The Time of Their Lives
The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors, and Authors
CONTENTS
Introduction
Part I: The Newcomers
1. You Are What You Publish: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2. Wishing for a Fair Wind: Grove Press
3. A Quest to Know More About the World: George Braziller
4. An Uncertain Partnership of Equals: Atheneum
5. A Most Unusual Cog in the Profession: St. Martin’s Press
Interlude: The Prettiest Backlist in the Business
Part II: The Survivors
6. Independent Publishing at Its Height: The Viking Press
7. The Curious Family Establishment: Doubleday
8. The Company That Was Always About Cass: The House of Harper
9. Give the Reader a Break: Simon & Schuster
Interlude: Publishing Was in His Veins
10. The Place That Ran by Itself: Random House
11. Living in a Dream World: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
12. A Father and Son Story: Little, Brown
Interlude: Making Memoirs
Part III: Swirl—The Paperbound Rush to Life
13. Ballantine, Avon, Pocket Books, Dell
14. New American Library, Bantam, Fawcett
Interlude: The Gothic Romance
Image Gallery
Sources
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1
YOU ARE WHAT YOU PUBLISH
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The first list of a new publishing house is always an adventure.
A new imprint on a book gathers character through the years,
and it is our hope that readers will come to know ours and,
perhaps, to feel a certain friendship for it. —JOHN FARRAR AND ROGER W. STRAUS, JR., 1946
On the Monday morning of December 8, 2003, after New York City had been hit by its biggest December snowstorm ever, I headed downtown to see Roger Straus. I wanted him to recall for me a life well spent as the founder of postwar America’s most distinguished new American publishing house—seventeen Nobel Prizes in literature, twelve of them since 1970. Alfred A. Knopf’s venerable house, considered the most literary of them all, had twelve Nobels between 1916 and 1964. But Farrar, Straus and Giroux set the postwar standard for literary excellence in the glory years of book publishing.
I wondered if Roger would show up for our meeting. He was nearly eighty-seven years old, with serious health problems, and he had just come out of the hospital after two weeks of fighting pneumonia. When I called his office I was happy to hear that he was back and would see me.
Roger and I had done good deeds together during my years at the Book-of-the-Month Club; so many of the books he published had become our books. We also bumped into each other now and then after a late afternoon weekend movie at our Westchester County cinema paradiso. On those impromptu occasions Roger was entirely without portfolio; he wore scruffy suburban work clothes, and talked with unbecoming shyness in the presence of our wives.
I was coming to Farrar, Straus and Giroux to converse with Roger, as I had explained to him earlier over the phone, about the book I was writing, on what I perceived to be the golden age of publishing. “It began,” I said, “in 1946, when you gave birth.” I told him that Farrar, Straus would probably be my first chapter. I think he liked the idea of marching ahead in the field, and so here he was, greeting me at the door of his corner office overlooking a rare setting outside—a marshmallow blanket of snow blinking in the sun atop all of Union Square.
I was not surprised to see a thinner, worn-looking Roger. His face carried a post-hospital pallor and his eyes were puffy. But he was still his dapper self, wearing a camel’s hair jacket over his chocolate brown shirt, khaki pants, a flamboyant ascot shielding his neck. His silken white hair seemed pulled back tighter than ever, giving him the look of a matador who had outlived his bulls. His voice, though muted some from his illness, registered strongly, especially when he plunged into his biblical arsenal of obscenities. He moved out from behind his desk, put a chair opposite mine, and issued his first indelicacy. He was talking with a certain delight about Sheila Cudahy, who had come to Farrar, Straus in 1953 as editor in chief after Roger bought her late husband’s Chicago book publishing company, Pellegrini & Cudahy.
“She was a goddamn good editor,” Roger told me. “Started our children’s division, weighed about eighty pounds soaking wet. I’ll tell you what she brought in that made her reputation. She brought in Nelson Algren. She spent some time in Chicago working with him on A Walk on the Wild Side, telling him to take ‘fuck’ out and put ‘shit’ in. He listened to her and did what she wanted.” She must have done good. A Walk on the Wild Side is still in print.
Roger died on May 24, 2004, five months after our conversation. I was lucky to have been with him when he was looking back with some pleasure, I think, at what he had been able to accomplish. It was light-years away from the wealth piled up by past generations of Strauses. His father had been president of the American Mining and Smelting Company; his mother was a Guggenheim whose father owned a copper mine. What Roger sang out at our meeting were some of his personal delights: the discoveries of his life: Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli; poet Joseph Brodsky, the author he regarded with the most warmth; Susan Sontag, “my closest friend”; Philip Roth, his best living American “dialogue” writer; Edmund Wilson and Isaac Bashevis Singer, both spirited away from other houses; Gayelord Hauser, the bestselling author who saved Roger’s company in those early years.
Hauser’s Look Younger, Live Longer was published in 1950 just as the buzzards had begun to circle overhead, ready to pick at the undeveloped bones of Farrar, Straus. Hauser was the Dr. Atkins of his time, a handsome gentleman about town with such dear friends as Greta Garbo, specializing not in low-carb, highprotein diets, but in the blessings offered by yogurt and blackstrap molasses. That mix oozed Look Younger, Live Longer toward a sale of 500,000 copies. “It carried us along for a while,” Roger said with a touch of unsettling humility. Most of all, the book helped him take up more ambitious searches, for books that mattered.
