“I have no idea.”
“With this book—no photographs, short book, no colored or printed endpapers, nothing fancy—figure a dollar a book.”
“A dollar a book!” I say.
“OK, what’s the price?”
“The price?”
“What will a retail book buyer pay for this book?”
“Twenty-one ninety-five?” I say, using my own most recent book as a guide.
“Good. For now, anyway. The sales reps may want to price it under twenty dollars, though. So how much will we earn against this advance?”
“____”
“Here’s an easy way to approximate it. We make about three dollars for each hardcover sale, one dollar for each paperback. The agent probably won’t let us have world rights, and there might not be any foreign publishers interested in this book anyway, so we can’t include that in any estimation of revenues.”
“So if we sell ten thousand hardcovers, that’s thirty thousand dollars.”
“Right.”
“And say ten thousand paperbacks. That’s forty thousand dollars.”
“Right—so the P-and-L probably won’t work. It has to show a profit in the bottom line. So we have to adjust the figures. Remember, you can’t change the returns percentage.”
“Increase the first printing to fifteen thousand and the second printing to seven thousand five hundred?”
“That ought to do it. Isn’t this scientific?”
Considering that I was Harry’s hire, Ann was being, and continues to be, remarkably generous to me in her tutelage.
Now I have been Senior Literary Editor at Random House for six months. I remain in many ways ignorant of the realities of book publishing, even though I’ve had two books of short stories of my own published, one of them, The Old Left, by one of Random House’s sister divisions, Alfred A. Knopf. But it begins to dawn on me that if a company publishes a hundred original hardcover books a year, it publishes about two per week, on average. And given the limitations on budgets, personnel, and time, many of those books will receive a kind of “basic” publication. Every list—spring, summer, and fall—has its lead titles. Then there are three or four hopefuls trailing along just behind the books that the publisher is investing most heavily in. Then comes a field of also-rans, hoping for the surge of energy provided by an ecstatic front-page review in the New York Times Book Review or by being selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Approximately four out of every five books published lose money. Or five out of six, or six out of seven. Estimates vary, depending on how gloomy the CFO is the day you ask him and what kinds of shell games are being played in Accounting.
Sometimes—often—a non-lead-title book’s success emerges from pure randomness. I am told that it’s always a good idea—and a tradition—to take a book to lunch with agents, writers, people in the media. So when I end up having lunch with a Today show producer, Terry Schaefer, I mechanically give her a copy of a first novel I’ve edited that Random House is about to publish, Amy and Isabelle, by Elizabeth Strout, about a high-school girl in Maine who has a sexual relationship with one of her teachers.
The producer actually reads it. She loves it. She gives it to someone else who works at the show. Strout is invited on for an interview. I watch the segment, and at the end the book’s lovely jacket fills the screen for three or four seconds—very important, I’m told, though even in my ignorance I figured as much—and the book “works.”
Most of my colleagues have told me that that jacket image isn’t very good. After the book’s success, editors and sales reps and publicity people start asking for the “Amy and Isabelle look” for novels with small-town settings and similar themes.
I sometimes think that many books at all houses are more nearly privished than published.
Fifty-five
As I go through my mother’s and father’s belongings in the house in Nyack, in the bottom drawer of an old secretary at which my father used to sit and pay the bills and curse, I find two pristine copies of The New Yorker of August 31, 1946—the issue in which John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” was published in its entirety. They are wrapped in what looks like shelf paper, a ribbon tied around them, with a note in my mother’s small, tidy hand: Save. I’m sure she saved them simply because the writing was so good and so new, and the publication was so famous, and because, surprisingly, she had a sliver of the collector’s set of mind.
