and a volume of poetry, but he seemed loath to leave. He had a rather
military bearing and handsome, regular features. For some reason, it
struck me that he might have been a submarine captain. Presently he
began talking about poetry and told me he had written a volume that was
privately printed. A few days later he brought in a copy. The verse was
much in the vein of Benton’s _This Is My Beloved_. He wondered if I
would stock a dozen of them on a consignment basis. I agreed. Why not?
When he left, he said cryptically, “You’re the only friend I have.”
Months passed during which I heard nothing from him. Then one evening I
saw a newspaper picture of my friend aboard a fine looking schooner tied
up at the mouth of the Chicago River. He was sailing to the South Seas
in it.
He came in a few days later to say goodbye. Of course I had failed to
sell any of the poetry, so he suggested I keep the books until he
returned from his voyage. As we shook hands, he was still tense and
jumpy. A few months later he was dead, shot by a girl he had taken
along. I had just recovered from reading the sensational press accounts
of the tragedy when I received a phone call from the late poet’s uncle,
who said, “I know about your friendship with Jack and would appreciate
it if you would give the reporters an interview as we absolutely refuse
to do so ourselves.” Before I knew it, I was being quoted in the papers
about a man I had scarcely known and a book I couldn’t sell. The girl in
the case got some engagements as an exotic dancer after her release from
a Cuban jail, but the affair did next to nothing for the book. Not even
a murder scandal will sell poetry.
To everyone who brings me his writing, I protest that I am not an agent.
But often it is hard to turn them away. There was the little gnarled old
man with a few straggly long grey hairs for a beard who came in
clutching a tired, worn briefcase. His story of persecution and cruel
rejection was too much for me. “Let me see your book,” I said. The
soiled, yellow pages were brought out of the case, along with half a
sandwich wrapped in Kleenex, and deposited gently on my desk. The
manuscript was in longhand. It purported to tell the saga of man’s
continual search for personal freedom.
“How long have you been writing this book?” I said.
“All my life,” he replied. He had once been a history professor he
assured me.
“And what do you do now?”
A kind of cackle came out of him. “I am a presser of pants.”
“And how did you come to bring this to me?”
“I watch you on television every morning.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m no publisher, but leave it with me. I’ll try
reading it over the weekend. When you come back for it, maybe I can tell
you what to do next.”
Or there was the woman who had written inspirational poetry since she
was ten. She had paid to have one volume of verse printed, and now she
had another. “This volume is for my mother,” she said. “She is very
sick. If I could get it published, I think it would help her. But I
don’t have the money to pay for it.” And her voice trailed away into
other worlds. She worked nights at a large office building. During the
day, when she wasn’t caring for her sick mother, she wrote poetry.
“May I see it, please?” And now I was stuck. “Leave it with me. I’ll see
what I can do.” Of course I could do nothing. But how could I tell this
fragile, helpless creature that even great poetry is unlikely to sell
two thousand copies? I recalled Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann once saying
to me: “A good analyst must always have a rescue fantasy to offer.” But
I am not an analyst, rabbi, priest, or even a Miss Lonelyhearts.
A young man, hate and rebellion written terribly across his face,
accosted me unannounced and declared: “I’ve watched you on TV. You sound
like a right guy. Here’s my book. Find me a publisher. Everybody’s a
crook these days, but maybe you’re not. Maybe you believe what you say.
Well, here’s your chance to prove it!” Then he rushed out, leaving the
manuscript behind and me yelling after him, “Hey, wait a minute!” But he
was gone.
It is not merely the poor and downtrodden or the hopeless nuts who seek
fulfillment through publication. “If you can get my wife’s book
published, I’ll give you ten thousand dollars,” a wealthy customer told
me. Another said, “Get this book published for me and I’ll buy five
thousand copies!” Another, who had certainly made his mark in business
told me, “If I can get published, all my life will not have been lived
in vain.”
Touching and even terrifying as these thwarted impulses toward
expression may be, virtually every example turns out to be deficient in
two ways:
1. It is badly written.
2. Its philosophic content is borrowed instead of being distilled from
the writer’s own experience.