Early in his reign, Roger had invited to lunch two successful and hard-drinking partners in a literary agency, Diarmuid Russell and Henry Volkening. (“Drink,” a British publisher once observed, “has always been crucial in the book trade,” and so will be covered in this book in a measured way.) “We went to their favorite French restaurant,” Roger told me, “where a number of martinis were consumed. I finally said, ‘I don’t want to be too boorish about this, but the reason I’m buying lunch for you guys is that I want to publish the kind of authors that you represent—Welty-like, Malamud-like, blah, blah, blah.’ And one of them, probably Henry, said to me, ‘Why should we give you an author like you’ve described until after we’ve had a chance to show Harcourt, Brace, Scribners, blah, blah, blah?’ Jesus Christ, they were right. I wouldn’t either if I was in their position.”
In those early years it was more or less hit-or-miss publishing. Roger and his wife, Dorothea, went prospecting in Italy, the country they loved. With the help of a well-connected Italian scout, the two brought back Christ Stopped at Eboli and rising young novelists Alberto Moravia, Giovanni Guareschi, and Cesare Pavese.
Since it was in his nature, Roger also aggressively pursued authors from other houses who were known to be aggrieved by their present publishers. One day in the late forties he got a call from an old friend at Random House.
“How would you like to publish Edmund Wilson?” Roger was asked. Wilson had done The Shock of Recognition for Random House’s Modern Library, two volumes on the development of literature in the United States.
“Of course I would like to publish Edmund Wilson,” Roger said. “Why the fuck aren’t you publishing Wilson?”
“Wilson can’t stand Bennett and the rest of the boys over there, and I can’t hold him.” Ah, Roger thought, a chance to upend Bennett Cerf, who not only governed Random House and was one of the most feverish quipsters of his time, but who also delighted in stealing authors from other houses.
Roger called Wilson, and they had lunch. “So I said all the things I’d say when one is in hot pursuit. I asked him what he was working on. He said he was collecting all his essays. ‘I’ll buy them,’ I said right off.” Roger didn’t remember whether the advance to Wilson was $2,000 or $2,500, “but that’s how we began. And,” he said with some pride, “he never left me for a moment after that. I published all his books.” Edmund Wilson did get on well with Roger Straus, who, he once wrote, “made me laugh and cheered me up.”
If Roger had one distinct feeling about his profession, it was an everlasting belief in his writers. “He was there in my thirties, forties, fifties and sixties,” John McPhee said, speaking at the memorial service held for Roger in New York, “and was still leading me up the street on a leash when I entered my seventies.”
Straus’s relationship with his editors, however, was different. He was tough on them, held many in slight regard—perhaps because they were contending with him for authors—and treated them with disdain. One of his strongest editors in chief, Aaron Asher, who brought with him Philip Roth, Brian Moore, and Arthur Miller, among others, spent five years at the house and couldn’t stand his boss. Another superb editor, Henry Robbins, who discovered Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, also ended up fleeing Roger. Partly it had to do with the firing of a woman at Farrar, Straus who meant very much to Robbins, but there were editorial spats as well.
Roger even had difficulties with his son, Roger Straus III. I always found young Roger to be a sweet-natured individual who seemed to fill his difficult role with much grace. But I didn’t sense that he had the driving ambition of his father. The breakup came in 1993 when the son left the company over “philosophical differences” with his father. Some people who were there felt that the father had become annoyed with his son for wanting to steer the house in a more commercial direction. Whatever the reason, young Roger worked at Times Books, then settled in as a serious photographer, a profession he still follows.
In the beginning, however, Roger did at least find a partner whom he respected and who brought resolute credentials to the new publishing house.
John Farrar once confessed: “I have no sense of humor and a vile temper.” A veteran of two world wars, Farrar had made his reputation right after World War I as editor of the prestigious literary magazine The Bookman. The magazine was then owned by Doubleday, Doran, a powerhouse publisher of the time, where Farrar was also a prominent editor.
In 1929, five months before the Wall Street crash, Farrar left Doubleday, Doran to form a new publishing house with Stanley Rinehart, his business manager on The Bookman, and Stanley’s brother, Frederick. The Rinehart boys were sons of Mary Roberts Rinehart, probably the richest bestselling author of her time. She was so rich that she never bothered to look at her royalty notices but, instead, complained to Stanley that she never seemed to receive money from the company. So one Christmas her son bought a huge strongbox and filled it with thousands of one-dollar bills and sent it to his mother for the holiday. “Stanley, dear,” she called on Christmas morning, “can you guess what I just received from Farrar & Rinehart? It’s unbelievable—a real treasure chest brimming over with crisp new dollar bills. Now I’m worried that your new firm will go bankrupt.”
No need to worry about that. One thing John Farrar took with him from Doran was the unsold stock of an unsuccessful Edgar Allan Poe biography that he had previously acquired, written by an unknown professor named Hervey Allen. He had also bought the right to look at a future work by Allen—“a long novel as yet untitled.” In 1933, in the teeth of the Great Depression, Farrar, Rinehart offered, for $3 retail, a 1,224-page historical novel by Hervey Allen. The first printing of Anthony Adverse was 17,000. Its second printing was 200,000. In the two years that Anthony Adverse topped the bestseller list, it sold 500,000 copies, and it kept on going and became a competitor to Gone With the Wind over the next twenty years.
