Some months later, Tina takes me to lunch at the new Royalton Hotel again, across 44th Street from the fabled Algonquin. “Dan, what do you think of Bill Buford?” She says “Booford.” Buford is the Editor and one of the founders of Granta, a very good literary quarterly published in England.
“There goes my job,” I say.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to hire him.”
“Oh, you probably are. You may not know it yourself—I realize that.”
“Well, you’re a chippy sod.”
“I think Granta is terrific,” I say. I used to try to get Gottlieb to go after Redmond O’Hanlon, one of Granta’s best writers. “But from what I know of how it runs, or doesn’t, I don’t think Bill Buford would do well at a weekly magazine. I mean, it’s a quarterly, but sometimes it manages only three issues a year.”
Fifty-three
“Dan, Dan—what great fiction do we have on the bank?” Tina asked me near the start of her reign.
“There’s a terrific long story by Alice Munro called ‘The Albanian Virgin.’”
“Great! I’ll read it this evening.”
“Tina, did you read the Munro?” I asked her the next day.
“I mean, it’s awfully long, isn’t it? And it really does drag.”
“Well, I don’t think so. But we can just keep it for a while if you’d rather not make room for it now.”
“Yes, let’s wait and see. Let’s look for something else for now.”
“Fabbelis!” Tina is saying now. My Fiction Department assistant, Jay Fielden (who will go on to be Editor in Chief of Men’s Vogue and other prominent magazines), and I have been presenting some of our ideas for The New Yorker’s first Fiction Issue (my idea, and for once not my mistake) to a group of editors. We’re in Tina’s huge, glistering-white office. Big windows face south over Bryant Park and the main branch of the New York Public Library. Jay and I had been looking through the archives there the previous week.
“And we found a lot of wonderful correspondence to and from William Maxwell,” I say. “Notes, routing slips, edited galleys, letters from O’Hara, Cheever, Mavis Gallant. I thought maybe a tribute to Maxwell would be a good idea.” I show copies of some of what we found. It looks good.
“Fantastic!” Tina says.
But there is a chill in the air. What is happening?
“Here’s a great note to Updike,” I say. I pass the slip of paper around. Roger Angell hands it along without looking at it. His face is set like a mask. Well, that’s where the chill is coming from. But why?
“And do we have a good long story for the center of the issue?” Tina says.
“Well, I hesitate to mention it, but we have had that Alice Munro story on the bank for months now,” I say.
“I love Alice Munro,” Tina says.
“Well, maybe you could take another look at the story,” I say.
She appears to have no idea what I’m talking about. “What’s the title?” she says.
“‘The Albanian Virgin,’” I say.
“I’ll look at it tonight.”
It is now psychologically as cold as a meat locker in her office. Has no one else noticed?
After the meeting, three or four of us are walking back toward the Fiction Department’s offices, Roger stalking in the lead. He turns right at the end of the hall, walks a few steps into his big corner office, and slams the door like I’ve never heard a door slam before. The latch click sounds like an ignition switch followed instantly by the detonation of the whole door violently arrested by its frame.
I go into Jay’s small office. “What is going on?” I say.
“I don’t know,” Jay says. “But he sure is steamed about something.”
“Did you feel it in Tina’s office?”
“Yes, but no one else seemed to.”
I go into my own office, narrow but nice enough. Ten minutes later, I get up my nerve and go out and knock on Roger’s door. “I think you’re angry at me,” I say when I go in and stand in front of his desk. “But I don’t know why.”
“I’m just furious, Dan.” He is glaring down at his desk.
“But why? What did I do?”
“First of all, you didn’t tell me anything about these ideas.”
“Jay and I didn’t tell anyone,” I say. “We thought it would be a pleasant surprise. You know—fun.”
“Never mind. Forget about it. Forget about it. Just leave me alone.”
I am shaken and bewildered. Back in my office, after a few minutes, I begin to wonder what was second of all, and third.
The next day, I run into Tina in the hall. “Dan, Dan—I read ‘The Albanian Virgin’ last night,” she says. “It’s astonishing! Perfect for the main story in the issue.”
Harold Evans, the Publisher of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of the Random House Corporation, calls me at The New Yorker. “I’d like to have a word with you,” he says. “Can we have coffee sometime, perhaps?”
“What’s this about?” I ask.
Evans and I have met at parties given by his wife, who happens to be Tina Brown. He once asked me if I played squash, and when I said yes, he found an old squash racquet of his and proudly showed it to me. “That’s a real vintage item,” I said. “Are you making a remark about my age?” he asked, brandishing the racquet at me. (At that same party he asked a friend of mine, “Did you read History at university?” and my friend, not knowing the British academic locution, said, “No—who’s the author?”)
On the phone Evans answers me: “You’ll see. When can we meet?”
“How about today?” I figure he is going to ask me to co-write or ghost-write a book, or offer me a job. The second possibility doesn’t fully register with me.
