Quietly, almost without my being aware that it was happening, sales of my big novels increased to the point at which I was tarnished with the epithet ‘best-selling author,’ a characterization that, as I’ve said, I deplored, since I thought of myself merely belonging to the long tradition of hardworking writers. Obviously I faced a dilemma: I was highly pleased to have won so many readers, and I was not unhappy with the added income this meant, but I did resent the implication that I wrote only for popularity and money.
Part of my discomfort stemmed from a bizarre experience in a unique secondhand bookstore located far out in the country near Cape Canaveral in Florida, where I was working on space-flight problems while a member of the NASA board. Needing used copies of out-of-date World Almanacs, I had been directed to this surprising shop: ‘He has two of everything. What a jumble.’
Upon entering the cluttered shop, I saw thousands of books scattered about in what seemed like chaotic profusion, but the owner knew exactly what he had, for when I asked for copies of the Almanac he said without hesitation: ‘Over there,’ and on a rickety shelf I found three I could use. When it came time to pay he asked what I did, and I said I worked at Canaveral—or Kennedy, as the government wanted it to be called—and he supposed that I was an engineer.
‘Not that sharp. I’m a writer,’ I said, and when he saw from my credit card who I was he said brightly: ‘I always have a couple of your books lying around. They go out pretty fast,’ and I saw on another shelf that he had four used copies of my novels. What really mattered was not the satisfaction of knowing that my books were still circulating, but that next to my shelf stood a large bookcase, and to appreciate the situation the reader must visualize its dimensions. Perhaps eight feet tall, it reached almost to the ceiling, and consisted of eight big shelves exactly six and a half feet wide. Each inch of that massive affair was jammed tight with small paperbacks whose spines were visible, and what a lively, colorful array they made.
‘Now, what is that?’ I asked, and the manager said proudly: ‘That’s our Barbara Cartland bookcase.’ I asked: ‘Who’s she?’ and his jaw dropped.
‘You never heard of Barbara Cartland, the most popular writer in the world?’ When I said I had not, he laughed: ‘You’d better learn right now,’ and he turned me loose on this huge collection of paperbacks, and after I had pulled down some dozen or so it became clear that Miss Cartland, whoever she was, wielded an ingenious pen, for I believe I checked into two shelves of her books before I came to a repetitious title. It seemed from the gaudy covers that she wrote mostly about beautiful young girls, often in chiffon, who were involved with handsome men, some of dubious character.
‘Who is this woman?’ I asked and he told me: ‘An Englishwoman, who has some tenuous relationship to noble families, publishes four or five novels a year, and has the most devoted readership in the world. Women don’t read her books, they devour them.’ Shortly after he said this an elderly woman, the kind Norman Rockwell might have used as a grandmother for a Thanksgiving Day cover, came into the store with a shopping bag containing five Barbara Cartland novels, and it soon became clear that by returning these for credit and paying an additional ten cents a copy she was eligible to select five new Cartland novels. Depositing her old ones, she headed directly to the Cartland case, where she rather quickly picked her five replacements, judging their merit by the liveliness of the covers.
When she returned to the checkout desk she asked the manager: ‘Have I read these before?’ and he deftly separated her selections into two piles: ‘These three are new, I think, but you’ve already read these two,’ and he fetched her two substitutes, which he assured her she would enjoy. When the phrase best-selling author is bandied about, I think not of myself but of Barbara Cartland, and much as I admire the lady, judging from what I’ve read of her bold public performances as a grande dame, I do not want to be put alongside her in the same category.
And yet, if the public makes an author a best-seller how can he or she escape pejorative classification? For when someone says ‘Jones is a best-selling author,’ what he really means is ‘Jones is only a best-seller’ with all the condescension that implies. Balzac was and is a best-seller, as were Dickens, Camus, Hemingway and Pearl Buck, but so are Harold Bell Wright and Barbara Cartland. Certainly in my day I have been one, and that inevitably raises two questions that writers do not like to talk about in public, even though they do a great deal of talking about them in private: ‘What did you do with all your royalty income?’ and ‘How do you see yourself as a writer?’ Like others, I shall duck those impertinent questions now, but I shall answer them frankly in the last two chapters.
