Hermit in Paris (3 page)

Orion Publishers

consists of two tiny rooms. This [Howard] Greenfeld is a bright, rich boy, but it’s difficult to understand what they want to achieve. However, since they only do very few books, they look after the commercial side, also as a kind of public relations exercise, and the
Italian Folktales
are everywhere, also because they come under children’s books even though Orion has done nothing to push the book in the children’s literature direction. On Sunday there was a review of it in the
New York Times Book Review
, very flattering as far as the Italian original was concerned but rightly critical of the translation.

Horch

She seems a woman who is on the ball, a fearsome old bird, but very warm and kind. She does not want to give
The Cloven Viscount
to Random House, who now want it, and I agree with her in keeping it for the smallest but most prestigious publishing house. So she will give it to Atheneum which will start publishing soon and it will certainly be a publishing event of tremendous importance since these are three highly prestigious editors who have got together: one is Haydn who used to be manager of Random House, another is Michael Bessie from Harper’s and the third is Knopf ’s son [Pat]. I have already made a bit of a mess of things because I made a promise to Grove who are sticking close to me, and indeed Grove books you find everywhere: they are the most fashionable books in avant-garde circles. Actually they did have an oral promise from Horch, but she wants to give the book to Haydn, and I also believe that Atheneum will be important.

10 November

Rosset

The cocktail party at Barney Rosset’s of Grove was the most interesting party to have brightened up my days here so far, and also the one that had the widest variety of people. It confirmed the verdict we reached on Rosset at Frankfurt: daringly and very classily avant-garde but lacking in historical and moral backbone. Rosset (and his partner Dick Seaver, who was also at Frankfurt, and who lives with a French wife in a hovel at the top end of Manhattan, which has nevertheless been adapted internally into an elegant intellectual’s house) has to be understood mostly by seeing him in the Village: he has the spirit of the Village intellectual’s eternal (and unproductive) protest against the even more eternal conformism of America. Consequently he gives credit to the beatniks because he says they are useful in waking up young Americans from their TV-watching; he gives credit indiscriminately to everything that Europe does in terms of avant-gardism, because it is useful for waking up America.

The Beat Generation

Allen Ginsberg came to Rosset’s party, with his disgusting black straggly beard, a white T-shirt beneath a dark, double-breasted suit, and tennis shoes. With him there was a whole crowd of beatniks who were even more bearded and filthy. They have all moved from San Francisco to New York, including Kerouac, who did not come tonight, however.

Arrabal’s Adventure

The beatniks naturally fraternize with Arrabal, who is also bearded (his Parisian under-the-chin beard and their unkempt beatnik beards), and invite him to their house to listen to his poetry readings. Ginsberg lives with another bearded man as man and wife and would like Arrabal to be present at their bearded couplings. When I got back to the hotel, I found Arrabal looking frightened and scandalized because they wanted to seduce him. This Teddy Boy who had come to America to scandalize others is totally terrified at his first encounter with the American avant-garde and suddenly is revealed as the poor little Spanish boy who up until a few years ago was still studying to become a priest.

He says that at home the beatniks are very clean, they have a beautiful house complete with fridge and television, and they live as a quiet bourgeois ménage and dress up in dirty clothes only to go out.

A Broadway Première

Hugo Claus went to the première of a new play by [Paddy] Chayefski [
sic
]. He says that after the show he went to dinner at Sardi’s, where all the playwrights and theatre people dine. Everyone awaits the appearance of the next day’s papers in a state of great anxiety, because one hour after the end of the show, around 1 a.m., the
New York Times
and the
Herald
are already out with their reviews (the reviews are written then, not at the dress rehearsal). The papers arrive. Amid a total silence one of the actors reads the review. As soon as they hear that the critic liked the show, they all applaud, embrace each other and order champagne. The play will be on for two years; if the notices had been unfavourable it would have been taken off after a few days. Immediately the impresarios and agents come forward, the worldwide rights to the show are sold, people rush off to the telephones, and in the space of an hour the fate of the show for the foreseeable future has been decided, with an instant turnover of millions.

The Jews

Seventy-five percent of the publishing world here is Jewish. Ninety percent of the theatre is Jewish. The ready-to-wear clothes industry, New York’s major industry, is almost exclusively Jewish. Banks, however, are completely closed to Jews, as are the universities. The few Jewish doctors are regarded as the best because such difficulties are put in the way of Jews trying to get into university and to pass exams that those who do succeed in graduating in medicine have to be of extraordinary brilliance.

The Women

Very attractive women are rare. On the whole they are
petite-bourgeois
. Whichever way you look at it, it’s basically like Turin.

Adventure of an Italian

In order to familiarize himself with the big city, the Italian newcomer spent the evenings going to one party after another, following people he did not know into houses owned by people he knew even less. Thanks to a very witty and intelligent actress, he ends up in the house of a beautiful singer from television, amid a rather commercial crowd of theatre people, impresarios, etc. He meets a young fellow-Italian who is an airplane steward who spends half his week in Rome, the other half in NY. When the Italian newcomer is about to take the actress back to her home, the steward suggests they form a foursome, and persuades the actress to invite along a rather pretty girl who is a cinema actress. The girl quickly agrees, the two Italians are already rubbing their hands as if everything was signed and sealed, and all they had to do was to decide on who takes which girl. But in the actress’s house the conversation turns to culture and progressive politics. By this stage it is clear that there will be no action. The girls are anything but stupid, even the Hollywood actress who at first seemed the usual starlet. It turns out that both are Russian and both Jewish. In the end the two Italians leave and the Hollywood actress stays to sleep with her friend. It turns out that they are both lesbians. The two Italians go out into the deserted, drizzling streets of New York at 5 in the morning.

