Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 (6 page)

           
DISASTER! Jack Rosenfarb QUIT this
morning!

           
This is the worst thing that can
happen in the publishing industry, bar none. It is worse than a bad dust jacket
or a low ad budget or even another book on the same subject coming out two
months ahead. It is
much
worse than a libel suit or a
Publishers
Weekly
slam or a paperback auction to which nobody comes.

           
Here’s the problem. Your average
publishing company is the last existing model of the feudal system at
(semi)work. Every department is its own fiefdom, jealous of its windows and its
telephones and its supplies of paper clips. No one is in overall charge, no
one. Publishers themselves have nothing whatsoever to do with books—would you
expect Mr. Standard to hang out with his toilets?—and what the hell do
employees care?

           
Publishing is the only industry I
can think of where most of the employees spend most of their time stating with
great self-assurance that they don’t know how to do their jobs. “I don’t know
how to sell this,” they complain, frowning as though it’s
your
fault. “I
don’t know how to package this. I don’t know what the market is for this book.
I don’t know how we’re going to draw attention to this.” In most other
occupations, people try to hide their incompetence; only in publishing is it
flaunted as though it were the chief qualification for, the job.

           
Out of the thousands of people in an
entire huge publishing empire, the only one who cares at all about
your
book
is the editor who bought it. He spent the company’s money, he made a
commitment, and his ongoing reputation—within the firm and within the
industry—depends for the moment on your book. When the flacks in publicity fail
to tell the difference between the “Today” show and WBAB,
Babylon
,
Long Island
,
it is the editor who strolls down the hall and chats with the nitwit there.
When the art department gives you a jacket that would have looked tired on a
Literary Guild selection in 1953, it is the editor who gently suggests that
maybe somebody other than the associate art director’s roommate might be the
best illustrator in this case. When the salesmen scratch their heads and say,
“I dunno how to pitch this book. What
is
it, anyway?” it is the editor
who explains what the goddam book is, in words clear enough for each salesman
to deliver (as though his very own) to book dealers across this mighty land.
When the accountant behind the publisher’s desk decides four thousand back
orders aren’t enough to suggest a second printing might be in order, it is the
editor who crawls across the Persian rug and says, “Please,
Murray
, please.”

           
No, the writer cannot do this for
himself. Who in the publishing company will listen to a writer? The writer can
be expected to be emotional and non-businesslike about this child of his; only
the editor can be accepted as a hardheaded professional.

           
When the editor who bought the book
leaves the company before the book is published, the winds blow very cold. In
the trade, such a book is called an “orphan,” and the word barely suggests the
Dickensian—nay, the Ho- garthian—horrors that await such a creature. Who shall
defend these pitiful pages? Who shall raise this tattered banner from the Out
basket?
No one.

           
A new editor is “assigned” to the
book, the way homework is assigned to reluctant schoolchildren, and the
futility is evident in the word itself. What commitment has this assigned
editor in this book?
None.
How much time and thought
will he divert to it from the books
he
chose for the company to publish?
Guess.

           
My gravedigger hasn’t been assigned
yet. Jack Rosen- farb is to stay on for two more weeks, tidying up his affairs.
He assures me he’s very excited about the new job that has been offered him by
the pay-TV company. May he rot in
hell.

           
And things had been going so well.
Jim Davis contributed a drawing of Garfield in a Santa suit that’s so charming
and cynical at the same time that I’ve almost lost my hatred for that cat, and
Gahan Wilson’s drawing of a Christmas tree decorated with any number of tiny
hanged men, women and children gave me pause at first, but the more I look at it
the more I like it. (I considered asking him to redo it in color, but on second
thought that might be dangerous.)

           
The writers haven’t been lax,
either. Truman Capote came through with a “Christmas Eve on Death Row” that is
touching and strong and a million miles above the staleness of the subject.
Arthur C. Clarke sent along a wonderful story about another Christ being born
to another species in another galaxy, and John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a
reminiscence of a childhood Christmas in
Canada
that made me smile all day after I read it.
Jerzy Kosinski’s fantasy about a couple of children living inside a
kaleidoscope at the North Pole is maybe a touch
too
cute, but it looks
as though he wrote it all himself, and I’m taking it. I don’t know quite what
to think about Kurt Vonnegut’s submarine story, “Captain Nemo’s Christmas,” and
just last Friday I sent it to Jack Rosenfarb for his opinion. Now, of course,
he can take his opinion and shove it.

           
I have also received several polite
turndowns, from (or from the secretaries oft Helen Gurley Brown and Annie
Dillard and Gerald Ford and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Joan Rivers and Isaac
Bashevis Singer (“It is not my subject; I’m sorry”) and Jonathan Schell and
Jamie Wyeth. The “How much?” letter has been received from Ann Beattie.
E. L. Doctorow, Richard Nixon, Tom Wolfe, John Simon and Calvin
Trillin.
A brief typed note from Mickey Spillane said, “You gotta be
kiddin .”
I wrote him that indeed I was not.

           
Isaac Asimov has sent me another
article, this one on the calendar dating of Christmas. I’d already told him I
was taking the aerodynamics-of-the-sleigh piece, so I don’t know why he sent
another, but he did; anyway, I liked the first one better, so I sent the
calendar piece back.

           
In the middle of all this, Pia Zadora’s
agent phoned to say his client might be persuaded either (a) to give me a
Christmas-theme photo spread, or (b) to contribute a Christmas song she’d
written. I said I’d take it up with the staff.

