Your four decisions are not only acceptable but right. Contract along lines suggested will be forthcoming, but this letter is binding. Advance on signing contract, $1,500. Make it the most perceptive book ever.
Like any fledgling writer, I spent that day gloating over the fact that I was to have a hardcover book of mine published by Kinetic, one of the great houses, for I knew that most university teachers of writing would commit mayhem to achieve such a goal. But toward evening, as the glow subsided, I had to face the fact that in order to become an author I had surrendered my principles. Yoder was a dreadful writer, a man who ought to be named as such in any serious book of criticism, but my voice had been strangled and for the basest of reasons. To Kinetic, Yoder meant money, and as such he had to be protected. I had sold out to defend my personal interests and no would-be critic could be proud of that action.
But I had another accomplishment in which I could take satisfaction, my college teaching, and during the time I was battling with Ms. Marmelle—and mostly surrendering to her—I was also teaching a heavy schedule and doing all I could to help my students acquire the skills they’d need if they wanted to become writers. So during the Christmas break I said to myself: If I’m getting this $1,500 windfall, let me spend some on my students, and I did something I had long wanted to do.
At my own expense I employed a Dresden sign painter to transfer onto a wall of my classroom the intricate chart I had sketched three years earlier in Athens and verified by careful research in Mecklenberg. When the painter saw the two sheets on which I had worked out the relationships he had two reactions: ‘I could make the chart look quite handsome, with different colors to show different things, but all those words at the bottom. I could never letter all that stuff.’
‘No, no! Only the chart goes on the wall. We give each student a Xeroxed copy of the legend.’
Only when the job was completed did I inform the administration of what I had done, and the buildings supervisor, after voicing furious objections before he saw the wall, relaxed when he saw how handsome it was and what a superior teaching tool it could be. And when my students filed in on the first day after winter break, they caught the significance of the wall, and my popularity as a professor increased.
* * *
When my book, American Fiction, appeared in the winter of 1984, I was propelled for the second time into the midst of a vigorous debate, and to the astonishment of both Ms. Marmelle and myself, much of the criticism focused not on my castigation of Hemingway but on some harsh words I had written, almost as an aside, about James Fenimore Cooper. Many readers felt that although Cooper was no Thomas Mann, he was our first serious novelist and a fine storyteller: ‘How could we have developed without the encouragement he gave?’ And several acerbic writers suggested that I was rather young to be casting aspersions on one of our greatest, although there were those who agreed that Cooper was something of a bore.
But after the first blasts had been delivered and resolved, a serious discussion ensued regarding the contemporary writers, with some arguing that Ellison and Salinger had both produced so little that they could not merit top approval, while to downgrade proven storytellers who had something valid to say, such as Vidal and Wouk, was so arbitrary as to be ridiculous. Cheever also had strong supporters. But when the fires died down, I proved to be the winner, for one of the newspaper syndicates, seeing how interested readers were in my unequivocal judgments, invited me, for a welcome fee, to provide a long article in which I listed the fifty books from all nations that I felt would reward readers.
My list included certain books of such vintage that no one could deny their viability—Les Misérables, Anna Karenina, Great Expectations, Huckleberry Finn—and others less familiar but perhaps of superior merit, such as Oblomov, The Plague, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Trial and McTeague. To the editor’s relief, I added a personal epilogue: ‘I cannot quit this exercise of juggling the great and near great without sharing with you the names of four books which, in my idle moments, I have read with sheer delight and which without trying to categorize their standing in the world of literature, I recommend to you as joyous reads: Green Mansions, The Member of the Wedding, The Constant Nymph and The Count of Monte Cristo.’
The wide dissemination of this chatty but instructive essay led not only to numerous invitations to lecture at other colleges and universities but also to requests by magazines and newspapers for reviews of new books. In these traditional ways I found myself a member of the hierarchy of those who deal with books in their various manifestations. Associates realized that I might be on my way to becoming a major voice in my field, a fact that was acknowledged by the college: I was promoted to assistant professor, then to associate, and there was every likelihood of a full professorship before I reached thirty-five.
