THE FIRST EIGHT BOOKS, 1970–1985
Two basic questions the editor should be addressing to the author are: Are you saying what you want to say? and, Are you saying it as clearly and consistently as possible? If these sound narrow at first glance, think further. They cover everything from awkward syntax and repetition to the destruction of a novel’s impact through a protagonist’s behavior so unexplained and unmotivated as to be unintentionally baffling. All this is of course subject to free and extended discussion and the author is the ultimate arbiter, as all responsible editors would agree. They would also concur that knowing when to leave things alone is as high an editorial skill as knowing when to suggest revision.
Does all this always work out in a glow of amity and constructive engagement? Certainly not, no more frequently than do love affairs. Overbearing, insensitive editors and mulish, unlistening authors, whether singly or in pairs, have caused many a shift of contract and failed book. Both species eventually tend to meet comeuppance and run out of partners.
Alan D. Williams, “What Is an Editor?” in Editors on Editing, 3d ed., edited by Gerald Gross, Grove Press
Copying out those words for the preceding epigraph, I appreciated Alan Williams anew, with the added refinement that time can bring. These paragraphs are so like him, so like his editing notes and his style of editing a manuscript. Everything is there, only he’s not going to hit you over the head with it. Read his assessment, read it again, “think further,” and you begin to extract its full wisdom and bite. It’s fitting that he can still bestow his editing gifts on me from the grave: in this instance giving me the image of a dance partnership for the relationship between an author and her editors.
On a publishing dance card, my partners would appear in this order:
1. David Segal
2. Robert Gottlieb
3. Alan Williams
4. Harvey Ginsberg
5. Linda Grey
6. Jennifer Hershey
7. Nancy Miller
8. Jennifer Hershey
9. Nancy Miller
My first partner, the one who went to lunch at the Brussels with John Hawkins, died before our dance ever got in full swing. In May 1970 David saw The Perfectionists through publication at Harper & Row. When he contracted for that novel, he had offered to guide me through the rest of the manuscript, or let me find my own way, and I chose to go it alone. When he received the finished manuscript he mailed me his notes, including a major suggestion that I resisted. But at the last moment, he and John Hawkins talked me out of murdering a character on the last page. (It was the right decision.) David then moved to Knopf as a senior fiction editor and we signed a contract for a second novel, The Angel Keeper, about a young American woman putting off her American marriage and getting caught up in the sinister goings-on in the household of her London employer, an Anglican priest, and his mad sister and a manipulative housekeeper. (“David has flipped over The Angel Keeper,” reported Hawkins.) However David had some suggestions and qualms about the setup of this novel: how was I going to sustain the American side, which, by page 90, wasn’t as interesting as the English side? We had made a date to discuss this over a long lunch on December 28, when, armed with my brand-new Ph.D., I would be in New York applying for teaching jobs at the Modern Language Association convention.
The morning of the twenty-eighth, a Monday, began on a note of anxiety. I lurked in my hotel room at the Americana and listened to the constant phone-ringing and opening and shutting of doors across the hall, where a university had taken an interviewing suite. To calm myself I started transcribing in my journal what I was overhearing from the hall.
Knock knock
(no answer)
Knock knock
(Door opens) Yes? (rather angrily)
Hello, I’m . . . mumble.
Oh, yes. Happy to meet you. Would you mind waiting outside for just a few more minutes? We’re still . . . mumble, mumble.
Oh, sorry, I . . .
(Door slams. Some seconds go by. We hear the unclicking of the candidate’s briefcase. Checking his vita sheet to make sure he still exists?)
Whenever I had something important to prepare for, I paced myself. Bathe and meditate on event ahead; prepare answers if necessary. Write in journal. Slowly dress. Apply makeup. I was still in pajamas and robe, having set my room service tray outside the door. That’s when I saw the “University of Indiana” sign posted on the door opposite. I myself had a job interview with that institution in midafternoon. Was it a good sign or a bad sign that their suite was right across the hall? At least I now knew better than to knock on the door too early, like that last unfortunate candidate. Also I would be coming directly from lunch with my editor; how many job applicants could breeze in fresh from a lunch with their editor?
