investigate the source of those prejudices. The older sibling of “Evil Sisters” was Bram’s earlier “Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-Siecle Culture” (Oxford University, 1986), which first raised the ideas explored in his new book.

Analyzing misogynistic images of women in turn-of-the-century European painting, Bram was already linking men’s paranoia to the imprimatur of science. Gender stereotypes were considered higher forms of evolution, and sexual women were demonized as vampires eager to rob men of their money and mental powers because brains were believed to consist of semen. Ezra Pound described the organ as “a great clot of genital fluid.”

“Idols of Perversity,” generally well reviewed, was called “witty and rewarding” by the New Republic.

“It certainly was very bold, lively and imaginative,” says Wendy Martin, English department chair at the Claremont Graduate School. “It was the first study I was aware of that looked at what seemed at the time an arcane subject--vampires. It sparked other studies. That whole notion of consuming the blood as a metaphorical framework is potentially quite interesting.

“It has become a vogue, the fin-de-siecle preoccupation with vampirism, and I think he pointed to that. He was a pioneer in the field of vampire studies.”

“Idols of Perversity” did set off some critics who bristled at Bram’s radical conclusion that misogyny was linked to the rise of Hitler.

“At the time a lot of critics said, ‘It’s a very interesting book, but he sort of goes off the deep end by saying that at the end,’ ” Bram says. “So I set out to prove that particular statement, and that’s the most striking aspect of ‘Evil Sisters.’

“I’m not saying that sexism created racism or that sexism was the cause of genocide. I’m saying that the metaphors of superiority and inferiority in the gender realm made it much easier to find a reason to consider certain races inferior and others superior, and to then develop notions of genocide on that basis.”

Bram argues that even though the original “scientific” basis for gender and race stereotypes was discarded long ago, they infiltrated popular culture and still persist, from Theda Bara’s vamps to Hollywood’s dumb blonds to the sharp-fanged vagina dentata of the she-monster in “Alien.”

“You could say the scientific theorist is like a man who makes someone pregnant and walks away,” Bram says.

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“Evil Sisters” fits nicely into the intellectual branch of Sandy’s literary bank, but she’s probably better known for carving out a swath of Asian American writers. After Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club” (Putnam, 1989) spent nine happy months on the New York Times bestseller list, word-of-mouth attracted such other notables as Maxine Hong Kingston, Anchee Min, Lisa See and Le Ly Hayslip.

“For me the ‘90s was like the ‘60s, in the sense that the ‘60s was the epoch of the Jewish writer, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow,” Sandy says. “And now in the ‘90s, it’s the Asian American writers, now second generation. It’s very exciting to see what they’re producing.”

Sandy discovered Tan when she was a trade journal writer in San Francisco with one short story published in Seventeen. Sandy called her, commissioned a couple of stories, and parlayed them into a contract for “The Joy Luck Club.” What’s more, she held out for a $50,000 advance--healthy for a first-timer--so Tan could quit her day job and write.

Ashmead says mining new talent is Sandy’s forte. “She’s really good at that,” he says. “I think that comes from having an academic background but also being able to see who can write popularly.”

Sandy was teaching English and American literature at UCSD when she happened to sell a friend’s book 18 years ago. Voila. With her biological clock about to go off five years later, Sandy decided to give birth to an agency instead.

“To be an agent, I don’t know if it’s a calling, but it’s certainly a life,” says Sandy, who gives her age as “the age of reason.” “It takes all of you.”

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Sandy’s academic genealogy is another dimension to her outsider persona, a status she frankly relishes. Not growing up inside the book business, and not being geographically correct enough to go to the Hamptons with publishers, Sandy has perhaps worried less about alienating them.

“I just fight for what I believe in, and I guess I’m passionate about that,” she says. “I think I’m reasonable but then my reasonableness is predicated upon my goals, which are to do well for the authors.”

Sandy ignited a hoo-ha four years ago, when she shopped around Faludi’s proposal for her second book, “The Man Question,” described as an exploration of “what men want.” Rather than stay with “Backlash” publisher Crown, which was admired in the industry for the way it shepherded the book to market, Sandy shopped around the proposal. Several miffed publishers boycotted the auction, although the Hearst Book Group reportedly anted up a winning bid of $1.5 million, somewhat more than the $1.25 million offered by Crown.

“She was really brazen about it,” says one industry observer. “She didn’t even pretend that she was playing by the rules.”

Sandy says the incident was “blown out of proportion. The house felt it made her a bestseller and therefore it owned her on its terms. I don’t work for Random House Inc. I work for the authors. The Susan Faludi thing sent a message to the industry that I know for whom I work, and that in essence was what was controversial. Because I didn’t behave like a member of the club.”

Max also says the rules were written to favor publishers.

“Over the last 30 years, they have steadily been eroded, so we have in effect a free-agent situation, and certainly Sandy is partly responsible for that,” Max says. “Sandy has really proven the truth that yesterday’s rebels are today’s conservatives.”

But Braverman says Sandy’s talk about putting writers first is just that. She says that Sandy gave her short shrift after failing to sell a novel to 10 publishers, and that she refused to send the draft to less lucrative small presses.

“She said, ‘Those people in New York don’t share your politics.’ She said, ‘I’m a real feminist like you.’ She gave me the Berkeley political thing.

“Two weeks later, I’m still in bed with spinal meningitis. She said, ‘It’s over.’ I said, ‘I almost died during this experience with you.’ She said, ‘It’s Pete Wilson’s wife on the other line,’ and she hung up on me. The song and dance about politics and feminism is an out-and-out fraud.”

Sandy says she did pitch the book to small presses among others.

“I went out with it to 25 publishers and unfortunately they didn’t share my passion for it,” she says. “I thought it was quite brilliant, but you can’t make the market do something it didn’t want to do. It says something about trade book publishing and how narrow it has become.”

Sandy says she’s still following her own eye as an agent, even if it means updating the good fight to the ‘90s.

“My motto is to make capitalism work for my authors,” she says, “and I would think this is one of the more humane forms of capitalism, the literary business.”

* RELATED STORY

Hal Marienthal reviews Bram Dijkstra’s “Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood” on page 8 of Book Review.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Bram Dijkstra

Age: 58.

Native?: Born in Indonesia, now lives in Del Mar.

Family: Married to Sandra for 32 years.

Passions: Art, music and literature.

On the presence of the past: “I’d rather deal with what I see in history. I think that one of the big problems with the American way of doing things is that famous Henry Ford statement, ‘History is bunk.’ It’s still operative in the case of most people.”

The lady is a villain: “I would say that probably eight out of 10 murders in the movies are committed by women. In the hard-boiled detective films from the ‘40s and ‘50s in particular, it’s always a woman who, if she isn’t the actual murderer, she drives the man to do it.”

On Sandy’s contribution to “Evil Sisters”: “She said, ‘Why don’t you shut up and start writing,’ and in order to make me write, she sold the book.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Sandra Dijkstra

Age: “The age of reason.”

Native?: Born in the Bronx, now lives in Del Mar.

Family: Married to Bram for 32 years.

Passions: Work, reading and art.

On Bram’s feminist credentials: “He’s a feminist male rather than a male feminist. I think a male feminist would be politically active in the feminist movement, but a feminist male would be a male with feminist ideas.”

Her mother on motherhood: “She understood we had a fantastic relationship and a great life, and she said, ‘Why would you want to mess it up? You’re so happy the way you are. Children are going to take you in another direction.’ ”

On who really pays the bills: “I think that what happens between agents and publishers too often is buddy-buddy. They vacation together and the agents forget for whom they work. And being out here you remember for whom you work.”