The Spooky Art (6 page)

Now, if a few of you are wondering why I did not take my book back and go to another publishing house, the answer is that I was tired, I was badly tired. Only a few weeks before, a doctor had given me tests for the liver, and it had shown itself to be sick and depleted. I was hoping that a few months in Mexico would give me a chance to fill up again.

But the next months were not cheerful.
The Deer Park
had been done as well as I could do it, yet I thought it was probably a minor work, and I did not know if I had any real interest in starting another book. I made efforts, of course; I collected notes, began to piece together a few ideas for a novel given to bullfighting, and another about a concentration camp; I read most of the work of the other writers of my generation (I think I was looking for a level against which to measure my third novel), went over the galleys when they came, changed a line or two, sent them back. Keeping half busy I mended a bit, but it was a time of dull drifting. When I came back to New York in October,
The Deer Park
was already in page proof. By November, the first advertisement was given to
Publishers Weekly.
Then, with less than ninety days to publication, Stanley Rinehart told me I would have to take out a small piece of the book—ten not very explicit lines about the sex of an old producer and a call girl. The moment one was ready to consider losing those lines, they moved into the moral center of the novel.
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It would be no tonic for my liver to cut them out. But I also knew Rinehart was serious, and since I was still tired, it seemed a little unreal to try to keep the passage. Like a miser, I had been storing energy to start a new book; I wanted nothing to distract me now. I gave in on a word or two, agreed to rewrite a line, and went home from that particular conference not very impressed with myself. The next
morning I called up the editor in chief, Ted Amussen, to tell him I had decided the original words had to be put back.

“Well, fine,” he said, “fine. I don’t know why you agreed to anything in the first place.”

A day later, Stanley Rinehart halted publication, stopped all promotion (he was too late to catch the first run of
Publishers Weekly
, which was already on its way to England with a full-page ad for
The Deer Park)
, and broke his contract to do the book. I was started on a trip to find a new publisher, and before I was done, the book went to Random House, Knopf, Simon and Schuster, Harper’s, Scribner’s, and unofficially to Harcourt, Brace. Someday it would be fine to give the details, but for now little more than a few lines of dialogue and an editorial report:

The lawyer for one publishing house complimented me on the ten lines, word for word, which had excited Rinehart to break his contract. This lawyer said, “It’s admirable the way you get around the problem here.” Then he brought out more than a hundred objections to other parts of the book. One was the line, “She was lovely. Her back was adorable in its contours.” I was told that this ought to go because “the principals are not married, and so your description puts a favorable interpretation upon a meretricious relationship.”

Hiram Hayden had lunch with me some time after Random House saw the book. He told me he was responsible for their decision not to do it, and if I did not agree with his taste, I had to admire his honesty—it is rare for an editor to tell a writer that kind of truth. Hayden went on to say that the book never came alive for him even though he had been ready to welcome it. “I can tell you that I picked the book up with anticipation. Of course I had heard from Bill, and Bill had told me that he didn’t like it, but I never pay attention to what one writer says about the work of another.…” Bill was William Styron, and Hayden was his editor. I had asked Styron to call Hayden the night I found out Rinehart had broken his contract. One reason for asking the favor of Styron was that he sent me a long letter about the novel after I had shown it to him in manuscript. He had
written, “I don’t like
The Deer Park
, but I admire sheer hell out of it.” So I thought to impose on him.

Other parts of the account are not less dreary. The only generosity I found was from Jack Goodman. He sent me a photostat of his editorial report to Simon and Schuster and, because it was sympathetic, his report became the objective estimate of the situation for me. I assumed that the book when it came out would meet the kind of trouble Goodman expected, and so when I went back later to work on the page proofs I was not free of a fear or two. But that can be talked about in its place. Here is the core of his report.

The eighth house was G. P. Putnam’s. I didn’t want to give it to them. I was planning to go next to Viking, but Walter Minton
kept saying, “Give us three days. We’ll give you a decision in three days.” So we sent it over to Putnam, and in three days they took it without conditions, and without a request for a single change. I had a victory, I had made my point, but in fact I was not very happy. I had grown so wild on my diet of polite letters from publishing houses who didn’t want me that I had been ready to collect rejections from twenty houses, publish
The Deer Park
at my own expense, and try to make a kind of publishing history. Instead I was thrown in with Walter Minton, who has since attracted some fame as the publisher of
Lolita.
He is the only publisher I ever met who would make a good general. Months after I came to Putnam, Minton told me, “I was ready to take
The Deer Park
without reading it. I knew your name would sell enough copies to pay your advance, and I figured one of these days you’re going to write another book like
The Naked and the Dead,”
which is the sort of sure hold of strategy you can have when you’re not afraid of censorship.

Now I’ve tried to water this account with a minimum of tears, but taking
The Deer Park
into the nervous system of eight publishing houses was not so good for my own nervous system, nor was it good for getting to work on my new novel. In the ten weeks it took the book to travel the circuit from Rinehart to Putnam, I squandered the careful energy I had been hoarding for months; there was a hard comedy at how much of myself I would burn up in a few hours of hot telephone calls; I had never had any sense for practical affairs, but in those days, carrying
The Deer Park
from house to house, I stayed as close to it as a stage-struck mother pushing her child forward at every producer’s office. I was amateur agent for it, messenger boy, editorial consultant, Machiavelli of the luncheon table, fool of the five o’clock drinks. I was learning the publishing business in a hurry, and I made a hundred mistakes and paid for each one by wasting a new bout of energy.