The phone rang and it was an old UNC classmate, Frank Crowther. He lived in Greenwich Village, was on the masthead of the Paris Review, and was working on a long novel, What if Laughter Were Tears? which he had begun back in Chapel Hill after getting out of the Marines.
“So you’re here. Come downtown and I’ll treat you to lunch at the Red Lion.”
“I’m having lunch with my editor at Knopf today.”
“Who is your editor?”
“David Segal.”
“But—he just died.”
“That’s not very funny, Frank.”
“You haven’t seen this morning’s Times?”
“No. What—”
A rustle of newspaper on his end; in a subdued voice he began to read:
David I. Segal, a senior editor of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., publishers, who was known for his encouragement of talented new authors, died yesterday, apparently of a heart attack, at his home, 280 Riverside Drive. He was 42 years old.
So instead of lunch with my editor, I was taken by my agent to meet the editor in chief and publisher at Knopf, who would assign me a new editor. (John Hawkins had been trying to get through to me while I was still listening to Frank reading David’s obituary.)
“What kind of editor would you like to work with?” was Robert Gottlieb’s first question to me in his office, and I replied rather pompously, “Well, it will have to be someone who appreciates great literature,” then burst into sobs.
I still cringe when I recall this unfortunate opening to our nine-year partnership, but then I remind myself:
1. The first person who took a chance on publishing me had just died in his sleep. David had come out to Iowa with Hawkins to meet me, and I had been charmed by this fat little man, so at home with himself, who loved books and told me I had a rare way of conveying “a sense of wrong.”
2. Only one week before, I had passed my Ph.D. comprehensives and was still stuffed to the gills with Great Literature.
3. I had no teaching job for next year and no savings in the bank and the future looked bleak, especially with my champion dead.
“Yes, Gail, you were crying the first time I met you,” Bob Gottlieb was to remind me more than once during our partnership, which had its affable periods and rocky moments.
“Some marriages are not made in heaven,” Gottlieb would later reflect about our time together in his 1994 Paris Review interview with Larissa MacFarquhar (“The Art of Editing”), but on that late 1970 December day, he waited out my sobs and then said kindly, in response to my Great Literature stipulation, “Well, Gail, I’m afraid that’s going to be me.”
Bob Gottlieb guided and endured me through four books, two of which—The Odd Woman (1974) and Violet Clay (1978)—were finalists for the National Book Award. He wrote one of my recommendations for a Guggenheim fellowship, which I got, and he wrote a letter of protest to Larry McMurtry when McMurtry trashed The Odd Woman in a review. When I turned in an early version of something still called The Angel Keeper but with a vastly changed story from the one David had “flipped over” (it would later become Glass People), Bob wrote me a long letter, which ended, “Please Gail, I don’t want you to ruin your chances,” and so I dispensed with my wonderfully researched science-fiction ending of Cameron Bolt taking back his wife, Francesca, without realizing that the returned version was a high-quality robot.
Having read Great Literature, Bob could always catch me out when I had someone say “as you so beautifully do,” or allowed a character to sunbathe naked next to a sleeping snake.
After I had turned in The Odd Woman, he urged me to add one more thing: “The reader needs to know whether Jane wants to have children. I think you must make this clear. Being a mother completely changes a woman’s life.”
Jane Clifford, a thirty-two-year-old English professor having an affair with a married man, wants tenure and she wants love, but I hadn’t given a single thought to whether she wanted to be a mother. At the time I was thirty-six and hadn’t quite made up my mind on that subject, but most days I did not see myself as a potential mother. However, Jane was not a paper doll of me—she wasn’t a fiction writer, for instance—and I found a way to work out her feelings on the subject by having her, toward the end of the novel, when she has just decided to leave her married lover, make a list of the fates of the five single women featured in George Gissing’s 1893 novel, The Odd Women, which she has been reading. It was fitting for the scholarly Jane to make a list of this kind and then apply it to her life.
Compromise—rebellion against compromise—death
Escape through drink—rehabilitation to “useful member of society”
Finding fulfillment through “others”
Sublimation of personal furies into “a cause”
Starting all over again in a child
The whole passage, like a little personal essay, ran eight pages in a late chapter of The Odd Woman. (I still think the novel would have been fine without it, but maybe it made a difference to some readers.) Jane ends up drawing a line through every word on the list, except “a child,” concluding with this open-ended fillip:
And who knew: though she might never conceive him, she might dream him, sitting in front of her old-maid fire, as Charles Lamb had sat in front of his, telling wonderful stories to her unborn child.
