* * *
ROGER, WHO LIVED THE HIGH LIFE as a rich man born to riches, seems to have had something like contempt for those who weren’t so fortunate. His failure to pay his staff sufficiently, let alone generously, was notorious in the industry. One young woman, confronted by Roger after being caught stealing books to sell to the Strand, said to him, “I’ll stop if you give me a raise.”
This stinginess applied at every level. In 1964, he and Giroux brought in the considerably younger and highly talented (and well-regarded) Henry Robbins to modernize the list. Robbins came through spectacularly: Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Wilfrid Sheed, Grace Paley, and Donald Barthelme quickly signed on, although Wolfe, whose snobberies were compatible with Roger’s, soon became a Roger man. (Wolfe letter to Roger: “Your splendid dinner Friday really did restore my soul.”) But Robbins was not the amenable Giroux—he found Roger’s editorial interferences enraging. Besides, his health was insecure: He had suffered a serious heart attack in his mid-forties, and he couldn’t support his complicated family life on his salary of twenty-five thousand dollars. By 1973, he was desperate.
At that time, I was running Alfred A. Knopf (where Robbins had once worked), and I remember him coming to see me for advice: Should he leave FSG for Simon & Schuster (where I had once worked)? S. & S. was offering him much more money, and he also felt that, as a strong commercial house, it would present his authors more aggressively: He was distressed by FSG’s somewhat sluggish (and cost-saving) publishing. My view was that he clearly had to improve his situation, but that S. & S. as it was then would be a personal disaster for him. Alas, that is what it turned out to be. After two unhappy years there, and a less painful short stretch at Dutton, he died of another heart attack, a major loss for American publishing. Bob Giroux spoke lovingly at his funeral; Roger not only didn’t attend, but when he heard that Bob was going he “threw a fit.”
The next editor in chief to try to be editor in chief at Roger’s publishing house was the much-admired Aaron Asher, who brought Philip Roth to the company but after half a dozen years bowed out, from then on, according to Kachka, always referred to by Roger as “the late Aaron Asher.” Other talented and productive editors—Pat Strachan, Michael di Capua—for the most part managed not to antagonize the boss, and so could enjoy long and fruitful careers at FSG.
The most complicated relationship Roger had with a colleague was with his and Dorothea’s only child, Roger III, known as Rog. Everyone who knew Rog back then, including me, liked and respected him, and he was in publishing not only because it was the family business but because he loved it. When he came into the company, Rog said, “I was twenty-one, and it was easy and comfortable to do it his [Roger’s] way. But by the time I was thirty-one, I started having ideas of my own, which were sometimes not his ideas.” He decided to move to Harper & Row. “I wanted more oxygen. I wanted to flap my own wings, or whatever. And also, since marketing had become my thing, I wanted a place where I had more money to spend, a more diverse list to market.” At that point, in 1975, he was sure he would never be back.
By 1985, he was back. But a final confrontation between Roger and Rog, in 1993, led to the younger Straus’s definitive departure. Rog: “He said a bunch of things and I said a bunch of things and I said, ‘If that’s the way you feel I’m gonna quit,’ and he didn’t say anything and I quit.” Roger gave Rog a final chance. “You’re not coming back, are you?” Rog said no. Philosophical conflicts? Temperamental conflicts? Oedipal conflicts?—it hardly matters. Roger and his son were fated to suffer the same clash of wills, and the same ultimate breach, that Roger had experienced with his own father, who had assertively challenged Roger’s choice of publishing as a way of life.
Roger’s unmediated temperament led to his being at odds not only with his father and with his son but with his brother and, eventually, with Bob. Toward the end of his life, Giroux explained that he wasn’t going to write a book about his publishing life because, as Kachka puts it, “he couldn’t find a way to write it without speaking ill of Roger Straus, and he didn’t think that would serve anyone well.” Unsurprisingly, the main cause of his disaffection was a justifiable resentment at the way Roger had dealt with him financially.
