The New York Review of Books
APRIL 5, 2018
Anatomy of a Publisher
THE STORY OF FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
WHAT MAKES A PUBLISHING HOUSE GREAT? The easy answer is the consistency with which it produces books of value over a lengthy period of time. That would include in our day, beyond the obvious candidates, houses as unalike as Oxford University Press and New Directions. But there’s also the energy and flair with which it brings its books to the attention of the general reading public, so doing justice to its authors. And there’s its loyalty to those authors. And its overall conviction that books matter. And, of course, turning a profit.
A new book—Hothouse (Simon & Schuster), by Boris Kachka—takes as a given that its subject, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has been and remains a great publisher, and without any question that’s the case. FSG, as it’s generally called, has brought us more than half a century of distinguished books, rarely slipping below the level of distinction it hoped to achieve. How it did so is certainly worth both parsing and paying tribute to, but a degree of disillusionment with this project sets in when we get past the cute title to the even cuter and more hyperbolic subtitle: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House. The tone is set: This vigorous and often diverting trot through the history of an important cultural institution is frequently slapdash and overwrought in its determination to show just how hot the house was—in fact, “hands down, the hottest house in New York.” I’ve been in the business close to sixty years, and there’s never been a single hottest house; neither FSG nor any other publisher has ever been perceived as one—except perhaps by the central character in Kachka’s account, Roger Straus, the crucial “S” of FSG and, to put it mildly, an accomplished blower of his own horn.
Roger (which is how he’s referred to throughout the book—we’re on a first-name basis here) drifted into publishing, as so many of us have done, though not by the usual route. Here was no wet-behind-the-ears idealistic book lover, recently out of college, scratching at the door of opportunity—no Dick Simon and Max Schuster, no Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer of Random House. Roger Straus came from the union of two of the most prominent German-Jewish families in America, the Strauses and the Guggenheims. The Strauses had been members of Our Crowd longer, and they had the more illustrious background: not just big money but serious government service. Roger’s grandfather Oscar had served as minister to the Ottoman Empire under Cleveland, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Taft, and as Roosevelt’s secretary of labor and commerce. The newer—and therefore slightly tarnished—Guggenheim money came from the American Smelting and Refining Company. But it was very big money indeed.
It was Oscar’s son, the first Roger Straus, who married Gladys Guggenheim. “Rarely, outside glorious Temple Emanu-El, was so much of New York’s new elite gathered in one room,” Kachka tells us. This Roger was dragooned into the Guggenheim family business, and made a considerable success and a great deal of money but preferred to lead a relatively modest existence—an estate of “a mere thirty acres” in Westchester County, as opposed to the new Guggenheim spread of 250 acres in Sands Point, Long Island: Scott Fitzgerald’s East Egg. Our Roger—Roger Jr.—spent his childhood and youth shuttling between these two principalities, concentrating on sports and girls. He didn’t finish high school—some private tutoring plus serious pull eventually got him admitted to Hamilton College, from which he also never graduated. However, he spent summers working as a copy boy at a local newspaper, and “the cocky teen” was “turned on.” During this period, he grew close to a young woman named Dorothea Liebmann, an heir to the Rheingold brewing fortune, whose parents had “stormed their way into the haute bourgeoisie,” and who was far more literary than Roger would ever be—known later for her stylish writing and for rereading Proust almost every year. They were married in 1938. He was twenty-one and without real occupation, but fortunately “he and Dorothea had two trust funds to tide them over.”
Roger went to work as a journalist, wandered into a magazine called Current History, and started a book-packaging firm. After Pearl Harbor, he was disqualified for active service because of osteomyelitis (which luckily didn’t affect his ferocious tennis game), and landed, thanks to a rich pal, in something called the Branch Magazine and Book Section of the Navy’s Office of Public Information; he did six weeks of training at Cornell and emerged an ensign—with a fetching uniform. On the job, he met and worked with a number of writers and made endless contacts—making contacts was one of his lifelong gifts—including one crucial to his future: a Navy lieutenant, in civilian life an editor at Harcourt, Brace, named Robert Giroux (the future “G” of FSG), who, “hair prematurely white at age thirty, outranked the handsome, grinning twenty-seven-year-old flack.”