I was to follow up on this idea of “Dream Children” in a later story, my first ghost story, which was also the title of the volume of stories I published with Knopf two years later, in 1976.
While I was checking some dates and facts for this chapter, I looked up Gottlieb and came across his Paris Review interview about the art of editing, which I had somehow missed.
“Some marriages are not made in heaven,” the part about our time together began.
Now, Gail was extremely sensitive, and she viewed herself as a highly successful commercial writer, whereas I viewed her as a rather literary writer with a limited readership. She couldn’t live that way, and eventually, although we worked together very cordially on several books, she moved to Viking. She had shown them a book she was working on, and they saw it the way she saw it—as a major commercial novel—and they paid her a lot of money, and indeed it became a big best-seller and made her famous and successful. I didn’t read her that way, and I still feel that her earlier work, which was less commercial, is more interesting. But she wanted to develop in a different direction, and I’m sure she doesn’t feel that she compromised in any way to do that. In other words, I was the wrong editor-publisher for her and she was wise to leave me.
But that’s not how it happened, I thought. How could anyone have gotten me so wrong? I viewed myself as a literary writer who wanted to reach a larger audience and make enough money to take time off from teaching. The events leading up to my leaving Knopf played out with more intricacy and complexity than indicated by Gottlieb’s recollections.
He was the first and only publisher to whom John Hawkins and I gave the first six chapters (250 pages, a third of what would be the finished novel) of A Mother and Two Daughters. Bob read it fast; he had never kept me waiting. “Listen, I like this,” he said, “and it’s fun to read.” He said he loved novels about families and that being an only child had made him a sucker for anything about siblings. He thought I had set up the three women just right: “I don’t mind stopping the sisters to read about Nell [the mother] and you shouldn’t either.” He said he’d given me up for lost the past eighteen months and for us to keep in close touch as I got nearer to the end, because “I know an author doesn’t like to finish a book and have their editor gone.” Then he called Hawkins and offered an advance of twenty-five thousand dollars, slightly more than he had paid for Violet Clay.
I anguished for several days. I knew that an advance is usually divided into four parts: a fourth on signing the contract, a fourth on manuscript delivery, a fourth on hardcover publication, a fourth on paperback publication. Sometimes there is a fifth part: final payment six months after paperback publication. I had hoped to bring in enough cash to let me go two years without teaching. I had been teaching at Vassar, and, at present, was teaching at Columbia. Six thousand a year minus agent’s commission wouldn’t pay for a year. Also, if I accepted Gottlieb’s offer, no other publishers would ever see the book. On the other hand, I liked being a Knopf author, something I had aspired to ever since the Knopf scout turned down my five pages in Chapel Hill in 1958; and I liked it when people asked, “Who is your editor?” and exclaimed, “Oh, he’s the best in the business,” when I told them. Nevertheless I told John Hawkins to decline the offer, and we started putting together a list of publishers I wanted to try.
“I’ve had a rather curious talk with Gottlieb,” John reported the day after. He had called Bob and told him we were declining because I needed a larger advance to live for two years without teaching. Bob had told Hawkins he just couldn’t go any higher and maybe we should look somewhere else. “Then,” John said, “I asked Bob, ‘If we don’t get what we want, can we come back?’ And Bob said, ‘Gail is always welcome to come back. But wait . . . what do I get out of this? You’re leaving me. Let’s say that I get a chance to match the highest bidder. If Gail gets a hundred thousand dollars, God bless her she should take it and go, but say someone offers thirty-five thousand, I’d like to see if I can talk to one of the paperback houses and then match the offer.’”
John sent manuscripts to Atlantic Monthly Press; Doubleday; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Morrow; Putnam; Simon & Schuster; and Viking.
Aaron Asher at Farrar, Straus was the first to call. “We don’t usually go after Knopf authors,” he said, but when John told him Gottlieb had agreed to let me test the market and wanted to be in on the bidding, Asher said, “In that case, I’d love to have this book on our list. I don’t know if I can afford it but I’d like to have it.”
