Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (9 page)

“An outrage, nothing less,” is what my favorite agent, G. Gordon Bidding, called Richard Curtis’s April Fool’s Day attack on editors (“News of the Week,” Mar. 30). “Relations are tense enough these days without having to throw a sucker punch like that, don’t you think?” he asked in a tone of genuine concern.

“Hardly,” I said. “The wonder is that editors haven’t gotten a proper skewering long ago. And what a pack of smug, supercilious parasites they are, too!” Bidding professed shock and promptly suggested, after coyly asserting that I owed him lunch (“and none of your local third-world bistros, either,” he chided), that we discuss it further.

By the time we met (in the Gull Room of the Four Caesars), Bidding’s ardor had cooled to a mild amnesia, and he suggested, between mouthfuls of foie gras washed down by chaste Perrier, that we get business out of the way first, to wit:

1) He’d been forced, much against his will, to take a $150K floor on the exclusive he’d given me for Judith Danielle’s hot new
roman à clef
on the aerobics industry. (“Michael Cordwood at Ransom House simply seduced me.”)

2) If I could just pry loose an extra $5K in advance money, my long-awaited ms. on the Iranian hostage crisis would almost certainly be delivered in time for the Inauguration.

3) He was fairly champing at the bit to get the first serial action rolling on the exciting designer sunglasses exposé we’d signed; in fact, as soon as I could messenger over some finished copies he’d make it a top priority.

4) He was as disappointed as we were about the ghosted John Mitchell autobiography. (“I was certain that once he’d actually
read
it, he’d fall in love with it.”)

5) Finally, if I could trust his instincts, he had this offbeat but wonderful little ms. on the history of sewage, which, to be sure, had been around the block a few times, but…

By now Bidding was toying with the last of his Grand Marnier soufflé. The effort seemed to exhaust him. He rallied for a moment to rail against a culture that rewarded guile and censored art, then jumped up, said he was off to an early drinks date, expressed his unshakable loyalty to me and my kind, and flitted into the gathering twilight. Would that all my agents were such sterling fellows, I mused, as the waiter took my credit card offstage for a melting.

John F. Thornton

Associate Publisher, Facts on File

New York, NY

April 27, 1984

A Publishing Parable

Maxwell Gherkin

“M
AXWELL
G
HERKIN
” is the pseudonym of one of America’s most distinguished editors
.

“The bottom line at Concord Press these days was the bottom line.” So how energetically should a dedicated editor like Martha G. fight the powers that be at Concord to get behind the new novel by her talented, serious (but seriously uncommercial) author, David R.? Should she put her in-house reputation, maybe even her job, at risk to push for more advertising for a well-reviewed novel she knows will sell less than four thousand copies? Or should she abandon David and his career and bask in the glory and the credit for her work on a mediocre, glitzy, sexy novel that is literarily underwhelming but is already a best-seller?

Veteran publishing insider Maxwell Gherkin’s dissection of how Martha G. solved her professional and personal moral dilemma stirred great controversy when it appeared in the pages of
Publishers Weekly.
And it is still being discussed passionately. Is it a piece of fiction about the amorality of contemporary publishing written by a cynical, embittered editor? Or is it a brutally candid, shrewdly observed piece of reportage by an unflinchingly honest editor offering a completely realistic look at a typical, practical problem faced by editors and writers in many publishing houses today? Your opinion may be colored by whether you are a successful or unsuccessful, commercial or uncommercial editor or writer. But wherever your career is at, you’ll want to learn what Martha’s decision was, and what economic, cultural, and publishing pressures influenced her decision. You might even look inside yourself and ask what
you
would have done if you were faced with her problem
.

A Publishing Parable

David R. is a gifted novelist in his forties. His first book, a strongly drawn account of an auto worker’s family that is torn apart by the conflicts of the 1960s, had been successful—glowing reviews, a $50,000 paperback sale, a National Book Award nomination, an immediate place in the sun. His next two were shorter, more experimental novels, one about a surreal commune in northern California, the other a metafictional treatment of people trapped inside a detective novel, and there was a sharp tailing off in review interest and sales. He wrote short stories for several years, trying unsuccessfully to find a way to score again.

David had taken all of this hard. He’d wanted to explore the different ways of telling a story, of imagining the world. But coming from a working-class background, he was particularly motivated to get ahead, to make his writing pay, and his attempts to develop his powers had made him lose ground; his career seemed to be going backwards, from modest riches to rags. He was also very conscious of the new generation of novelists, the so-called Brat Pack, who were getting so much attention and astonishing advances for what he dismissed as “go-go writing” but by whom he felt eclipsed. Stuck in a teaching job at a small university in Ohio, where he ran the writing program, burdened by family responsibilities, and bored spitless by the small-time community where he had been living for twelve years—the sort of town that novelists of previous generations had fled from—David felt himself sinking into the excuses and cynicism that he had seen mark the end of the line for a number of writers.

But then an NEA grant came through, and soon after he hit upon a story idea that was rich in possibilities, maybe even commercial ones. Spurred on by his returning powers, he wrote a three-hundred-page novel in eighteen months. Thinking it both the best book he had written and the riskiest, he sent it off to New York, and in the weeks that followed felt like a man awaiting a jury verdict.

Martha G., a veteran editor, was anticipating David’s manuscript with mixed feelings. She loved most of his work, was glad that he had come out of his malaise, but was apprehensive about how a new novel by him would fly at Concord Press, where the success of his first book had worn thin. From what he had indicated to her, the new one was much more “mainstream” than his last two, but novelists usually tended to believe that, particularly the more experimental ones. She admired his desire to keep
exploring, but she found herself hoping that he had come back to a broadly interesting subject and the common touch that had launched him. Also, she could use a success herself.

