HE JACKET FOR DENNIS ORPHEN’S new book was lousy, said MacTweed to his young partner And Company. What was more it was inadequate. He would go a step further and say it was only so-so. The last modest adjective, being unfamiliar to And Company’s blurb-conditioned ears, struck him as the most sweeping condemnation one could hope to hear. He could not keep the admiration out of his eye.
“In fact,” said MacTweed, banging on the desk willed to him by old Pat Negley, that “beloved” dean of publishers, that name used by a thousand authors for years to frighten their children, “in fact,” said MacTweed louder, and banging on this same desk so that the Children’s Book editor in her little dimity-deviled room next door spilled red ink all over proof sheets of A Book of Valentines—“In fact I’m not at all sure of this book, anyway.”
“Not at all sure it will sell, perhaps,” said And Company, eyes twinkling, for a source of quiet amusement around this temple of art was old MacTweed’s old-fashioned interest in profits. “There can be no doubt about it’s being good. No doubt at all.”
“Why no doubt?” parried MacTweed, lifting his horrendous piratical gray eyebrows by specially developed muscles at the top of his skull—certainly no ordinary temporal muscles could undertake such a mighty task very frequently. “Why no doubt? I doubt if Walter Scott is any good. I doubt if H. G. Wells is any good. I doubt if any author’s any good. As a matter of fact, Johnson, I look forward to the day when all our books will be written by blurb writers.”
“Ha,” said And Company obediently for he was not so long with the firm he could merely smile nor so new he need have hysterics, so he merely said Ha with taste and restraint. The last And Company had decided to pull his money out of the firm and take up some safer career like backing musical shows, but for some reason the money seemed to have taken root in the fertile MacTweed spring list so that it wouldn’t pull up without pulling up a great many lawsuits and other liabilities with it. So the withdrawing member had been presented with a great many papers all signed and notaried and highly non-negotiable, and had allowed his partnership to be resold to another promising young fellow, namely Johnson.
MacTweed had seen his young partners’ faces change so often in his time that in order to give an air of stability to the office he had refused to alter his own style of sideburns, soup-mustache, pepper-and-salt Norfolk business suits, dog-headed ebony cane, and high Walk-Over black shoes (for fallen arches) in forty years. The changing faces got on his nerves once in a while but the solid old firm could always use “new blood”—publisher’s argot for new investors. Johnson was more ambitious than any of his predecessors since he came with far less backing. Already he was reputed to be one of the most brilliant of the younger publishers. He had discovered more young proletarian writers than MacTweed could shake a stick at. He was so brilliant he could tell in advance that in the years 1934–35 and –36 a book would be hailed as exquisitely well-written if it began:
The boxcar swung out of the yards. Pip rolled over in the straw. He scratched himself where the straw itched him.
Johnson hoped for the day when “And Company” would be “Johnson.” He hated And Company. He often looked about him at the Travers Island Athletic Club and saw all the other And Companys. They seemed to be stamped permanently “And Company” for they all looked alike. Good God, he looked alike too! Keen, long-jawed, tallish young men with sleek mouse-colored hair, large mouths filled with strong big white teeth good for gnawing bark or raw coconuts but doubtless taxed chieflyby moules or at the most squab, nearsighted pleasant eyes under unrimmed glasses that might be bifocal, large ears set away from the head like good aerials, large carefully manicured hands, a bit soft, and agreeable deep voices left over from old Glee Clubs. As for dress, they wore well-made loose English clothes with the pants sometimes, as in Johnson’s case, coming up almost to the armpits, English style, the pleats making a modest bust, and the long stylish fly tastefully and unobtrusively operated by a zipper. These And Companys, many in publishing, some in their uncles’ devious businesses, were all men of good taste, and if Semitic were decent enough to be blond and even a little dumb just to be more palatable socially. But they all looked and talked alike and it had Johnson by the throat. He tried to break away from this insidious chain. He married a chorus girl, instead of a Bryn Mawr girl, a very pretty one from Face the Music. But all the other And Companys that year had married chorus girls from Face the Music and furthermore, like Mrs. Johnson, the girls were all private-school products and all wrote an occasional poem for F.P.A. or the weekly magazines dealing with the curious effect nature had upon them and how, in sum, it made them feel alone.