Roger Straus was happy to have Farrar with him. “He knew everybody and everybody knew him,” Roger said. “They knew he was honest. They knew he was a good editor. He had this respect from among his peers.”
Hugh Van Dusen, who became an editor at Harper’s in 1956 and stayed on full-time until 2006 (but is still in the office three days a week), had a different take on John Farrar. Hugh met him when he was job hunting. “Farrar knew my parents slightly,” Hugh said, “and so my father asked if he would see me.” (Hugh’s father, Henry P. Van Dusen, was president of Union Theological Seminary in New York.) Farrar invited Hugh to have lunch with him.
“I found Mr. Farrar to be one of the most inarticulate great men I ever met,” Hugh said. “He was sort of fumbling around during lunch, trying to find something of importance to say about publishing to this young guy who was just graduating from Harvard.” Farrar may have sounded inarticulate, but he was not without a kernel of gold to bequeath the youngster. “As we were about to leave,” Hugh recalled, “he stopped and turned to me and, I think, even grabbed my arm for emphasis, and he said, ‘You know, publishing is all about memory.’” Perhaps the old Farrar was telling the young Van Dusen that institutional memory has always been vital in book publishing, not just for connecting the past to the present, but also for finding truths from the past that could light up the present and even the future. Farrar provided many such insights to Roger Straus until illness came along and robbed him of his own memory.
In 1955, his company nine years old, and not yet sure of its footing, Roger hired the person he needed most. And he did it even though he understood from the beginning that Robert Giroux’s heart would never belong to Daddy. Three years older than Roger, Giroux had been a wunderkind at Columbia University in the mid-1930s, an abiding influence on a group of book-loving students with literary aspirations. Among his classmates were Herman Wouk, John Berryman, Robert Gerdy, who became an editor at The New Yorker, and Thomas Merton. Merton introduced himself to Giroux, then the editor of the literary magazine Columbia Review, in 1935 when he came to show Giroux some of his writings. Merton himself was editor of the college humor magazine, Jester. Thirteen years later, in 1948, it was Giroux who told Merton that his book, The Seven Storey Mountain, would be published by Harcourt, Brace. Giroux had gone to work for Harcourt in 1940 as a junior editor, Merton had entered a Trappist monastery in Kentucky in 1941, and by the time Merton’s classic was published, Giroux was a commanding editor of the house.
Roger claimed that he had first gone after Bob Giroux in 1946 when he was putting his company together. At lunch the publisher offered Giroux the job as editor in chief.
“Oh, my God, Roger,” Bob said, “I can’t afford to.”
“What do you mean you can’t afford to? We haven’t talked about money.”
“No, no. What I mean is I have this sinecure with Harcourt, Brace and, you know, you may make it or maybe you won’t.” Roger thought that was a fair assessment at the time. Bob was also having a good time in his early years at Harcourt. For one, he had inherited Carl Sandburg. “I used to go out with him because he was a troubadour,” Bob told me. “He was one of the earliest folk singers, and he published a book at Harcourt called The American Songbook. My favorite song of his was ‘My Name Is Sam Hall and I Hate You One and All’ Well, he had a noose around his neck; he was going to be hanged.”
Bob talked about a convergence of greatness at the Harcourt offices—the meeting of Carl Sandburg and T. S. Eliot. “I know Eliot didn’t think much of Sandburg’s poems, and Sandburg was very critical of Eliot because, he said, he had no sense of humor. I thought, they must never meet each other because they’re on opposite ends of the spectrum politically. Well, one day Eliot visited the offices. And I had him with me, and suddenly one of the secretaries called me and said, ‘Mr. Sandburg has just arrived.’ And I said, ‘Put him in Mr. Harcourt’s office,’ which was way down at the end. ‘I don’t want them to meet.’ I had to leave Eliot to go to the John or something, and I was probably gone five minutes. When I came back, Carl was sitting in my office, right next to Eliot, and Eliot had a big grin on his face. Carl said, ‘Bob, look at that man’s face. Look at the suffering in that face.’ And Eliot shot back, ‘You can’t blame him for the people who ride on his coattails.’”
Six years later, when Roger heard that there was trouble at Harcourt, he took Giroux to lunch again and said flat out, “You know, my offer is still open. Do you want to come?”
“Yes, I would,” Bob said. He left Harcourt still in a state of rage because management had refused to let him buy a book that was rightfully his—a first novel that the then-unknown author, J. D. Salinger, wanted him to have.
ROBERT GIROUX
Jerry Salinger was publishing these stories, mostly in The New Yorker, and they were, one after another, fantastic. So I wrote him a very short note from Harcourt, care of Bill Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, a reclusive figure whom I had gotten to know. In the note I said, “I know that every editor in town is asking to see your first novel, but I have a proposal to make. Let me publish all your stories right now.” Never heard from him.
About a year later I was eating a sandwich at my desk when our receptionist called. “Mr. Salinger is here,” she said, “and he wants to meet you.” I said, “Mr. Salinger? What’s his first name?” And she said, “Jerome, his name is Jerome.” I said, “Send him in.”