The second error is also a glaring defect in the work of many practicing
and commercially successful novelists. For example: the writer who, in
drawing a neurotic character, simply reproduces the appropriate behavior
patterns as described in psychoanalytic literature. The result may be
letter perfect as to accuracy and tailor-made to fit the requirements of
the situation, but the final product is nothing but an empty shell.
In any event, a real writer is not just someone with a fierce urge or
dominating fantasy about self-expression. He may well have a demon that
drives him or he may find a way to knowledge out of the depths of
personal frustration. But before all else, he is someone who has a
feeling for the craft of handling the written word and the patience to
try to discipline himself in this craft. The main thing to remember
about a writer is that he makes it his business to put words together on
a sheet of paper.
Beyond this, he may be any sort of person, of any physique, of any age,
alcoholic or not, paranoid or not, cruel or not, drug addicted or not,
horrible to women and children or not, teach Sunday School or not,
anything you please. He can even engage in any vocation or profession,
as long as he keeps going back to his desk and putting words together.
He can be wealthy or have no money at all, and his personal life can be
perfectly average and uneventful or utterly unbelievable. Just as long
as he really works at words.
The level of his intention and his art may vary from writing for the
newspapers to plumbing the depths of experience or pursuing some
ultimate vision, but within the range he undertakes, the discipline of
words calls also for the discipline of values, intelligence, emotion,
perception. Writers who are serious about their business know these
things, and the difficulties they present, too well to have to talk
about them. In all my conversations with writers, I can recall few
instances in which anybody ever talked directly about the art of
writing.
In the case of professional writers, I have acted more often as a
catalyst than as a volunteer agent. For example, I abused as well as
prodded Paul Molloy, the prize-winning columnist of the _Chicago
Sun-Times_, until he turned his hand to a book. The simplicity and
sincerity of his style has an undoubted appeal, as the success of the
book, _And Then There Were Eight_, has proved. I am sure he would have
written it anyway, ultimately, but even a fine talent can use
encouragement.
I have also found it possible to help another type of writer—the expert
in a special field who is perfectly qualified to write a type of book
that is greatly needed. During the period when my psychiatric book
speciality was at its peak, I became aware of the need for a single
giant book on the whole story of psychiatry. Dr. Franz Alexander, then
Director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, was the obvious
choice for such a monumental undertaking. No other great authority was
so widely respected outside his particular field—not only among those in
other “schools” of psychiatric thought, but among workers and scholars
in every area concerned with the human psyche.
Dr. Alexander was the very first student at the Institute of
Psychoanalysis founded by Freud in Vienna. I loved to listen to Dr.
Alexander reminisce about his relationships with Freud and the original
Seven and especially admired his view of the relationship of modern
psychoanalysis to Spinoza’s philosophy of the emotions. He was one of
the few men I had encountered in this field who had a thorough
background in philosophy. When I broached the idea of a monumental
compendium, embracing the total field of psychiatry and psychoanalysis,
historically and technically, he at first hesitated, then finally
agreed—if the right publisher could be interested and if a fairly large
advance could be obtained to help with the extensive research that would
be involved.
Shortly thereafter, while on a trip to New York, I had lunch with
Michael Bessie of Harper and Brothers and explained the idea to him. He
was very much taken with it, and within a few weeks all of the details
were worked out to Dr. Alexander’s satisfaction. The work is still in
progress, Dr. Alexander having retired to California to devote the
greater part of his time to its completion.
Other books which I also managed to place for Chicago analysts were
Irene Josslyn’s _The Happy Child_ and George Mohr’s _Stormy Decade,
Adolescence_.
But what of the young man or woman who has determined to devote himself
to the difficult craft of writing, who has beaten out a book to his best
ability, and is looking for a publisher? What do you do?