Seven houses besides Knopf wanted to publish A Mother and Two Daughters. Viking, Doubleday, and Simon & Schuster stayed in the bidding until the end, and Viking won with a fifty-five-thousand-dollar offer. (Bob Wyatt at Avon had backed the deal with an offer for the paperback, which, in turn, would lead to another auction.)
When recalling today that seven major New York houses were bidding for my book while Robert Starer, the composer with whom I shared my life, and I were crossing on the ferry to Ocracoke, I feel there are still three of me in one skin and none of us can quite believe it. There is the author on the ferry, on her way to revisit the island where A Mother and Two Daughters will reach its denouement, which she hasn’t written yet; there is the unpublished student chanting Anglo-Saxon poetry on her solitary walk home under the Iowa stars; and there is the present me, who sits here at the keyboard in Woodstock, in the house that was built on the bounty that had its beginnings on that day.
Robert and I landed on Ocracoke, and I called Hawkins from a pay phone. The auction was over. But first John had had to call Gottlieb, as promised, and he had just gotten off the phone with him. “Gail must call me herself and tell me she wants to be published by me,” Gottlieb had told John. “Then I might top Viking’s offer. Or I might not. I haven’t decided yet.”
“So, it’s up to you,” said John. “Do you need time to think it over?”
“No, I have already decided,” I said.
Robert and I had discussed it at length during our drive from Woodstock to North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
“I want to start over,” I told John, “with an editor who is over the moon to have won me.”
And that is my side of the story of how Bob and I came to the end of our dance.
Alan Williams at Viking was the first editor with whom I finally got to have lunch. He had been at Viking for two decades, as both managing editor and editorial director.
I didn’t meet him until after he had read the completed manuscript of A Mother and Two Daughters. In those bygone days, publishing wasn’t shut down between Christmas and New Year’s, and on December 31, the last day of 1980, I took the seven thirty A.M. bus from Woodstock to New York so I could arrive at Viking a little past ten: a whole new beginning. The lobby of 625 Madison was blazing with pots of red and white poinsettias. After a final going-over with my hairbrush, I took the elevator to the sixteenth floor. Alan Williams, stocky, with thick white hair, blue eyes, and a young face for his age—fresh in its quality of expectancy to be enlightened or entertained—took me to meet his colleagues: publisher Irv Goodman, editor Amanda Vaill, marketing director Connie Sayre, publicity director Victoria Meyer, and subsidiary rights editor Jean Griffin. All of them had read A Mother and Two Daughters, and each talked of their department’s plans for it. It was a publishing first for me: meeting so many people all at once who were excited about working with me on my book.
We went to Alan’s office, overflowing with books and manuscripts that toppled onto several of the faded green slipcovered chairs. Over coffee Alan said that he had read my manuscript during the weekend before Christmas and it had been like living two lives, “only the life of your book seemed more real.” At Princeton Christmas parties, he kept looking for people like Lucy, the ex-congressman’s wife who precedes her husband into parties smiling and blinking like the little flasher cars that precede oversize vehicles on the highway.
We then adjourned to a conference room where we sat next to each other at a big table and went through the manuscript. He had written notes on a legal pad and, for an hour and a half, he suggested large and small clarifications, corrected grammar and syntax, and also pointed out things he had especially loved: the opening party, the theological argument between Cate and her mother’s clergyman friend, the names of certain characters, like the wild divorcée, Taggart McCord. His attention to detail was extraordinary. Wouldn’t rich Roger Jernigan have bought his handicapped son a state-of-the-art telescope to watch the passing traffic on the Mississippi River from the bluff outside their castle? Would a pile of National Geographics burn more slowly than old newspapers in a house fire?
After that, we walked to a Japanese restaurant where it was private and dark and talked about writers we admired and those we thought were overrated. He told me about his three daughters, one of whom had just published her first story in Redbook, and I told him about my mother and her writing and about Robert.
I sometimes wonder how things would have gone if I could have had more time working with Alan. But the publishing industry was on the threshold of drastic upheavals, and I was fortunate to have had him as long as I did. He saw me through the publication of A Mother and Two Daughters, which was my first novel to become a bestseller and my third to be a finalist for the National Book Award. He came up with the idea of titling my next book, a novella and five stories, Mr. Bedford and the Muses instead of Mr.Bedford and Five Stories. He was a man of grace notes. When he had finished reading the manuscript of The Finishing School, he put Chopin’s Scherzo in B flat Minor on the stereo in his Princeton study, and I could hear its opening bars when I answered my phone in Woodstock. This was the “all clear” scherzo Julian DeVane in The Finishing School played to summon his sister, Ursula, back from the fields after he had finished teaching music to children in their house.