Now, however, I should like to answer a grab bag of queries that are asked repeatedly: ‘Which of your books gave you the most pleasure in the writing?’ The Source was the biggest challenge, for it dealt with immortal themes and required research in three languages I did not read: Hebrew, Russian, German. Whenever I think of that book, I give a little prayer of thanks that I did it when I did, for now I would be too old to tackle the tremendous amount of work it required.
‘In which foreign country did you most enjoy working?’ I think that any young man who experienced Afghanistan in the days that I have described earlier, when life was so extremely rugged and pre-biblical, will recall it as having been an apex of his adventuring life.
‘What city was the most satisfying to work in?’ Incomparably Denver, my base while writing Centennial, because within half an hour’s drive to the east I was in the great flatlands, which excited me so much and which I used to advantage; within the same time span to the west I was in the high foothills of the Rockies and some minutes later in the highest plateaus. Also, my workroom was ten minutes from a notable library, unexcelled in its collection of materials on the American West, and fifteen minutes from a huge international airport. But this mountain paradise has a crippling drawback: an intolerable smog that makes Los Angeles look as if its belching tail pipes weren’t even trying. Were it not for the smog, I would live in Denver, because it is also the substitute capital of the United States with so many important government offices hiding there that exceptionally bright personnel abound.
‘How big a research staff do you employ on a full-time basis?’ One: me. On two occasions, the book on sports and Centennial, I had the part-time help of two different bright young men, but they were assigned me by others who owed me courtesies that could not be discharged by cash payments, and I must stress that they were finders and judges of data, not writers of prose. When such helpers bring the research material to my attention, I still do all the reading, evaluating and writing. In most instances I have not even had the help of book-finders, but when I did, their assistance was appreciated. I have also been fortunate in finding in every writing task I have ever undertaken secretaries who have been wizards on the typewriter, and more recently, on the word processor. As every writer knows, without such help in moving a large manuscript forward, writing would be almost impossible.
One secretary stands out. In Israel I had the help of a woman who took her Jewish religion seriously, and once when I had Jehovah striking down one of my characters for what she deemed an inadequate reason, she wrote on the margin of my manuscript: ‘I don’t think this was very nice of God,’ and she refused to type the passage. I, who believed that Jehovah could be pretty arbitrary at times, had to write the passage out by hand and staple it to the manuscript, but I was afraid to let her see what I had done.
‘Which of your books is your favorite?’ Always the next one. I hope that this time I will be able to hold all the threads together, that the characters will evoke a sense of reality, that what I’ve written will elucidate the theme, that an occasional paragraph will sing, that I can, in a phrase I learned in England, ‘bring it off.’ This, I believe, is the constant ambition of the writer and his constant prayer; it is certainly mine, and the apprehension we experience about failing, especially when we are in the midst of a struggle, is far more te
rrifying and common than the casual observer would suspect. Does any artist other than a writer of a massive book know this anxiety, that all the energy of three years’ unremitting toil might be wasted? The writer of a lyric ode does not spend three years on the poem; the painter of a normal-sized canvas does not begin to invest the time and energy that a novelist does, nor suffer the heavy consequences if he fails. I suppose the writer of a play shares an equal uncertainty, and perhaps a greater, for he must find financial backing, a theater, a composer if it is a musical, a director, a producer, a set of stars, and a play-doctor if it runs half an hour too long. I deem the playwright’s job the most complex, the novelist’s the most lonely and perilous, and the poet’s the most hopeless under present conditions in that he can scarcely find a traditional publisher to even look at his work.