Well, of course, there is nothing to prevent you from bundling up your
manuscript and mailing it to various publishers. Experience shows,
however, that very few manuscripts submitted “cold” or, in the trade
phrase, “over the transom” (obviously the mailman can’t stick a
manuscript through the letter slot), ever see the light of day. This
doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t carefully consider the piece before
attaching a rejection slip to it. I should say, however, that something
of a very special literary quality—not the self-styled “advance guard”
but the truly different, which has no audience ready-made and hence must
create its own, the kind of literature which you just possibly might
write (and which I think certainly is being written) and that could
change the world through its extension of our resources of feeling and
expression—does not stand too strong a chance of passing through the
literate but patterned screening of publishers’ manuscript readers.
Furthermore, since each publishing house has a character all its own,
the likelihood of any one manuscript ending up in the right place is a
numbers game that can be quite disheartening to play.
Perhaps the best advice that can be given to the determined author is:
Get a good agent. This is not necessarily easy and there are pitfalls,
including sharks who prey upon the innocent for their own financial
gain. A manuscript that comes into the publisher’s office “cold” stands
a better chance of receiving serious consideration than one sent under
the auspices of a dubious agent. Nevertheless, a manuscript by an
unknown writer usually gets a quicker reading if it comes through a
recognized agent.[2]
With or without the help of an agent, the task is to try to place the
book with some publisher. This task has become increasingly difficult
unless the book is, by its very nature, a safe bet to sell. Nowadays the
best bets are the so-called “non-books”—books specifically designed for
selling, such as collections of humorous pictures and captions or
volumes whose authors are not only well known in the entertainment
world, but also carry a heavy clot with TV audiences: The Jack Paar
Story, The Zsa Zsa Gabor Story, The Maurice Chevalier Story, The Harpo
Marx Story—they may not all have exactly the same name and they may be
written in greater or lesser part by relatively accomplished hacks, they
may range from the fascinating to the disgusting in content, but they
all exist for the same reason: there is a built-in audience that will
buy them. Frankly, if Books and Brent had ever achieved network status,
I could have done the same thing.
The problem is not that publishers will buy a sure thing. Of course they
will and, within reason, why shouldn’t they? The problem is that less
and less is being published today that stands a chance of belonging in
the realm of permanent literature. It is easier to get a book like this
published, _about_ books and writers (although not too popular a subject
and therefore a fairly adventurous publishing undertaking), than it is
to get the hard-wrought, significant works of some of the writers I have
mentioned into print. Actually, most of the material that is selected
for publication today is chosen precisely _because_ it is temporary in
value and appeal. Publishing, of course, is a difficult business and
every book, in a sense, is a long shot, more likely to fail than to
succeed in turning a profit. Most publishing houses have been built on
the proposition that the successes must help subsidize the failures, but
that this is the only way that the new and unknown talent, which will
create the future of literature, can be developed. Publishing has never
been like most manufacturing industries, where you can survey a new line
before you try it, and drop it if it doesn’t pay its way. In spite of
all the tons of junk printed since Gutenberg, the glory and prestige of
publishing is linked not with numbers of copies sold but numbers of
enduring works produced. Virtually no one remembers the best sellers of
1900 or even 1950. But the great editors and publishers who nurtured,
say, the talents of the 1920’s have become part of literary history. A
Maxwell Perkins couldn’t exist in an industry that didn’t care what it
was doing or that wouldn’t take its chances.
Taking a chance seems to be a custom that is going out of
fashion—especially taking a chance on something you believe in. It is
strange that this should be so, especially in business and industry,
where the tax laws tend to encourage judicious failure (“product
research,” etc.) in any enterprise strong enough to be in the fifty-two
percent bracket. Perhaps corporate structure is one of the factors that
tend to close our horizons. A free individual can keep taking his
chances until the world catches up with him. But the officer of a
corporation who is responsible for justifying his actions to the board
(and the board to the banks and the stockholders) does not have much
leeway.
