In my would-be-blithe, greenhorn’s way, I liked the idea of no author’s name, because it reminded me of contemporary and historical texts whose authors used (or sometimes suffered) anonymity or pseudonymity. Go Ask Alice, Beowulf, the I Ching, Mark Twain, Nora Roberts, George Eliot, Lemony Snicket. Because of the author’s and agent’s and my insistence, “Anonymous” stuck and became one of the principal reasons for the book’s success. Many of those who had vigorously opposed the idea contorted themselves afterward into having not only supported but urged the idea. In fact, in a filmed interview about the book, Harry Evans, who was then still the Publisher of Random House, said that he insisted that the author remain anonymous.
Evans had come back from lunch with a well-known agent named Kathy Robbins and walked straight into my office with a manila envelope in his hands. He asked me to read what was inside and tell him what I thought. I took it home and read it over the weekend. As I said in my note to Evans, it read “like wildfire,” though the ending seemed awfully abrupt—incomplete. He asked me if I thought we should try to acquire it and what I thought about the anonymity of the author. I said yes, and I liked the idea of the anonymity. So I bought the book, for $250,000, but in my conversation with Kathy Robbins I said that the ending seemed just sort of cut off. She said, “It’s only the first half! Didn’t Harry tell you?”
Primary Colors became an immediate bestseller, partly on account of the publicity and speculation generated by the anonymity of the author. Walter Weintz, a fine and very intelligent man, now head of Workman Publishing, who was then Associate Publisher of Random House, came into my office shortly after the book’s publication and said, “You do realize how rare this is, don’t you? Most editors go through an entire career without something like this happening.” I hadn’t realized it, though I did know that this success hit the book and me as the proverbial lightning strike—powerfully, and at random. I kept wondering what if—as was possible at the time—Clinton hadn’t run for reelection. And later, just after 9/11, I saw very good books, especially quiet but excellent novels, get pushed away from any chance of literary recognition by a catastrophe of real life. The reception of any cultural production more often hinges on real-world vicissitudes than most people understand.
For all the onerousness and corporate foolishness and credit larceny, an editor does learn a huge amount about the world, especially if he or she acquires and edits nonfiction. And despite their intense neediness, writers are often fascinating and stimulating company. And most important, despite publishing’s plentiful empty rituals, every day brings with it highly varied tasks and challenges. Every single book is its own particular enterprise, every agent his or her own kettle of fish, every writer an education (sometimes in dysfunction), every book jacket a unique challenge. And occasionally what you do has real importance to the world.
Fifty-nine
Cathy Hemming, Publisher of HarperCollins, takes me to lunch and offers me a job as Executive Editor, at a salary significantly higher than my salary at Random House, where I have been working as a Senior Editor for five years. I tell Ann Godoff—who has replaced Harry Evans as Publisher—about the offer, partly in the faint hope that I can get a good raise from her and stay at Random House, partly resigned to leaving, because once you threaten to leave, you probably have to leave if you don’t get what you’re hoping for, as I was pretty sure I wouldn’t.
“Who made the offer?” Ann says.
“Well, it doesn’t really make any difference, does it?” I say. “It’s a respectable competitor.”
“We can’t match that amount,” she says. “But you don’t really want to leave, do you?”
“Ann, I have one kid going to college and one kid who will be going in a few years.”
“Well, I got you a bonus this year, don’t forget.”
“I know, and I appreciate it, but still, there’s a real differential in this offer.”
“And we gave you a bonus for Primary Colors.”
“Well, no, actually, I never got a bonus for that.”
“Really?”
“Really. I was so ignorant that I didn’t know that I might have gotten a bonus for that. Should have gotten one, I would say now.”
“I was sure you got a bonus. I’ll have to look it up and see what happened.”
“Anyway, I’d like to stay, all things being equal, but they’re not. Equal.”
“We just can’t match that offer, Dan—it’s too much.”
“That doesn’t leave me a lot of choice, I’m afraid.”
“This is Random House, Dan. You know you don’t want to leave. Come on, tell me who made the offer.”
“I’m not supposed to.”
“Oh, come on. You know I’m going to find out anyway.”
“OK—HarperCollins.”
“I hate what they do,” Ann says.
“What? Publish books?”
My mistake, but the die was so vigorously cast at that point that it didn’t make any difference.
Sixty
I work at HarperCollins for so little time—less than two years—that it ends up feeling more like a walkabout than any kind of era in my working life. But among other worthwhile moments during this brief period, I have the good fortune to inherit Scott Spencer—a superb novelist whose first book, Endless Love, has sold more than a million copies—from an editor who has recently died. And I have the best boss I ever will have, Susan Weinberg, the Editor in Chief. Direct, honest, confident, and a good listener.
A conversation that I have at HarperCollins with an agent stands out for its typicality. I’m trying to acquire a “Best of the Year” paperback collection. The agent (and a good friend) wants to “move” the series from its old publisher because he thinks the old publisher didn’t do enough to promote it. Here is our conversation:
ME: How many copies did it sell last year?
AGENT: Fifteen thousand.