So although I have written many books that have met with a lucky reception, I still experience the most nagging fears when I am in the middle of a major project: ‘Who will read so many pages about finding a gold mine, even supposing I can get it finished to my own taste?’ The echoes of terror are always there, and if the public has made my books best-sellers, I have often sweated in clammy silence to bring the books to where the public could find them.
If I have refused to make subject-matter concessions to my readers in order to court acceptance, I have certainly made great efforts to make my books physically pleasing to the eye and comfortable to the hand. I revere fine books—I do not mean expensive ones—and take pride when I have helped my publisher produce a respectable one: firm boards on the cover, appropriate typeface of adequate size, good opaque paper, proper spacing on the page to allow the eye to take in a complete line without battling gutters, excellent maps when required and a general look of fine craftsmanship. I have sometimes been apologetic when seeing for the first time the smallness of the type that has had to be used because of the length of my books and have resolved to keep subsequent ones shorter so that a more comfortable type size can be used. In other words, I have a passion for making books that are aesthetically pleasing, and one or two that have been published in Asia have been gems in that respect, and all original editions published in America have been presentable. Expensive special editions have sometimes been quite handsome, and most reprints have been acceptable, but a few have been so unprofessional as to shame me.
In dealing with the physical aspects of my books I pay most of my attention to the interior—typefaces and paper—but in later years I came to respect the importance of outer appearances. To me titles have never had great importance, and I have not paid much attention to mine. I submit seven or eight possible choices, any one of which would satisfy me, and allow Random House to make the final selection; occasionally they have suggested one which had not occurred to me but which I came to prefer. I have had no aptitude for devising great titles like Gone With the Wind or A Streetcar Named Desire and have concluded that a fine title is whatever appears on the cover of a fine book. However, I remember a frolic perpetrated by a group of idle writers, some seven or eight, who agreed that each would write one chapter of a wild, sexy adventure novel to see if they could get such a mishmash published. The project would have failed had they not come up with one of the most titillating titles of recent decades, Naked Came the Stranger, which propelled their book right onto the lists.
I’m afraid I did not understand the importance of a colorful jacket for a hardcover book, or a lurid one for a paperback, until a memorable experience in London provided some instruction. During an unexpected layover in that city my British hardcover publisher insisted that I drive out to the countryside to visit the paperback publisher who’d had rather good luck with a whole string of my books. I saw no reason to do this, but my publisher said: ‘They’ve been awfully good to you, Jim, and it would be a courtesy—to let them know you appreciate their help.’
Out we went into the gracious environs of London, and as I entered the publishing establishment I was led directly to a smallish but not tiny room I shall never forget, for its four walls were covered with bookracks for the display of all the various reprintings of my novels. Let’s say there were ten versions each of fifteen different books, all of the same size. In the case of each title, copies were arranged in chronological order, the earliest printing to the left, the latest—often the preceding month’s—to the right, all in full color. After a gasp at seeing so many bright and dancing jackets I noticed the essential fact about this display: invariably, each succeeding jacket showed an attractive girl wearing less and less clothing until I wondered what they might have in store for three or four reissues down the line.
‘What we do,’ one of the managers explained, ‘is track bookstall sales attentively, and when it becomes apparent that one of your titles is beginning to lag, we hurry up and give it a new jacket, and your words gain a whole new life.’ I believe there had been some fifteen reprintings of Tales of the South Pacific, or it might have been Hawaii, and the resulting display was awesome, but there were one or two other books whose contents did not deal with luscious beauties in dishabille, but on the covers they pirouetted wearing little.
At lunch I met the staff artist responsible for the covers and he told me: ‘You assure me an almost permanent job. I’ve never read any of your books, but editors point out the good parts and I do the rest.’ He calculated that he might have done nearly a hundred covers for my books. I was definitely not pleased with so much nudity but was powerless to make any effective protest. However, there was some consolation when, later that day in an airport lounge, I saw a display of Thomas Hardy reprints and noticed that the heroine—it could have been Eustacia Vye or the D’Urberville girl—was also rather scantily clad.
