Publishing Read online

  Evenings at Five was an act of love and grief, written on consecutive evenings in the year following Robert’s death in April 2001. It was a celebration of him and our life together for almost thirty years, of the house we had built, of his wit and his rages, of his swift and alarming physical decline, and, not least of all, of our cocktail hours together. My original title for it was The Pope Called, which was Robert’s statement to signal me it was time to stop our work for the day and meet downstairs for that first cocktail.

  My friend Frances Halsband, who drew the illustrations for this book, did the pen-and-ink drawings: exteriors and interiors of the house; Robert’s medicine shelves, which I had not yet dismantled; Robert’s work desk and piano; my work desk; Robert’s Stickley chair and Turkish cushion; a favorite kitchen knife; an etched cocktail glass given to him on a houseboat in wartime Cairo.

  I had met Frances Halsband in 1990, when I thought I was going to be writing My Last Protégé, the novel about the architect. I had asked Beverly Russell, who edited an architecture magazine, to find me such a woman at the top of her game. At the lunch date Beverly set up for us at a Woodstock restaurant, Frances and I quickly realized we had years of intimate conversations ahead of us. Each of us was fascinated by the nuts and bolts of the other’s work and by certain dramatic contrasts: if Frances erred in her vision of a work, millions of dollars could be lost or a structure could collapse, whereas I could just wipe the slate of my mind clean and start over. We laughed a lot about this. We also had many “professional women anecdotes” to laugh about. When she was elected the first woman president of the American Institute of Architects, the man who introduced her started off by praising her legs; when I turned in my novel about a female academic, the editor said I hadn’t mentioned whether she wanted children and I needed to clarify her feelings about this for my readers. Frances was married to another Robert (the architect Robert Kliment), who, like my Robert, had been born in Europe and had grown up in other countries during World War Two. They had a weekend house in Woodstock, and the four of us became friends.

  Frances received 15 percent of the Evenings at Five advance for her exquisite drawings, and we had a joint book signing at a Barnes & Noble store in midtown Manhattan. John Hawkins threw a book party for us at his apartment, which he later asked Frances to redesign for him.

  Packing for book tour

  Silver jacket, Victorian brooch, and “silver eminence” beads.

  In May 2013, when I had one chapter left to write for Publishing, I was laying out my book tour clothes for my novel Flora on the bed and suddenly wished Frances could draw the scene as I saw it: the svelte new carry-on “spinner” suitcase, the twenty-four-year-old silver Armani jacket, the Victorian brooch and strapped evening shoes. The objects were all but animate in their statement about the “author performances” that usually accompany a book’s publication. I asked Frances if she was willing to read the chapters and consider doing her pen-and-ink drawings of certain objects and places for a new book I was writing about publishing. She leapt on board and surpassed herself, flying to Chapel Hill and drawing the significant buildings, visiting my archives at the Wilson Library (the star in the upper-right-hand corner of that drawing had to be stamped on her drawing paper to show she wasn’t sneaking out any papers from the archive). She took the train to Washington to draw the Lehrers’ drawing room and library, which held the party at the end of this book.

  Nancy Miller did come to see me in Woodstock after becoming my editor at Ballantine, arriving in the first hybrid car I had ever seen. Here was another professional woman at the top of her game with whom I had immediate rapport. I entrusted her with two folders of work in progress: the opening chapters of Queen of the Underworld and the first year of my apprentice journals from 1962–1969, which Rob Neufeld, the book critic of the Asheville Citizen-Times, was editing and footnoting for me. Her response to the novel was quick and passionate. She loved Emma Gant, the ferociously ambitious young reporter set loose in the Miami of 1959. She also wanted to publish the journals.

  Hawkins negotiated the four-book contract (two volumes of journals, Queen of the Underworld, and a second novel, to be called The Red Nun) with Gina Centrello, the president of Ballantine. (A year later Gina would become head of the newly merged Random House–Ballantine, Nancy Miller would move with her, and these four books would be published under the Random House imprint.)

  Queen of the Underworld (2006) did not make any bestseller lists, though it has since become the “problem child” favorite of all my works. I named its protagonist Emma Gant—the Gant after Thomas Wolfe’s voraciously ambitious Eugene Gant, the Emma after Jane Austen’s eponymous protagonist, about whom Austen said when beginning her novel: “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.”

  We meet Emma Gant as she boards the train for her Miami newspaper job the same day she graduates from journalism school. Her go-getterism was too much for some readers: “Get over yourself!” was the headline of the USA Today review. Though Emma had her champions, too. The National Public Radio critic Alan Cheuse wrote: “You would think that by this time America might have produced a dramatic and moving bildungsroman about a female writer in her formative years . . . finally we have a book that more than fills the role: Gail Godwin’s Queen of the Underworld.”