But my obvious success in teaching and criticism never dimmed my aspiration to produce one or two novels that exemplified my theories of what good writing should be. More and more I found that I was spending my spare time not in preparing for my seminar or in honing my essays on other people’s novels but in planning my own, and I convinced myself it would be a major contribution.
In the winter of 1984 I brought to the campus some attractive professional writers for a series of lectures, and they delighted both my students and the townspeople from the German cities who joined the audience. It was at one of the most exciting of these evenings that I met the young man who was to have such a great impact on Mecklenberg and on my life. This seminar had been conducted by a pair of poets flown down from Boston, a man from Harvard, a woman from M.I.T.—university rumor was that they were lovers—and after the seminar we all convened at the Dresden China. The Harvard man said: ‘It’s a cultural anomaly. A century ago we had a group of very bad poets, each with three names, that everyone worshiped. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the rest had enormous audiences and great income but nothing to say. Today we have a group of very good poets whom no one appreciates, who have no audience, no income, but a great deal to say.’
The M.I.T. woman broke in: ‘And what we have to say deserves to be heard, needs to be heard. We’re entitled to vast audiences and we get none.’
‘We’re the vestal virgins of American literature,’ the Harvard man said. ‘Maintained off to one side in untouched sanctity, to bestow validation when required.’
A professor from Lafayette, in neighboring Easton, said: ‘But you’ve made your poetry so precious the ordinary reader has no chance of comprehending it. The difference between you and the nineteenth-century poets you seem to scorn is tremendous—an unbridgeable gap.’
This spurred the M.I.T. woman to go to the heart of the matter: ‘If one were capable of estimating the cultural, moral and political influence of poets, one would probably find, the world over, that poets living today enjoy a greater influence than at any time since the days of those great poets of ancient Greece and Rome.’
There was such a murmur of objection to this that she raised her right hand, palm out, in a pacifying gesture: ‘Now, wait. Look at the role of the poet in Russia, in the Latin countries, in Europe generally, except England. Look at who wins the Nobel Prize in literature—half are poets because judges who really understand the world know that singers are inherently more valuable to society than people who mumble in prose.’
Such vigorous debate followed this declaration of war that the woman withdrew temporarily, but when the storm had subsided somewhat, she came back forcefully: ‘I do believe there is a hierarchy of values. Novelist A of only modest competence may sell a hundred thousand copies of his latest piece of nonsense, all air and no substance, but the intellectual and social values of each of his readers may have an index toward the bottom of the list—say, two. Poet B, one of the ablest in the world, may acquire only a thousand readers, but the index figure of his typical reader may be two hundred fifty. So while the novelist has a total influence on his society of two hundred thousand because of his enormous popularity, the quiet poet will have
an influence of two hundred fifty thousand because of the relevant things he says to the relevant people.’
‘What do you mean by the relevant people?’
‘Those legislators who write the laws, the political leaders who set the agendas, the clergymen who define and defend the moral codes, the professors, the editors, the village philosophers, the heads of our great corporations, our military leaders and all those who, on their own account, strive to make a positive difference in the world. Those are the relevant ones, the ones whom we poets address.’
‘Only one in a hundred of that gang reads modern poetry,’ a gruff-voiced man claimed, and the woman snapped back: ‘But he’s the one who makes the difference. For the human mind cannot improve unless it sings.’
The Harvard man said: ‘In the next century novelists will find themselves where we are now. Can’t you see it coming? Television will replace the novel, that’s for sure, and it will be so bad that no one will waste his mind upon it, supposing there’s any mind left. Novelists in 2084 will be traveling from one university or perhaps from one monastery to the next, because at the rate universities are drifting downward they’ll be no better than glorified shopping centers—’
He was not allowed to finish his analogy because a distinguished-looking woman in the audience, a Mrs. Garland, who sat on the board of our college, interrupted rather forcefully: ‘Do you mean that if I were still alive I wouldn’t be reading good novels as they appeared? Unthinkable!’