Viz.: In the attic of the house, I find a brown box made of some kind of old-fashioned plastic, about two feet long, a foot wide, and eight or nine inches deep. It has a lid and a kind of belt that goes around it and is fastened on the top. I recognize it as the box in which I sent laundry home from college. My mother would wash my dirty clothes and fold them and send them back to me. “Believe it or not,” I say to myself, as shame comes over me. I open the box. There, in a pretty large plastic food container, are the baseball cards I collected in the Forties and Fifties, often bought with stolen change. About two hundred of them. They are in excellent shape. A Mickey Mantle rookie card. Don Newcombe, Allie Reynolds, Gil Hodges, Jim Piersall, Warren Spahn.
When my mother was ill, I didn’t visit her often enough. What would have been often enough? I’m not sure, but it would have been more often. Once, when she was in a drugged sleep on the couch where, home from college, I used to watch Soupy Sales, I was so impatient for the next nurse to arrive that I went out and stood at the bottom of the driveway and paced back and forth, muttering, like a New Yorker. I had to get back to the city for work, I had to get back for the kids, I had to get back so that I wouldn’t be here. I returned to the house to find my mother awake, her eyes filled with fear. “Oh,” she said, “you’re still here.” She relaxed a little. “I’m still here,” she said.
A couple of weeks later, she was unconscious and her breathing was labored. But the hospice nurse assured me that she would hang on for two or three more days. So I called my cousin Janet Bingham, who had been driving over from Westchester County and sitting with my mother during this vigil period. I told her what the nurse had said and let her know that I was driving to the city to have dinner with my family. When I arrived at our apartment, on West 83rd Street, my wife told me that the nurse had called. I called back. My mother had died. To my surprise, Janet got on the phone. “I drove over, Danny—just in case—and I was here with Mamie when she died,” she said. “But don’t worry. I think she was just waiting for you to leave before she could go.”
This turn of events at first made me angry—I saw my cousin’s behavior as a kind of sneaky recrimination for my having left, and a kind of familial coup d’état. It took a few days for me to recognize the anger for the eversion of guilt that it was.
Enge died five years ago, leaving me his house and land in the Berkshires, and also leaving me with another, but smaller, sense of guilt, for not having attended him closely enough as the end approached. My excuses were that my kids were very young, my new job at Random House bewildering and demanding, and the three-hour drive up to Massachusetts and back usually required an overnight stay. But I did go to see him as much as I could, tried a nursing home for him—it didn’t work—then arranged round-the-clock care for him at his house, called him regularly, managed his finances, and so on. And continued to learn from him—in this case, to try not to be alone in old age.
Enge’s lover, Tom Waddell, the Olympian, had left years earlier, to live in San Francisco, found the Gay Olympics, take up with a new and younger man. He did stay in touch, loyally, and visit, but he was far away. Enge’s friends in New York and Great Barrington began to fall away, because of death, inertia, the debilities of age, or defection from a man whose own advanced years were transforming his wit and mischievous charisma into often bitter criticism and complaint.
But when the house came to us, we did what we could to preserve its handsome look and at the same time rescue it from decrepitude, all the while wondering, “What would Enge say?” (When visiting the old friends who had bought his Guest C
amp’s land down by the lake and built a house there, Enge walked in the door for the first time, looked at the spiffy, modern place, and said, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?”)
In any case, my family and I settle into the house—but we’ll always feel Enge’s eyes on us—and into the community where my last name still means something to local tradesmen and shopkeepers. My two uncles’ camps provided work and income to the town. We get to know the place and the people.
And in one case re-acquaint ourselves with another link to the past. Pauline Kael has a house in Great Barrington, about six miles from Enge’s—I mean, ours. She and I have become friends up here, now that we have both left The New Yorker. I’m visiting her at her house, on the hill above the town, one afternoon, sitting on the wide front porch. She has read a piece I wrote for the New York Times Magazine about Emmylou Harris and gives me a compliment about it. I tell her that once I’d been interviewing the singer, years earlier, backstage at Carnegie Hall after a concert, when we were both in our early thirties. She was in what seemed like a rivalry, a friendly one, with Linda Ronstadt. I’d fancied myself in love with Emmylou Harris, which distinguished me from perhaps four blind, deaf males in America. She turned away to say something to someone else, turned back to me, and said, “I’m sorry, Dave, what was the question?” I said, “It’s Dan, but that’s OK, Linda.” She laughed. Ten minutes later, after circulating in the room, she came back to me and said, “We’re going out to have some dinner. Would you like to come?” I said that I couldn’t, even though I absolutely could—because I was just plain terrified. So the point was I absolutely couldn’t. Oh, oh, my mistake.