Alan was a serious lover of music; he was the first polymath I ever knew well, if anyone could claim to know Alan well. Like some people in the religious life, he could talk engagingly about almost anybody or anything without “getting personal.” The only time I ever saw him show emotion was on a windswept night when he was visiting Robert and me in our rented beach cottage on Pawleys Island in the summer of 1985, and he told us, having to steady his face, how the young women from the Olympic hockey team had shown up en masse for the funeral of his aunt Ann, their hockey coach. By that time he had resigned abruptly from Viking after the CEO of Penguin, during the corporate restructuring of Viking, had screamed at him, but Alan was to bestow a magnanimous editorial gift on Robert during that visit with us. Robert had been typing some vignettes of his rich and eventful life, and Alan read them and suggested he break them up into chapters and send what he had to Charles McGrath at the New Yorker.
“Once something appears in the New Yorker,” Alan told Robert, “editors in publishing houses call you up and want to make a contract for a book.” This is just what happened. Several months later, when Robert felt they were good enough, he sent some chapters to McGrath and heard back almost immediately. The New Yorker wanted to publish Robert’s long chapter about his sixteenth year working in wartime Palestine as a traveling accompanist for the old German tenor Hermann Jadlowker, whom the kaiser had once called “My Lohengrin” and who had known Brahms. Here they are in the old Zion Hotel, halfway up Mount Carmel; for some reason only a single room has been booked and two single beds have been pushed close together.
It seemed quite unreal that I should be in the same room, almost in the same bed, with a man who had sung for Brahms. By now Jadlowker had settled in his bed. “Brahms had a large pot belly,” he said, “and he kept his foot on the pedal a lot.” I had not played much Brahms, but the thought did occur to me that a protruding belly might account for why the left and right hand in his piano writing often seemed so far apart . . . I had never heard Jadlowker talk so much and so freely, and I did not want him to ever stop talking. Through listening to him I felt that somehow I knew these men myself—men who until then had been just names in books and on the title pages of printed music. I also felt that through having made music with Jadlowker, I had entered a chain of musical continuity, and that if someday I was to tell this to someone else, he or she would also become part of it.
McGrath told Robert they would have run all the chapters if they’d had the space. “I wish everyone wrote as sparsely and clearly and directly as you,” he said. Joe Fox at Random House, tipped off about the New Yorker sale by John Irving, asked John Hawkins to see the manuscript and bought it. Robert named it Continuo. Shortly after, the English publisher Tom Rosenthal bought it for Andre Deutsch and a portion of it was published in The Times of London.
I’ve always delighted in Virginia Woolf’s flat-out assertion (in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” her essay about the ways authors present their characters) that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed.” In the same spirit, I will likewise declare that on Labor Day weekend, 1983, the publishing business changed for me.
It was Saturday afternoon, September 3, 1983, in Woodstock when I heard the faraway ringing of the kitchen phone. I had turned off my bedroom phone before taking a nap. I had been dreaming of the characters in The Finishing School, which was in its final chapters. The phone kept ringing, so I plugged in the bedroom phone and answered.
“Have you heard?” asked John Hawkins.
In the coming years this salutation, delivered in his ominous rumble, was to become so frequent that John took to prefacing it with his special dire chuckle.
“Heard what? It’s Saturday.”
“On Thursday Peter Mayer walked into Viking and fired the president, Irv Goodman. Nobody’s answering their phones over there, but it’s rumored there’s a bloodbath coming.”
Peter Mayer was the CEO of Penguin Books, which had bought Viking Press in 1975; he was also a neighbor of ours, and spent weekends in Woodstock when he was not in London.
I saw gentlemanly Irv Goodman standing on the lovely Persian carpet in front of his desk, only the reds in it were now pools of blood.
“Alan is still there, unless he quits,” said John. “I finally reached his assistant at home, but Connie Sayre, the marketing director, was close to Irv, so everyone is worried about her.”