In he came. He was very tall, dark-haired, had a horse face. He was melancholy looking. It’s the truth—the first person I thought of when I saw him was Hamlet.
“Giroux,” he said. I said something like, “Right. It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Salinger.”
“Giroux,” he said again. “Mr. Shawn has recommended you to me. But I want to tell you that to start me out it would be much better to publish my first novel instead of my stories.” I laughed, thinking, you want to be the publisher, you can have my seat. But I said, “I’m sure you’re right about that.” And I said, “I will publish your novel. Tell me about it.” He said, “Well, I can’t show it to you yet. It’s about half finished.” I said, “Well, let me be the publisher.” And he said yes, and we shook hands.
When Jerry Salinger left, I was thrilled. He’d come in to see me, which is the last thing in the world I expected, and which probably happened because of Shawn. Anyway, I thought it was something the firm should be proud to publish.
A year later a messenger came to the office with a package from Dorothy Olding, Salinger’s agent at the Harold Ober literary agency. I opened it, pulled out the manuscript. There on the top page I read the title: The Catcher in the Rye.
I read it that night and was thrilled and delighted that we would be able to publish a first novel of such originality. It never occurred to me that my new boss, Eugene Reynal, would not back me up.
Reynal had recently sold his publishing house, Reynal & Hitchcock, to Harcourt, and he had become head of Harcourt’s trade division. He had a mixed reputation. He’d come from old money; gone to Harvard, Oxford—he even smoked initialed cigarettes. But I had to get on with him. I gave him the book to read. He didn’t like it, didn’t understand it. He asked me, “Is this kid in the book supposed to be crazy?” And I said, “No, he’s not. He’s disturbed in many ways, but he’s not crazy. He’s very lucid about what he thinks, and very imaginative. Gene,” I said, “I’ve shaken hands with this author. I agreed to publish this book.”
“Yes,” he said, “but, Bob, you’ve got to remember, we have a textbook department.” And I said, “What’s that got to do with it?” He said, “This is a book about a kid going to prep school.” So he sent it to the textbook people, who read it and said, “It’s not for us.”
The next thing I knew Reynal had rejected the book without telling me. I remember apologizing to Salinger. He said, “Ah, it’s okay. I expect things like that. It happens.” Well, I never thought it would happen to me.
Giroux came to Farrar, Straus without Salinger, but he did bring along seventeen other authors who constituted seemingly half the total literary talent in America at the time, including Thomas Merton, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, Jack Kerouac, Peter Taylor, Randall Jarrell, and Bernard Malamud. They don’t make lists like that anymore. In 1996 Alan Williams, a masterful editor and a much loved colleague, put together a fiftieth anniversary volume of excerpted pieces from books published by the house over the half century. In his introduction Williams called Giroux’s Pied Piper sweep “almost certainly the greatest number of authors to follow, on their own initiative, a single editor from house to house in the history of modern publishing.”
There was one other author besides Salinger who Giroux wasn’t sure would follow him: T. S. Eliot, who had won the Nobel Prize during Giroux’s reign at Harcourt, Brace and who described the ideal of writing this way: “The common word exact without vulgarity, the formal word precise but not pedantic, the complete consort dancing together.” There then came the day when Bob rushed into Roger’s office, waving a telegram in his hand. He read it to Roger: “‘I congratulate you in your new association. Of course, my next book will be with you on your new imprint. T. S. Eliot.’”
One of the last questions I asked the ailing head of his house that December morning in his office as we gazed out his windows, watching the shovels falling on the snow, dealt with the relationship between these two strong-willed individuals. “Roger,” I said, “do you think that Bob is the greatest living book editor?”
He was silent for a moment, working out his thoughts. Then he said: “It couldn’t be anyone else.” But quickly he offered this P.S.: “You know, he did have a temper.”
In 1964 Roger made Robert Giroux chairman of the board and changed the name of his company to Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
When I met with Bob Giroux in early May 2004, he was ninety years old, living in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, hard by Asbury Park, in a tree-shaded retirement home. He was waiting for me down in the lobby with Charlie Reilly, who has been with Bob since they first met in grammar school in Union City, New Jersey, home of the Giroux family. Both gentlemen on this hot day were dressed semiformally—summer sports jackets, open-necked sports shirts, slacks. To me, Giroux looked at least twenty years younger than his age. His wavy white hair was fresh and fluffy, his eyes were clear and alert, and there was an air of authority to him that friends said he’d always had. Herman Gollob, a renowned editor of this golden age (see chapter 4 on Atheneum) told me, “I thought Robert Giroux would be a tall, slender, aristocratic guy—you know—with a cocktail in his hand. Here’s this guy looking like a ward heeler.” Jack Kerouac’s mother had a different take on Giroux when she met him. “You don’t look like a publisher,” said Gabrielle Kerouac, “you look like a banker.” Even now, on a cane Bob Giroux moved with the authority of a banker, bent but unbowed.
My wife, Rosa, was with me. She had grown up in nearby Long Branch, and she wanted to go see the house where she was born, which we did after spending most of the day with Bob and Charlie. They paid Rosa courtly attention. Their apartment was cozy, with a terrace off the living room that was, of course, overflowing with books. As we talked Bob’s voice was earthy and commanding, and his memory, except for names, was still razor sharp.