By the time the war was over, in 1945, Roger knew that he wanted to be a publisher—that is, he wanted to have a publishing house of his own. The money was found, some from his family, some from outside sources, and an appropriate editorial partner was found as well: John Farrar, who had been one of the founders of Farrar & Rinehart, the Rineharts being the sons of the formidable, best-selling Mary Roberts Rinehart. But when Farrar came back to New York after a distinguished war career, he was instantly and unceremoniously ousted from the company he had helped found. He needed a job, Roger needed a partner with editorial experience, and, in the fall of 1946, Farrar, Straus & Company launched its first list.
Despite Farrar’s experience, what was determining for the company’s success was the character, the temperament, the psyche—and the talent—of the young Roger. The talent wasn’t primarily editorial, although he was a canny reader, and he had taste (he liked to say that his favorite FSG book was Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian). And although he was certainly shrewd on a day-to-day basis, his core strength was strategic: He knew what he wanted in the long term, and he knew how to move toward it. Roger needed to be a very big frog in whatever pond he was going to be in, and he needed as well to be in total charge, which meant not joining one of the established houses. The question was how to impose himself on the book world with a newly hatched, undercapitalized company that had no backlist and no really prominent editor on board.
Farrar did acquire a number of established writers (Theodor Reik, for one), and he presided over several best-selling novelists, but the FS list was somewhat schizophrenic. The first book published was an interior-decorating how-to called Inside Your Home, and close behind it came Francis (he was the Talking Mule). The book that was a harbinger of things to come was Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, a critical triumph and best seller in 1947, and it was Roger who had acquired it—through a scout. His famous days of personally descending on Europe in search of major writers didn’t begin until twelve years after the firm came into being, although he preferred to forget that detail. But his instincts for commercial publishing were already sharp: In 1950, on a tip from another scout, he published Look Younger, Live Longer, by the health guru Gayelord Hauser, which sold half a million copies—a huge number in those days—as well as Judge Samuel Leibowitz’s sensational Courtroom, another commercial triumph.
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BUT COMMERCIAL SUCCESS, alas, can lead to serious difficulties. Despite almost demented penny-pinching—starvation wages for the staff, the office run on Draconian principles (the martinet supplies manager made the out-of-town salesmen turn over all their stolen hotel soap for use in the company bathrooms)—over-optimistic expansion threatened the health of the business. Later, Straus would sum up the situation in the fifties: “Success almost bankrupted me once.” From then on, Kachka says perceptively, he became a more conservative publisher, “one who focused less on his company’s growth than on its identity—less on market share than on a market niche.”
One advantage Roger had when capital was low was that banks, aware of the family fortune, took for granted that he was solvent and were willing to accommodate him. On the other hand, even
when books were selling, the company was not perceived as a real money-maker. Despite further commercial successes along the way, like Sammy Davis Jr.’s Yes I Can, and several major best-selling novelists (Scott Turow, Tom Wolfe), there was a sense in the industry that FSG was having to scramble, a perception that actually contributed to Roger’s astute—and highly vocal—positioning of the company as a plucky, somewhat beleaguered firm of quality prevailing in a world of ruthless commercial big boys: the Simon & Schusters, the Random Houses, the Doubledays. His particular, and loudly proclaimed, bugbear was Richard Snyder, of S. & S., who had dared, in Roger’s view of things, to snatch several of his authors. This kind of feud, even when one-sided, clearly amused him—it suited his swagger—and did no harm to his targets.