Both good books and bad books sell (and many books, both good and bad,
fail to sell at all). A good book is, very simply, a revealing book. A
bad book is bad because it is dull. Its author is obviously lying, not
necessarily by purveying misinformation, but because he lards his work
with any information that falls to hand—a sort of narrative treatment of
the encyclopedia. A good book stirs your soul. You find yourself lost,
not in an imaginary world (like the encyclopedia), but in a world where
everything is understood. Readers and editors alike, no matter how
debilitated, can detect this difference.
So, even, can the reviewers—largely a group of underpaid journalists and
college professors who have a right, if any one does, to have become
weary of letters. A writer friend of mine recently told of waiting at an
airport for a plane that was late. He bought all three of the literary
magazines obtainable from the newsstand and settled down to read. Every
book review seemed to him written by someone who hated literature. He
became utterly disgusted with both the reviews and the reviewers.
Considering the volume of publishing, how can it be so difficult to get
good new books? There are not enough really significant titles coming
out for me or anyone else to make a decent living selling them (I gave
up trying with the Seven Stairs). When I talked with Mr. Simon, he
assured me that Simon and Schuster and the book industry as a whole were
booming with the mergers and the mushrooming educational market, but
that the big problem was finding good writers and good books. I wonder
if they are going about it properly. Somehow the prize contests and
other subsidies never seem to bring genuine individual talent to the
fore, and while everybody claims to be looking for something fresh, what
gets bought looks suspiciously like the same old package.
Publishing has so often been (and in many cases, still is) a shoestring
industry, that one gets a momentary lift from seeing it listed today on
the board on Wall Street. But it is an open question whether the
investors are supplying risk money for a cultural renaissance or buying
into a sure thing: the increasing distribution of synthetic culture
through textbooks and the propagation of standard classics and
encyclopedias at cut-rate prices through the supermarkets.
Anyone who has given his heart and soul to literature and the arts is
likely to regard everyone who pulls the financial strings in the
communications world as a monster. But the commercial outlook on
something like the retail book trade is so dispiriting that the wonder
is anybody pays any attention to it whatever or publishes any books at
all whose distribution depends upon such channels. In Chicago, for
example, a center of about six million people, there are approximately
five major bookstores (excluding religious and school book suppliers).
Compared to this, I am told of a village in Finland of six thousand
people where there are three bookstores doing a fine business! Now in my
own shop I sell books, to be sure, but I also sell greeting cards, art
objects manufactured by or for the Metropolitan Museum, paperbacks,
records, and, at Christmas time, wrappings, ribbons, stickers, and
miniature Santa Clauses. I still got into trouble one day when a woman
came in and couldn’t get a pack of pinochle cards. She thought I had a
lot of nerve advertising books and not selling playing cards. Actually,
“Bookstore” in America has come to mean a kind of minor supplier of
paper goods and notions—and that is exactly what the great number of
“Book Dealers—Retail” listed in the Chicago Redbook in fact are.
But you _can_ buy a book in Chicago. Try it, however, in most of the
cities across this vast country up to, say, 100,000 population. You’ll
be lucky to find a hardback copy of anything except the current best
sellers. And in spite of the wonders of drug store paperbacks, a culture
can’t live and grow on reprints.
So let’s face it. In a nation of 185 million people, some of whom are
reasonably literate, a new book that sells ten to twenty thousand copies
is regarded as pretty hot stuff. In an age of the mass market, this
isn’t hot enough to light a candle.
What to do about it? Well, in the first place, let’s not be complacent
about what’s happening to American culture, to the American psyche. It
isn’t just the money-grubbing, the success-seeking; grubbing and
striving, more or less, are a part of living. It is the emptiness, the
meaninglessness. Nobody can get along without an interior life. The soul
must be fed, or something ugly and anti-human fills the void. Spiritual
nourishment is not a frill, apart from everyday necessity. The everyday
and the ultimate expression of man do not exist apart. Synge remarked:
“When men lose their poetic feeling for ordinary life and cannot write
poetry of ordinary things, their exalted poetry is likely to lose its
strength of exaltation, in the way men cease to build beautiful churches
when they have lost happiness in building shops.”