“But we were all working so well together! Why does there have to be a bloodbath?”
“Peter said Viking isn’t making enough money and Viking and Penguin now answer to Pearson, the multinational book company.”
I was within two months of completing The Finishing School. Viking was publishing my novella about the young people in the London boardinghouse, Mr. Bedford and the Muses, the following week.
After John and I hung up, the phone rang again. It was Peter Mayer’s wife, Mary, wondering if we were free for lunch at their Woodstock house tomorrow.
Robert and I were invited for twelve thirty. Knowing the Mayers’ laid-back style, we tried our best to be late, but still arrived at twelve forty-five. Peter and two other half-naked men were digging a trench in the private road. Peter, pouring sweat, gleefully informed us that his two assisting ditchdiggers were John Webster, the financial director of Penguin International, and Mr. Blass, the cochairman of Penguin. “Oh, yes,” they cried, “we’re the slaves!”
Robert and I sort of hung around while the men went back to their digging. Mary came out of the house and asked us if we wanted a drink. Then Peter’s former secretary from his days at Pocket Books arrived with her husband. Mary brought our drinks and we sat around the picnic table and swatted off bugs from the pond below. Mary, a new mother, enumerated the advantages of the infant section in British versus American planes. The British had the baby cots at shelf level, while the American ones were on the floor. American planes had infant safety belts attached to the mother’s safety belts, whereas on British planes the mother held the baby in her arms. Soon after, Peter’s parents, Alfred and Lee Mayer, arrived, and we talked about Woodstock things. Alfred Mayer was the publisher of Overlook Press, which he and Peter had started together. Alfred had just bought our friend Maria Bauer’s Prague memoir, Beyond the Chestnut Trees, which he was publishing in the spring of 1984. Maria and Robert Bauer were our close Woodstock friends.
After the sweaty ditchdiggers had showered and dressed, I asked John Webster whether he was a descendant of the John Webster who wrote The White Devil. Peter came to his rescue. At last the nutcrackers and picks were laid out and Mary presented us each with a whole lobster accompanied by yellow rice and sliced tomatoes. We began with Folinari wine and then switched to red. I told Mr. Webster, a rugby-ish type from Lincolnshire, how I had traveled in the Midlands and northeast England for the U.S. Travel Service in the 1960s. He said he had been with Price Waterhouse before he came to Penguin.
Peter and I were playing a little game. I was determined to play by social rules and not be the first to mention Viking or the publishing business and not to go within a hundred miles of the subject nearest my heart, the fate of Alan Williams. After Mr. Webster and I had finished discussing what made selling books different from selling fabric or ketchup, I waved my nutcracker at my host. “Now listen, Peter, you must tell me . . .” I said, “how to tackle this lobster.”
He said, “Oh!” and laughed. “I thought you were going to ask what I was going to do about Viking.”
I didn’t rise to the bait, and Peter showed me how to crack the claws and extricate the meat with the pick. When he left the table on some errand, I said to my new friend Mr. Webster, “Tell me, is Viking broke, or what?”
“Oh, no, no! Certainly not. Absolutely not.” He launched into corporate assurances to a worried author, and Peter, reappearing promptly, explained how he himself would be staying in New York for the time being to oversee Viking’s restructuring.
Mr. Webster told me Peter had a thirty-eight-year-old boss whom neither he nor Peter liked. This boss had asked Peter if he would stay on at Penguin for another five years. But this boss hadn’t actually made Peter an offer yet, Mr. Webster confided.
After Peter’s father told a story about meeting a bear on two legs while hiking in the mountains around Woodstock, the senior Mayers left for the outdoor concert at the Maverick.
Robert and I stayed a little longer. I helped Mary clear the table, and we all drank more wine. Viking wasn’t discussed anymore, and the name of Alan Williams never uttered.
When Robert and I got home, I said: “You know what worries me most about this afternoon? Even the Peter Mayers have to be scared of somebody now.”
