LITMIR.BIZ

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(10), the story of Bowles’s success is emblematic of a generally overlooked aspect of its moment in literary history, a moment when both high-and mass-culture institutions began to realize the salability of the idea of the avant-garde or “art” novel—the growth, that is, of a market large enough to support a novel marketed as such. It is not surprising that the emergence of this type coincides with the emergence of the art-house cinema; in the era immediately after World War II, the book and movie businesses found relatively small but reliable audiences for products marketed as art rather than as entertainment.⁷

      Bowles is an ideal figure with which to trace this development because the trope of detachment (what Bourdieu calls “disinterestedness”) was a hallmark of his life and literature. But only because he was a well-known figure in avant-garde artistic circles long before he had published a novel was he able to make that detachment work for him. When Bowles first left the United States in 1929, after a single semester at the University of Virginia, he was already a published poet, having had his work included in the March 1928 issue of transition, a little magazine, alongside James Joyce, André Breton, and Gertrude Stein. He was seventeen years old at the time. Bowles idolized Stein; when he visited her in France in 1931, it was as a fledgling poet in search of a mentor. Stein, happy to oblige, exerted her influence in two important ways. First, she effectively shattered his poetic ambitions by telling him his poetry showed no promise.⁸ Second, more constructively, it was on Stein’s advice that Bowles visited Tangier for the first time, in 1931. He made that trip with his other mentor, Aaron Copland. Copland showed interest in Bowles’s music, and Stein showed none in his poetry, so Bowles abandoned poetry and became a full-time composer on his return to New York in the 1930s. He now divided his time between work for the Broadway stage and “serious” composing—working in the same artistic and sometimes the same social circles as Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Benjamin Britten (with whom he briefly shared an artist’s residence in New York, along with, among others, W. H. Auden). Bowles was inspired to write again by his wife, Jane Bowles, whose novel Two Serious Ladies was published in 1941. He wrote short stories in which, as in his novels to come, his own detachment was inscribed. This is true not just in the sense that they portray alienated Americans searching for a more authentic existence in northern Africa and Central America but also in the sense that the narrative voice always stands far apart from the sometimes grotesque violence it describes. Before he became a novelist, Bowles’s distance from conventional American culture was already a pronounced aspect of both his biography and his writing.

       The Agent

      One way of considering the postwar relationship between mass culture and the novel in the early postwar era is to ask how and why an avatar of detachment like Bowles became associated with Helen Strauss and the William Morris Agency, and, equally important, why Strauss and the agency showed interest in Bowles. The answers to these questions can be found in the simultaneous growth of the book business and the mass-media industries over the first half of the twentieth century. Before writing his novel, Bowles wanted to publish a volume of short stories, but editors at Dial Press told him that to publish such a volume an author needed two things. First, the author needed a published novel. The reason seems clear enough: short-story collections by unknown authors rarely sell well. Collections by established novelists, however, at least have a chance to justify the publisher’s investment.⁹

      Second, the author needed an agent. “According to them,” Bowles writes in Without Stopping, “an agent was essential; they offered to telephone then and there to make an appointment with one for me” (274).¹⁰ In itself, this requirement suggests a significant but infrequently noted shift in the literary field. The original purpose of agents was protection, to make sure that the publisher treated the author fairly. The advent of the literary agent is in this sense a consequence of the modernization of the book business: as the business grew more profitable and more complicated, the relationship between publishers and authors became more impersonal. Authors, according to the agents’ pitch, as artists and not businesspeople, needed representatives to ensure that publishers did not exploit them. Not surprisingly, therefore, when literary agents first appeared on the scene in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, publishers denounced them as the scourge of the book business, in terms that mirrored antiunion rhetoric from factory owners of the same era. The agent’s interest, so the publishers’ rhetoric went, was neither in the well being of the book business (without which there could be no books) nor in the quality of the individual finished product, the book. From the beginning, publishers and sometimes authors negatively identified agents with the commodification of culture, casting the agent as the serpent in the book business’s familiar fall narrative, who corrupts the previously pure process of book production by interfering in what was a gentlemanly and nurturing publisher-author relationship.

      By mid-century, however, as Dial Press implicitly told Bowles, the publisher-agent relationship had changed: agents, although still charged with protecting the business interests of the authors they represented, had come to serve a necessary function for publishers as well; agents did much of the work of finding commercial writers and weeding out unsuitable ones. As the publishing industry expanded after World War II and as the number of prospective authors and manuscripts increased exponentially, agents came to be useful as “screens” for publishers, “winnowing good books from bad” (Coser, Kadushin, and Powell 287). By mid-century, as Bowles’s experience suggests, the agent served a double role. Now that the agent no longer served just as a protector of the writer, the hiring of the agent became an important part of the process of novel production and an added hurdle in the construction of a literary career, necessary to legitimize the writer in the eyes of the publisher.¹¹

      This consideration of literary agents from the publisher’s and author’s perspectives should not obscure the basic truth about them: their trade is opportunistic, and their existence signals the belief that there is money to be made. That agents became increasingly prominent in the literary field shows the commercial potential of that field, and that potential was tied not just to the growing reading public but also to the growing connection between the book and mass-media forms. A telling and little-noted sign of the growth of the book trade is the fact that, in 1944, the William Morris Agency formed a literary department.¹² William Morris, then the second-largest theatrical agency in the United States, was noted not just for its sizable stable of talent but also for its ability to adapt to shifts in the cultural market; not only did it leave its competitors behind in making the transition from vaudeville to movies, but it was also the first agency to recognize television’s potential.¹³ The agency’s decision to establish a literary department signifies both the growth of the reading audience and the book trade’s developing relationship with mass-media industries. The decision to hire Helen Strauss to head the department reflects these two developments: in her previous job as a story editor for Paramount, she was charged with finding and buying from authors stories that were suitable for filming and with convincing writers to write such stories.¹⁴

      Strauss’s decision to leave Paramount for William Morris testifies to both the growing commercial opportunities afforded by the literary field and the opportunism of the agent. In her memoir, Strauss characterizes the relation between Hollywood and the book business at the time of this decision: “Each of the big film companies was buying approximately fifty pieces of material annually—novels, plays, magazine serials and short stories…. They bought more than they needed, more than they could produce, not knowing what they would or could do with it. They bought everything. They gobbled up the best-seller lists and the bulk of magazine fiction” (39). Strauss left Paramount for William Morris because she felt it would be more lucrative to represent authors than to work for the studio, given the studios’ seemingly unending willingness to spend on movie material. Her choice to become a literary agent was a winning bet on the economic future of the book business.

      That Strauss’s motives were explicitly financial puts her decision to represent Bowles in its proper context: she evidently saw in his literary endeavors a chance to make money. In the light of Bowles’s unconventionality and relative anonymity—he had at the time no commercial credentials, but he did have what might be called highbrow credentials—that judgment is fairly striking. When an agent takes on a client, that agent is gambling that the client will succeed commercially.

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