My Mistake (22 page)

I say “specific knowledge” because writers and agents surely have to realize that companies must practice this kind of emphasis triage. But they and you, as the editor, silently collude in trying to ignore the obvious when you tell them that the first printing of your book will be three thousand copies, that it will not have full-color bound galleys, that no advertising or tour is planned, and that it has been assigned to a publicist who up until yesterday worked in the Xerox department.

Why the collusion? Because this is a business fueled largely by writers' need for attention, and no one wants to crush a writer's dreams before a book is published. Especially because every now and then those dreams actually come true.

Speaking of the need for attention, if this hasn't become clear by now, an editor must be prepared to suffer transference from his writers as much as any therapist must from his patients. Many writers, like anyone else who performs for the public and desires wide recognition, no matter how successful they become, have an unslakable thirst for attention and approval—in my opinion (and in my own case) usually left over from some early-childhood deficit or perception of deficit in the attention-and-approval department. You frequently find yourself serving as an emotional valet to the people you work with.

All business and cultural successes spawn retroactive specious credit-taking. But because front-list publishing outcomes are so unpredictable, the false retroactive credit-taking in this enterprise can achieve a farcical dimension, as it no doubt does in the other media, especially TV and movies. Sales departments will claim credit for dark-horse bestsellers that they miserably undersold when they made their initial sales calls. A publisher who didn't want to acquire a book will often gladly accept and even court admiration if the acquisitions editor somehow overcame his or her resistance and the book was acquired and then became successful. Publicity departments that didn't bother to pitch a book with any conviction will run to get on board when the train picks up speed, and then say, out of breath though they may be, that they were on board all along.

One of the first novels I published at Random House was
Primary Colors,
by Anonymous, a fictional account of a Presidential campaign from the viewpoint of a black campaign aide to a candidate with a Southern drawl and a history of womanizing. For legal reasons, everyone tried hard not to refer to it as a roman à clef. But there was a lawsuit anyway, brought by a librarian in Harlem who claimed that people would think she was the character who has a brief encounter with a Presidential candidate who of course bears not the slightest—not an iota of—resemblance to Bill Clinton. I was deposed for four days, partly because I had made the mistake of using the term “roman à clef” in the book's flap copy. Being coached for a deposition will teach you the difference between telling the truth and telling the helpful truth.

In any case, the suit dragged on, as suits will, but it was finally thrown out of court, perhaps partly because the litigant was young and black and the character was middle-aged and Jewish. The suit also ran into the difficulty that literary libel accusations and charges of invasion of privacy often run into: The aggrieved party says people will think the character is him- or herself but also says that he or she would
never
do anything like whatever scandalous thing the character does.

So anyway, many colleagues in the Sales and Editorial and Publicity Departments discouraged the writer—whose identity none of us knew—and his agent and me from using “Anonymous” as the byline. No author to tour. No author to be interviewed. No newspaper stories about the author. No readings. Etc.

In my would-be-blithe, greenhorn's way, I liked the idea of no author's name, because it reminded me of contemporary and historical texts whose authors used (or sometimes suffered) anonymity or pseudonymity.
Go Ask Alice, Beowulf,
the
I Ching,
Mark Twain, Nora Roberts, George Eliot, Lemony Snicket. Because of the author's and agent's and my insistence, “Anonymous” stuck and became one of the principal reasons for the book's success. Many of those who had vigorously opposed the idea contorted themselves afterward into having not only supported but urged the idea. In fact, in a filmed interview about the book, Harry Evans, who was then still the Publisher of Random House, said that he insisted that the author remain anonymous.

Evans had come back from lunch with a well-known agent named Kathy Robbins and walked straight into my office with a manila envelope in his hands. He asked me to read what was inside and tell him what I thought. I took it home and read it over the weekend. As I said in my note to Evans, it read “like wildfire,” though the ending seemed awfully abrupt—incomplete. He asked me if I thought we should try to acquire it and what I thought about the anonymity of the author. I said yes, and I liked the idea of the anonymity. So I bought the book, for $250,000, but in my conversation with Kathy Robbins I said that the ending seemed just sort of cut off. She said, “It's only the first half! Didn't Harry tell you?”

Primary Colors
became an immediate bestseller, partly on account of the publicity and speculation generated by the anonymity of the author. Walter Weintz, a fine and very intelligent man, now head of Workman Publishing, who was then Associate Publisher of Random House, came into my office shortly after the book's publication and said, “You do realize how rare this is, don't you? Most editors go through an entire career without something like this happening.” I hadn't realized it, though I did know that this success hit the book and me as the proverbial lightning strike—powerfully, and at random. I kept wondering what if—as was possible at the time—Clinton hadn't run for reelection. And later, just after 9/11, I saw very good books, especially quiet but excellent novels, get pushed away from any chance of literary recognition by a catastrophe of real life. The reception of any cultural production more often hinges on real-world vicissitudes than most people understand.

For all the onerousness and corporate foolishness and credit larceny, an editor does learn a huge amount about the world, especially if he or she acquires and edits nonfiction. And despite their intense neediness, writers are often fascinating and stimulating company. And most important, despite publishing's plentiful empty rituals, every day brings with it highly varied tasks and challenges. Every single book is its own particular enterprise, every agent his or her own kettle of fish, every writer an education (sometimes in dysfunction), every book jacket a unique challenge. And occasionally what you do has real importance to the world.

 

Fifty-nine

 

Cathy Hemming, Publisher of HarperCollins, takes me to lunch and offers me a job as Executive Editor, at a salary significantly higher than my salary at Random House, where I have been working as a Senior Editor for five years. I tell Ann Godoff—who has replaced Harry Evans as Publisher—about the offer, partly in the faint hope that I can get a good raise from her and stay at Random House, partly resigned to leaving, because once you threaten to leave, you probably have to leave if you don't get what you're hoping for, as I was pretty sure I wouldn't.