Pauline listens. When I finish, she says, “You asshole!”
I laugh and say, “Thanks, Pauline—thanks for your understanding after I told you this mortifying youthful tale.”
“You have to understand,” she says. “I said that because when I was in San Francisco, at KPFA, Duke Ellington propositioned me. I was a young, swooning girl, but I said no too.”
“I’m not sure ‘propositioned’ is the right—”
“‘Asshole’ is.”
I’m being wheeled out of the operating room after hernia-repair surgery. The surgeon says that as I was coming out of anesthesia I was trying to tell a joke. “Something about a little piano player in a bar,” he says.
“I know what it must have been,” I say groggily. “Do you want to hear it?”
The surgeon seems uninterested, but I tell it anyway:
Guy walks into a bar looking sad and blue. There’s another sad-and-blue guy already sitting at the bar. In front of him, and actually on the bar, is a miniature piano player, playing a miniature piano—playing it beautifully.
“Why do you look so down?” the guy sitting down says.
“I saw a genie yesterday and he said I had one wish, and I wished for a million bucks and I got a million ducks. But how about you? Is that little piano player yours?”
“Yes,” the other guy says.
“But he’s amazing—I mean, he’s really good. You could really make a fortune with him. So why so dejected?”
“It must have been the same genie, a couple of days ago, and he said I had one wish, and do you think I asked for a nine-inch pianist?”
The surgeon smiles wanly. Then he says, with some excitement, “We can do that.”
“What?”
“I mean, you know—we can actually do that, if you want.”
“Are you saying you think I need it?” I say.
Fifty-six
I am trying to acquire two novels, one completed and the second under way, by a British writer. Ann Godoff likes the finished book, or takes my word for it that it’s good, or she is in a good mood, and has authorized me to offer $100,000 for each book. On the phone to the agent in England, I say, with no guile, “We’re offering a hundred thousand dollars for both books.” He says, with acceptance detectable in his voice, “You mean fifty thousand for each?”
I hesitate, but not too long. “Yes.”
“Done and done.”
Roger Angell has taken me to lunch at a small club called the Coffee House. You aren’t allowed to talk about work there. We soldier through the conversation, greet others whom Roger knows. On the way back to the offices of The New Yorker, a passer-by who hasn’t quite passed us by yet steps in front of us and says to Roger, “Aren’t you Roger Angell?”
“Yes,” Roger answers, with some wariness.
“I just want to say that I think you are the best sportswriter in America,” the guy says.
“Thank you.” Roger smiles, warming up.
“No, I mean, you are one of the best writers in America. Period.”
“Well, thank you,” Roger says.
The two shake hands and we continue on our way. About thirty seconds later, Roger turns to me and chuckles and says, “That’s what it’s all about, Dan.”
“What?” I say.
“Love from strangers.”
Fifty-seven
Steven Pinker is in my office at Random House. I am trying to get him to consider writing a short, essayistic book in popular language on the question of free will. It has preoccupied me since college days, when I read about it in Introduction to Philosophy and then, more extensively, in an Honors seminar. And also, as I looked back on choices I (and others I knew) had made about life and work, I began to think that these choices were not really choices, as we commonly think of them, but simply what we were going to do, under the illusion of conscious decision-making.
