I don’t think it immoderate to ask why the book hasn’t been advertised in Chicago, at least. Henle has taken only three ads. One in
PR
before publication, one in the Sunday
Times
and one in the
Saturday Review
. I don’t ask him to make me a millionaire, Lord no! But he seems to be satisfied with very little as a small publisher, and I have to be content with even less.
Dangling Man
sold less than two thousand copies the first year and about a hundred a year since then. The advance sale of
The Victim
was twenty-two hundred; I shall be greatly surprised if it totals five thousand copies in all. If it were to bring me enough to live on for a year I wouldn’t think of trying to sell it to the movies for sure butchery. It will be no pleasure to me, I assure you, if the book is sold. I simply need the money to put Minneapolis behind me.
What provoked me to write in this fashion was a note I received in which Henle said he expected the Progressive Book Club to have
The Victim
as its March choice. At seventy-five cents. It seems to me that this is tantamount to remaindering the book and getting shut of it. The Progressive Club has as members people who might normally be expected to buy a book like mine. If it does dispose of something like two thousand copies, I will receive something under two hundred bucks and half-saturate the market, or whatever they call it.
I’ve been writing stories. I have quite a packet of them that I am working over, health and leisure permitting. Recently I sold a travel letter to
Partisan Review
at the new rates. [ . . . ]
I’m making plans, together with Ed McGehee (already represented by you and Mr. Russell), to get together a travel anthology and to expand the article into a preface. I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d take this matter over for us. The anthology will be called
Spanish Travelers
or something like that and will be made up of accounts by 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century travelers in Spain, many great writers among them from Casanova to Roger Fry. Random House has already expressed interest in this, and if you like we can get up an outline.
Please read this overwrought document charitably.
Yours sincerely,
PS I’m going to write Henle only that I’m resuming relations with you—a by-the-way note. I’m depending on your discretion in this matter, acting on your advice not to send the letter to Henle. It would be disastrous if he were to learn circuitously about my dissatisfaction.
To David Bazelon
December 1, 1947 Minneapolis
Dear Dave:
I’m still down in the neighborhood of a hundred sixty lbs. but apart from a certain understandable nervousness I’m not in bad condition, merely mindful of old age and death more than I should normally be. Which probably accounts for my inscription in the
Charterhouse
—“fly, Fleance . . . !” [
18
] And then, too, my battles (the two books) have tired me out. I feel I have one foot on the right path and another somewhere else: I don’t know where that is but perhaps it is a better place than what I have always considered the “right” one. Anyway, the feet aren’t together.
Commentary
’s foolishness is very annoying. I thought the Hammett piece was one of your best. I never saw the idea of the
job
treated in just that way. And
Partisan
’s conventionality is of course exasperating. If it’s pipsqueaks they’re guarding against someone ought to tip them off about the pipsqueaks they’ve been publishing. It’s just that they consider
Partisan
a very classy magazine and feel, like the managers of concert halls who have Beethoven’s name painted on the proscenium and would feel the dignity of the establishment lowered by Louie Armstrong’s at the other end, a connection between culture and incantation.
About school: I think you must accept it as Raskolnikov did Siberia: indispensable punishment. Soon I fancy you’ll be able to arrange to write articles as term papers. There’s no reason, for instance, why the Hammett piece shouldn’t be a perfectly acceptable term paper. When you get the requirements out of the way, you’ll be much happier. Universities are full of fools, naturally, but so are all establishments. Brains and talent are the
raison d’être
for the university, however, and can’t be entirely repudiated. Not
entirely
. You can always invoke the
raison d’être.
Besides, when you’ve got Tennyson behind you you can’t be kept from Hardy, etc. But you know all this. [ . . . ]
I spent Thanksgiving Day in Chicago with Oscar and Vic and Johnny, eating goose and thinking up schemes to make a million dollars. My father offered to make me a mine superintendant at ten thousand. The fact that I was a celebrity last week made no difference to him. A mine’s a mine, but
Time
is a mere striving with wind. I smiled at the offer but in the old heart of hearts I had to admit that he made sense. His instinct is sound. He doesn’t read my reviews, only looks at them. Again, high wisdom. The reviews are incredibly vulgar, so why read them?
I’m glad [Elizabeth] Hardwick didn’t take the axe to me. She’s very formidable.
Write me.
Love,
1948
To James Henle
[n.d.]
Dear Jim:
Surely you don’t mean that the total sales of the book come to two thousand! Why, you wrote last November that it had an advance sale of twenty three hundred. Is the two thousand you speak of in addition to the advance sale? That would be little enough for a novel that has been reviewed like mine. And if you mean that the
total
sale is two thousand I hardly know what to say after two years of wringing to pay bills and fighting for scraps of time in which to do my writing. Have I nothing to look forward to but two years of the same sort and a sale of barely two thousand for the next novel I write? And can it be worth your while to continue publishing books which sell only two thousand copies? I don’t understand this at all; I feel black and bitter about it, merely.