In a way there was sense to it. For the first time in years I was having the kind of experience which was likely to return someday as good work, and so I forced many little events past any practical return, even insulting a few publishers en route as if to discover the limits of each situation. I was trying to find a few new proportions to things, and I did learn a bit. But I’ll never know what that novel about the concentration camp would have been like if I had gotten quietly to work when I came back to
New York and
The Deer Park
had been published on time. It is possible I was not serious about such a book, it is also possible I lost something good, but one way or the other, that novel disappeared in the excitement.

The real confession is that I was making a few of my mental connections those days on marijuana. Like more than one or two of my generation, I had smoked it from time to time over the years, but it never had meant anything. In Mexico, however, down in my depression with a bad liver, pot gave me a sense of something new about the time I was convinced I had seen it all, and I liked it enough to take it now and again in New York.

Then
The Deer Park
began to go like a beggar from house to house and en route Stanley Rinehart made it clear he was going to try not to pay the advance. Until then I had had sympathy for him. I thought it had taken a kind of displaced courage to be able to drop the book the way he did. An expensive moral stand, and wasteful for me; but a moral stand. When it turned out that he did not like to bear the expense of being that moral, the experience turned ugly for me. It took many months and the service of my lawyer to get the money, but long before that, the situation had become real enough to drive a spike into my cast-iron mind. I realized in some bottom of myself that for years I had been the sort of comic figure I would have cooked to a turn in one of my books, a radical who had the nineteenth-century naïveté to believe that the people with whom he did business were 1) gentlemen, 2) fond of him, and 3) respectful of his ideas even if in disagreement with them. Now I was in the act of learning that I was not adored so very much; that my ideas were seen as nasty; and that my fine America, which I had been at pains to criticize for so many years, was in fact a real country which did real things and ugly things to the characters of more people than just the characters of my books. If the years since the war had not been brave or noble in the history of the country, which I certainly thought and do think, why then did it come as surprise that people in publishing were not as good as they used to be, and that the day of Maxwell Perkins was a day which was gone, really gone, gone as Greta Garbo and Scott Fitzgerald? Not easy, one could argue, for an advertising man to admit that advertising is a dishonest occupation, and no easier was it for the working novelist to see that now were left only the cliques, fashions, vogues, snobs, snots, and fools, not to mention a dozen
bureaucracies of criticism; that there was no room for the old literary idea of oneself as a major writer, a figure in the landscape. The day was gone when people held on to your novels no matter what others might say. Instead one’s potential young readers waited now for the verdict of professionals.

I had begun to read my good American novels at the end of an era—I could remember people who would talk wistfully about the excitement with which they had gone to bookstores because it was publication day for the second novel of Thomas Wolfe, and in college, at a faculty tea, I had listened for an hour to a professor’s wife who was so blessed as to have known John Dos Passos. My adolescent crush on the profession of the writer had been more lasting than I could have guessed. I had even been so simple as to think that the kind of people who went into publishing were still most concerned with the few writers who made the profession not empty of honor, and I had been taking myself seriously. I had been thinking I was one of those writers.

Instead I caught it in the face and deserved it for not looking at the evidence. I was out of fashion and that was the score; that was all the score; the publishing habits of the past were going to be of no help for my
Deer Park.
And so, as the language of sentiment would have it, something broke in me, but I do not know if it was so much a loving heart as a cyst of the weak, the unreal, and the needy, and I was finally open to my anger. I turned within my psyche, I can almost believe, for I felt something shift to murder in me. I finally had the simple sense to understand that if I wanted my work to travel further than others, the life of my talent depended on fighting a little more, and looking for help a little less. But I deny the sequence in putting it this way, for it took me years to come to this fine point. All I felt then was that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it, I liked it a good sight better than trying to be a gentleman, and with a set of emotions accelerating one on the other, I mined down deep into the murderous message of marijuana, the smoke of the assassins, and for the first time in my life I knew what it was to make your kicks.

I could write about that here, but it would be a mistake. Let the experience stay where it is, and on a given year it may be found again in a novel. For now it is enough to say that marijuana opens the senses and weakens the mind. In the end, you pay for what you get. If you get something big, the cost will
equal it. There is a moral economy to one’s vice, but you learn that last of all. I still had the thought it was possible to find something which cost nothing. Thus,
The Deer Park
resting at Putnam, and new friends found in Harlem, I was off on that happy ride where you discover a new duchy of jazz every night and the drought of the past is given a rain of new sound. What has been dull and dead in your years is now tart to the taste, and there is sweet in the illusion of how fast you can change. To keep up with it all, I began to log a journal, a wild set of thoughts and outlines for huge projects—I wrote one hundred thousand words in eight weeks, more than once twenty pages a day, in a style which came willy-nilly from the cramp of the past, a lockstep jargon of sociology and psychology that sours my teeth when I look at those pages today. Yet this journal has the start of more ideas than I will have again; ideas which came so fast and so rich that sometimes I think my brain was dulled by the heat of their passage.