He held court by himself, telling story after story. One of the most unusual tales was about an odd publishing discovery. It came on a day in 1960 when a woman living in Bob’s apartment building approached him. “I have a brother,” she said, “who’s a priest. He’s stationed in Rome and wants to write about the Vatican Council. His name is Father Francis X. Murphy, and he’s coming to New York. Will you see him?” Bob said he would.
The great Second Vatican Council was scheduled to commence in the fall of 1962 (the first one had begun in 1870). Two thousand five hundred bishops of the Roman Catholic Church would crowd into St. Peter’s Basilica for four years to work out extensive changes in the Church’s doctrine and practice. Father Murphy told Bob that he was a Redemptorist priest and would be an observer in the Council. “I would like to write about the Vatican Council for The New Yorker,” he declared right off.
This stumped Giroux. “The New Yorker doesn’t do much with religion,” he told the priest.
“I’m not going to write about religion,” Father Murphy said. “I’m going to write about politics. The Vatican Council is a political meeting. I read The New Yorker. I know what they publish and I admire their style, and I think I can write in their vein.”
Sure, Bob thought. But since he had nothing to lose he said, “Write me a few pages about what you have in mind, and I’ll try to get the editor, William Shawn, to look at them.” When the material came in, Bob couldn’t help but be impressed. “Very good phrasing,” he told Shawn, “and in the New Yorker style.” Shawn agreed and asked to meet the source, but Bob said that would be impossible. This priest would require complete anonymity. Shawn went along and Father Murphy, under the pen name Father Xavier Rynne, would write “Letters from the Vatican” each year that the Vatican Council was in session. The New Yorker would print excerpts, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux would publish the volumes. “A whole Catholic generation of writers was formed by reading these accounts of how things were done,” a young FSG editor, Paul Elie, who still works there, told me. In 2004, Farrar, Straus and Giroux republished the Rynne diaries in a one-volume edition. Francis X. Murphy died in 2002, deep into his nineties, and even those who disagreed with his liberal approach to the Council regarded him as “one of the great clerical raconteurs.”
Bob received an extraordinary bonus for his recruitment of Xavier Rynne. Bob’s friend, Robert Fitzgerald, the brilliant translator of classical languages, who was intimately involved with Vatican II and was living in Italy with his family, found tickets for Bob and Charlie to attend the last day of the conference when the Pope and all the cardinals would walk down the aisle and out the door. It promised to be a historic moment. There was a catch, however. The tickets were for general admission. Fitzgerald told his guests, “You must gather in the open square in front of St. Peter’s, and go to your particular section.” Then he gave them a coach’s advice. “You’ll find it crowded with Italian nuns. They all tend to be short. The thing you must remember about them is that they can run very fast. They’ll lift up their skirts and tear like hell for the side door. You have longer legs than they have. Get up near the wooden horses, and take off!”
“We did,” Bob crowed like a teenager. “You know where the main altar was with the Bernini columns. We ended up looking down on it, and we were in the first row. These nuns were furious because they thought they deserved the first row. But nobody had told them how fast we could run.”
When it was over, the doors that had been closed all the years the Vatican Council was in session were finally opened. Bob fondly remembered the moment: “And we walked out onto the Vatican Square into a heavenly sunlight.”
As he went on that lazy afternoon in May 2004, a sweet smell of honeysuckle wafted into the room, just in time, it seemed, as he began to speak of Bernard Malamud.
It was Alfred Kazin, a scout for Harcourt, Brace, who, in 1950, introduced Bob to Malamud. The two found they had much in common, not the least being that both had been born in the same year, 1914, in the same month, April, and that nothing was more important to both of them than the book. They became Bob and “Bern” to each other.
At that time Malamud was working on a first novel, about baseball, seeking to find his voice. Bob liked The Natural, but the reason he gave Bern a two-book contract at Harcourt was because of a short story he had read in the Partisan Review, “The Magic Barrel.” Bob felt it was a masterpiece, and figured that Malamud’s second book, all things being equal, would be a volume of short stories that would feature “The Magic Barrel.”
Harcourt published The Natural in 1952 to very good reviews; later it became a celebrated movie starring Robert Redford. When Bob left for Farrar, Straus, Bern did not accompany him; the second book still belonged to Harcourt. But one day he received a call from Malamud.
“Bob,” Bern said, “they’ve turned down the book.”
“I can’t believe they’d turn down your stories,” Bob said.
“Oh, it’s not my stories,” Bern said. “I’ve written a novel called The Assistant. Would you like to see it?” Bob said of course he would. He read the novel immediately. He was stunned by The Assistant, which was based on Malamud’s mother and father’s life running a small neighborhood grocery in Brooklyn, and Bob thought that Malamud had found his voice. In 1957, Farrar, Straus published The Assistant to critical acclaim. (Not long ago John Updike said, “I think in The Assistant, Malamud wrote a wonderful book—better to my mind than The Great Gatsbyr.”)
In 1959, Malamud’s short story collection was published under the title of the story Bob loved the most, The Magic Barrel. Soon after, Malamud received a call from Roger Straus. “Are you sitting down?” Roger said. Malamud said he was. “You’ve just won the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel.” Malamud was filled with pride. So was Straus, for it was the first major American literary award for his house. Malamud came through again in 1967, winning both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer for his novel The Fixer.