Roger couldn’t pay writers the big bucks, but he recognized that in post-war New York there was an intellectual and artistic ferment that could be harnessed if not organized. One of his brilliant maneuvers was to inaugurate a Great Letters Series, for which prominent figures of the present edited the correspondence of important figures of the past: Lionel Trilling (Keats), Jacques Barzun (Byron), Lillian Hellman (Chekhov), et al. “This was another ploy,” Roger boasted, aimed not at selling books but at the “entrapment of authors.” And then these eminences, and their connections, would be beguiled by the Straus social life—“scoring invitations to literary soirées” at the elaborate East Side town house (“where you might eavesdrop on Leonard Bernstein, Mary McCarthy, and Jerzy Kosinski”). And then certain of these stars would become informal editorial advisers to the firm: Trilling, for one, and, more important and longer lasting, Edmund Wilson, to whom Roger gave endless (needed) support and for whom he had endless (needed) patience. It all worked, until eventually “you didn’t have to score a party invite to know where the vital center of books could be found.”
Another particularly clever and successful strategy of Roger’s was the acquisition of small imprints that had valuable authors or backlists but were failing—conspicuous among them Horizon, Pellegrini & Cudahy, Hill & Wang, and Noonday, which had not only a paperback line but a handsome fish colophon, which Roger swiped, and about which Kachka makes too much of a fuss. The FSG logo is elegant, but it’s never had the same level of recognition as the Random House house, the S. & S. sower, or the Knopf borzoi. (Alfred really promoted that borzoi, convincing a lot of people that “A Borzoi Book” guaranteed quality. Readers couldn’t know that the Knopfs thought borzois were a particularly stupid breed of dog.)
Beyond occasional best sellers and takeovers and bank leniency and industry perceptions, what consolidated the success of the company was the arrival of Bob Giroux, in 1955. As John Farrar was slowly receding from the business, Roger turned to a stockholder who was also a well-known writer and critic, Stanley Young, for financial and editorial help. That was the brief era of Farrar, Straus & Young. Then came the meatpacking heiress Sheila Cudahy, who brought herself, along with her foundering publishing venture, to Roger, so inaugurating the marginally longer era of Farrar, Straus & Cudahy.
It was Cudahy, at a point when Roger was urgently looking for a major editor, who suggested Giroux—at the very moment when Giroux, about to be forty-one, and now editor in chief of Harcourt, Brace, had decided to leave the firm because of the Old Guard’s conservative editorial policies. (They wouldn’t, for instance, let him acquire The Catcher in the Rye.) Giroux was a quiet, modest, passionately literary man whose homosexuality was known and disregarded; he shared his life with the same man for more than half a century, until they died, within a few months of each other, in 2009.
As an undergraduate at Columbia, he had made close friends with a number of writers-to-be, including John Berryman and Thomas Merton, who famously became a Trappist monk, and whose The Seven Storey Mountain sold six hundred thousand copies for Harcourt, Brace in its first seven months. Among Giroux’s responsibilities at Harcourt had been the care and feeding of such weighty figures as T. S. Eliot, whom he became close to, and Edmund Wilson (“He needed no editing. My only function was to praise the writing”). Among his own discoveries were Robert Lowell (who took him to Washington to meet Ezra Pound, in St. Elizabeths Hospital), Jean Stafford, Flannery O’Connor, Bernard Malamud, and Hannah Arendt, whose Origins of Totalitarianism he published in 1951; almost all of them followed him to FSG. Among the many writers he later signed were Elizabeth Bishop and Walker Percy.
New publishing houses tend to flourish best when their two leading personalities are in sharp contrast to each other: owlish, bookish Max Schuster and marketing genius Dick Simon; Random House’s glad-handing, savvy jokester Bennett Cerf and distinguished, gentlemanly Donald Klopfer; panjandrum Alfred Knopf and his fierce and exigent wife, Blanche. As for Straus and Giroux, what a curious pair they were: “the Jewish prep school jock and the Jersey City Jesuit,” as Kachka snappily puts it. That they were so unalike made the arrangement workable—until their differences eventually made it unworkable. Although Giroux immediately helped the company to a new level of visibility (and profitability), it was nine years before he outlasted both Y and C to become the “G” in FSG.