There were those who loved Roger and those who hated him: Not many people were neutral. A buccaneer of his own stamp, the notably aggressive agent Andrew Wylie, with whom Roger had an ambivalent (mostly antagonistic) relationship, spoke at Roger’s memorial service, summing him up as “a magnificent character: vindictive, raucous, willful. A wonderful man.” His energy, his charm, his single-mindedness, his nerve, his ruthlessness, his remarkable instincts propelled him to the top of the book world, yet he wasn’t an intellectual; he was an unashamed autodidact. He was almost abnormally competitive, relishing public brawls. He was funny, he was foulmouthed, and he could be cruel: His very talented editor Michael di Capua, who was gay, once came back to the office after a stay in the Hamptons “with his balding pate bright red. ‘Hey, Mikey, did someone suck your head off on the beach?’” Was this the man whose favorite book was Memoirs of Hadrian? Or was he showboating—enjoying shocking people and happy to be adding to his reputation for outrageousness?
What seems to me a sadness about him was his lack of capacity for intimacy. Once a week for fifty years he played tennis with a man named Roger Hirson. Their friendship, we’re told, consisted almost entirely of their tennis dates, yet Straus made Hirson a co-executor of his will. “He didn’t have a lot of personal friends,” Hirson says.
When Roger died, an Italian publisher pronounced, “He was not a great publisher, but he was a great man.” I think he got it exactly backward. From the story Kachka tells, Roger emerges as a truly great publisher but very far from a great man.
* * *
THE HISTORY OF FSG CONTINUES, of course, after Roger Straus’s death, and therefore so does Hothouse. The firm had begun to change before he died, when concern for the future led to his finally deciding to sell it. Immediately after his son left, Roger called his Frankfurt pal Dieter von Holtzbrinck, the billionaire chairman of a company whose holdings in America were the publisher Henry Holt and the magazine Scientific American. The deal—for about thirty million dollars—was concluded over the phone. Having inveighed endlessly about the awfulness of publishing conglomerates while congratulating himself on not being part of one, he had capitulated: FSG had become part of the second-largest consortium in German media; only Bertelsmann was larger.
By that time, however, a potential successor was in place. The editor Jonathan Galassi, a refugee from Random House, had all the intellectual qualifications of a Bob Giroux, but was both tougher and more ambitious—as well as more tactful than a Robbins, an Asher, or a disaffected son. (“Ductile,” Scott Turow called him. “He’s supple in his dealings with very strong personalities, and knows how to get around them.”) Galassi brought to the firm writers like Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Thomas Friedman, and he steadily rose to become editor in chief and executive vice president. Unlike Giroux, he was a first-rate publisher as well as an editor; unlike Rog, he was a first-rate editor as well as a publisher. He himself says he was “the good son, [Rog] was the bad son.” That the two “sons” have remained good friends is a tribute to both their characters.
In the first decade after the sale, Holtzbrinck kept most of its non-interference promises—the most important to Roger being the promise of continuing editorial independence. Meanwhile, inch by inch, he ceded authority to Galassi, while suffering (or ignoring) the modernizations on the business side, essential for survival, that were being quietly implemented. (Only after his death did the company move into handsome modern offices that made day-to-day life for the staff not only bearable but pleasant.) He had become an old lion now, but not a toothless one—and he was still The Chairman. When Galassi suggested to him that his feuds and grudges might be counterproductive, he snapped, “Don’t give me any of that Christian forgiveness, Galassi, I’m a vindi
ctive Jew.” Even so, he was mellower, and his health had grown shakier. By the time he died, in 2004, at the age of eighty-seven, FSG had, without losing its unique distinction, been transformed.
Given the new technologies, the past ten years have, as everyone knows, been traumatic for the publishing business. FSG, under Galassi, seems to have ridden out the storm as well as any of its rivals, owing to a combination of things: the rationalization of its business practices following the sale to Holtzbrinck; the richness of the backlist that Roger so carefully nurtured; and the success of its editors in acquiring impressive and profitable newer authors. Of course there have been compromises, but FSG has not been compromised.
Kachka doesn’t have much to say about writers as writers, but when there’s gossip in the air he’s on top of it—pages and pages, for instance, are devoted to the notorious Jonathan Franzen–Oprah Winfrey spat. On the whole, though, it’s the early history that’s freshest and most instructive; particularly welcome is the detailed portrayal of Bob Giroux. But Kachka really doesn’t grasp what things used to be like in publishing, what the relationships and struggles and personalities were—he lacks context. This is feature journalism masquerading as history.
