13 Writing and Publishing
I knew she was crazy the moment she entered the room. It was a miserable November day, snowing and blowing, when a woman with a round face, rosy from the bitter cold, wearing a long raincoat and a hat trimmed with big bright cherries burst into the old Seven Stairs and almost ran me into the fireplace.
“Are you Mr. Brent?” she cried. She was fat and dumpy and she now took a deep breath and stood on tiptoe, running the tip of her tongue across her lips.
“I am,” I said, backing away behind the desk.
“Oh, Mr. Brent, a friend of yours sent me. I teach her children at the Lab school, and she thinks you’re a wonderful man. And now, seeing you, I think so, too!” She breathed deeply again. “I have a wonderful book, a divine book, that will change everything ever written for children. You must be the first to see it. I’ve brought it along.”
With this, she removed the long raincoat and began peeling off one sweater after another. I remained behind the desk watching the sweaters pile up and thinking, if she attacks me I’ll make a break for the stairs and yell for help.
Finally she started to undo a safety pin at one shoulder, then at the other, and then she unbuttoned a belt about her fat waist. These apparently related to some kind of suspension system beneath her dress, for she now pulled forth, with the air of a lunatic conjurer, a package wrapped in silk which she deposited on my desk and began to unwrap ever so delicately. She did have lovely long fingers.
As the unwrapping proceeded, her mood changed from hysterical exuberance to one of command. “Take this cover and hold it,” she directed, her lower lip thrust out aggressively. I held the cover while she backed off and unfolded the book, her eyes fixed upon me with a wicked gleam.
“This book shows something no other book has ever dared to do,” she said. “It shows the true Christmas Spirit. Look carefully and you’ll see the new twist. Instead of showing Santa Claus coming down the chimney, I have shown Santa coming up the chimney! Furthermore I’m prepared to make you my agent. I’ll work with you day and night. Are you married? No? I thought not. My dear boy, we’ll make ecstasy together and be rich!”
It was a delicate situation. I told her I did not think she should let the manuscript out of her hands, but in the meantime I would think of some publisher who might be interested in a new twist about Santa Claus.
Without another word, she wrapped up the book, pinned it back to her stomach, strapped the belt about her, piled one sweater on after the other, put on her hat and raincoat, and backed away like a retreating animal until she hit the door. Then, still staring at me, she slowly turned the knob, flung open the door, and fled into the cold November morning. Her poor soul haunted me for days.
Long before I was known to anyone else, I began to be sought out by people who wanted to write, or had written and wanted to publish, or had even gone to the futile expense of private publication. There was an October night when I was nearly frightened out of my wits, while sitting before the fire at the Seven Stairs, by the sudden appearance of a tall young man with a black hat pulled far down over one eye and a nervous tenseness that warned me immediately of a stick-up. His opening remark, “You’re open rather late,” didn’t help any, either.
I remained uneasy while he looked around. Finally he bought two records and a volume of poetry, but he seemed loath to leave. He had a rather military bearing and handsome, regular features. For some reason, it struck me that he might have been a submarine captain. Presently he began talking about poetry and told me he had written a volume that was privately printed. A few days later he brought in a copy. The verse was much in the vein of Benton’s This Is My Beloved. He wondered if I would stock a dozen of them on a consignment basis. I agreed. Why not? When he left, he said cryptically, “You’re the only friend I have.”
Months passed during which I heard nothing from him. Then one evening I saw a newspaper picture of my friend aboard a fine looking schooner tied up at the mouth of the Chicago River. He was sailing to the South Seas in it.
He came in a few days later to say goodbye. Of course I had failed to sell any of the poetry, so he suggested I keep the books until he returned from his voyage. As we shook hands, he was still tense and jumpy. A few months later he was dead, shot by a girl he had taken along. I had just recovered from reading the sensational press accounts of the tragedy when I received a phone call from the late poet’s uncle, who said, “I know about your friendship with Jack and would appreciate it if you would give the reporters an interview as we absolutely refuse to do so ourselves.” Before I knew it, I was being quoted in the papers about a man I had scarcely known and a book I couldn’t sell. The girl in the case got some engagements as an exotic dancer after her release from a Cuban jail, but the affair did next to nothing for the book. Not even a murder scandal will sell poetry.
To everyone who brings me his writing, I protest that I am not an agent. But often it is hard to turn them away. There was the little gnarled old man with a few straggly long grey hairs for a beard who came in clutching a tired, worn briefcase. His story of persecution and cruel rejection was too much for me. “Let me see your book,” I said. The soiled, yellow pages were brought out of the case, along with half a sandwich wrapped in Kleenex, and deposited gently on my desk. The manuscript was in longhand. It purported to tell the saga of man’s continual search for personal freedom.
“How long have you been writing this book?” I said.