In March 1986 the Malamuds and Bob Giroux were dinner guests at Roger and Dorothea Straus’s home. Bern was happy. He said he was four chapters from the end of his new novel. The next day, working at his desk, he died of a heart attack. On Bob Giroux’s ninetieth birthday, Bernard Malamud’s widow, Ann, called to wish him all the happiness in the world.
I keep thinking about that phone call and remembered something Malamud had told his class one day at Bennington College. He was trying to describe the writing ordeal, something he was going through at that time in his life: “Before the first word strikes the page, or the first decent idea occurs, there is the complicated matter of breaking the silence.” How well he came to break the silence.
The hiring of Robert Giroux by Roger Straus, despite the uneasiness each felt for the other, was, as the present leader, Jonathan Galassi, told me, “the beginning of the real FSG.”
And it was. Roger remained as always the house’s central nervous system. Galassi said that Roger read every book FSG published. He was the boss who, almost every day of his life, came into his office and clucked over his troops. “I don’t think Roger was in essence a literary person,” Galassi explained. “He created himself into a publisher, and he created FSG. And he kept it going. What really mattered to him was the organism of the company. I always felt he had an affinity with the authors because they were creative, too. He sort of saw them as his peers.”
It was more difficult for Roger, however, to classify his editors as “peers,” for he felt he was above them all—even the one, you could say, who made the house. At one point in a conversation I had with Bob Giroux after Roger’s death, I did ask him how the two of them had gotten along through those years. There was in his voice a certain restraint. “He was very smart,” Bob said, “a very good backer of books. But there were times when he thought I was trying to steal his thunder in one way or another.”
There were two particular moments in the history of the company in which each baldly antagonized the other. In 1971 Bob proposed that FSG do a twenty-fifth-year anthology showcasing the house’s most prideful works. Roger was enthused, and they moved ahead on it. Henry Robbins did much of the pickings for the book, and Bob wrote the introduction. On one page he depicted the publisher with his legs up on his desk, talking with Jimmy Van Alen, who was one of the company’s original moneymen (and who also, it should be revealed here, invented the tiebreaker in tennis). Roger took the introduction home to read. The next day he told Bob, “My wife thinks you’re making fun of me.”
“I’m not making fun of you.”
“I want to take it out.”
“I won’t take it out.”
“Then we won’t publish the book.”
And they didn’t, even though it was in the catalog and on press.
Many years later, in 2002, The New Yorker published a profile of Roger Straus titled “Showboat.” In it, Straus was quoted as saying to Giroux, “The trouble with you is that you’ve been in publishing a hundred and seven years, and you still don’t know the difference between an editor and a publisher.”
When we met two years later, Bob was still livid about the description. “I never wanted to be a publisher,” he said. “He hired me as his editor. I was his editor,” he said, his voice rising. “And I was a damn good editor. There’s nothing great about the word publisher per se, except that one publisher—I think it was the second Nelson Doubleday—said, ‘I publish books. I don’t read them.’ No editor would ever say that,” Bob said, calming down, thinking about his years in the company. “I loved being there, and the firm really rose.”
The problem was that they were a team of mismatched personalities: Straus glib, flamboyant, power-driven, with a hunger for books that would go places, yet stingy with his forces; Giroux austere (he was Jesuit-trained, after all), conservative in dress, with an elegant mind that translated into a purity about his calling. Yet the center somehow held. Straus and Giroux needed each other because they shared the same fervent desire to find enduring works of literature. And both understood that it could only happen in the sanctity of an editorially driven publishing house.
Paul Elie joined the company in 1993. At that time he was working on a book of his own, about the interconnected lives of four Catholic “literary saints”: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy. Except for Dorothy Day they were all Giroux authors, and Bob helped make Elie’s conception work. An American Pilgrimage was published in 2002 to much deserved praise. “Robert Giroux was more of a teacher, with his knowledge of taste,” Elie told me, trying to gauge his superiors. “It was important to me to hear Mr. Giroux talking, him and his peers trying to figure out what was true or what was phony. One of the things I’ve understood in my work here—and this is true of Jonathan and Roger as well, considering that they’re all brilliant men—their power is not intellectual. They go by instinct, gut reaction. They marry people to ideas in a way that’s so nimble, you hardly know they’re doing it.”
Roger was nimble in other ways, too, as, for instance, how he netted Isaac Bashevis Singer, a novelist who would take Farrar, Straus and Giroux all the way to Stockholm. For years FSG’s rival, Knopf, had published the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s older brother, Israel Joseph Singer. Funny, I remember a best-selling I. J. Singer novel, The Brothers Ashkenazi, coming into our house when I was a kid. This novel could have been about my parents’ life in what they called “the old country.” They had no money to buy books, but my Aunt Rose, a schoolteacher and a lover of books who was living with us, brought it home. I read The Brothers Ashkenazi when I was a little older and loved it almost as much as Anthony Adverse.