ME: Fifteen thousand as in twelve thousand five hundred?
AGENT: Yeah, about that. Twelve thousand five hundred.
ME: Twelve thousand five hundred as in eleven?
AGENT: Twelve-five as in twelve.
ME: So it sold about eleven-five?
AGENT: Yeah.
This is the way in publishing, as I’m sure it is in most other industries that produce physical objects for sale. Rounding up is fun. Rounding down is reality. Announced first printings of, say, a hundred thousand hardcovers often shrivel to under fifty thousand. Publicity announcements of an author tour of twelve cities shrink to New York, Washington, and Boston, and only if the writer agrees to use Bolt buses for transportation. “Reviews” generally signifies a misty hope rather than a guarantee.
No such playing with numbers in a doctor’s office. “You got the sugar, honey?” a nurse asks me during my annual physical checkup. She’s holding a piece of blue litmus paper in her latex-gloved hand. I do have the sugar, it turns out. It’s probably a late-blooming effect of my infancy’s illness—which has left me on a permanent quest for carbohydrates and sweets—as no one in my family has ever had this problem and I have remained pretty slender.
This diabetes will involve medication only, not insulin, since I exercise so fanatically and keep my weight down. But it’s the first of three serious medical problems I’ll encounter in my sixties. Paradoxically, these problems cure me of my vestigial hypochondria. The second problem is Graves’ disease, which, briefly, is when your thyroid gets overactive and must be nuked. A nurse dressed in hazmat clothes hands you a leaden goblet that looks like something out of Game of Thrones and gives you a single radioactive pill. She then clears out of the room immediately, and you are left with your own private Fukushima. Your thyroid eventually gives up the ghost, and you have to take Synthroid for the rest of your life. The third problem I list here under “Coming Attractions.”
I go to see William Maxwell a few days before his death. He is lying in a hospital bed in his apartment. His family and friends are hovering in the
living room and dining room, signing remembrance books, discussing the calligraphy and the exquisite paper. There is some discussion about whom Maxwell has wanted to see and whom he hasn’t. He is impossibly thin and frail-looking, but he smiles and his eyes are warm. I go to sit in a chair, but he motions me over to sit on the side of his bed. “It’s so lovely to see you,” he says. “I’ve decided there’s not much reason to stick around, now that Emmy’s gone, and I’m doing my best never to take another bite of food.”
I say, “I hope you’ll change your mind about that,” and then I can’t say any more. Maxwell grips my arm with surprising firmness, as if to say, Hold on. “When my mother died and I was ten,” he says, “a man came to the door ostensibly to pay his respects to my father. But my father suspected that the man came in secret triumph or glee about my mother’s death. It may have had something to do with a sexual secret. In any case, my father opened the door, saw who it was, and slammed it in the man’s face so hard that the house shook. I had never seen him do anything like that before, and I never knew until that moment that anyone could be so direct and angry in polite circles. And I haven’t forgotten it since.”
I am wondering why he has told me this story now. Well, of course it bears on death—on a death that changed Maxwell’s life forever and has appeared in a number of his novels in one form or another. It may bear on my brother’s death. It bears on the question of whom one might and might not want to see at a moment of past or imminent sadness.
He smiles at me serenely. He is some guy, I’ll tell you. In order to veer away from mute admiration and gratitude, and tears, I go in the other direction. “You know, when you left me at the magazine, it took about three years for me to stop feeling completely unwelcome.”
He puts his hand on my arm again, and with that warm and loving smile says, “I knew you’d be all right.”
My fourth father leaves me. If I am ever to be father to myself, it will be now.
Sixty-one
Gina Centrello, who has replaced Ann Godoff as Publisher of Random House, calls me and asks me to return to the division as Editor in Chief, a position that Godoff held, in addition to being publisher. Centrello and I have lunch. It’s my impression that since Godoff’s departure some time ago, naming an editor in chief has become an urgent matter. I know, through publishing’s chronic gossip affliction, that Centrello has offered the job to one or two others, who turned the offer down.
I don’t. I do a little bargaining and we reach an agreement. I leave HarperCollins on good terms.
When I enter the Random House building once again, and then the conference room for the Random House division, I get warm applause from the forty or so people gathered there, most of them former colleagues. Finally! Something a little like the gang I tried and failed to organize at the Little Red School House, and like the “army” of kids at the Guest Camp who pretty quickly went AWOL.
Sixty-two
I run into Pete Seeger in the lobby of the apartment building where I live. He’s going to visit the Weavers’ producer of long ago, Harold Leventhal, who lives on the top floor. We get in the elevator together—he is with his wife, Toshi—and I say, “Mr. Seeger, my name is Dan Menaker and I’ve listened to your music all my life, and I just wanted to thank you for it.” He says, “Why, that’s very kind and you’re certainly welcome. Now wait a minute—‘Menaker,’ you say? Are you any relation to Enge Menaker, the square-dance caller many years ago?”
Maybe Enge is listening to this final rectification in his Marxist Heaven, where there proceeds from each angel according to his ability and to each according to his need. Maybe he and Readie will soon be arguing with each other over who should do the celestial laundry.