Best,
To David Bazelon
January 5, 1948 Minneapolis
Dear Dave:
I agree with you entirely about
The Victim
that it is not so successful as it might have been and does not grow to the fullest size. Compared to what is published nowadays between boards, it is an accomplishment. Judged by my own standards, however, it is promissory. It took hold of my mind and imagination very deeply but I know that somehow I failed to write it
freely,
with all the stops out from beginning to end. They were out in a few places. I could name them. And I must admit that in spite of the great amount of energy I brought to the book at certain times, I was at others, for some reason, content to fall back on lesser resources. For instance, it would not have been difficult to make Leventhal on the same scale as I did Allbee but I thought it would be seen that they were aspects of one another. As though it wouldn’t have been evident if I had allowed Leventhal a bit more room. But there is a certain diffidence about me, not very obvious socially, to my own mind, that prevents me from going all out, as you call it. I assemble the dynamite but I am not ready to touch off the fuse. Why? Because I am working toward something and have not yet arrived. I once mentioned to you, I think, that one of the things that made life difficult for me was that I wanted to write before I had sufficient maturity to write as “high” as I wished and so I had a very arduous and painful apprenticeship and still am undergoing it. This journeyman idea has its drawbacks as well as its advantages. It makes me a craftsman—and few writers now are that—but it gives me a refuge from the peril of final accomplishment. “Lord, pardon me, I’m still preparing, not fully a man as yet.” I’m like the young man in the Gospels, or have been till lately. “Give all thou hast and follow me,” says Christ. The young man goes away to think it over and so is lost. There’s a limit to thinking it over, even if grace isn’t immediate. But there must be something I’m afraid to give up. It isn’t through not wanting.
I do think that [Greenwich] Village-sensibility has peculiar dangers. In the Village where so much desire is fixed on so few ends, and those constantly narrowing ends, there is a gain in intensity and a leak and loss in the respect of solidity. The Village is too unfriendly to the common, much too gnostic. Besides, the novelist labors in character, not in psychology, which is easier and swifter; the psychology of a man comes from many different sources, a theory that is shared; the vision of him as a character comes from the imagination of one man. The Villagers are poetic theorists in psychology and consider a vision of character naïve when it fails to satisfy their hunger for extremes. One could not write a novel in Village psychology because that is a group-product. I don’t think I make myself clear.
But I’m writing a novelette which may surprise you. It’s called “Who Breathes Overhead.” From Schiller’s “Diver”—“Who breathes overhead in the rose-tinted air may be glad.” It’s about the
amor fati
, the vein of enjoyment that runs through our deepest suffering, and it centers about a man who is rotting to death in a hospital room. His stink offends the other patients. The hero of the story defends him because nothing is, for him, more valuable than life or more sacred than the struggle to remain alive. Here I know what I’m doing. The apprenticeship is in its last days. [ . . . ]
I had hoped that you would show up in Chicago, a deserving scholar taking a Christmas rest, like myself.
Love,
To Henry Volkening
February 18, 1948 Minneapolis
Dear Henry:
That was a nice letter of Mrs. [Katharine] White’s. She’s right not to ask for revisions, though I feel she would ask for them if she were genuinely after the story, because I wouldn’t, I couldn’t start nipping, creasing or deleting to suit the policy of a magazine. The policy of a magazine ought to be to publish good stories, and the blitheness that seeks to ward off boredom above everything else runs inevitably into thin squeaking—as the
New Yorker
does. Have you seen E. Wilson’s remarks on it in
Commentary
? They went right to the button. But does this mean he has broken off with the magazine?
Henle answered me at great length and he said that in the long run I couldn’t miss (but how long is long?) and that Farrell and every other serious writer in America had the same bad row to weed. I answered him, more mildly than the first time, that Farrell’s books started to come out during the Depression and that these are fat years. What is fundamentally wrong, it seems to me, is that Henle has too small an organization to push a book to the retailers. Arthur Bergholz explained the whole thing very sensibly from the seller’s standpoint. A good many firms have been fishing after me with hints of gold and spinners of silver. Of course I hear that Leviathan Viking swallowed Lionel Trilling up whole and stilled the prophet’s voice pretty damn effectively. Still, the come-ons are attractive. I can understand your reluctance to try to break Vanguard’s option. But I can tell you that when my next novel is ready it’ll take a lot of hauling to harness me to Vanguard’s wagon again. However, I’ll think of measures to take when the time is ripe.
Meanwhile, it may be a sound idea to get up an outline of that Spanish Travelers book I mentioned before. My piece in
Partisan
(have you seen it?) might do as an introduction. I could easily lengthen it. McGehee and I have gone a little into the literature and believe we could get up a fascinating anthology. These big houses need grist, don’t they? For their standing mills. Publishing may be slack now but it would be worth it to any house to invest a couple of thousand dollars and have a book ready when the wave returns. Could you perhaps sound out old Mr. [Pascal] Covici? We need money in the worst way. [ . . . ]
As ever (as you see),
To Melvin Tumin
[n.d.] [Minneapolis]
Dear Moish:
A little destiny is a treacherous thing. Once again I am doing things that I only half understand because something commands me to do them. I went in and asked Zozo [Joseph Warren Beach, chairman of the Department of English at the University of Minnesota] for a year’s leave, terming it so—though it’s perfectly clear to us both that I won’t be returning. And after all I am a family man now; I have more gray hairs than black. This may not appear to be an excess in view of the fact that I have just published a book which has been well received. But that book, now past its sales prime, has sold in the neighborhood of twenty-two hundred copies.
Anyway, I had sworn not to stay. We have a little money and I have applied for a Guggenheim, but I have been so often rejected by Guggenheim I have no right to look for anything but still another
no
. Isaac’s is really the first case I know of a needy writer and a deserving one getting the prize. Ordinarily it goes to people who have enough of a reputation to have acquired money by means of it. Them as has, gets. The executors of a vast estate could never find it in their hearts to be disloyal to that grand principle.