“All my life,” he replied. He had once been a history professor he assured me.
“And what do you do now?”
A kind of cackle came out of him. “I am a presser of pants.”
“And how did you come to bring this to me?”
“I watch you on television every morning.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m no publisher, but leave it with me. I’ll try reading it over the weekend. When you come back for it, maybe I can tell you what to do next.”
Or there was the woman who had written inspirational poetry since she was ten. She had paid to have one volume of verse printed, and now she had another. “This volume is for my mother,” she said. “She is very sick. If I could get it published, I think it would help her. But I don’t have the money to pay for it.” And her voice trailed away into other worlds. She worked nights at a large office building. During the day, when she wasn’t caring for her sick mother, she wrote poetry.
“May I see it, please?” And now I was stuck. “Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do.” Of course I could do nothing. But how could I tell this fragile, helpless creature that even great poetry is unlikely to sell two thousand copies? I recalled Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann once saying to me: “A good analyst must always have a rescue fantasy to offer.” But I am not an analyst, rabbi, priest, or even a Miss Lonelyhearts.
A young man, hate and rebellion written terribly across his face, accosted me unannounced and declared: “I’ve watched you on TV. You sound like a right guy. Here’s my book. Find me a publisher. Everybody’s a crook these days, but maybe you’re not. Maybe you believe what you say. Well, here’s your chance to prove it!” Then he rushed out, leaving the manuscript behind and me yelling after him, “Hey, wait a minute!” But he was gone.
It is not merely the poor and downtrodden or the hopeless nuts who seek fulfillment through publication. “If you can get my wife’s book published, I’ll give you ten thousand dollars,” a wealthy customer told me. Another said, “Get this book published for me and I’ll buy five thousand copies!” Another, who had certainly made his mark in business told me, “If I can get published, all my life will not have been lived in vain.”
Touching and even terrifying as these thwarted impulses toward expression may be, virtually every example turns out to be deficient in two ways:
1. It is badly written. 2. Its philosophic content is borrowed instead of being distilled from the writer’s own experience.
The second error is also a glaring defect in the work of many practicing and commercially successful novelists. For example: the writer who, in drawing a neurotic character, simply reproduces the appropriate behavior patterns as described in psychoanalytic literature. The result may be letter perfect as to accuracy and tailor-made to fit the requirements of the situation, but the final product is nothing but an empty shell.
In any event, a real writer is not just someone with a fierce urge or dominating fantasy about self-expression. He may well have a demon that drives him or he may find a way to knowledge out of the depths of personal frustration. But before all else, he is someone who has a feeling for the craft of handling the written word and the patience to try to discipline himself in this craft. The main thing to remember about a writer is that he makes it his business to put words together on a sheet of paper.
Beyond this, he may be any sort of person, of any physique, of any age, alcoholic or not, paranoid or not, cruel or not, drug addicted or not, horrible to women and children or not, teach Sunday School or not, anything you please. He can even engage in any vocation or profession, as long as he keeps going back to his desk and putting words together. He can be wealthy or have no money at all, and his personal life can be perfectly average and uneventful or utterly unbelievable. Just as long as he really works at words.
The level of his intention and his art may vary from writing for the newspapers to plumbing the depths of experience or pursuing some ultimate vision, but within the range he undertakes, the discipline of words calls also for the discipline of values, intelligence, emotion, perception. Writers who are serious about their business know these things, and the difficulties they present, too well to have to talk about them. In all my conversations with writers, I can recall few instances in which anybody ever talked directly about the art of writing.
In the case of professional writers, I have acted more often as a catalyst than as a volunteer agent. For example, I abused as well as prodded Paul Molloy, the prize-winning columnist of the Chicago Sun-Times, until he turned his hand to a book. The simplicity and sincerity of his style has an undoubted appeal, as the success of the book, And Then There Were Eight, has proved. I am sure he would have written it anyway, ultimately, but even a fine talent can use encouragement.
I have also found it possible to help another type of writer—the expert in a special field who is perfectly qualified to write a type of book that is greatly needed. During the period when my psychiatric book speciality was at its peak, I became aware of the need for a single giant book on the whole story of psychiatry. Dr. Franz Alexander, then Director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, was the obvious choice for such a monumental undertaking. No other great authority was so widely respected outside his particular field—not only among those in other “schools” of psychiatric thought, but among workers and scholars in every area concerned with the human psyche.
Dr. Alexander was the very first student at the Institute of Psychoanalysis founded by Freud in Vienna. I loved to listen to Dr. Alexander reminisce about his relationships with Freud and the original Seven and especially admired his view of the relationship of modern psychoanalysis to Spinoza’s philosophy of the emotions. He was one of the few men I had encountered in this field who had a thorough background in philosophy. When I broached the idea of a monumental compendium, embracing the total field of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, historically and technically, he at first hesitated, then finally agreed—if the right publisher could be interested and if a fairly large advance could be obtained to help with the extensive research that would be involved.
