Mind of an Outlaw (14 page)

Where Ellison can go, I have no idea. His talent is too exceptional to allow for casual predictions, and if one says that the way for Ellison may be to adventure out into the white world he
knows so well by now, and create the more difficult and conceivably more awful invisibility of the white man—well, it is a mistake to write prescriptions for a novelist as gifted as Ellison.

James Baldwin is too charming a writer to be major. If in
Notes of a Native Son
he has a sense of moral nuance which is one of the few modern guides to the sophistications of the ethos, even the best of his paragraphs are sprayed with perfume. Baldwin seems incapable of saying “Fuck you” to the reader; instead he must delineate the cracking and the breaking and the melting and the hardening of a heart which could never have felt such sensuous growths and little deaths without being emptied as a voice. It is a pity, because Baldwin is not without courage. His second novel,
Giovanni’s Room
, was a bad book but mostly a brave one, and since his life has been as fantastic and varied as the life of any of my fellow racketeers, and he has kept his sensitivity, one itches at times to take a hammer to his detachment, smash the perfumed dome of his ego, and reduce him to what must be one of the most tortured and magical nerves of our time. If he ever climbs the mountain, and really tells it, we will have a testament, and not a noble toilet water. Until then he is doomed to be minor.

I have a terrible confession to make—I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today. Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to read them. Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale. At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque,
maquillée
in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn.
^*
Since I’ve never been able to read Virginia
Woolf, and am sometimes willing to believe it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict may be taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the ground of departure—that a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls. If to this, I add that the little I have read of Herbert Gold reminds me of nothing so much as a woman writer, well I do not know that I have to be aware now of still another such acquaintance.

There are fifty fine writers who could be mentioned, and the odds are not that the first of us to become major will come from their host. More likely we are to hear from writers altogether unknown, working in silence, here, nowhere, and there.
^†
But since I can speak only of people with whose work and/or person I am knowledgeable, I can do no more than tip my hat to such men and boys of good repute as William Gaddis, Harvey Swados, Harold Humes, William Humphrey, Wright Morris, Bernard Malamud, John Philips, and all the other respected old and new styles of our piggish time.

I will cease with the comment that the novelists will grow when the publishers improve. Five brave publishing houses (a miracle) would wear away a drop of nausea in the cancerous American conscience, and give to the thousand of us or more with real talent the lone-wolf hope that we can begin to explore a little more of that murderous and cowardly world which will burst into madness if it does not dare a new art of the brave.

IN HIS REVIEW OF
The Deer Park
, Malcolm Cowley said it must have been a more difficult book to write than
The Naked and the Dead
. He was right. Most of the time, I worked on
The Deer Park
in a low mood; my liver, which had gone bad in the Philippines, exacted a hard price for forcing the effort against the tide of a long depression, and matters were not improved when nobody at Rinehart & Co. liked the first draft of the novel. The second draft, which to me was the finished book, also gave little enthusiasm to the editors, and open woe to Stanley Rinehart, the publisher. I was impatient to leave for Mexico, now that I was done, but before I could go, Rinehart asked for a week in which to decide whether he wanted to do the book. Since he had already given me a contract which allowed him no option not to accept the novel (a common arrangement for writers whose sales are more or less large), any decision to reject the manuscript would cost him a sizable advance. (I learned later he had been hoping his lawyers would find the book obscene, but they did not, at least not then in May 1954.) So he had really no choice but to agree to put the book out in February, and gloomily he consented. To cheer him a bit, I agreed to his request that he delay paying me
my advance until publication, although the first half was due on delivery of the manuscript. I thought the favor might improve our relations.

Now, if a few of you are wondering why I did not take my book back and go to another publishing house, the answer is that I was tired. I was badly tired. Only a few weeks before, a doctor had given me tests for the liver, and it had shown itself to be sick and depleted. I was hoping that a few months in Mexico would give me a chance to fill up again.