I had my most instructive visit with a foreign publisher during a stopover in Istanbul when a charming Turkish gentleman visited my hotel, having read in the papers that I was in town. He had with him five or six of my books, which he had pirated with no payment to me, for Turkey does not abide by international copyright law, and after proudly spreading them before me he asked with almost fatherly interest: ‘Which of your books would you like me to take next?’ I picked up one with an especially lurid jacket and asked him to explain the shocking artwork, and he said: ‘We’ve never had in Turkey a really good lesbian novel, so I thought that if we would revise your story a little …’ He lifted the book and offered it to me with two hands as if it were a jewel.
Finally, is it useful for the author’s photograph to be on the back cover of the jacket? Not for me, since I simply do not look like an author or anything else distinctive. I leave the choice of poses to New York and sometimes gasp when I see the result: ‘My God! do I look like that?’ However, if the writer is a handsome young man with a strong jaw or a beautiful young woman with a provocative smile, the back-cover shot can be a powerful sales aid, especially in first-time appearances. There is apparently a brisk market in the photographs of young writers, because an enterprising company has recently uncovered a very old negative taken of me in 1946 and has been printing up a fine glossy that sells for something like three dollars. It must be doing well, because I keep receiving copies through the mail for me to autograph, and I inscribe them with my birth date, 3 February, and the current year—say, 1991—with the caption ‘Portrait of the writer on his eighty-fourth birthday’ and let others decipher that mystery.
It should be clear that whereas the external aspects of a book may have helped some photogenic authors who had dreamed up brilliant titles, my titles, covers and portraits accounted for little of my good fortune. As it should be with books, it was the contents, verbal and intellectual, that made the difference, but having said that, I am again powerless to specify what it has been that has attracted and retained readers. Let me describe what it is I do, and invite the reader to reach his or her conclusion.
I have worked diligently to achieve a flowing narrative style so that the reader who persists to the bottom of page one will find herself or himself invited to proceed to page
two; the same applies to chapters. I have inclined toward a classic style of presentation and have hoped that the book would hang together as a whole and evoke a sense of leading to a satisfying conclusion. These are modest stylistic aims but are difficult to achieve.
Critics have learned to be suspicious of best-sellers, and rightly so. I doubt that any critic in the world has seriously reviewed each of Barbara Cartland’s fifty latest novels; they discovered early on that they didn’t have to. In somewhat the same way, some critics have not felt it necessary to keep on reviewing the books of any writer who has turned out a series of popular successes, such as I have. I am sure I’ve suffered from this easy dismissal.
However, I would like to refer to public response to four different books. When Hawaii appeared, readers on the islands went into a fury, local newspapers gave full pages to outraged letters vilifying me, angry discussion was rampant, and one paper carried a full-column editorial advising me to get out of Hawaii and stay out. The condemnation, however, was not so severe as that suffered by Robert Louis Stevenson when he left the islands three quarters of a century earlier. He had so offended missionary families by praising Father Damien, the Catholic priest who had served the lepers on Molokai, that the editor of one of the papers hoped that the ship carrying Stevenson away would sink. But the warmth with which my novel was received elsewhere and the fact that it brought thousands of visitors to Hawaii softened animosities, and as the years passed the locals realized that my book was one of the good things that had happened to the islands. Now a friendly editor printed an entirely different column that said in effect: ‘Come on home, Jim. All is forgiven.’† The most amazing result of the book’s publication however, is the problem it caused for the islands’ major church. So many vacationers from the mainland, having read it and recalling that the protagonist, Abner Hale, was a clergyman, pestered the custodians of the church to find out where he was buried. The inquiries became so intrusive that the church had to publish a small handbill, in good taste and exuding patience, reminding the visitors that Reverend Hale was only an imaginary person. An official told me: ‘They read it and say: “Very interesting. But where is he buried?” We may stop trying to convince them.’
The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 53