One small but signal incident in particular has stayed in my mind. Ten or twelve years earlier, I was playing the outfield in a New Yorker softball game in Central Park. A fly ball came in my direction but over my head. I began to run back for it and then decided not to try to catch it—it suddenly didn’t seem worth it. I just chased it down and threw it back to the infield. As I stood there watching runs score, it occurred to me that my brain and body “knew” that I couldn’t catch that ball (I would have been able to, in my thirties), and they “decided” not to try. But my mind gave me the illusion that it, my consciousness, had made that choice.
So I say to Pinker, as we look out the window, “Do you think the people down there have what they think they have—free will, the way it’s commonly understood?”
“No,” he says. “But there are the qualia!” That is, the conscious perceptions that some nonphysical aspect of ourselves, outside the workings of our bodies and brains, is able to control decision-making. Given the fly-ball experience, and many other, far more monumental, and too often regrettable, decisions I have made—some of them deeply hurting not only me but, even more seriously, others—I realize, standing there, that I have been looking for a way to in some measure absolve myself of culpability for those actions. Not responsibility—I accept that; society, family, and individuals demand that we respond to the consequences of our actions that appear to have been taken freely—but culpability. That in some very important way, we couldn’t have done anything other than what we’ve done.
Pinker decides that he can’t do this book, owing to contractual obligations to another publisher. He notices a book jacket on my desk, for a collection of poems by Katha Pollitt. The title, fittingly enough, is The Mind-Body Problem. Pinker says, “Oh! You know, my friend Rebecca Goldstein wrote a novel with this same title. I’d like it if you could change the title of this book.”
“Well, you can’t copyright a title,” I say. “And wasn’t that novel published some years ago?”
“Yes, but I would appreciate it if this title could be changed.”
I tell myself that I choose to table this request, and I will end up leaving Random House before Pollitt’s book comes out, and so that turns out to be that.
I am assigned, at Random House, to work with Michael Eisner on his autobiographical book Work in Progress. I meet him a couple of times, and he is perfectly congenial. He tells me how foolish it was for anyone to call any movie anything like The Lemo
n Sisters—inviting, as it did, all kinds of review snidery. “On the other hand, we had a great success with a movie whose title had three words that each by itself should have spelled death at the box office,” he adds.
“What was it?” I say.
“Dead. Poets. Society.”
This conversation takes place at a screening of Armageddon, the Bruce Willis movie in which one of Hollywood’s evidently endless supply of earth-threatening asteroids is, well, threatening the earth. Near the end of the movie, the Willis character, Harry Stamper, stays behind on the asteroid because, owing to various malfunctions, the nuclear weapon that will split the asteroid in half and send both halves harmlessly skirting the earth has to be detonated manually. Before this act of self-sacrifice, Stamper argues with ground control about the necessity to stay on the asteroid—they are glued to their screens and instruments and are ordering him to leave. “You don’t understand,” he says, or words to that effect. “This is real. I’m actually here. I know what has to be done.”
When Eisner and I are talking, I mention how telling I found that scene, what it says, underneath the melodrama, about technology versus real experience—real, direct presence. He laughs and says, “I can assure you the people who made that movie had no such idea in mind.”
Remembering Professor Beardsley’s seminar and his coining of the term “intentional fallacy,” I say, “It doesn’t matter what they had in mind. It’s there anyway.”
Fifty-eight
I keep thinking about Armageddon (which, by the way, was the top grossing film of its year, outdrawing even Saving Private Ryan) and a whole slew of other 1990s movies that seemed to have as a theme the antagonism between technology and the real world. It’s part of the theory that popular culture—even, or particularly, schlocky popular culture—expresses the anxieties and concerns of its era. This amateur sociology began in college when my friends and I would leave an art film—some completely static French talkathon—and someone would say, “You want to know what that movie was really about? It was about trees. Remember, Claude is planting a tree in his garden when he first meets Marie, and then later, she hides behind a tree when she’s trying to get away from Marcel, and then Igor uses a fallen limb as a weapon when the three thugs, who are all wearing Toronto Maple Leafs jackets—leafs, get it?—try to beat him up, and at the end Claude is pushing Marie on a swing.”
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