In the modern world, good reading offers one of the few means of getting
back to one’s self, of refreshing the spirit, of relating to the inward
life of man. Through reading you can get acquainted all over again with
yourself. You can stand being alone. You will look forward again to
tomorrow.
Anything that stands in the way of this hope for renewal is an affront
to man and a judgment on our times.
If the publishing industry has found a helpful new source of income
through the present mania for education, fine. But a few extra years of
education aren’t going to change anybody’s life. If we wait for a
popular growth in “cultural maturity” to justify making more widely
available the sustenance men need, it will come too late. There must be
ways of cutting through the jungles of mass markets and mass media to
reach, in a way that has not previously been possible, the much smaller
but more significant audience of the consciously hungry. For as long as
there are human souls still alive and sentient, there can be good books,
good writers, even booksellers selling books again, paying their bills,
earning a living.
Meantime, if you must be a writer, write seriously and well. Never pay
for publication of your own book. Take your chances. If you succeed,
fine. If not, then you must either persist in trying, time after time,
or give up. Perhaps the present custodians of culture have their minds
on other matters and do not wish to hear what you have to say. So be it.
You will not be the first.
14
Books and Brent
When I began to read, I fell in love with such a consuming passion that
I became a threat to everyone who knew me. Whatever I was reading, I
became: I was the character, Hamlet or Lear; I was the author, Shelley
or Stendhal. When I was seized by sudden quirks, jerks, and strange
gestures, it was not because I was a nervous child—I was being some
character.
One morning when I awoke, I looked into the mirror and discovered that
one part of my head seemed bigger than the other. I ate my breakfast in
silence with my three sisters gathered about the table watching me. When
I suddenly looked up, I thought I saw them exchanging meaningful
glances.
“Do you see something strange about me?” I asked.
They shook their heads and suppressed a giggle.
My mother, washing dishes at the sink, stopped and looked at me, too.
“Do you see anything unusual about me?” I said. She didn’t.
I got up and, standing in the middle of the floor, bent my head to one
side and said, “Look, my head is swelling!”
My sisters laughed wildly, while my mother cried, “What are we going to
do with this silly boy? What are we going to do?”
My knowledge, they assured me, was coming out of my head. And I told
them this was not funny at all.
When I went back to the mirror, I liked my face much better. The
forehead was showing some wrinkles. Lines were appearing at the mouth.
The eyes seemed more in keeping with what might be expected of a thinker
or poet. Before I had begun to read, this face certainly had appeared
more ordinary—just smooth and clean and nothing else. Now that I had
begun to peer a little into the minds of great men, something was
entering my soul that reflected itself in my face. I was sure of it.
Naturally, the idea that filling my head with knowledge might cause it
to burst was nonsense, but I certainly was cramming in an oddly
miscellaneous assortment of facts, dates, events, phrases, words,
snatches of everything. I never read systematically. I read everything,
and I think still that it is simply stupid to tell boys and girls to
read certain books between the ages of nine and twelve, other books
between sixteen and twenty, etc. I got lost in the paradise of books and
it wrecked me forever—destroyed any possibility of my becoming a
“successful” man, saved me from becoming a killer in the jungle of
material ambition.
I think prescribed reading is the enemy of learning, and today it is
probably the end of culture. As a boy, I devoured all the Sax Rohmer
mysteries, the Rover Boys, the Edgar Rice Burroughs’ _Men of Mars_ and
the Tarzan series; I read _Penrod and Sam_, _Huckleberry Finn_, _Tom
Sawyer_—all with equal enthusiasm. This is where it begins. Taste can
come later.
There is a certain point, once enthusiasm is engendered, when a good
teacher can open doors for you. I had such a teacher, and later a
friend, in Jesse Feldman. His enthusiasm supported my own, and at the
same time he held the key to the wealth of possibilities that literature
offers. He was a scholar, but his real scholarship resided in his love
for people. He believed ideas could change human hearts. He inspired me
by making me wonder about everything. He showed me that the worst sin of
which I might be capable would be to become indifferent to the human
spirit.