“You like my work?” I. J. Singer would push Alfred Knopf, “my brother is even as good, if not better than I am.” Finally, as Roger Straus heard it, “Alfred told Harold Strauss, his editor in chief at the time, to go see this guy who was writing for The Jewish Daily Forward, writing in Yiddish on a typewriter whose carriage moved from right to left.” Harold Strauss bought the novel, The Family Moskat, for $500. “That was a fair price in those days,” Roger said, “and Knopf published it. But unbeknown to Isaac, Knopf cut the book by about twenty-five percent without his permission. So,” as Roger explained it, “Isaac said, ‘Fuck off, boy, I’m leaving him.’ I heard about it, and in 1958 we published Satan in Goray.”
There followed, with Giroux as his editor, a grand parade of Singer novels and stories—and in 1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize. Roger said that Singer had published ten novels without an agent. “I handled all of his work by myself. Finally, I thought, this is very incestuous what I’m doing. I can’t be your publisher and your agent and fuck you one way or another. He wasn’t very pushy, but I knew I had to get him an agent.”
That isn’t quite the way Bob Lescher remembers it. Bob was a major editor for nine years at Henry Holt and at Harcourt, then changed course to become a highly regarded literary agent (Dr. Benjamin Spock was one of his first clients). Bob was tipped off that Singer was looking for an agent, so he took the author to lunch. It was a cordial affair, and then Lescher got down to business. “Tell me, Mr. Singer, why do you want an agent? You’ve dealt with Mr. Straus and Mr. Giroux directly all these years. They appear to have published you superbly. Do you have trouble, for example, reaching Mr. Straus?”
“You know,” Singer said, “in the old days when I wanted to reach Roger Straus I’d call him and he took my call. Now I call and the secretary says, ‘He’s on the phone with Mr. Solzhenitsyn.” Singer waved his hand in the air. “I don’t mean to take anything away from Mr. Solzhenitsyn,” he said, “he’s a perfectly good novelist …” With that, Lescher signed on as Singer’s literary agent and today is the executor of the Singer estate.
In 1982, FSG published Singer’s Collected Stories—forty-seven of them, headed by his incomparable “Gimpel the Fool.” In his author’s note to the collection, Singer wrote with intensity about the essence of what he called genuine literature: “Genuine literature informs while it entertains. It manages to be both clear and profound. It has the magical power of merging causality with purpose, doubt with faith, the passions of the flesh with the yearnings of the soul. It is unique and general, national and universal, real and mystical.”
Singer died in 1991 at the age of eighty-seven. His widow, Alma, called Bob Giroux to attend his interment at a New Jersey cemetery. Immediately, Bob noticed the headstone, with a misspelled word—“the Noble Prize.” The mistake was fixed later, but Bob seized on it when he spoke and praised “the extraordinary, even noble literary career of Isaac Bashevis Singer.”
On the one wintry day we spent together—the last time I would see Roger—he reminisced about the Nobel Prizes. He spoke with pride about his two major commercial authors, Scott Turow and Tom Wolfe, but the Nobel Prize was Roger’s Congressional Medal of Honor. In 1970 the winner was the one who had gotten into Mr. Singer’s bald head a bit—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It came out all right when, eight years later, Singer joined Solzhenitsyn in the Nobel pantheon. Straus’s other Nobelists were Pablo Neruda, Czeslaw Milosz, Elias Canetti, William Golding, Wole Soyinka, Joseph Brodsky, Camilo José Cela, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney—the last three coming within five years of each other! “The best part of that,” Roger said, “is that it will never happen again.”
Of all those literary heroes, the one Roger loved the most was Joseph Brodsky. Roger carefully took from the top of his desk a heavy piece of glass—a replica of the Brodsky Medallion struck by the Nobel foundation. “Joseph wasn’t married then,” Roger explained, “and he put me down as next of kin. That did two things for me. It got me this medal, and it also got me a private interview with the king and queen. Only next of kin got in to meet the king and queen.”
“Joseph was like a son to Roger,” said Jonathan Galassi. “I think he was totally loyal and appreciated Roger in a certain way. They didn’t sit around talking about people. They had this very connected relationship.”
Roger was not in the office for Brodsky on January 28, 1996, when he made his last visit. But Paul Elie was there. “He asked me to get him a pack of cigarettes,” Paul said. “I, for once, just couldn’t do it. And he came back and he said, ‘Ah, you did not get cigarettes, did you?’ And I said, ‘Joseph, I couldn’t.’”
“‘Ah—see, you are growing. Last year you would not have been able to resist me.’”
Joseph Brodsky died that night. He was fifty-five years old.
The poets die young. The heads of publishing houses—those who are what they publish—tend to live longer lives. Upon the death of Roger Straus in May 2004 there swelled forth a string of memorial services, running from New York to London and, later in the year, to the Frankfurt Book Fair. The tributes were deferential to a degree, but Roger’s contentiousness created certain oratorical opportunities for those who mourned him.
Christopher MacLehose, a brilliant British literary publisher in the Straus tradition, may have best expressed the shadings of Roger’s psyche in his remarks:
“Not content with rivals, Roger created for himself among his peers, sometimes with breathtaking provocations, bitter enemies, and these he kept in good repair. He had the soul of a buccaneer and, not seldom, the turn of phrase of an ordinary seaman.” But MacLehose also proclaimed, “No American publisher I know did more for his writers.”