“Let me check with my assistant,” Evans says. A minute or so later, he says, “Well, yes—can you come up right now?” The vowels, in his Beatles-esque accent, make the words sound a little like “coom oop.”
At the elevator bank of The New Yorker, I run into Nancy Franklin, later to become the TV critic for the magazine. We have known each other and worked together for years. We call each other “Nosy,” for “Nosy Parker”—the British slang term for a snoop. “Where are you going at this time of day, Nosy?” Nancy says.
“To see Harry Evans,” I say.
“What about?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s going to offer me a book contract. Or a job.”
“Oh, no!” she says. And it is at this point, with a version of that old cold, sick feeling, that I realize what’s going on. It’s my strong suspicion that Tina now actively wants me out of the magazine and has persuaded her husband to offer me a job.
“See here, I want you to come to Random House and lose some money for us with literary books,” Harry says to me half an hour later. “I’ll pay you considerably more than you earn at The New Yorker.” He says “Random House” this way: “Random House,” the way my friends from Philadelphia say “cottage cheese.”
He goes on: “I know it will be hard to leave The New Yorker. I mean, you’ve been there for quite a while. Five or six years, is it?”
“Twenty-six,” I say.
A cloud of embarrassment crosses his face. “But that can’t be,” he says. “You moost have started work there when you were fifteen.”
“Twenty-seven,” I say. “I’m fifty-three.” To myself I say, “Nice save. Nice try at a save, anyway.”
Another cloud scuds by, this one of not-quite-concealed consternation. What has his wife gotten him into?
The next day, I go to see Tina. I say to her, “As you certainly know, Harry has offered me a job.”
“Yes, I know, Dan. Of course we’d hate to lose you,” she says, far too quickly. “But I won’t bar the door.”
No kidding, I think.
“You see, Harry and I have this policy, if we want to hire someone who works for the other person,” Tina continues. “We have to wait at least a year before . . .” She goes on with an acc
ount of this spousal-professional pact meant to convince me of her husband’s active quest to retain my services for Random House—to keep me from thinking she said to him the night before, “Harry, will you take this fellow Dan Menaker off my hands? He might work out, you know.”
“Well, you could keep me if you wanted to,” I say.
“I’m afraid we couldn’t get close enough to the salary Random House is offering.”
“You could make me officially head of the Fiction Department,” I say. “I do all that work anyway—watch the bank, do the nominations for awards, watch the slush pile, do the scheduling.”
“I wish I could but I can’t. Roger would be too upset. He has complained to me about the situation down there from time to time.”
“He has? What situation?”
“But the Random House job is a great opportunity,” Tina says.
(You doubt my doubt about Harry Evans’s yearning for me at Random House? A little paranoid, maybe? OK, well, a little while into my tenure at RH, Harry will ask me, through someone else, what I think of the idea of hiring another New Yorker editor—someone who I know is just not working out at the magazine. For the first and last time in my life, I threaten to quit a job. For one thing, in my opinion, the person in question would not make a good book editor. More important, I’m afraid the hire would substantiate in the eyes of those few who watch such matters the suspicion that Tina was using Random House as a sort of small recycling facility for her own refuse. Me. The other person isn’t hired.)
Only two people advise me not to take the job. Betsey Schmidt, who works as an assistant to Alice Quinn, the poetry editor, says I should stay. She bases this advice on the experience of her father, Benno Schmidt, who was Dean of the law school at Columbia when he accepted the Presidency of Yale. Betsey thought he shouldn’t have made that move—that if he had remained at Columbia he might have been appointed to the Supreme Court. A bathetic comparison—him to me, I mean—if ever there was one.
The other skeptic is John Sterling, a publisher who has also been an agent and a writer. He tells me at lunch, “You do realize that what you will be doing is essentially a sales job. If seventy-five per cent of what you do now is editing and reading and writing opinions about fiction and twenty-five per cent is office stuff and meetings and so on, that percentage will be reversed.”
The trouble is that despite the special Fiction Issue, Tina has cut the amount of fiction in The New Yorker by half, shunted it from the front of the magazine to the back, and has everyone, on the factual and fictional sides, politicking and meeting and competing for her favor and attention. Some editors hold finished pieces back from her so that when they think there may a chance for them to run, they will take on the stop-the-presses urgency that she loves, and seem fresh to her eye. Hot!
So I wouldn’t be losing what I had under Gottlieb, which was a kind of heaven for me, out from under three thumbs—of Shawn and Roger and my friend Chip—and publishing, for the first time in the magazine and often anywhere, such writers as Cynthia Kadohata, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Michael Cunningham, Allegra Goodman, Amy Bloom, Antonya Nelson, Abraham Verghese, Elizabeth Jolley, Ann Cummins, George Saunders, Ann Packer, and Noah Baumbach. That’s already gone.
So in the fall of 1994, I take the Random House job, but I want to start in January of 1995, so that I can finish a novel I’m working on, called The Treatment, an extension of four stories I’ve published in The New Yorker. Evans agrees.