“Who made the offer?” Ann says.

“Well, it doesn't really make any difference, does it?” I say. “It's a respectable competitor.”

“We can't match that amount,” she says. “But you don't really want to leave, do you?”

“Ann, I have one kid going to college and one kid who will be going in a few years.”

“Well, I got you a bonus this year, don't forget.”

“I know, and I appreciate it, but still, there's a real differential in this offer.”

“And we gave you a bonus for
Primary Colors.
”

“Well, no, actually, I never got a bonus for that.”

“Really?”

“Really. I was so ignorant that I didn't know that I might have gotten a bonus for that. Should have gotten one, I would say now.”

“I was sure you got a bonus. I'll have to look it up and see what happened.”

“Anyway, I'd like to stay, all things being equal, but they're not. Equal.”

“We just can't match that offer, Dan—it's too much.”

“That doesn't leave me a lot of choice, I'm afraid.”

“This is Random House, Dan. You know you don't want to leave. Come on, tell me who made the offer.”

“I'm not supposed to.”

“Oh, come on. You know I'm going to find out anyway.”

“OK—HarperCollins.”

“I
hate
what they do,” Ann says.

“What? Publish books?”

My mistake, but the die was so vigorously cast at that point that it didn't make any difference.

 

Sixty

 

I work at HarperCollins for so little time—less than two years—that it ends up feeling more like a walkabout than any kind of era in my working life. But among other worthwhile moments during this brief period, I have the good fortune to inherit Scott Spencer—a superb novelist whose first book,
Endless Love,
has sold more than a million copies—from an editor who has recently died. And I have the best boss I ever will have, Susan Weinberg, the Editor in Chief. Direct, honest, confident, and a good listener.

A conversation that I have at HarperCollins with an agent stands out for its typicality. I'm trying to acquire a “Best of the Year” paperback collection. The agent (and a good friend) wants to “move” the series from its old publisher because he thinks the old publisher didn't do enough to promote it. Here is our conversation:

 

ME
: How many copies did it sell last year?

AGENT
: Fifteen thousand.

ME
: Fifteen thousand as in twelve thousand five hundred?

AGENT
: Yeah, about that. Twelve thousand five hundred.

ME
: Twelve thousand five hundred as in eleven?

AGENT
: Twelve-five as in twelve.

ME
: So it sold about eleven-five?

AGENT
: Yeah.

 

This is the way in publishing, as I'm sure it is in most other industries that produce physical objects for sale. Rounding up is fun. Rounding down is reality. Announced first printings of, say, a hundred thousand hardcovers often shrivel to under fifty thousand. Publicity announcements of an author tour of twelve cities shrink to New York, Washington, and Boston, and only if the writer agrees to use Bolt buses for transportation. “Reviews” generally signifies a misty hope rather than a guarantee.

 

No such playing with numbers in a doctor's office. “You got the sugar, honey?” a nurse asks me during my annual physical checkup. She's holding a piece of blue litmus paper in her latex-gloved hand. I do have the sugar, it turns out. It's probably a late-blooming effect of my infancy's illness—which has left me on a permanent quest for carbohydrates and sweets—as no one in my family has ever had this problem and I have remained pretty slender.

This diabetes will involve medication only, not insulin, since I exercise so fanatically and keep my weight down. But it's the first of three serious medical problems I'll encounter in my sixties. Paradoxically, these problems cure me of my vestigial hypochondria. The second problem is Graves' disease, which, briefly, is when your thyroid gets overactive and must be nuked. A nurse dressed in hazmat clothes hands you a leaden goblet that looks like something out of
Game of Thrones
and gives you a single radioactive pill. She then clears out of the room immediately, and you are left with your own private Fukushima. Your thyroid eventually gives up the ghost, and you have to take Synthroid for the rest of your life. The third problem I list here under “Coming Attractions.”

 

I go to see William Maxwell a few days before his death. He is lying in a hospital bed in his apartment. His family and friends are hovering in the living room and dining room, signing remembrance books, discussing the calligraphy and the exquisite paper. There is some discussion about whom Maxwell has wanted to see and whom he hasn't. He is impossibly thin and frail-looking, but he smiles and his eyes are warm. I go to sit in a chair, but he motions me over to sit on the side of his bed. “It's so lovely to see you,” he says. “I've decided there's not much reason to stick around, now that Emmy's gone, and I'm doing my best never to take another bite of food.”

I say, “I hope you'll change your mind about that,” and then I can't say any more. Maxwell grips my arm with surprising firmness, as if to say, Hold on. “When my mother died and I was ten,” he says, “a man came to the door ostensibly to pay his respects to my father. But my father suspected that the man came in secret triumph or glee about my mother's death. It may have had something to do with a sexual secret. In any case, my father opened the door, saw who it was, and slammed it in the man's face so hard that the house shook. I had never seen him do anything like that before, and I never knew until that moment that anyone could be so direct and angry in polite circles. And I haven't forgotten it since.”

I am wondering why he has told me this story now. Well, of course it bears on death—on a death that changed Maxwell's life forever and has appeared in a number of his novels in one form or another. It may bear on my brother's death. It bears on the question of whom one might and might not want to see at a moment of past or imminent sadness.

He smiles at me serenely. He is some guy, I'll tell you. In order to veer away from mute admiration and gratitude, and tears, I go in the other direction. “You know, when you left me at the magazine, it took about three years for me to stop feeling completely unwelcome.”