The Situation

My desire to discover something new taking shape in this America which has emerged from the Cold War has not found anything promising so far. It seems that there are no other groups like the New Deal people emerging on the horizon, and the current climate – although everyone agrees it is enormously improved – seems to hold no promise of any change among the country’s leaders. The country continues to prosper and the relaxed mood strengthens the internal status quo.

Corruption

Everyone’s conversation these days is about American corruption, the corruption and greed for money in the institutions of power, the newspapers, etc., which they say has never been so rife. The TV scandal concerning Van Doren,
²⁰
which is the main topic in the papers, is seen as a symbol of the universal acceptance of deceit. In certain quarters (for instance, in the theatre world) Van Doren is defended as being just a scapegoat for a situation which prevails everywhere.

The Third Sex

is even more widespread than in Rome. Especially here in the Village. The unwitting tourist goes into any outlet to have breakfast and suddenly notices that everyone in the place, customers, waiters, chefs, are all clearly of that persuasion.

A Small World

The European visitor was really happy with his first American girlfriend. He certainly could not have wished to find anyone better, any girl more joyfully enthusiastic and problem-free. But the thing which he liked best of all was that she was so totally American, devoid of any contact with Europe. She had only spent a few weeks in Europe some years ago. After a few days of contented love, he discovered that when in Europe she had been the girlfriend of his friend X whose ex-girlfriend Z had also been his girlfriend.

Mischa

I have only seen him once, out at lunch, because at home his children have got ’flu. But we will see each other a lot. He is the person who says the most intelligent things and gives the most valuable pointers on America. Elizabeth I have only met in the street; she has not written again because she was waiting for Giulio to write.
²¹
Now we will work out how to organize the work.

Jacqueline

Wonderful creature. I spent yesterday evening with her. But being with her is difficult for me since her extreme irritability transmits a certain uneasiness (though I’ve noticed that as you speak to her this gradually diminishes), and it is not very useful because I can’t get anything out of her either as regards publishing (her qualities are neither literary nor editorial), nor socially (being a pessimist and a misanthrope, she stays very much inside her shell). She represents the other side of America, the negative, painful one. And as such, she too will be an inevitable point of reference for me, precisely because she is the one American woman I have met so far with whom you cannot instantly establish a naturally cordial relationship.

How Random House Works

Editorial Department
: every editor (whether Senior or Junior) knows the author personally. A writer such as Faulkner has his own editor with whom he is in continual correspondence for all matters editorial. (Administrative issues are not part of the picture: these are dealt with between the author’s agent and the publisher’s legal department.) The editor works with the author on the book; it is common practice for him to make the author correct his manuscript until there is nothing left that he is unhappy with. The editor is usually the person who has sponsored the book’s publication, in the case of a new author; if the author has long been on the publisher’s books, his editor is the person who has always dealt with him and knows how to approach him. The editor, they tell me, has to ensure that a character who has dark hair in the first chapter does not have fair hair in chapter ten. But in reality the person who deals with these minutiae is the copy-editor who works under the editor: he reads and rereads the proofs finding things to correct, though he is not the person who corrects typographical errors, because they work in the printers and have nothing to do with the publisher. (Random House does not have its own printers.) The person who is responsible in the publisher’s eyes for the book coming out, for how long it takes to get published, etc. was called the managing editor while Haydn was there, but now Albrecht Erskine has arrived he is called the executive editor. (Erskine is, moreover, Faulkner’s editor.)

The
Art Department
deals with the cover, the binding, the illustrations.

The
Production Department
is what we call the technical office.

The
Publicity Department
is not to be confused with the
Advertising Department
. The latter deals with publicity that is to be paid for. Random House has no such department because it has a contract with an advertising firm that deals with publicity for the books, operating on a budget for every book that is decided by the publisher. This firm also prepares the wording of fliers and sends them directly to the publisher for approval. Instead the Publicity Department deals only with the papers, with relationships with reviewers (and when possible with radio and TV), and it all revolves round public relations and lunch invitations, and is always carried out in fact by female staff. Even very small publishers like Orion concentrate their efforts in this area.

The
Promotions Department
works on mail-order sales, using advertisements with order forms in newspapers and sending out postcards to various addresses depending on the kind of book. This is a very important department with around ten staff in it.

The
Sales Department
is run by machines, as I have explained already and as my book has discovered.

The
Juvenile Department
: Random House has one of the largest outputs of children’s literature and this is looked after by a separate editorial department.

The
College Department
is for school texts. The Modern Library series was initially under the College Department, but is now under the Editorial Department.

The
Legal Department
deals with the question of rights.

From what I have been able to work out, the structure of Macmillan’s is no different, apart from the enormous importance of university editions and differences in nomenclature (they do not know what a Promotions Department is, and sales by mail-order come under the Business Department).

The Most Important Young Writers in America

According to Mr Dompier, the critic of the
Herald Tribune
, with whom I had a lunch interview yesterday, organized by Orion, the main writers of the new generation, which in his view is an extraordinary generation, are (in this order):

Peter Fiebelman (
A Place without Twilights
)
Philip Roth
William Humphrey
Bernard Malamud
Grace Paley
H. E. Humes
Herbert Gold
Harvey Swados

Systematic Editorial Work,

of course, I have not been able to begin yet. In the coming week I have several important publishing engagements. But above all I need to organize my days in such a way as to have time to read and get my ideas in order. In the meantime, therefore, I can only transcribe for your benefit some scattered notes from my notebook.