Very calmly the Harvard man said: ‘Let’s not go forward a century, let’s go back. You’re in Concord, Mass., and Ralph Waldo Emerson is lecturing and he says: “I can foresee the day a century from now when no one will be reading poetry. They’ll be reading only turgid novels like those of my friend Hawthorne.” And you would have risen to your feet and cried: “Unthinkable!” Well, it’s happened, and poor poets like Miss Albertson and me tour the provinces like the scops of old.’
‘What’s a scop?’
‘Thanks for asking. It means troubadour. I do love words that allow me to show off. That’s what a poet is—a word show-off.’
Neither he nor the woman would back down from their basic prediction as summarized by the man: ‘Within the century the job of the novelist will be not to entertain the masses but to communicate with his or her peers on ever higher intellectual levels—to keep the national culture vigorously alive.’
It had been an electric evening, and when it ended, Yoder, in attendance as usual, maneuvered rather aggressively, I thought, so that he could grasp me by the arm: ‘A remarkable evening! Six new ideas a minute.’
‘I heard it years ago from Devlan.’
Yoder smiled: ‘So down I go and up they go,’ pointing to the visitors from Boston.
‘But remember, they said the novel doesn’t disappear until 2084. You’ve got a hundred good years, and the way you’re going, Mr. Yoder—’
‘Please call me Lukas, because we are landsmen.’ He pronounced this in Yiddish style, lahntz-m’n, suggesting much to my displeasure that we were two rural bumpkins from the same farming district in Poland. Failing to see my irritation, he burbled on: ‘Last year on television we proved that critics and novelists can work together.’ Then he added: ‘And I heard from one of your students that you may soon be published as a novelist. Then we really will be landsmen.’
Aware that I must say something to terminate this unwelcome conversation, I said, somewhat coldly I must confess: ‘I hope I can do half as well with the short novel I’m trying to write as you do with your long ones,’ and I left him, for I wanted to explore further with the two poets their concept of writing for the elite.
But I refrained from approaching them because they were in a corner talking animatedly with a sixteen-year-old high school student, one of the most remarkable youths I had ever seen. Not only was he conversing with the poets on their own level, comprehending all they had to say and asking questions that challenged their remarks, but he was almost unjustly handsome, with a beautifully modeled face that had yet to be shaved, black wavy hair, an infectious smile and a graceful bearing that showed to advantage in an expensive suit. ‘How unfair!’ I whispered to myself. ‘All that and the ability to express himself, too.’ I stood transfixed, comparing him at sixteen with the ungainly, tongue-tied lad I had been, and I wondered why he was so lucky.
Hoping to learn more about him, I elbowed my way into the group but was ignored. The poets had obviously classified him as one of their elite and they did not wish to waste their time on others. But I would not accept the dismissal, I even edged myself closer to the boy and heard him say in a voice that had only recently changed: ‘I like Yeats and Eliot better than I do Frost,’ and one of the poets said: ‘Young intellectuals always do, but as they grow older they discover sweet merit in Frost.’ And the group dispersed, with me knowing nothing about the boy but feeling that his aura would remain with me for a long time.
The final speaker I sponsored in that memorable winter was the woman to whom I was so deeply indebted and for whom I had growing respect. Editors and agents in New York, always on the search for talent, had formed the profitable habit of visiting schools of writing, paying their own way and accepting no fees, in order to meet the professors of writing like me and our abler students. They gave fascinating talks on the writing trade and their roles in it, and many students told me that such sessions were among the most rewarding I set up.
My visitor was Ms. Yvonne Marmelle, and her reputation had been so enhanced by her editorship of Yoder’s novels that the auditorium was crammed with students and would-be writers. She spoke with an uncanny sense of what my young people would want to know, but during the long question-and-answer period the older townspeople ran away with the evening. A professor from nearby Lehigh University asked: ‘Is there anything to the rumor that Kinetic may be bought by the big German publisher Kastle of Hamburg?’