Johnson decided to throw his fellows off the track by lunching at the Vanderbilt or 70 Park instead of the club but they all went to lunch with him—indeed, they were there first, their fine clean-cut jaws uttering well-bred baritone remarks, never too personal, never too witty for good taste. In summer, instead of going up to Woods Hole, Johnson stole by night with his wife and the little blond baby everyone was having that year over to Martha’s Vineyard. But there they all were again on the ferry, their spectacles adjusted keenly over their copies of Men of Good Will, their pleasant deep voices politely deferring to their decently un-made-up little wives. Johnson, anxious to have one gesture of individuality, took to drinking applejack instead of Scotch. They all ordered applejack. He saw them all over the country clubs and town restaurants, he saw them in bar mirrors, rows of clean-cut, spectacled, somewhat adenoidal young men drinking applejack, hats at the same angle, eyes never quite blue or never quite brown but compromise shades between the two, they were all the same except for one who had a boil on his neck. Johnson envied this pioneer, this rebel. Not being gifted with boils he must differentiate himself intellectually, he felt. So he went to Communist meetings, he heard lectures at the John Reed Club, he went to a dinner for John Strachey—they were all there, their New Masses in their pockets. He discovered Forsythe. They all discovered Forsythe. Johnson was going mad. “Am I the mass mind?” he asked himself. “If I have a thought or an impulse does it mean that at that very minute ten million other men of my education and background are having it, too? Isn’t there a chance of my having one atom, one little hormone different from the others or do our metabolisms all work together like Tiller girls?”
One night, late in leaving the office, he was cheered up by a rather simple incident. He had often passed an Oriental wholesale house on Fifth Avenue called MOGI, MOMONOI & CO. The name held his fancy. He had even thought of it as an ideal motto beneath some splendid heraldic device for future publishing purposes. Mogi (I live) Momonoi (I conquer) and Co. (and forever). The translations he made up himself but they soothed him. All of the shops in this neighborhood, which was the wholesale clothing district, were closed on this evening, for it was nearly eight, and he had Fifth Avenue to himself, a delightful sensation for a man doomed by birth and instinct to Westchester. He was going to a performance of Sailors of Cattaro that evening feeling reasonably assured that the majority of And Companys would be at the Beaux Arts Ball, when he saw the front door of the Oriental house open and two short little Japanese gentlemen come out. They stood on the sidewalk quietly waiting. They were, oh, beyond a doubt, Mogi and Momonoi themselves. A third was locking the door. Johnson waited eagerly. The door locked, Number Three joined the others; unquestionably he was And Company himself, but how unlike any And Company Johnson had ever seen! He was smaller than his partners and he had a mustache. Johnson could not remember a Jap with a mustache but what elated him most was the daring, the insolence of an And Company with a mustache. The very next day his electric razor, Christmas gift, skirted his upper lip in its swift flight. In less than three months Johnson boasted a mustache as large as an anchovy, but its under-size was made up for by its rich emphatic black color, particularly since Johnson’s own hair was only hair-colored. The mustache was distinguished, smart, and only Johnson knew that the pallid reddish bristles from his native follicles were heightened daily by his wife’s eyebrow pencil. So this visible badge of a unique personality gave him the courage now to argue with his master, MacTweed, to insist that Dennis Orphen’s book was exactly what Gannett, Hansen, and Isabel Paterson had been waiting for all their lives.
“The truth is,” said MacTweed, and when MacTweed prefaced his remarks with the word “truth” or “fact” Johnson suspected the worst, so he looked discreetly down at his fingernails now, “I don’t like the idea of one author satirizing another. This would be downright libelous, this book, if Callingham was fool enough to sue. Naturally he won’t want to bring such attention to it since he’s so savagely ridiculed in it. But still is it right, is it ethical, I ask?”
