A Novel Marketplace - Evan Brier

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If the book fails commercially, the agent’s ability to secure advances for other authors, and thus the agent’s bottom line, will be damaged. Bowles, moreover, was not the exception among Strauss’s clientele; her list of authors would come to include such literary stars as Archibald MacLeish, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Robert Penn Warren, Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas, and Leon Edel. Fears of mass culture in the 1950s were often based on the notion that the masses would coarsen or debase literary culture (if they had not already done so). But just as the emergence of the art cinema signified the emergence of an audience for serious film that Hollywood studios would soon try to exploit, Strauss’s decision to take Bowles and other literary stars on as clients suggests that institutions of mass culture perceived (rightly, it turned out) a growing audience for the literary, a niche market waiting to be tapped.15

      Not only the agent saw commercial potential in Bowles: within ten days of her hiring, Strauss secured for him an advance for a novel from Doubleday, “one of the authentic colossi of the industry,” in the words of publishing historian John Tebbel (112). Bowles’s new position in the field of literary production was enviable: he was represented by the biggest Hollywood agency and was to be published by one of the biggest houses—all without having written a word of his novel or even come up with the idea for it. The idea did not come until after he received word of the advance, which he used to fund the trip to Tangier and the Sahara that inspired the writing of the novel. This chain of events (the hiring of the agent, who secures the advance, which pays for the trip that leads to the inspiration, idea, and writing of the novel) suggests again how integral these disavowed aspects of novel production—agents, advances, commercial publishers—had become to the construction of the novel, even for, if not especially for, the novelists most vigorously engaged in efforts to suppress their ties to them. The kind of detachment embodied by Bowles’s sojourn to the Sahara is not cheap; it can only occur in the context of some attachment to the business world. At the moment in literary history when the novel was receiving from both New Critics and the New York intellectuals its closest critical attention as a distinctive form of artistic production, its institutions were becoming increasingly intertwined with other, more consumer-oriented forms of culture.16

      Bowles’s literary career was set back when Doubleday rejected his manuscript for The Sheltering Sky. The publisher told Bowles that what he had submitted was, simply, not a novel.17 It is best not to make too much of this assessment; as Bowles himself concluded with evident satisfaction in his autobiography, Doubleday’s rejection was likely a (regrettable) assessment of The Sheltering Sky’s commercial prospects, a curious one at that, given that the novel is much like the short stories on the basis of which, presumably, along with Strauss’s recommendation, Doubleday gave him the advance. Doubleday’s assessment of the book, that is, is likely not an intentional application of genre theory to a specific text. But the language of the rejection does suggest the role of publishing houses in the construction of genre conventions, in determining what constitutes a novel and what does not. In strictly material terms, if no publisher is willing to deem The Sheltering Sky a novel, then it is not one.

       New Directions

      Doubleday’s rejection, a footnote in most accounts of Bowles’s career, nonetheless triggered a chain of events that altered the reception of his first novel and probably altered perceptions of his entire career.18 In the short term, it put Bowles in a precarious position because, as a first novelist with no commercial track record, he was asked to return Doubleday’s advance.19 The manuscript then “went through a bad year of being turned down by every publisher who saw it.” Finally, Bowles reports, he “sent it to James Laughlin, at the other end of the publishing spectrum” (Without Stopping 292). In his preface to the novel, Bowles emphasizes that “it was I, and not my agent, who finally sent the typescript to New Directions, and fortunately he liked it and agreed to publish it” (6).

      Bowles’s version of this story is noteworthy. By signaling that his manuscript was accepted only when the agent was bypassed, Bowles links the story of the novel’s publication with the mythic bygone era alluded to earlier, before agents arrived on the literary scene, when publishing was gentlemanly and the author’s relationship with the publisher was direct, personal, and concerned solely with art. The makers of art novels and the owner of the avant-garde publishing house in the early postwar era would repeatedly connect their productions to an earlier age of purportedly unmediated aesthetic judgment, to a time when there was no institutional apparatus and no intermediaries (agents, for example) whose concern might be something other than the aesthetic quality of the text. In this respect, the key phrase of Bowles’s account is “he liked it,” where the assessment of commercial prospects (if not application of genre theory) that governed Doubleday’s decision to reject is replaced by something more ineffable: the taste of a single, discerning reader.

      That reader is James Laughlin and, to understand the making of The Sheltering Sky, one needs to take stock of Laughlin’s unusual place in the postwar literary field. Although it is important to understand that New Directions occupied a different place in that field than did Doubleday (it was, as Bowles rightly puts it, “at the other end of the publishing spectrum”), it is equally important to see that the marketing strategies used by New Directions proved to be not all that different from those of the larger companies. A useful point of departure is the grammar of Bowles’s above account—“I … sent the typescript to New Directions, and … he liked it” (emphasis mine). Bowles’s use of the pronoun “he” to refer to New Directions is understandable; the publishing house was perceived to be a one-man operation. “I don’t have any business acumen,” Laughlin once said. “I am not good at deals and can’t cope with agents” (“History” 222). Just as Bowles, in his letters to Laughlin, disavowed the agent in order to maintain his avant-garde status in the eyes of the publisher, New Directions achieved its cultural status in part by disavowing the trappings of the modernized publishing house. Laughlin, heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune, had founded the company in 1936 after his mentor Ezra Pound told him he had no future as a poet (his experience with Pound is much like Bowles’s with Stein) and would be more “useful” (Pound’s term) as a publisher of Pound and his friends (Laughlin, “New Directions” 21). Starting as Pound’s patron, Laughlin cultivated a reputation as the publisher who would publish what no one else would, a patron to the avantgarde whose interest was neither in best sellers nor politics but in art itself.20

      This reputation suggests in broad strokes what Bowles’s account of Laughlin’s decision to publish his novel suggests in miniature: that without the aid of financially motivated intermediaries Laughlin discovered great, unpublished writers, and that through his discernment and concomitant indifference to financial matters put them into print.21 Laughlin and New Directions writers have an interest in telling this version of events, as it allows both to accrue maximum symbolic capital from their association with one other, and they have done so frequently over the years.22 Laughlin in particular railed against the literary world’s collaborations with mass-media corporations, railed that is against the very apparatus that Helen Strauss represented: “Every day,” he wrote in 1946, “some new and more disgusting ulcer forces its way into the skin of the putrefied body—just yesterday I read in a trade journal that Warner Brothers have established a special department to ‘inspire ideas’ for writers to make into books and later into pictures” (qtd. in Barnhisel, James Laughlin 96–97). The poet Donald Hall summed up this version of Laughlin-as-aesthete best in saying that Laughlin chose which works to publish based on two assumptions: “the assumption of quality and the assumption that these books would not sell in the marketplace” (275).23

      But two, related ideas are left out of this assessment of Laughlin’s importance, and both need to be considered if we are to understand the story of The Sheltering Sky. First, the network of writers who recommended other writers to Laughlin muddies the picture of him as the solitary man of taste. Second, the surprising profitability of New Directions by the end of the 1950s—after almost two decades of losses, Laughlin’s company began to turn a profit—must alter our view of Laughlin as a nonbusinessperson whose books would not sell. Some New Directions books did sell, and the method of advertising the book by not advertising it (Hall’s description of Laughlin,

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