Thus I was startled one morning, shortly before nine, as I was hurrying past the shop, to hear Eli’s voice hailing me from the doorway: “Now you’ve done it! Now you’re going to jail!” I’d barely had my coffee, and I was already headed for jail without passing Go?
“Good morning, Eli,” I said, turning in my tracks to face him. “What have we done now?”
“Last Exit to Brooklyn. The Selby novel. It’s really beyond the pale.” More than the Tropics? I asked. Absolutely, he declared. You mean we’re going to be sued again? He guaranteed it. Did that mean he wouldn’t stock the book? Of course he would stock it. They would be indemnified, wouldn’t they? Of course they would. I asked him what he found so offensive about the book. Certainly not the language? No … everything. “It’s the most shocking book I’ve ever read,” he ended, and I decided to take that as a compliment.
Arriving at the office, I thought I should report my Eli conversation to Barney, who took it in stride: “They’re going to display the book, aren’t they?” We had published several sections of the novel in Evergreen Review, and the feedback was virtually all positive. Congratulations on discovering a new voice. Shocking but powerful. Perusing again a set of pages that morning, to refresh my recollection, as I had learned to say in court, I found it difficult to believe we’d have legal problems. True, another obscenity trial was wending its way through the courts, that of Fanny Hill, published by Lolita’s publisher, Putnam, being defended by our old friend Charles Rembar. As of this date, 1964, it was not faring well. A loss for Fanny Hill might set freedom to publish back a giant step from the gains of Chatterley, Miller, and Burroughs, but for the life of me I could not see it having any relevance to Selby. The language was raw, but far less so than Henry Miller’s: street language, that of Brooklyn’s lower depths, but of an authenticity no prosecutor could deny. What, then, had prompted Eli’s sudden outburst? Leafing through the pages, I came upon “Tralala” and scanned the opening lines:
Tralala was 15 the first time she was laid … Getting laid was getting laid. Why all the bullshit?… Tralala didn’t fuckaround. Nobody likes a cockteaser. Either you put out or you dont. Thats all. And she had big tits.
Maybe it was that. Maybe the shock came less from the words themselves than from the cynical, callous attitude of many of the characters, starting with Tralala: you fucked a boy with the same disinterest you displayed in drinking your morning cup of coffee or brushing your teeth. Yes, it was the attitude of these kids that shocked. And of course their age: young people were not supposed to think and act this way. Society would doubtless not go quietly into the night with this one. But rereading random passages that morning, I knew this was a book that had to be published and was eminently defensible, no matter what the cost. The cost … Easy for me to say, when I knew all too well the bills that continued to pour in. Still, I was sure that this was a seminal work, both literally and figuratively, one that would endure long after the season’s spate of bestsellers had vanished from the earth.
* * *
Hubert Selby Jr. was a pale, bespectacled young man from Brooklyn who looked more like a librarian than a wild-man writer breaking down still more literary barriers. Shy to a fault, he preferred the shadowy back corridors of literature, apparently intent on avoiding the limelight at all costs. He would describe as he saw fit the sad life and lowlife of Brooklyn whence he came and not worry himself about the reception or repercussions. I became Selby’s editor and friend. We worked together closely, spending long hours on his manuscript. I was also delegated to take the photograph Exit to Brooklyn that was used for the jacket.
The novel itself, its title a simple roadside sign but, inferentially, one of the most evocative of modern literature, was really a selection of overlapping stories, several of the characters reappearing in minor roles once they had had their brief strut on the stage of his fiction.
It is possible, indeed probable, that of all the books we published that year, Last Exit to Brooklyn will best stand the test of time. But for those of us who were in the trenches, there were at least half a dozen others on which we would have placed our money, assuming (wrongly) we had any. That year, 1964, we published far fewer books than had been our wont, either because our finances were too fragile to pay advances for all the projects submitted or because, still with a staff of fifteen, we had yielded to fatigue and overwork. Still, this was the year we published Beckett’s How It Is, a major new prose piece; two more plays by Bertolt Brecht; William Burroughs’s Nova Express; Eugène Ionesco’s writings on the theater entitled Notes and Counter Notes; a volume of poems, The Dead Lecturer, by LeRoi Jones, a.k.a. Amiri Baraka; a new volume in our film script series, John Osborne’s Tom Jones; a third novel by Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers; a volume of poems by the Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky; and young Jorge Semprun’s novel The Long Voyage, fruit of the second year’s Formentor, which unlike the first provided a rich harvest of new fiction, offering the international publishers a fair return on their investment. Not included in the above list was Wayland Young’s Eros Denied: Sex in Western Society, a work of scholarship and passion that brought the world up to date on the realities of sexual relations.
This was the year, too, when, having published Our Lady of the Flowers without (legal) incident, we gave a second blast of the Jean Genet cannon with his equally brilliant, equally provocative Thief’s Journal. As with Our Lady, I went over Bernie’s translation with a fine-tooth comb, but by now we could work via the mails, and he was receptive to the majority of my suggestions. If that sounds self-congratulatory, let me quickly add that any kudos should go to Frechtman, for in the reverse situation I am far from sure I would have been as magnanimous.