Roger Straus and Robert Giroux
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AS THE KINGDOM EXPANDED, Roger moved toward empire: Finally braving Europe, he quickly became a central figure at the Frankfurt Book Fair, hosting dinners and parties, establishing close relationships with the major foreign publishers (though oddly not with the English; the FSG list has always been weak on British literature), and scooping up an extraordinary list of important writers, alerted to them by his editors or unofficial advisers (Philip Roth, for one). His passion was for publishing Nobel Prize winners, and between 1978 and 1995 ten of the eighteen laureates were FSG writers, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, Elias Canetti, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney. An astounding record, which to a large extent he owed to his most important writer/friend/adviser/maybe lover, Susan Sontag.
Practically from the moment Sontag turned up at FSG, in the early sixties, she and Roger formed an almost conspiratorial alliance, and everybody was aware of it:
By 1965 … Sontag was in a category of her own. When she swept into those grimy offices to work on a manuscript, “everything had to stop for her,” says a former copy editor. “We would put aside whatever else and we would work with her.” During the long stretches Sontag spent in Europe, FSG received and sorted her mail, looked after her apartment, and paid her bills—sometimes even her rent and Diners Club card.
There were minor bumps in the road, but “my loyalty to you, my gratitude to you, and my love for you, Roger, are absolutely unchanged” (Susan), and “Dearest, Dearest Susan … Please don’t brood about us. Everything should be so good” (Roger). “Neither Straus nor Sontag was naïve about the utility of their friendship,” as Kachka tactfully puts it, “but they seemed genuinely to adore each other.” Why? “Both were preternaturally vital, social, and restless. They loved gossip and actively sought out people who were brilliant or beautiful, preferably both. Out on the town at One Fifth or the Brussels, in matching leather jackets, they were a power couple. The question of whether or not they were ever an actual couple still divides industry gossips today.” It does?
Here Kachka is in his element. Gossip about Roger’s sexual life (and everyone else’s) is a dominant feature of Hothouse—yes, FSG was hot in this way, too. Not only was Roger the Emperor of Frankfurt, but in New York, in the office, he was the Sun King—complete with deer park. The chief doe, Peggy Miller, arrived in his life around the same time Sontag did. She was an experienced executive secretary who went to work for Roger in that capacity and stayed on until the end, a major force at FSG. (“I’m … grateful to Peggy Miller,” Kachka writes, “the living soul of independent FSG, for giving me so much of her time.”)
For decades, Roger would pick up Peggy on his way to work every morning. And for years Peggy was with him at the Frankfurt fair, making arrangements and acting as hostess—and before the fair going
with him for weekends to Bavarian spas (where “Peggy indulged in her favorite dessert, a delicate seasonal plum cake”) and, after the fair, on to London for meetings and theater. Some of the Europeans “who didn’t know him well thought she was his wife. Some of those who knew her better, in the halls of 19 Union Square West, speculated on the extra spring in Miller’s step come September, trilling: ‘Peggy’s gonna get laid in Frankfurt!’” (That “trilling” is a quintessential Kachka touch.)
But Peggy Miller was only one of the FSG women to receive Roger’s personal attentions. “By the early 1960s, he was probably sleeping with three of his female employees. At the very least there were a switchboard operator and a publicity director. They were opposite physical types, but that didn’t seem to matter. ‘Roger would fuck a snake if you held it down,’ says one employee from that time period. These two women, who were good friends, went shopping together and bought Roger matching bathrobes so that their boss would feel equally at home having ‘lunch’ at either of their apartments.” Now, that’s team spirit.
Others exhibited the same team spirit. “Everybody was fucking everybody in that office,” Kachka quotes Leslie Sharpe, “a former FSG assistant who occasionally slept with Roger” after leaving the firm. Top editors were having conspicuous affairs. Husbands left wives for younger colleagues. “People were having sex in the mailroom after hours.” No wonder Dorothea Straus referred to FSG as a “sexual sewer.”
How did any work get done? And how did Dorothea deal with all this? To a large extent, she led her own life, although she was always an elegant hostess in her black silk dresses and big hats with veils (her son remarked, “I think my mother saw an Aubrey Beardsley drawing when she was young and never recovered from the experience”). And her talk, Kachka assures us, “was always of the highest order.” Clearly, like many others she was in some kind of thrall to her husband, that potent combination of grand seigneur and buccaneer.
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