For the bottom line at Concord Press these days was the bottom line. A house that had been small and venturesome in the arts, political and social thought, and children’s literature, Concord was now trying to find a new, broader identity as the hardcover house in a publishing group owned by INCOM, an international communications empire. Having acquired Concord, one of the last of the independent houses, for several times its value, the new management had dealt with it as a real-estate developer deals with a venerable town house he has bought mainly for its location and then carves up into condos. Under the mandate to spend what was necessary to increase profits by 10 percent each year, Concord had acquired a number of “brand name” authors, doubled its marketing operations, and pruned and diversified its editorial staff to provide more product for the shopping mall market: i.e., books that “meet a need or a trend,” as Dot B.—the chic, hard-driving marketing whiz whom INCOM had recently brought in as publisher—put it. The weekend after David’s book arrived Martha pushed aside a manuscript called
The Adult Parent
that she was editing and a hot project for a Romanian cookbook, and settled into her reading chair with
Remembering Angie
.

David had found his subject: she could tell that after two pages by the simple, unmistakable feeling of expectant pleasure that fiction that was right on the money gave her. “My first impression of Angie Annaseri was of a pretty, glum-faced girl you might come across in a high school yearbook with one activity underneath her name.” The first chapter was in the words of Dwight Jay, a U.S. attorney, who twenty years ago had picked Angie up at a Softball game in Dearborn, Michigan, where he was working that summer as a draft resistance counselor. In the next chapter Angie took up the story, prompted by a letter she had received from Dwight, who had been approached for help by her brother, Jimmy, an indicted drug dealer. “Dwight was like a lottery ticket in which you got Peter Fonda. Spectacular but foolish to believe in. Yet she had. People were believing all sorts of craziness back then. Like Jimmy had believed Dwight and ended up in prison.”

…

Told in alternate chapters and letters by the two of them—Dwight in Chicago, Angie in San Jose, California—the novel became a political parable of the past three decades, a drama of moral responsibility, and most of all a riveting study of a contemporary working-class woman. Ballsy, full-hearted, resolute, Angie has raised three children by herself; she had also
become addicted to the amphetamines that got her through the days and to the Manhattans that got her to sleep. When Dwight contacted her, she was an assistant manager at a Sizzler restaurant, a fixture of her AA group, and thinking of marrying an older man, another recovering alcoholic. But the summer she had spent with Dwight was still the homing device of her heart, and the novel left her in limbo as a more or less emblematic figure of cultural betrayal like her brother.

Martha sensed that David hadn’t fully grasped Angie’s present life, which weakened the ending. She phoned David late Sunday night, sang the book’s praises for several minutes, and then entered her reservations. He didn’t agree with her about the ending. “You want some uplift that just isn’t in their cards,” he said.

A few days later she wrote to David, saying that since this was finally Angie’s story, she wondered if there could be an epilogue and some prior indication that registered where Angie had come out. David wrote back that that kind of ending had gone out with Dickens, that he didn’t know what decision she would make and didn’t want to have to rewrite the last third of the book to find out.

Shortly thereafter, David’s agent, Al V., phoned to say that unless Martha made a substantial offer they wanted to show the book elsewhere. “We feel that this is David’s breakout book,” he said. “We’re looking for six figures.”

Martha said that she’d been thinking in the $25,000 area if David agreed to find a way to pull the novel together.

“No way. We need much more of a commitment.”

“Commitment? We published David’s last two books, which didn’t earn twenty-five thousand between them. Be reasonable, Al.”

“Martha, things are crazy out there. I sold a first novel last month for a hundred sixty-five thousand that doesn’t have half the legs David’s book does.”

There was little else to say. Martha wrote David a wish-you-well letter and thought that was that. Another close, long-standing relationship down the tubes of what publishing had become.

…

A few months later David called Martha, said he was in New York and needed to see her. When he arrived, his normally sturdy bearing was visibly shaken. He told her of the other houses’ responses. Several had passed; one had offered a $7,500 advance; two others had mentioned considerably more, but one wanted “a big dramatic scene at the end in which they meet again” and the other wanted the story to focus more on the romance: “less telling, more showing; less talk, more sex.” David banged his big hands
together and grinned for the first time. “Less your book, baby, and more mine.” The outcome of their meeting was that he decided to take a crack at revising it along the lines Martha had suggested.

At first he reported that it was “like digging into frozen ground,” but the more he imagined his way into Angie’s recent life and state of mind, the more he found the material opening up again and coming alive. When he was finished, they both saw that his new accession of consciousness about Angie needed to be pieced into the earlier sections of her story.

When the revisions began to click, Martha submitted the first fifty pages and a description of the rest to the publishing committee in order to acquire the book. Believing that
Remembering Angie
now stood a good chance of selling a minimum of 10,000 in hardcover and again in paperback, she asked for an advance of $25,000.

But at the publishing committee meeting she ran into solid resistance. Dot B., looking more harried than stylish these days (Concord had just lost its top thriller writer to another house and its nonfiction leader, a “juicy” account of the Reagans’ social circle, was taking heavy returns on a 250,000-copy first printing), said she hadn’t gotten very far with
Remembering Angie
. “Half the time I didn’t know where I was,” she snapped. “Past or present. Chicago or California. Also, a tony lawyer and a hash slinger? Give me a break.”

Mac S., the editorial director, liked the writing of the sample chapters but thought that the character of Angie was too blue-collar for many hardcover readers, particularly women, to identify with.

“Such things happen,” Martha said as calmly as she could. “Even in fiction. For example,
Love Story.”

“This isn’t
Love Story,”
Dot said. “It’s much less emotional and accessible. Also it’s a downer, from what I can see.”