Ms. Marmelle, indicating by a shrug of her shoulders that it would be improper for a member of Kinetic to answer that question, passed it along to another professor, who said: ‘One would be foolhardy to discuss what those energetic German houses like Kastle and the English one with the weird name, Spider, might be up to. With the American dollar so low and the German mark so high, anything seems possible, and I’ve been warned that two or even three major American companies, one of them a paperback house, might find themselves with German owners.’
The knowledgeable questioner was persistent: ‘Would Ms. Marmelle, as an executive at Kinetic, care to elaborate?’
‘I only know what I read in the papers,’ she said and the audience laughed. She added: ‘And the papers have been saying for years that we were on the block. Regardless of who owns us, we still operate editorially as if we were independent and, if I do say so myself, we’re one of the best.’ Applause was dampened by another professor: ‘You can laugh, but the threat is real. As you know, when Kinetic was a privately owned company, it was sold to Rockland Oil, the huge conglomerate. They soon tired of it and put it on the auction block. I understand that numerous potential buyers have nibbled at the bait, among them one of the Australian billionaires and a Japanese multinational. Is it not likely that Kastle might jump in with a quick sure-money bid and walk off with the company?’
Discussion then turned to what such radical changes might entail, and Ms. Marmelle said: ‘Life in the home offices, the editorial ones, at least, would probably continue untrammeled.’ But a speaker warned: ‘We’d better be prepared to see substantial changes in our nation’s intellectual life, because some of our great publishing houses are almost certain to be purchased by either a German, an Australian or a Japanese conglomerate.’
The questions then became more concerned with the editorial than with the managerial, and several people wanted to know whether there were any editors left who took the same care with their authors that Maxwell Perkins took with his. Somewhat to my distaste, for he was hogging the show, Lukas Yoder rose to say: ‘I can testify that Ms. M
armelle is such a reincarnation. I owe most of my good luck to her.’ This brought such loud applause that I felt I must, to divert attention from Yoder, make a similar speech: ‘Ms. Marmelle sought me out and gave me such excellent counsel on my first book of criticism that it became a modest best-seller. I shall expect the same favors from her on my novel.’ At this public revelation that I was working on a novel, the audience applauded just as loudly as it had when Yoder finished.
At the conclusion of her talk so many listeners clustered about to pepper Yvonne with questions that she held up her hands: ‘Please. If you are so concerned about publishing, I suggest you join me in the lounge at the Dresden China, where we can chat comfortably.’ When half a dozen professors from surrounding colleges indicated that they wished to talk further, she said with a relaxed smile: ‘I invite all of you. Beer and pretzels, Pennsylvania Dutch style, in honor of my two Dutch authors, Yoder and Streibert.’
As we gathered in her corner by the Meissen ware, the questioning became pointed, with a professor from Franklin and Marshall setting the tone: ‘Most of us in this group dream of publishing one of these days. And with a strong house like Kinetic. What would it mean to our chances if Kinetic were sold to a German house?’
She was frank: ‘Since we are now out of public hearing, I can say that Kinetic’s being kicked around like a football. I’m sure you know that Rockland Oil is finding that running a publishing company is far less glamorous than they thought. The meager seven percent per annum we return on their investment is far below the thirty-five percent they can hope for in what they call the go-go companies they own like oil and fast foods. Frankly, they’re trying desperately to get rid of us. They’d sell us to anyone with cash.’
‘Would the German buyer, if it turns out that way, keep Kinetic pretty much as it is now?’
She laughed: ‘Some years ago a financial writer for The New York Times produced an informative book, Welcome to the Conglomerate, You’re Fired. The new owner always promises “absolutely no changes,” and three months later you’re out on your keister.’
The Novel Page 26