Another difficulty is the tone of the writing, which is again and again overexcited and/or inexact. “The old bookman [Donald Brace] said he couldn’t overrule his trusted hire.” Columbia was “a cauldron of passionate, callow strivers.” The Strauses’ decorator died soon after completing his work on their New York house, “never to see it resonate with the contentious exclamations of Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe, or Joseph Brodsky.” “His relationship with Susan only grew more enmeshed after her recovery.” When Rog decided to leave for Harper & Row, he “spun it to Dad like a stifled boyfriend.” “Profits were nothing to drool over.” Three hundred and forty-five pages of this kind of thing is hard to take.
Even so, and despite all its flaws and confusions, Hothouse is a valuable effort. No one has previously anatomized a publishing house in such depth, and publishing is fascinating—at least, to those of us who are in it. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, moreover, is well worth anatomizing. It’s had a larger-than-life central character, an amusing cast of secondary characters, and a history replete with drama. Most important, it has maintained an amazingly consistent level of quality: It’s better than “hot,” it’s good. And it’s now a happy place, for both writers and staff. Take it from one who knows: I’m an FSG author.
The New Yorker
AUGUST 12–19, 2013
The Maestro
ARTURO TOSCANINI
ON THE NIGHT OF JUNE 30, 1886, Arturo Toscanini—recently turned nineteen—arrived, barely on time, at the imperial opera house in Rio de Janeiro, where the touring company for which he was the principal cellist was about to perform Aida. Pandemonium. The unpopular lead conductor had resigned in a huff. His unpopular replacement had been shouted off the podium by the audience. There was no one else. Toscanini, who was also assistant choral master, was thrust forward by his colleagues. “Everyone knew about my memory,” he would recall, “because the singers had all had lessons with me, and I had played the piano without ever looking at the music.” He was handed a baton and just started to conduct. A triumph! Typical of the glowing reviews: “This beardless maestro is a prodigy who communicated the sacred artistic fire to his baton and the energy and passion of a genuine artist to the orchestra.” For the remaining six weeks of the tour, Harvey Sachs tells us in his biography Toscanini: Musician of Conscience, the maestro led the orchestra in twenty-six performances of twelve operas, all from memory. No one offered him a raise, and it didn’t occur to him to ask for one.
It was almost sixty-eight years later, in April 1954, that he conducted his final concert, an all-Wagner program, at Carnegie Hall. He was eighty-seven and decades earlier had established himself as the world’s most famous conductor—the world’s most famous musician; a “genius,” in fact, alongside such names as Einstein, Picasso, and, with a backward glance, Thomas Alva Edison. Nor was this a new notion: Back in the conservatory in Parma, his hometown, “Arturo’s fellow students teased him by calling him Gèni, the dialect word for ‘genius.’”
Genius or not, he unquestionably was a prodigy. At school he had been assigned the cello as his instrument, and he quickly mastered it—by the time he was fourteen he was playing in the Parma opera company’s orchestra. He taught himself to play the piano, the violin, the double bass. He sang, he composed, he organized and led groups of his fellow students. Everyone was aware of his astounding photographic memory and his immense powers of concentration. In his final year he was named the school’s outstanding graduate, and he was liked as well as admired. “When I look back at the years of my adolescence,” he would reminisce, “I don’t remember a day without sunshine, because the sunshine was in my soul.”
Music happened to him by accident. His good-natured if rather feckless father, Claudio—whose heart lay in his years of campaigning with Garibaldi’s army of the Risorgimento, and who made a somewhat precarious living through tailoring—and his cold and distant mother, Paola, were “musical,” but not exceptionally so. It was an elementary school teacher who spotted little Arturo’s strong response to music and advised his parents to send him to Parma’s music conservatory, where once he was accepted as a live-in student all his expenses were taken care of—a boon to the financially strapped family.