Sixty-three
Because I come to know that Diane Sawyer, the ABC newsperson, likes poetry, and I publish some poets at Random House—Billy Collins, Virginia Hamilton Adair, Deborah Garrison—we find ourselves in touch. I ask her to lunch, hoping to get her to agree to write a book. I offer her five million dollars, without any prior approval. She laughs and says, “So you want me to write about who Richard Nixon slept with.” (She worked in the Nixon White House.) I say, “You bet.” She says she can’t write a book at this time because, as she puts it, “ABC owns my face”—a very modern kind of sentence, it occurs to me. She gets up after a cordial twenty minutes, and I finish the lunch with her producer.
People do read serious and worthwhile books. They don’t have to be professors or editors or reviewers or the husbands or wives of people like that, or students or researchers. It’s interesting to talk to Sawyer about Virginia Hamilton Adair, the blind poet who has published her first, very good book, Ants on the Melon, in her eighties. Sawyer is transformed from star to fan instantly, with no huge erudition but with a good reader’s intuitive grasp of the meaning and feeling of what she has read. As a publisher and editor, you can sometimes forget that intelligent and sensitive people in all places and occupations and personal situations make books part of their lives. Not most of their lives, as you may do, but an important part of them.
Will Murphy, a colleague of mine at Random House, and I are meeting with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the fierce Lebanese-born author of a cult philosophical/financial book called Fooled by Randomness. He wants to publish another, to be called The Black Swan, about the impact of “outliers”—powerful but unpredictable events—on our lives, and our tendency to fail to see events as randomnesses in favor of our brain’s preference for retroactive narrativization and future forecasting. That is, we are evolutionarily programmed to try to make “sense” of past events, so that we can anticipate the future. When to plant the beans for the best harvest, etc. This programming does make sense until we try to apply it to highly complicated past and future occurrences that depend in large measure on happenstance and that proliferate as technology and the information it produces grow ever more complicated. That’s what Taleb’s book is going to be about, and given my preoccupation with such matters, I want to acquire it.
Will and I meet with Taleb at his hedge-fund office, or whatever it is, where his employees—I am guessing they are his employees—are constantly consummating their marriages to their computers. Taleb is an intense, black-bearded firebrand of certainty—about uncertainty, and many other topics. He rambles on, fascinatingly, about his book and his ideas, and parenthetically says, “I am of course an epiphenomenalist about consciousness. Sorry, it’s probably not a term you are familiar with.”
“I’m one too,” I say. (I am.)
Taleb asks me to explain—to prove my claim—and essentially I do, thanks once again to that deep Swarthmore education.
He looks at me differently—that is to say, looks at me—and says he wants to meet my boss right away. So we go back across town to Random House and hastily convene a larger meeting. Gina Centrello, my boss, skeptical of this philosophical zealot, says, “What happened to you in the big crash in 1987?”
“That is when I could have retired,” Taleb says. Centrello smiles and looks at Taleb differently.
We acquire the book.
Sixty-four
Manuscripts and proposals and file folders cover the floor of my office. When Chip McGrath or David McCormick complains about the work he has to do, I always say, “I wish you could sit in my chair for ten minutes if you want to know what real hard work is like.” Or it seems that I always say that, because one day when I’m having dinner with Chip after we see a junky movie, as we do once a month or so, he says, “I wish you could sit my chair for ten or fifteen minutes, and then you’d know what real hard work is.” Then he laughs, and I realize he’s mimicking me, though I hadn’t been aware of the frequency of my resort to this rhetoric. (One day at lunch, I say to McCormick, “That’s a good idea,” and he says, “It is and it isn’t,” and laughs the same way Chip laughed about sitting in my chair. I realize for the first time that I use this equivocal device very often. Well, I do and I don’t.)
But the work is hard. In fact, I
think it’s impossible to do an Editor in Chief’s job very well—or at least fully conscientiously—for any length of time, and at that only a little harder than doing the job of a non-executive acquiring editor, especially in publishing as it stands—maybe I should say stumbles—right now. Electronic-book sales have begun in earnest, making acquisition and prediction of success, to say nothing of the idea of copyright, all the more complex, if not chaotic. Add that to the traditional and tectonically opposing demands on publishing—that it simultaneously make money and serve the cause of literature—and you have a fine stew of what corporations and politicians call “challenges.” I call it a mess.
If I belong anywhere, it probably isn’t in publishing. But, then, I felt I didn’t belong in academia, or, at the beginning and near the end, at The New Yorker. Or grading high-school essays. I keep forgetting that this sense of dissatisfaction explains why work is called “work.” I keep forgetting the good insights I gained from psychoanalysis and from simple but hard reflection—that my problems with authority are as much problems with myself as they are problems with authority, that like the teenager I was and in some ways still am, I grouse about and make fun of what I have to do and the people who tell me I have to do it, even when those people are me. For all kinds of reasons—illness, family imbalance, spoiling and its consequent narcissism, tragedy—I simply have not grown all the way up. Period. And never will.
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