Shortly thereafter, while on a trip to New York, I had lunch with Michael Bessie of Harper and Brothers and explained the idea to him. He was very much taken with it, and within a few weeks all of the details were worked out to Dr. Alexander’s satisfaction. The work is still in progress, Dr. Alexander having retired to California to devote the greater part of his time to its completion.
Other books which I also managed to place for Chicago analysts were Irene Josslyn’s The Happy Child and George Mohr’s Stormy Decade, Adolescence.
But what of the young man or woman who has determined to devote himself to the difficult craft of writing, who has beaten out a book to his best ability, and is looking for a publisher? What do you do?
Well, of course, there is nothing to prevent you from bundling up your manuscript and mailing it to various publishers. Experience shows, however, that very few manuscripts submitted “cold” or, in the trade phrase, “over the transom” (obviously the mailman can’t stick a manuscript through the letter slot), ever see the light of day. This doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t carefully consider the piece before attaching a rejection slip to it. I should say, however, that something of a very special literary quality—not the self-styled “advance guard” but the truly different, which has no audience ready-made and hence must create its own, the kind of literature which you just possibly might write (and which I think certainly is being written) and that could change the world through its extension of our resources of feeling and expression—does not stand too strong a chance of passing through the literate but patterned screening of publishers’ manuscript readers. Furthermore, since each publishing house has a character all its own, the likelihood of any one manuscript ending up in the right place is a numbers game that can be quite disheartening to play.
Perhaps the best advice that can be given to the determined author is: Get a good agent. This is not necessarily easy and there are pitfalls, including sharks who prey upon the innocent for their own financial gain. A manuscript that comes into the publisher’s office “cold” stands a better chance of receiving serious consideration than one sent under the auspices of a dubious agent. Nevertheless, a manuscript by an unknown writer usually gets a quicker reading if it comes through a recognized agent.2
With or without the help of an agent, the task is to try to place the book with some publisher. This task has become increasingly difficult unless the book is, by its very nature, a safe bet to sell. Nowadays the best bets are the so-called “non-books”—books specifically designed for selling, such as collections of humorous pictures and captions or volumes whose authors are not only well known in the entertainment world, but also carry a heavy clot with TV audiences: The Jack Paar Story, The Zsa Zsa Gabor Story, The Maurice Chevalier Story, The Harpo Marx Story—they may not all have exactly the same name and they may be written in greater or lesser part by relatively accomplished hacks, they may range from the fascinating to the disgusting in content, but they all exist for the same reason: there is a built-in audience that will buy them. Frankly, if Books and Brent had ever achieved network status, I could have done the same thing.
The problem is not that publishers will buy a sure thing. Of course they will and, within reason, why shouldn’t they? The problem is that less and less is being published today that stands a chance of belonging in the realm of permanent literature. It is easier to get a book like this published, about books and writers (although not too popular a subject and therefore a fairly adventurous publishing undertaking), than it is to get the hard-wrought, significant works of some of the writers I have mentioned into print. Actually, most of the material that is selected for publication today is chosen precisely because it is temporary in value and appeal. Publishing, of course, is a difficult business and every book, in a sense, is a long shot, more likely to fail than to succeed in turning a profit. Most publishing houses have been built on the proposition that the successes must help subsidize the failures, but that this is the only way that the new and unknown talent, which will create the future of literature, can be developed. Publishing has never been like most manufacturing industries, where you can survey a new line before you try it, and drop it if it doesn’t pay its way. In spite of all the tons of junk printed since Gutenberg, the glory and prestige of publishing is linked not with numbers of copies sold but numbers of enduring works produced. Virtually no one remembers the best sellers of 1900 or even 1950. But the great editors and publishers who nurtured, say, the talents of the 1920’s have become part of literary history. A Maxwell Perkins couldn’t exist in an industry that didn’t care what it was doing or that wouldn’t take its chances.
Taking a chance seems to be a custom that is going out of fashion—especially taking a chance on something you believe in. It is strange that this should be so, especially in business and industry, where the tax laws tend to encourage judicious failure (“product research,” etc.) in any enterprise strong enough to be in the fifty-two percent bracket. Perhaps corporate structure is one of the factors that tend to close our horizons. A free individual can keep taking his chances until the world catches up with him. But the officer of a corporation who is responsible for justifying his actions to the board (and the board to the banks and the stockholders) does not have much leeway.
Both good books and bad books sell (and many books, both good and bad, fail to sell at all). A good book is, very simply, a revealing book. A bad book is bad because it is dull. Its author is obviously lying, not necessarily by purveying misinformation, but because he lards his work with any information that falls to hand—a sort of narrative treatment of the encyclopedia. A good book stirs your soul. You find yourself lost, not in an imaginary world (like the encyclopedia), but in a world where everything is understood. Readers and editors alike, no matter how debilitated, can detect this difference.
