by Gail Godwin
“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 w
as 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.
Robert’s Yamaha Grand
“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.
Publishing Partners, Continued
THE NEXT NINE BOOKS, 1987–2011
The big difficulty throughout this projected book will be to know, to learn to know, when I must depart from the literal truth and find the right parallels, the matching fictional realities, the correct inner private symbolisms. Already, just in contemplating the writing of it, I have felt sickened at having to deal with certain realities, tired or bored at the thought of others, and uplifted and intrigued at some others . . . it gives me an opportunity to put more of myself in it than anything else I can imagine. And yet I know the dark days will come when I doubt my right to such an “indulgence.” But the way I see it now, it’s not an indulgence as much as it is an artistic challenge and an emotional duty.
Spring 1984 notes to myself on beginning A Southern Family
In the spring of 1985, while The Finishing School was still on the hardcover bestseller list and the reviews were still coming in, John Hawkins said it was the right time to go looking for a new contract. By that time I had completed four long chapters of A Southern Family, roughly 150 pages of the finished book, which would come to 540 pages in hardcover. That was only 24 pages shorter than the hardcover of A Mother and Two Daughters (1982). It would, like A Mother and Two Daughters, spend weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, though fewer than its predecessor. Of all my books (so far), A Mother and Two Daughters has been the only one to achieve the number one fiction spot—in paperback, for a single week until knocked down to number two by Father Andrew Greeley. I consider A Southern Family to be the more complex and profound of the two novels, though A Mother and Two Daughters is an easier and more engaging read.
A Mother and Two Daughters, based on a best friend’s savage anecdotes about a contentious summer trip with her widowed mother and sister, is, in its ultimate resolutions under the umbrella of society, a comedy. A Southern Family, based on the 1983 violent deaths of my twenty-eight-year-old half brother and his girlfriend, has a wider sweep of character and social class. It is a tragedy in that nothing is resolved and the social fabric is in tatters. It was, and remains, the most autobiographical of my books and was the most difficult to write. The difficulties didn’t arise from problems of composition or incentive: I could hardly stop writing it. There were things that I wanted and needed to find out: Who was this doomed boy with whom I shared a mother? What had all of us left undone that might have saved him?
I looked forward to entering the minds of the characters most alien and unlovable to me and seeing what new perspectives they might bring. (And they certainly delivered those perspectives.) But my difficulties sprang from the ongoing dramas being enacted by the real family as they continued to live their actual lives in the same time frame that I was composing my novel. There was a bitter custody hearing over Tommy’s three-year-old son and, following that, a divorce brewing between my mother and stepfather. My mother had more or less anointed me to write this book, something with a beginning and an end that could contain the horror. “You will write Tommy’s story,” she told me the day of his funeral. But, as my c
hapters were accruing in Woodstock, the animosities between Tommy’s father and mother were intensifying in Asheville. My stepfather said if I presented him as a bad person in the novel, he would sue me for everything I had.
After Hawkins told me it was time to seek a new publisher, I revised and polished the first four chapters of A Southern Family. (Chapter four, “Magnolia Leaves,” was told from the father-stepfather’s point of view.) Hawkins made the requisite copies for Viking and two for Avon, the paperback house that had published my last three books and had first refusal rights. Linda Grey, president of Bantam, and Steve Rubin, whom I had met when he interviewed me for his newsletter, Writers Bloc, wanted to be in on the bidding if we held an auction. Viking-Penguin had first right of refusal and made a generous offer, but I didn’t want to stay with them. Morrow’s president, Larry Hughes, and Avon’s Rena Wolner bid against Bantam’s Linda Grey and Steve Rubin for a two-book contract. After much deliberation I chose Morrow. Harvey Ginsberg, who would be my editor at Morrow, was a known quantity to me; at present he was editing my fellow writers Robb Forman Dew and John Irving. Larry Hughes, back in his own editing days, had seen Paul Scott through his massive Raj Quartet. Larry’s astute reading of the first part of A Southern Family coupled with his assurances to Hawkins that he would put all Morrow’s forces behind the book made me choose Morrow over Bantam.