I’m not sure I was aware at the time, but one of the virtues of working at Grove in the 1960s was the pleasure—privilege, really—of being involved with so many authors who mattered, people whose work you admired and who, in many instances, were—or one day would be—of world stature.
46
The Grove Method: A Top-Line Approach to Publishing
WE RARELY HAD EDITORIAL MEETINGS at Grove, and in my years there we had never done a P&L—a profit and loss statement—that showed at what point a book would make money, if ever. This admission came as a major surprise to several of my colleagues at other publishing houses, who were obliged to bring their “numbers” to be evaluated at weekly editorial meetings. If the numbers didn’t work, they turned the book down even if, as many claimed, they loved the manuscript, swore on the head of their mother that it was brilliant, wonderful, unique. For editors placed in that unpleasant position, the only options were to die or lie, which struck me as unacceptable choices: either you had to slink back to your office in defeat, grumbling about the dunderheaded decision makers who had killed your putative masterpiece, or you took out the template on which the P&L was based, fiddled with the numbers until they did work, then re-presented your case to the reigning Caesar who had earlier given you the dumb thumbs-down. A classic case of games people play, and, to me and the rest of us at Grove, a dangerous game to boot: the creative mind versus the bureaucrat, and in that battle you know who always wins.
At Grove, if the manuscript was good, the author serious, the writing (for nonfiction) at least acceptable, you signed it up, especially if the premise was provocative and controversial. Looking back from the vantage point of the mid-1960s at the books we had published since my arrival six years before, I could see several categories that immediately emerged, as if they had been planned, which most of them emphatically had not: Books of controversy first and foremost, which would have to include Chatterley, all the Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Sade certainly, Story of O, the John Rechy, The Deputy. Next, psychology and psychiatry. Third, books of discovery, that is fiction, drama, and poetry by new authors, a list that would include Shelagh Delaney, Marguerite Duras, Jack Gelber, Eugène Ionesco, Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Koch, Michael McClure, Frank O’Hara, Octavio Paz, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Har
old Pinter, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Tom Stoppard, Alex Trocchi, Arnold Weinstein, Douglas Woolf … Since most of these authors were faithful to their publisher, and the publisher faithful to them, each year before we started, we had maybe half the list laid out: new works by our “house” authors. Sprinkle in the works on psychiatry and psychology, and the usual half a dozen relating to the Far East, and there you go: roughly three-quarters of the list was preordained. Which left just enough room for new discoveries without recourse to stodgy meetings. These discoveries came from two sources, our own ebullient editorial brains and our cherished authors, who often wrote suggesting writers they had “discovered.” In 1961 or early 1962, Henry Miller wrote to Barney touting a novel called One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding by a previously unpublished young author. The manuscript arrived, and it was indeed funny, irreverent, fresh. We published it immediately to considerable success, and the author, Robert Gover, subsequently produced two other novels, not the equal of the first, but full of wit and humor. Samuel Beckett suggested a Frenchman he greatly admired, Robert Pinget, and he too went on the next list. Not that we automatically published our authors’ suggestions, but there was a constant flow to which we paid close attention.
To take a fair example of our decision-making process, one day in 1963 or 1964 I read a French book published by François Maspero, whom I had met a year or two before, entitled Les damnés de la terre—The Wretched of the Earth. The author was a black Caribbean-born psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, who struck me as offering new insights into the hearts and minds of that considerable part of humanity that had been deprived, usually from birth, of basic rights, starting with food and shelter. I discussed the book with Harry Braverman, who joined Grove in 1960, who knew of Fanon and concurred as to his importance. “You and I, Dick, are maybe the only two people in America who have heard of this guy. Of course we should publish him.”
I walked over to Barney’s office, sat down, a copy of the French edition in my hand, and expostulated for about three minutes on the merits of the book and the author. You think he’s that important? Absolutely. Has anybody else read it? No, but I talked to Harry, who knows about Fanon and agrees. Then sign him up. We did, publishing it in 1965 to important reviews, and almost immediately the subsequent paperback became a staple of the backlist. Two years later we published another equally provocative work, Black Skin, White Masks, in which he pinpointed the ills besetting the postcolonial world and suggested the remedies needed to cure them.
I never met the man, for he had died young in 1961, but I admired him beyond measure, and after our publication of The Wretched of the Earth his widow came to see me in New York to reiterate how gratified her husband would have been to know that his works were appearing in English.
* * *
The one book on which none of us would have put our money in the mid-1960s was a manuscript by a Canadian-born doctor out of McGill University, Eric Berne, called Games People Play, bearing the subtitle The Psychology of Human Relationships. Three years earlier we had published the good doctor’s previous book Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy, a specialized work that, despite its forbidding title, had sold reasonably well. I had found Berne an easy author, open to suggestions. I thought we published far too many books on psychology and psychiatry for our own financial good. Despite my reservations, I noted that, increasingly, that category was providing a slow but steady income stream, as many of the titles reprinted and became part of the growing backlist.