The word ethical was a masterpiece. Johnson was moved by it. It sounded like the deep choked voices of all the clean-cut And Companys swearing loyalty to their ivy-covered alma maters. It was a word for seniors to use, hallowed by cap and gown. Ethical. It said, framed as it was now by the tobacco-stained fangs of MacTweed’s generous mouth, boys, it said, there’s something more to the game of life than just drinking and wisecracking and wenching; there’s a gentlemen’s code. There’s ethics. Ethics the white flag that went up when you saw you were licked, ethics, the rules for other people, ethics, the big King’s X. Through the momentary glamour of MacTweed’s ethics Johnson perceived a cablegram lying under the chromium Discobolus paperweight. He had a dim hunch.
“Yes, Johnson,” said MacTweed. “You think I’m just a hard-headed businessman, an old Scrooge. Well, let me tell you I’ve got a sense of professional ethics and, by God, I don’t see where this guy Orphen gets off raking over a giant, a titan, like Andrew Callingham.”
“Callingham’s last book sold nearly a hundred thousand,” agreed Johnson.
“Yes,” said MacTweed, consulting a memorandum before him, “one hundred and fourteen thousand. And now in seven languages. If we should ever be in a position to publish Callingham—he wants an unearthly advance—how is it going to look for us to start off with a satire on his love life? I ask you, Johnson. It’s simply a problem of publishing ethics.”
Johnson felt depressed. He fingered his mustache nervously. He looked out the window over the tops of Fourth Avenue and saw the tugs on the East River breathing out sooty puffs of smoke, chugging along on their little ethical duties of carrying oil or coal or canned beans someplace else. It was too bad. He, Johnson, had been the little father of Dennis Orphen, he felt very proud of his discovery, picking him up out of the gutter, you might say, and making literature of him. He had seen his first Orphen in a woodpulp magazine eight years ago, a full novelette it was, sandwiched between ads for bust developers for wallflowers and designs for a stylish truss. This, said Johnson at the time, reading eagerly from bust to truss, is it. It’s literature. For it began:
The freight slows up just outside the yards. As she jerks round the bend by the tower Spud gives Butch a kinda push and out they rolls outa the side door onto the gravel. Wot the hell, sez Butch, take it easy, take it easy. Ya wanna kill us?
He had nursed Orphen along. All the other And Companys were nursing promising lads and lassies along and Johnson thought he might as well nurse talent as the next one. The trouble with this nursing was that it involved a lot of pocket money and not the firm’s either. Orphen, for instance, had never felt properly nursed without a half dozen or so Manhattans and lunch besides, a good lunch. Presently, in due course, the first full length novel was ready for publication. Johnson read it and was chagrined to realize that in the case of Orphen he had overnursed. Orphen, instead of staying in the boxcar of his woodpulp days had, at the first kind word, leapt to the past tense and grammar of satin pages. Johnson was worried, not only for the immediate author but for future nursees. It was an age of the present tense, the stevedore style. To achieve this virile, crude effect authors were tearing up second, third, and tenth revised drafts to publish their simple unaffected notes, plain, untouched, with all the warts and freckles of infancy. The older writers who had taken twenty years to learn their craft were in a bewildering predicament, learning, alas, too late, that Pater, Proust, and Flaubert had betrayed them, they would have learned better modern prose by economizing on Western Union messages.
So Johnson saw future nursees, like Orphen, encouraged out of their native gold mines into the sterile plains of belles-lettres. Very well, he said, I will learn something myself from this and hereafter discourage virile young writers till they get tougher and tougher out of sheer bitterness and become incorruptible. Too late now to save Orphen, however. A seeming dyed-in-the-wool hard guy, he had become in Johnson’s nursing school a coddler of fine phrases, a figure-of-speech user, a master of synecdoche. He had been compared to Huxley and Chekov alike, and Louis Bromfield had retired to the south of France to do a blurb for The Hunter’s Wife. “Fine,” it said, and was placed by Johnson himself on the back page of the jacket under Hugh Walpole’s own words, just above what the women of England in Time and Tide had said and the women of America in Books had said about the earlier book.