But the next months were not cheerful.
The Deer Park
had been done as well as I could do it, yet I thought it was probably a minor work, and I did not know if I had any real interest in starting another book. I made efforts of course: I collected notes, began to piece together a few ideas for a novel given to bullfighting, and another about a concentration camp. I wrote
David Riesman Reconsidered
during this time, and
The Homosexual Villain
; read most of the work of the other writers of my generation (I think I was looking for a level against which to measure my third novel), went over the galleys when they came, changed a line or two, sent them back. Keeping half busy I mended a bit, but it was a time of dull drifting. When we came back to New York in October,
The Deer Park
was already in page proof. By November, the first advertisement was given to
Publishers’ Weekly
. Then, with less than ninety days to publication, Stanley Rinehart told me I would have to take out a small piece of the book—six not-very-explicit lines about the sex of an old producer and a call girl. The moment one was ready to consider losing those six lines they moved into the moral center of the novel. It would be no tonic for my liver to cut them out. But I also knew Rinehart was serious, and since I was still tired, it seemed a little unreal to try to keep the passage. Like a miser I had been storing energy to start a new book: I wanted nothing to distract me now. I gave in on a word or two, agreed to rewrite a line, and went home from that particular conference not very impressed with myself. The next morning I called up the editor in chief, Ted Amussen, to tell him I had decided the original words had to be put back.

“Well, fine,” he said, “fine. I don’t know why you agreed to anything in the first place.”

A day later, Stanley Rinehart halted publication, stopped all ads (he was too late to catch the first run of
Publishers’ Weekly
, which was already on its way to England with a full page for
The Deer Park
) and broke his contract to do the book. I was started on a trip to find a new publisher, and before I was done the book had gone to Random House, Knopf, Simon & Schuster, Harper’s, Scribners, and unofficially to Harcourt Brace. Someday it would be fine to give the details, but for now little more than a few lines of dialogue and an editorial report:

Bennett Cerf: This novel will set publishing back twenty years.

Alfred Knopf to an editor: Is this your idea of the kind of book which should bear a Borzoi imprint?

The lawyer for one publishing house complimented me on the six lines, word for word, which had excited Rinehart to break his contract. This lawyer said, “It’s admirable the way you get around the problem here.” Then he brought out more than a hundred objections to other parts of the book. One was the line, “She was lovely. Her back was adorable in its contours.” I was told that this ought to go because “the principals are not married, and so your description puts a favorable interpretation upon a meretricious relationship.”

Hiram Haydn had lunch with me some time after Random House saw the book. He told me he was responsible for their decision not to do it, and if I did not agree with his taste, I had to admire his honesty—it is rare for an editor to tell a writer the truth. Haydn went on to say that the book never came alive for him, even though he had been ready to welcome it. “I can tell you that I picked the book up with anticipation. Of course I had heard from Bill, and Bill had told me that he didn’t like it, but I never pay attention to what one writer says about the work of another.…” Bill was William Styron, and Haydn was his editor. I had asked Styron to call Haydn the night I found out Rinehart had broken his contract. One reason for asking the favor of Styron was that he sent me a long letter about the novel after I had shown it to him in manuscript. He had written, “I don’t like
The
Deer Park
, but I admire sheer hell out of it.” So I thought to impose on him.

Other parts of the account are not less dreary. The only generosity I found was from the late Jack Goodman. He sent me a photostat of his editorial report to Simon & Schuster, and because it was sympathetic, his report became the objective estimate of the situation for me. I assumed that the book when it came out would meet the kind of trouble Goodman expected, and so when I went back later to work on the page proofs I was not free of a fear or two. But that can be talked about in its place. Here is the core of his report:

The eighth house was G. P. Putnam. I didn’t want to give it to them, I was planning to go next to Viking, but Walter Minton kept saying, “Give us three days. We’ll give you a decision in three days.” So we sent it over to Putnam, and in three days they took it without conditions, and without a request for a single change. I had a victory, I had made my point, but in fact I was not very happy. I had grown so wild on my diet of polite letters from publishing houses who didn’t want me that I had been looking forward to collecting rejections from twenty houses, publish
The Deer Park
at my own expense, and try to make a kind of publishing history. Instead I was thrown in with Walter Minton, who has since attracted some fame as the publisher of
Lolita
. He is the only publisher I ever met who would make a good general. Months after I came to Putnam, Minton told me, “I was ready to take
The Deer Park
without reading it. I knew your name would sell enough copies to pay your advance, and I figured one of these days you’re going to write another book like
The Naked and the Dead
,” which is the sort of sure hold of strategy you can have when you’re not afraid of censorship.