A Novel Marketplace - Evan Brier

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the course of the 1950s, early examples of the synergy that would be one of the rationales for media mergers in the 1960s and after, and their marketplace success does indeed constitute the realization of a modernized book business’s commercial potential, which had only begun to come to light in the late 1940s. But the to-date unexamined stories of the making and marketing of both novels confound the still-too-prevalent modernist narratives that connect the book trade’s growth and the rise of mass culture to literary decline; it is one of this book’s aims to unsettle the hold that these narratives of decline have had on accounts of cultural change after World War II. Between The Sheltering Sky and Peyton Place, two novels on opposite sides of an old version of the cultural spectrum, there exists, again, not a divide but a continuity that was obscured in the service of the myriad goals of collaborating cultural and economic institutions.

      That continuity, and the growth of the book business that fostered it, was exposed late in 1959, when Random House sold 30 percent of its shares to the public and months later bought Knopf; the merger was front-page news in the New York Times (Talese 1). At almost the exact moment of the stock sale, Norman Mailer’s unorthodox, early career retrospective Advertisements for Myself was published and, as Chapter 5 shows, its relentless exposé of the business of publishing is itself both a sometimes blinkered comment on what had become of the book trade over the period this book covers and a prescient example of how its transformation into a high-profile business might affect the ideology of the novel going forward. With Mailer’s unorthodox example in mind, this book ends where it begins, in the twenty-first century. With hindsight, truly mass culture is a brief moment, the result of an unlikely set of circumstances that shifted the cultural ground beneath the novel and allowed it to be defined a certain way. Even as publishing houses have continued to consolidate, to be bought and sold by multimedia corporations over the past two decades, the number of choices for culture consumers has grown exponentially, and the mass audience, if it ever existed, has become ever more a fiction. Our current era, featuring a conceivably unlimited number of cultural niches, has shifted the ground beneath the novel yet again and in ways that we have only begun to consider.

      Chapter 1

       Constructing the Postwar Art Novel: The Making and Marketing of The Sheltering Sky

      I’m sorry about my agent—both for your sake and mine.

      —Paul Bowles, in a letter to his publisher, James Laughlin, April 7, 1949 (In Touch 201)

      Keep up your standards. It is better to be read by 800 readers and be a good writer than be read by all the world and be Somerset Maugham.

       —James Laughlin, in a letter to Delmore Schwartz (qtd. in Gussow D19)

      He was one of the least troublesome, most gentlemanly clients I had, really a nice man. Despite our friendship, he always addressed me as “Miss Strauss.”

       —Helen Strauss, Bowles’s agent, on Paul Bowles (152)

      Apologies for his agent, Helen Strauss, are a recurring feature of Paul Bowles’s letters to James Laughlin in the months leading to the publication of The Sheltering Sky, Bowles’s first novel, by New Directions, Laughlin’s company, in December 1949. The apology above, like most of the others, is given for no apparent reason. There is no sign that Strauss did anything that warranted an apology; if Bowles complained to her about her conduct with Laughlin, there is no record of it. As it turned out, Bowles’s association with Strauss far outlasted both his friendship and his business relationship with Laughlin, suggesting that the apologies are better understood not as genuine expressions of regret (or not solely as such expressions) but as Bowles’s attempts to affirm his detachment from business matters—the agent’s purview—and thereby ingratiate himself with his publisher, who, as his advice to Delmore Schwartz indicates, counted himself not as a businessman but as a patron of avant-garde artists.1 At the time of these letters, Bowles had not established himself as a novelist, and before Laughlin agreed to publish The Sheltering Sky, the manuscript had been rejected by numerous publishing houses, so Bowles’s desire to stay on Laughlin’s good side is understandable. Long before the publisher markets a novel to the public, the novelist, particularly the yet-to-be-published novelist, must market himself or herself to the publisher.

      In his letter, Bowles goes on to say, “I should have known better than to sign up with Eddie Cantor’s and Jack Benny’s agent. Except that I was ignorant at the time of the entire species” (In Touch 201). In fact, Strauss did not represent either star, but her employer, the William Morris Agency, did. Bowles defends his decision to hire Strauss on the grounds that his lack of interest in such things left him incapable of making the “right” decision; paradoxically, according to this logic, only someone interested in such mundane matters (only someone of a commercial bent) would know enough to not hire an agent so invested in the commercial. Bowles’s next letter, dated April 30, 1949, continues in this vein: “I’m sorry the agent business has been so harassing for you…. I do need some sort of link with New York, naturally” (203). The agent is here cast as the necessary consequence of Bowles’s expatriation to Tangier. Again, the novelist justifies his attachment to the world of commerce by presenting it as the necessary consequence of his self-imposed detachment from that world.

      If Bowles’s apologies for his ties to commerce are paradoxical, they are not idiosyncratic. As Pierre Bourdieu writes, “The literary and artistic world is so ordered that those who enter it have an interest in disinterestedness” (“Field” 40). Perceptions of the writer’s artistry depend in part on the perceived distance he or she maintains from what Bourdieu calls the “economic world”; it is thus in the writer’s interest to disavow this world, to announce his or her lack of interest in the commercial.2 More specifically, Bowles’s apologies reflect the changing cultural and economic status of the novel at the start of the 1950s. Between 1948 and 1955, two-thirds of American homes acquired television sets (Spigel 1), spurring predictions of the demise of the literary novel and high culture.3 At the same time, notwithstanding these predictions, the combination of the postwar economic boom with a sharp increase in college attendance—and even the growth of the mass-media industries themselves—presented the book trade with an unprecedented opportunity to expand, to sell more books to more people than ever before.4 The book trade, in a transitional moment between its prewar past as a decentralized cottage industry and its post-1960 future as a small piece of multimedia corporations, exploited this opportunity in part by marketing individual novels, and at times the novel in general, as something other than—something more special than—a mere commodity.5 In this regard, the book trade’s response to the emergence of mass culture throughout the 1950s mirrors the gesture of Bowles’s apologies to Laughlin in 1949—strategically, if somewhat disingenuously, advertising to a growing, increasingly literate audience of consumers the book’s separateness from the world of commerce.

      In this chapter, I treat not just Bowles’s apologies but also the story of the writing, publication, and reception of The Sheltering Sky as a means to illuminate the complicated set of negotiations among the book trade, culture critics, and mass-culture institutions in the early postwar era. After falling out of print in the 1970s, Bowles’s first novel has been of interest to scholars over the past decade as a recovered masterpiece of postwar alienation, conducive to revisionist studies of the 1950s as an anxious rather than a placid decade; Bowles’s entire oeuvre, now back in print, has garnered renewed attention as texts well suited to queer and especially postcolonial readings.6 In its own time, however, the novel was something different: a best-selling “art novel”—to borrow Mark McGurl’s term for the post–Henry James, self-consciously artistic novel—sprung from what was then an unusual and in some regards accidental collaboration between mass-and high-culture institutions. The Sheltering Sky was hardly the first art novel in American literary history to achieve immediate commercial success. But when viewed in its institutional context, the context of what Theodore Ziolkowski calls “the totality of agents

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