(When I submitted the fourth of those stories, “Influenza”—which won an O. Henry Award, my second—to McGrath, he gave it to Tina to read. She gave it back to Chip, and Chip said, “It’s the most sexually graphic story that will have ever been in the magazine.” According to Chip, Tina replied merrily, “Yes, I know. My God! Dahn—call me for lunch!”)
I’ve also said that I won’t leave The New Yorker if I have to wait the full five years required to be eligible for all of Random House’s benefit and pension plans. Because S. I. Newhouse owns both companies, Evans manages to have the job change classified a “transfer.” So I remain fully vested, whatever that means.
When I formally accept the job, Evans says, “You have five years to fook oop.”
Part IV
Isn’t This Scientific?; The Sugar
Fifty-four
At the memorial gathering for my mother, my son, eleven—a would-be tough guy—dissolves into tears as people talk about her. My daughter, eight, leans forward in her chair and looks at her brother with surprise and fascination.
My mother made a practice of cultivating young friends. My girlfriends, Mike’s wife, researchers at Fortune, neighbors in Nyack, nieces and nephews. In her last years, facing a solitary life in the big empty house, she and I arranged to have young students from the Nyack Missionary College board there for free in return for seeing to its upkeep, helping her with errands, and so on. All of these people stayed in touch, and many attend the service in her memory—which is for the most part fitting and moving. The last person to speak is Greg, my mother’s last boarder. He does a bad job, unfortunately—choking back tears and speaking almost incoherently. It makes me angry.
But then I think how amused my mother would have been by this display, and that calms me down. And then I remember two incidents involving Greg that make my blood simmer all over again. Once, in the driveway at the Nyack house, Greg told me that he had been undecided about whether to take this course or that course at the college. “But I listened for God,” he said, “and God told me what direction to follow. I heard His voice saying what I should do, and I felt so grateful.” OK—that bugs me but really isn’t so bad. Greg was lucky to have his traffic-cop God pointing him in the right direction. But then, as he is still gabbling and quasi-sobbing, I recall a conversation that my mother had with him shortly after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She said: “I asked him, ‘Greg, do you believe that when I die I will go to Hell because I haven’t been born again?’ And he got upset and looked around and sighed and knitted his brow, and then he said, ‘Yes, Mary, I’m afraid that that is what God has decreed. You will go to Hell.’” When she told me that story, I said, “What the fuck kind of religion obliges its followers to tell someone with a terminal diagnosis, a very fine and moral person, that they are going to Hell?” My mother said, “That she is going to Hell.’ ‘Someone’ is singular.”
“You want to buy this book, Dan?” my boss, Ann Godoff, says, referring to the first work I’m trying to acquire at Random House, a novella and shorts stories called CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, by George Saunders (just now lionized by the New York Times Magazine as I write this). I had edited Saunders at The New Yorker. (He was discovered in the slush pile by my assistant, David McCormick.)
“Yes.”
“Well, do a P-and-L for it and we’ll see.”
“What’s a P-and-L?”
“Profit-and-loss statement.”
“____”
“You don’t know how?”
“No. Sorry.”
“I’ll walk you through it. What’s the advance?”
My only knowledge came from what I had been paid for my books, so I thought surely I should offer more. “Fifty thousand dollars?”
“For a book of stories? A lot of them have already been published. But OK, let’s stick with that and see what happens. What’s the payout?”
“Payout?”
“Start with how much of the advance the author will get on signing the contract.”
“Thirty thousand dollars?”
“Twenty-five—half on signing.”
“OK, twenty-five.”
“On D-and-A?”
“D-and-A?”
“Delivery and acceptance.”
“Well, twenty-five I guess.”
“No—you have to have an on-pub payment.”
“On-publication?”
“Yes.”
“Twenty for D-and-A? And five on-pub?”
“Nothing for paperback on-
pub?”
“Oh. Ten for D-and-A, ten for on-pub, and five for the paperback?”
“Nah—it’s OK. You don’t really need a paperback payment. But with bigger advances you do. I just wanted to mention it.”
“Oh. OK. Fifteen and ten, then.”
“OK. Initial print?”
“Initial print?”
“How many hardcovers are we going to print at the start?”
“Twenty thousand?”
“Too much. Ten.”
“OK, ten.”
“Second printing?”
“Five?”
“Good! Paperback printing, assuming we’ll do it in paperback, which is open to question.”
“Fifteen thousand?” A shot in the dusk if not entirely in the dark.
“Probably more like ten. Returns?”
“Returns?”
“How many unsold hardcovers will booksellers send back?”
“Five hundred? A thousand?”
“Nah. Usually figure one-third—in this case, five thousand.”
“Whoa!”
“It’s a shitty business, Dan.”
“OK, five thousand returns.”
“OK. Trim?”
“Trim?”
“How big is this book going to be?” She takes three books from the shelf in her office and shows me the three choices.
“The small one,” I say.
“Right, an A trim. And the PPB?”
“PPB?”
“Plant, printing, and binding—how much it costs to manufacture each book.”
My Mistake Page 14