During Peter’s restructuring at Viking, nine more people were fired. One old-school editor, Cork Smith, resigned in “honorable protest” of the firings. Connie Sayre survived the bloodbath and lasted at Viking until 1986. Irv Goodman’s successor was a man who had made his name selling toys. Alan Williams, although stripped of his power to authorize substantial advances (under the new regime he wouldn’t have been able to authorize the one paid for A Mother and Two Daughters) stayed on for a while, during which time he edited The Finishing School. However, he had resigned from Viking before that novel was published, in 1985, and Kathryn Court saw it through production and publication. It was on the bestseller list for a number of weeks, and I signed fifteen hundred copies for a Franklin Library first edition. The story of a lonely fourteen-year-old girl and her dramatic and somewhat unstable mentor, it remains a favorite in high school reading courses and book clubs. Peter Mayer eventually stepped down as CEO of Penguin and runs Overlook Press. Overlook’s books are now distributed by Penguin, which has merged with Bantam, Dell, Doubleday, Random House, and Knopf to become Penguin Random House. When Robert’s health worsened in the mid-1990s and he felt too sad to compose music, he decided to write a novel about an Austrian-born piano teacher, Bernard Winter, who prepares gifted American children for performance. “It is another way my life could have gone,” Robert said. He asked Peter Mayer to read it, and Peter liked it and wanted to edit it himself and publish it. In the spring of 1997, Overlook published The Music Teacher, with its beautiful cover art of Carnegie Hall from the view of someone on the stage. Robert dedicated the book “to all my friends who teach music.” Meanwhile, he was once again writing music.
“When Robert’s health worsened . . . and he felt too sad to compose music, he decided to write a novel about an Austrian-born piano teacher.”
That 1983 Labor Day weekend was a little drama acted out on the Woodstock stage announcing the next era of publishing. I was to be one of many authors caught in the tumult while it thrashed about in search of a new business model.
Of course publishing had begun to change when I was admitted to its inner sanctum in 1970. Publishing as a family business, as a literate, gentlemanly occupation, had already taken on the sepia hues of nostalgia, but the new publishing, whatever that creature would turn out to be, hadn’t reared its head yet. In the meantime, “the industry,” as John Hawkins referred to it in his acerbic moods, went through some ungainly and ruthless stages. It still hasn’t finished deciding what kind of creature it is supposed to be, and is now circling its wagons to fend off its monster predator, the Internet. Not one of the seven houses that wanted to publish A Mother and Two Daughters—eight, counting Knopf, who reserved the right to match the final bidder—stands by itself today. Six of those bidders are now subsumed into two of the “big five” publishing corporations.
Returning for a moment to the dance image that opened this chapter, let’s say there has been an intermission, and when we publishing partners (authors, editors, and publishers) return to the dance we notice things are different. A proliferation of nondancers has taken to the floor, wearing in their lapels tiny logos that have nothing to do with publishing. They don’t dance but just monitor our movements, like bodyguards with earpieces and dark glasses, only it isn’t our bodies they are protecting, it is an unseen corporate body. A mood of foreboding has blighted the air of camaraderie and grace. We sense we are expected to dance faster or more gainfully, and our uncertainty makes us tense. Any one of us could trip, or fall behind, and be tapped on the shoulder by one of the corporate nondancers and asked to leave the floor. Even the floor feels wobbly beneath our feet, and the traditional old building that has supported us has sprung holes in its roof, through which we glimpse patches of an indefinite space in which communications zip back and forth in ways not entirely imaginable to the most far-seeing among us.
Ever since that Labor Day lunch when John Webster, formerly of Price Waterhouse and no relation to the John Webster who wrote The White Devil, confided to me that Peter had not yet had his Penguin contract renewed, I’ve been uncomfortably aware of what a large role the fear element plays in current publishing. Unless you own your publishing company, however far up you are on the ladder, there’s always going to be someone further up who can make you clean out your desk by the end of the workday and sign an agreement not to bad-mouth your evictors if you want to receive your severance package. In the following chapters you will get used to John Hawkins telephoning to say, “Have you heard?” Or “Bad news, So-and-so’s been fired.” And the “so-and-so” will be my editor or my publisher, in some cases both.
It’s hard to maintain your equilibrium when your dance partners keep getting dragged off the floor.
This element of fear seeps into all the corridors and crannies of the publishing structure. When I recall those welcoming faces greeting me on my first visit to the Viking headquarters on the last day of 1980, I can’t help picturing their counterparts today: still assembled as a united group to welcome a new author but all of them watching their backs, each wondering who among them is the least indispensable.