Of all the houses I cover in this book, FSG is the only one—up to now, at least—that has not materially changed after being bought by another company. In 1997, Roger actually offered his house to the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, Stuttgart, because he knew and respected the Holtzbrinck family and their dedication to publishing serious works of literature.
The legacy that was laid down for the house in the time of Roger Straus and Robert Giroux, and that is now being attended to with excellence by president and publisher Jonathan Galassi, may have been best expressed after Roger’s death by Verlyn Klinkenborg of The New York Times: “His firm was often discussed as if it were an antique, an inefficient old relic in a world of streamlined publishing machines. But, as Mr. Straus knew and demonstrated, the only meaningful efficiency in publishing is excellent taste.”
2
WISHING FOR A FAIR WIND
Grove Press
I had a very good publishing career, but not money-wise.
We got rid of the money. —BARNEY ROSSET
When Barney Rosset was in high school at the ultra-progressive Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, he was captain and star tailback on the football team, and he picked up an obsession for Henry Miller. When he was full-grown, he was active at tennis, softball, and Ping-Pong, and he was determined to publish Tropic of Cancer.
Before Barney was finished with his book publishing career, Henry Miller had fallen to him as one of his vanguard of golden age authors—Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, Marguerite Duras, William S. Burroughs, Frantz Fanon, and Octavio Paz were happy to join Grove Press. “Try to imagine a non-Grove Press America,” said publisher John G. H. Oakes, in a 1999 speech honoring Barney Rosset, “that is, an America where Barney Rosset never made his indelible mark—and you’ll see why it’s easy to call him the greatest influence on American culture in the postwar era.”
Publishing Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer had not come easy. The book had been banned in the United States (and a host of other countries) since its publication in 1934. When Rosset founded Grove Press in 1951, his strategy for sliding by the censors and book-banners was to use the unabridged Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a blocking back for Tropic of Cancer. He knew he would be challenged for publishing Chatterley—a novel, incidentally, that he never personally loved. But he understood that D. H. Lawrence passed literary standards; scholars and lawyers could make a case for him on that basis. Henry Miller was not so highly regarded. So Rosset would go first with Chatterley, and if the American court system ruled favorably, it would clear an opening for the book he did love and run it in for a touchdown. It took a bit of doing.
Rosset had entered the publishing business almost on a whim. (One of his editors, Kent Carroll, was once heard to say: “Rosset has a whim of steel.”) In 1951, at twenty-nine years old, he was feeling depressed rather than steely. One of the causes of his dejection was his failure as a filmmaker. This had been his occupation of choice after coming out of the army, partly because his best friend in high school, Haskell Wexler, was flourishing in Hollywood; indeed, Wexler would become one of the film industry’s most revered cinematographers. (It was such a close friendship it survived Wexler’s first marriage, to Barney’s high school sweetheart.) Three years earlier, Rosset had produced a documentary called Strange Victory (an allusion perhaps to Billie Holiday’s famous song about lynching, “Strange Fruit”) about how the United States may have won a world war but was failing domestically in the war against racism. The film didn’t work, and even he came to dislike it.
Barney was then living in Paris with Joan Mitchell, the daughter of a Chicago doctor and of a mother who was the editor of Poetry magazine. Mitchell was beginning her career as a painter; she was, in every way, as tough and independent as Rosset. They married in France, then came back to America and settled in Greenwich Village among the young American artists who were opening new pathways in art, as Rosset would do in avant-garde literature. Soon after, Joan Mitchell left Barney to pursue her own career as a painter. She would, in fact, become an acclaimed abstract expressionist.
This was a most uncomfortable period in Barney’s life. The loss of Joan Mitchell hurt a lot (although he survived to marry three more times). He took courses at the New School for Social Research and went to work for a magazine called Monthly Review Press. “I was trying to do something over there,” he told me, “but they decided that I might seem to be too liberal and left wing. But, chrissakes, I had a convertible car, and I got a parking ticket delivering the magazine. I was fired. I mean, like I was an unpaid intern. So I lost that. And then came the books. I liked them.”
One day a friend of Joan Mitchell’s from Chicago blew into town with two suitcases filled with books. She told Barney that these two guys she knew had started a book publishing house called Grove Press. The books in the suitcases were their inventory. They had only published three books in three years and wanted out. Barney bought the company for three thousand dollars, half contributed by his banker father. Soon, the new owner of the orphaned Grove Press, now filled with a purpose in life, was kicking open the doors and releasing a mighty draft of cool, fresh, unabridged air over the American book publishing industry.
The early nineteen-fifties was the opportune time for Barney Rosset to do what he was determined to do. There were unprecedented opportunities abroad. At the end of a destructive world war that had destroyed much of Europe, crippling the continent’s sense of promise and possibilities, talented young authors were thrashing around, unread and unpublished. So American publishers began looking outside the United States for “orphans” who could really write. It wasn’t just the Knopfs and Random Houses and Vikings and Harpers and Doubledays and the other good old boys who were in on the cultural gold rush. The new publishers, beginning with Farrar, Straus and George Braziller, were scooping up their share of the literary lode from France, Germany, Italy, Latin America, and the rest of the world. In 1953, Barney Rosset, having become a political radical when he was ten years old, began going after books no one else would publish.