MacTweed had liked this change in Orphen for his part, having never got over an old apprenticeship in throwing out any manuscript whose first page smacked of illiteracy. His committee of judges, consisting of himself and his chromium Discobolus disguised under five other celebrated names, had awarded Orphen the MacTweed Prize for 1933. Orphen became a minor property. But now, as Johnson saw, MacTweed had scented big game. MacTweed, plucking at a fertile eyebrow reflectively, admitted as much.
“Frankly, Johnson,” said MacTweed, “we are publishing Callingham. Foster visited him in Saint-Cloud and contacted him constantly. It sounds to me as if Foster contacted the pants off him. He outcontacted Doubleday and Harcourt and Macmillan. He certainly did his job. I like Foster.” MacTweed chuckled, offered Johnson a Players’ Club cigarette from his lizardskin case, gift of his wife and embarrassingly initialed Y. M. so that everyone must guess his unfortunate real name could be nothing but Yuremiah.
“Has anything been settled yet?” asked Johnson uneasily. He saw a bad month ahead explaining to Dennis why his book was not being pushed, and grasping at straws desperately, he decided he’d have to say it had offended the Church or would the Chase National sound more powerful? But ah the distinction, the glory of being Callingham’s publisher over all the other And Companys. He brightened a little.
“Foster’s sailing here on the Bremen with him right now.” MacTweed beamed. He lit Johnson’s cigarette generously. “It’s in the bag.”
“Callingham on his way here?” Johnson gave a start. “With The Hunter’s Wife coming out tomorrow, and with all the gossip about it being Callingham’s own life—the reporters all meeting his boat and getting his denials that the book is about him—what a break for sales!”
MacTweed’s eyes half-closed under the grizzled brows. He toyed with the Discobolus. His hands were tobacco-stained, calloused, the nails ripped off and appallingly unkempt due largely to his passion for tending his own garden at his place up the Hudson. Johnson tactfully withdrew his own large, beautifully tended white And Company hands from the desk.
“That is something,” muttered MacTweed and smiled appreciatively. A nice problem in ethics here. The book with its scandal base would probably sell as much as Callingham’s last one. It would get all the Callingham foes as well as his fans. And wouldn’t it in a way stir up interest in Callingham’s own future work? Wouldn’t there be controversies back and forth that would aid sales? That’s the way it could be put to Callingham. It could be handled. Foster could handle it. MacTweed banged on the table suddenly and once more the Children’s Book editor in the next room must grab the toppling vase of jonquils and calm the storm-tossed ink bottle.
“We’ll make that young Orphen yet,” said MacTweed. “We’ve got a real property there, Johnson. Let’s get behind him on this book. Let’s get Caroline Meigs to give a tea for him. Let’s get all set before the Bremen lands.”
He swung his chair’s front legs which had been patiently poised in the air during the conference down to the floor and thrust out his hand. Johnson shook it eagerly. This was a step forward.
“Congratulations, sir, on getting Callingham,” he said.
MacTweed stood up and faced the picture of old Pat Negley standing in a trout stream, rod in hand, an inscription running across the grassy bank in the right lower corner—“To Mac, Ever, Pat.”
“We’ll be bigger publishers than you ever were, you old sonofagun,” said MacTweed. “By golly.”
He slapped Johnson on the back. It was all very amiable and jolly, a real esprit de corps. Johnson saw And Company changing into Johnson almost before his eyes.
“By the way, a new young man is coming in on Monday to learn the trade,” MacTweed said casually. “Just out of Harvard—a connection of the Morgans on his mother’s side. Seems to be a hell of a clean-cut fellow. Wants to learn the ropes ha-ha.”
“Ha,” said Johnson with a sinking feeling.
“Building up the way we are we need all the new blood we can get,” said MacTweed.
“New blood, yes,” said Johnson.
MacTweed dropped back a step and studied his young partner’s face with concern.
“You look peaked, Johnson. I wish you’d let me put you on a Hay diet. All proteins at once, all starches—well, hell, you see what it’s done for me.”
“Yes,” said Johnson and went rather gloomily back to his dark room under the filing cabinets.