Word of Toscanini’s South American success quickly got around, and soon he was a busy itinerant opera conductor: Turin, Bologna, Venice, Genoa, Palermo, Pisa, Rome—he was working everywhere, though undoubtedly his greatest satisfaction in those early days was playing cello for Verdi, his hero, at the 1887 premiere of Otello. After some years at Turin’s Regio Theater, where in 1895–96 he conducted the world premiere of La Bohème (he’d done the same for Pagliacci in Milan) and the first Italian production of Götterdämmerung, he was wooed away, inevitably, by La Scala, where he reigned on and off until in 1908 he left Italy to lead the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In Milan he had worked with (and disciplined) the young Caruso and Chaliapin, had forced audiences to accept darkened auditoriums, instituted a bitterly opposed policy of no encores, and had the orchestra playing in a pit rather than at stage level. He had mounted and conducted the first Italian performances of Siegfried, Pelléas et Mélisande, and Eugene Onegin.
And he had married. When Arturo met Carlotta De Martini in 1895, he was twenty-eight and she was eighteen, a pretty, vivacious girl whom he pursued with all his intensity and tenacity. They married in 1897, and he liked telling people that their son Walter was born exactly nine months after the wedding: “in tempo, like a good conductor.” Two girls and another boy would follow. You could say that it was a successful marriage but not a happy one. Arturo and Carla would stay together until her death in 1951, both of them loyal to the idea of family but increasingly distanced from each other emotionally. Her messiness maddened him (“For 41 years I’ve suffered from this disorder of hers!!!”), and his serial philandering deeply wounded her. He came by his life of compulsive adultery honestly: Claudio, Arturo would say, “was a good-looking man. Women went after him. And what’s a young man to do? Some say yes, some say no.” Claudio said yes often, and Arturo, notably short though equally good-looking, said yes as well—many, many times, both as a young man and as an old one.
The most damaging of his extramarital relationships was a prolonged affair with the leading soprano Rosina Storchio. The relationship was an open secret—one night when she was singing Cio-Cio San, one of her finest roles, a breeze ruffled her robes and a member of the audience shouted out, “Butterfly is pregnant with Toscanini’s child.” In 1903 Rosina gave birth to a son, Giovanni, but a mishap during the delivery left him brain-damaged, and Giovanni died at sixteen. Rosina never married.
In a dismaying echo of that tragedy, Arturo and Carla suffered an equally devastating loss. Their second boy, Giorgio, not yet five, died of diphtheria while they were all in Buenos Aires, a
nd Carla—not only drowning in grief but wildly angry because she believed her husband had been with Storchio as Giorgio was dying—packed her trunks to leave for Italy. She relented, though, as always torn between her love for her husband and her distress at the circumstances of her marriage. Besides, she had her other children to consider, Walter and her daughter, Wally. Despite her grief—or, as Sachs suggests, perhaps because of it—she determined to have another baby. But with the birth of Wanda, when Carla was thirty, all sexual relations between husband and wife came to an end. As for Wanda, whose difficult disposition reminded her father of his difficult mother, she went on to marry the profoundly neurotic (and homosexual) piano virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz.
Toscanini’s relationship with Geraldine Farrar, the reigning diva of the Metropolitan Opera, was hardly a secret. She was determined to marry him, he had no intention, then or ever, of leaving Carla and the children, and it’s generally assumed that he resigned his leadership of the Met after seven years in order to escape her importunities. Among the dozens of other women with whom he was involved were other famous singers like Lotte Lehmann and Alma Gluck (and, some said, Gluck’s daughter, the writer Marcia Davenport). Carla put up with all of it—and, in fact, befriended a number of the mistresses.
* * *
ONE OF THE THINGS that led Sachs to write a second biography of Toscanini, more than twice as long as his first (published in 1978), was the new availability of huge archives of documents and letters—in 2002 he edited The Letters of Arturo Toscanini. The letters cover an immense range of musical, political, and personal matters, but the most astonishing ones are passionate love letters that sometimes go beyond the erotic to the pornographic. From a typical letter to Elsa Kurzbauer, with whom he was in love for many years: “Your kisses, your lips (oh! sweetness) your mouth inflame ever and evermore at the utmost my frenzy to have you under my libidinous caresses—kisses—suckings—lickings—bitings, all over your girlisch body—I am dying and lusting for every part nook—crevice—hole—holy hole of your lovely person.” Their relationship would pick up, though not quite where it had left off, twenty years later, when Elsa had escaped from Vienna to New York. “Don’t lose time,” the septuagenarian Arturo wrote to her. “Maybe before long God will take away even the little bit of virility that’s left me. And then? What misery!”
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