           
As winter fades, it’s becoming
harder and harder to think about Christmas. Here it is the end of March, little
round pregnant buds protrude from every branch, there’s a smell of mud and
mildew in the air, spring is on the way, and in the apartment hallway Bryan and
Joshua simultaneously play baseball and soccer. The sight of a pair of boys
dressed in Mets caps and first baseman’s mitts kicking a soccer ball back and
forth is rather
too
heartwarming and Norman Rockwell for somebody who’s
spending all his waking hours with Christmas anyway, but there they are.

           
On the other hand, it is nice the
way those two boys get along. My
Bryan
is nine and Ginger’s Joshua is ten, and I
think maybe they have the best alliance of any of the teams involved in this
over-extended family. As is so often the case, their relationship started when
they went to bed together. Ginger and 1 don’t have a lot of extra space in this
apartment, so whenever my kids stay over
Bryan
bunks in with Joshua. (Eleven-year-old
Jennifer, who does
not
hang out with eight- year-old Gretchen, sleeps on
blankets on the floor in Gretchen’s room on those occasions.) The boys early
discovered a mutual interest in sports and truly rotten television reruns, and
have been fast friends ever since. I think I may have to take them to the Mets
opener.

           
But what’s going to happen to
The
Christmas Book
? With Asimov and Capote and Kosinski and Rooney and Vonnegut
and Clarke and Galbraith and Davis and Wilson I’ve already got name-strength;
they
cant
let the book languish now, can they?

           
Sure they can.

           
But they’ve got so much money
committed.

           
Sure they can.

           
But it’s such a great idea.

           
Sure they can.

           
But I’m working so
hard.

           
Sure they can.

           
But it’s their one best hope for a
Christmas book.

           
Sure they can.

           
Sure they can.

           
TOMORROW is the first day of
Passover. My new editor told me so today at lunch, several times. In fact, I
have come to the conclusion that the purpose of our having lunch had nothing to
do with
The Christmas Book
—which was barely mentioned—but that we had
gathered at the Tre Mafiosi for sole and chablis so that Ms. Douglas could
explain to me what tomorrow, the first day of Passover, meant in the ongoing
troubled relationship between herself and her mother, who lives in Fort
Lauderdale. I feel I know both mother and daughter very well by now; far too
well.

           
Vickie Douglas is a hotshot younger
editor, or at least she was until a year or so ago when she crossed the Rubicon
of thirty. About five years back, she was the one who plucked out of the slush
pile the ex-hookers diet-and-pornography book which became known in the trade
as
Fuck Yourself Thin,
but which Ms. Douglas herself (it is rumored, or
claimed) titled
How
a Better Sex Life Can
Lead to a Slimmer You.
With the ex-hooker’s national tour, plus the rather
sensational nude exercise photos in the book, it became a monstrous bestseller
(I choose my words carefully) and Vickie Douglas immediately left that
publisher (and the other not-yet-published books she’d bought there) for a
different publisher and a better salary. She’s been at a number of houses the
last several years, and came to Craig, Harry & Bourke after leaving
Metronome House last fall during a flap that even got reported gingerly in
Publishers
Weekly
(the
Junior Scholastic
of this tiny world); it was a dispute
over the title Qf a famous lesbian golfer’s autobiography Ms. Douglas had
insisted it be called
Different Strokes
, while the publisher even more
strongly demanded it be called
The Carol Murphy Story.
(Around the
business, it was generally known as “I Can Lick Any Woman on the Tour.”)

           
A tall, skinny, dark-blonde woman
with a very large head provided with prominent facial features, Vickie Douglas
is attractive in an acrylic sort of way, until she starts talking, and smoking,
and knocking her bulging leather bag over, and dropping ashes in the water
glass, and putting her elbow in the salad, and jangling her bangles, and
staring wide-eyed like someone who’s just received a dirk in the back in a
Hitchcock movie. Her voice is loud and breathy at the same time, and she talks
very fast like a mother lying to the truant officer, and her self-involvement
is so total I don’t understand how she can bear to release herself after she
puts a sweater on.

           
This
is the creature
who
came to bury
The Christmas Book
, not to praise it.
“You’re doing a fine job,” she told me, her wide eyes glazed as she thought
about her mother. “It’s a very interesting concept,” she mumbled, looking
around for her roll (it was in her bag). “I don’t want to second-guess you,
just keep going on as before,” she suggested, grapes from her sole
Veronique
rolling across the table.

           
But intermixed with these platitudes
were a few zingers. Frowning at a nearby waiter as though measuring him as a
potential stepfather, she brooded, “It’s hard to know what the
thrust
of
the book is, what its
argument
is.” Wiping coffee from her blouse, she
mumbled into her chest, “I’m afraid Mr. Wilson isn’t very impressed by the
kind
of contributor you’ve come up with so far. Capote, Galbraith; these are all
rather
yesterday
, aren’t they?” Staring at the American Express credit
card slip, trying to do gratuity mathematics in her head, she mused, “Perhaps
the problem is Christmas itself. Perhaps it’s just too
ordinary
.”

           
What am I going to do about this
woman? I have to do something about this woman, but what? If I kill her,
they’ll only assign another editor, and I know what they’d give me next
(assuming I didn’t get arrested for murder, which I surely would). What they
would give me next would be some hundred-year-old, pipe-smoking fart with a
wonderful shock of white hair and a brain that died in the late nineteenth
century, during his second year at
Exeter
. He
would be named something like Raymond Atherton Swifft or Hamble- ton Cudlipp
the Third, he would not have actually
done
anything at the firm within
living memory, and once we had become fast friends he would tell me his one
anecdote; the time he got drunk with John O’Hara, missed his train to Croton,
and had to take the 7:10.

           
So Victoria Douglas is not the worst
possible disaster that could befall
The Christmas Book\
she’s only the
second- worst.

           
I have to do something. There’s
nothing to do. But I have to. I have to do something
about this woman.