So, even, can the reviewers—largely a group of underpaid journalists and college professors who have a right, if any one does, to have become weary of letters. A writer friend of mine recently told of waiting at an airport for a plane that was late. He bought all three of the literary magazines obtainable from the newsstand and settled down to read. Every book review seemed to him written by someone who hated literature. He became utterly disgusted with both the reviews and the reviewers.
Considering the volume of publishing, how can it be so difficult to get good new books? There are not enough really significant titles coming out for me or anyone else to make a decent living selling them (I gave up trying with the Seven Stairs). When I talked with Mr. Simon, he assured me that Simon and Schuster and the book industry as a whole were booming with the mergers and the mushrooming educational market, but that the big problem was finding good writers and good books. I wonder if they are going about it properly. Somehow the prize contests and other subsidies never seem to bring genuine individual talent to the fore, and while everybody claims to be looking for something fresh, what gets bought looks suspiciously like the same old package.
Publishing has so often been (and in many cases, still is) a shoestring industry, that one gets a momentary lift from seeing it listed today on the board on Wall Street. But it is an open question whether the investors are supplying risk money for a cultural renaissance or buying into a sure thing: the increasing distribution of synthetic culture through textbooks and the propagation of standard classics and encyclopedias at cut-rate prices through the supermarkets.
Anyone who has given his heart and soul to literature and the arts is likely to regard everyone who pulls the financial strings in the communications world as a monster. But the commercial outlook on something like the retail book trade is so dispiriting that the wonder is anybody pays any attention to it whatever or publishes any books at all whose distribution depends upon such channels. In Chicago, for example, a center of about six million people, there are approximately five major bookstores (excluding religious and school book suppliers). Compared to this, I am told of a village in Finland of six thousand people where there are three bookstores doing a fine business! Now in my own shop I sell books, to be sure, but I also sell greeting cards, art objects manufactured by or for the Metropolitan Museum, paperbacks, records, and, at Christmas time, wrappings, ribbons, stickers, and miniature Santa Clauses. I still got into trouble one day when a woman came in and couldn’t get a pack of pinochle cards. She thought I had a lot of nerve advertising books and not selling playing cards. Actually, “Bookstore” in America has come to mean a kind of minor supplier of paper goods and notions—and that is exactly what the great number of “Book Dealers—Retail” listed in the Chicago Redbook in fact are.
But you can buy a book in Chicago. Try it, however, in most of the cities across this vast country up to, say, 100,000 population. You’ll be lucky to find a hardback copy of anything except the current best sellers. And in spite of the wonders of drug store paperbacks, a culture can’t live and grow on reprints.
So let’s face it. In a nation of 185 million people, some of whom are reasonably literate, a new book that sells ten to twenty thousand copies is regarded as pretty hot stuff. In an age of the mass market, this isn’t hot enough to light a candle.
What to do about it? Well, in the first place, let’s not be complacent about what’s happening to American culture, to the American psyche. It isn’t just the money-grubbing, the success-seeking; grubbing and striving, more or less, are a part of living. It is the emptiness, the meaninglessness. Nobody can get along without an interior life. The soul must be fed, or something ugly and anti-human fills the void. Spiritual nourishment is not a frill, apart from everyday necessity. The everyday and the ultimate expression of man do not exist apart. Synge remarked: “When men lose their poetic feeling for ordinary life and cannot write poetry of ordinary things, their exalted poetry is likely to lose its strength of exaltation, in the way men cease to build beautiful churches when they have lost happiness in building shops.”
In the modern world, good reading offers one of the few means of getting back to one’s self, of refreshing the spirit, of relating to the inward life of man. Through reading you can get acquainted all over again with yourself. You can stand being alone. You will look forward again to tomorrow.
Anything that stands in the way of this hope for renewal is an affront to man and a judgment on our times.
If the publishing industry has found a helpful new source of income through the present mania for education, fine. But a few extra years of education aren’t going to change anybody’s life. If we wait for a popular growth in “cultural maturity” to justify making more widely available the sustenance men need, it will come too late. There must be ways of cutting through the jungles of mass markets and mass media to reach, in a way that has not previously been possible, the much smaller but more significant audience of the consciously hungry. For as long as there are human souls still alive and sentient, there can be good books, good writers, even booksellers selling books again, paying their bills, earning a living.
Meantime, if you must be a writer, write seriously and well. Never pay for publication of your own book. Take your chances. If you succeed, fine. If not, then you must either persist in trying, time after time, or give up. Perhaps the present custodians of culture have their minds on other matters and do not wish to hear what you have to say. So be it. You will not be the first.