With Games People Play, however, the doctor was most assuredly suffering from delusions of grandeur, for with his manuscript came a letter stating unequivocally that this work would sell more than a hundred thousand copies, and a print order of that magnitude was strongly recommended. Reading the manuscript, I had to admit it was clearly aimed much more at a general audience than the first book, but the author’s expectations seemed so absurd I wasn’t quite sure how to answer him, especially after we had more or less decided on a first printing of five thousand copies, based on the first year’s sales of Transactional Analysis. Publishers of course are generally not bound to inform authors of the exact size of any printings, information they will receive when their biannual royalty reports are sent out. I simply punted by plying Berne with a number of editorial questions and supplying him with a general idea of the book’s schedule. By return came the answer to my editorial queries, followed by an insistent demand to know how many copies we intended to print. The last paragraph of the letter, however, gave me second thoughts, for Berne offered to buy twenty-five hundred copies out of the first printing for his own use. Since authors generally have the right to buy copies of their own work at 40 percent discount, and since Games People Play was slated to have a list price—what one pays in the bookstore—of five dollars, I did some simple math and figured that at a cost of a little over a dollar apiece, our total printing bill for seventy-five hundred copies would be virtually covered by his paying us three dollars a book. I showed Barney the numbers, and his response was to wonder aloud if the doctor was good for the promised amount. “I’ll make him pay half up front and the second half when he receives the books. Which means we’ll have the money in hand before we have to pay the printer.”
It seemed that Berne’s contribution to fiscal stability, though modest, was a step in the right direction. When the book came off press, to our pleasant surprise the first five thousand copies sped out the door. “Okay,” Barney said, “out our door, but how about the bookstores?” The sales manager, Nat Sobel, checked a number of retail outlets both in New York and in half a dozen other East Coast cities and reported back that apparently the book was not only selling but selling briskly. “What the hell’s ‘briskly’?” Barney wanted to know. “Don’t you have any hard numbers?” Nat did. Pulling a sheet of paper from his pocket, he began ticking off the stores: four out of five here, two of three there, one of three elsewhere … on and on. Barney listened impassively, then said: “That’s like calling an election when 5 percent of the votes are in.” “Still,” I reminded him, “Eric’s contribution to the first printing paid for the entire cost. So at this point we’re way ahead of the game.” He nodded, and nervously ordered a second, modest printing of three thousand. By the time that printing arrived a couple of weeks later, more than three thousand orders had been chalked up by the abacus or whatever had replaced it as our counting tool, at which point we had no choice, it seemed, but to order a third, equally modest printing. When that too was gone before the new printing came off press, we consulted and ordered a fourth printing of—dare I say it?—seventy-five hundred copies! Nat made a geographically broader survey, and wherever he phoned, the news was good. The book was still selling “briskly,” a term that irritated Barney then as much as the first time, though now he was less pessimistic, for sales were already in the solid five figures.
For the next several weeks, new printings barely kept up with demand, and soon the book hopped onto the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for a record 102 weeks. By year’s end we had sold hundreds of thousands of copies, the book had gone to number 1 and remained stuck there.
Waving the paper in my hand the day it first appeared in the top spot, I told Barney there was good news and bad: the good was the book was number 1 in the country; the bad was Dr. Berne had been right in the first place. Barney laughed. “No, he wasn’t. He predicted the book would sell a hundred thousand copies. You see how greatly he underestimated its potential.”
Few of our offerings over the years seemed to recommend themselves to the Book-of-the Month Club, for our editorial approach, and our audiences, were worlds apart. Still, with the bestseller lists to back me up, I sent copies off with a letter suggesting the Berne might just be an ideal choice for BOM. A few weeks later I received a reply thanking me for my submission but, using the standard rejection line, “this isn’t right for us.” On the first anniversary of its arrival on the New York Times bestseller list, however, I took my courage in my hands—a strange p
hrase, now that I look at it—and sent another copy, with the anniversary circled in red. After the normal, though irritating, delay, word came back that “thank you again, but no thanks.” BOM 2, Grove 0.
A full year later, when the second anniversary of the book’s bestsellerdom had been reached, I was tempted to try again but thought better of it. Who needed another face slap? Anyway, by then we were preparing a cheap paperback edition, which I figured obviated any chance of a belated book club hardcover. Wrong. One morning I received a call from BOM: Were book club rights still available? They were, I allowed, but I’m afraid you’re too late, we’re about to release our paperback edition. “That’s all right,” Mr. BOM intoned, “our audience doesn’t care.” I reported the conversation to Barney, who at first thought it was a joke. Then, angered by the remembrance of their rejections, he responded with a double expletive, which I leave to your imagination. “Barney,” I reminded him, “they’re paying a substantial advance, which doubtless, given the timing, they’ll never earn out.” At which point he acquiesced, and Grove had its first BOM “selection.” And again I was wrong: despite the competition of the low-priced paperback, the club not only earned out its advance but kept sending royalties for months on end.
Games People Play was a book that saved our skin, at least for the moment, and also proved how smart you have to be to become a book publisher. Books you swear are going to set sales records stumble and fall, never to be heard from again; books about which you have grave doubts, questioning whether you should have signed them up at all, sell beyond all expectation. That’s what makes publishing such fun, and what, so often, makes it hard to get a good night’s sleep.
The Tender Hour of Twilight Page 42