  At the start of the novel, I resolved not to have an older, mellower Emma looking back on her embarrassingly vainglorious young self who was hell-bent on making it as a top journalist, famous novelist, and femme fatale—all three as soon as possible. No, I would stay right inside young Emma and we would do our worst together. Nancy Miller stabilized me in this resolve. At one point I said, “Oh, God, maybe I should skip over Emma’s next days and take up the story after she is exiled from Miami to the sleepy Broward bureau and begins to reflect on her actions.” “No,” said Nancy, “I want to follow her minute by minute through every one of those actions.” The entire novel takes place in ten days in June 1959 in Miami. Emma’s hotel is filling with Cuban refugees fleeing Castro’s new regime. Both Emma and the city are on the cusp of change.

  My literary emboldener for Queen of the Underworld was Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years. (There was to be a second volume, but Mann did not live to write it.) Both Felix and Emma know how to beguile, and both began their careers by waiting tables. At last, in this twelfth novel, published in 2006, I was able to bring life to some of the success-hunger I had hoped to capture in the novel I had abandoned in 1958 after the Knopf scout turned down the first five pages of Windy Peaks.

  Nancy Miller had joined a growing list of Random House’s departures by the time I was in the very early stages of The Red Nun. I was assigned a new editor whose name I wasn’t familiar with. After I looked up the books on her list, I decided we wouldn’t suit each other. “Can you rescue me?” I asked John Hawkins.

  “Let me ask around over there,” he said.

  In doing so, he discovered that Jennifer Hershey, with whom I had worked on my nonfiction book Heart: A Personal Journey Through Its Myths and Meanings (2001) for Morrow, was now an editor at Random House. She read the chapters John sent her of The Red Nun and told him, “We can publish this quite well.” So we decided to finish out the contract with Random House since Jennifer would be chaperoning this remaining novel and volume two of The Making of a Writer.

  After all, she had seen me through Heart after my editor for that book was fired.

  Heart had been the brainchild of a young editor, Hamilton Cain, who had just been hired by Morrow. He pitched his idea after I had finished Evensong, and I thought it would be refreshing to try a book of nonfiction. I estimated the project would take me a year, but those turned out to be the final years of Robert’s illness and it took two years. Hamilton Cain was long gone by then, and Jennifer Hershey, who had taught him how to do a profit and loss statement for Heart, edited the book. It was published on Valentine’s Day, two months before Robert’s death
. Jennifer came to Robert’s funeral in Woodstock with John Hawkins, and this thoughtful act also counted with me in deciding to stay with Random House.

  My disappointments concerning the production of The Red Nun, aka Unfinished Desires, are told in the chapter ‘The Good Husband, the Sorrowful Mother, and the Red Nun,” but I will just add here what is obvious: that the books of authors who haven’t earned out their advances for previous books are published under a rain cloud. The publisher’s goal by then is to stop the spending, not to “throw more good money after bad,” and so there can be no ads, no marketing budget, no enthusiastic gymnastics performed by the publicity department. When I was under my rain cloud with Linda Grey and she said she could not spend any more money, John and I returned a part of my advance to be used for promotion and ads for Evensong; we also gave back the foreign rights. I hired Goldberg & McDuffie to take complete charge of the publicity for that book. I hired Camille McDuffie for Heart in 2001 and for a third time in 2006 for Random House’s publication of Queen of the Underworld and volume one of The Making of a Writer. For those two books, published simultaneously, I also paid for ads, designed by Random House, to run in the New York Times Book Review and the New Yorker. By plowing back my profits from gainful days into a new venture I felt I was behaving like any small business owner who intends to stay in business.

  Unfinished Desires was published to good reviews in December 2009, and volume 2 of The Making of a Writer came out in January 2011. It was also to receive a positive reception, but by then my standing with Random House had cratered. Jennifer Hershey had become editor in chief of the company’s Ballantine imprint.

  Since I knew there would be no ads, I decided to write a short essay that I hoped the New York Times Book Review would publish as an endpiece around the time of publication of volume 2 of Making of a Writer. I wrote about what it was like to be a writer for many years, how what you want from writing changes with age. I wrote about the style and tempo changes of your work habits, and how you look forward to using up your life’s materials “like biscuit dough, pushing the leftovers into another and another artful shape—down to the last strange little animal.” I called it “The Old Writer,” though the book review retitled it “Working on the Ending.” It was published a few weeks before volume 2 of The Making of a Writer, and in the little author slot at the bottom of the page was my small proactive “ad” announcing the forthcoming work.

  In late November 2011, John Hawkins shocked us all by dying, apparently during an afternoon nap, after a long convalescence from his back and knee surgeries. Friends and clients were dismayed: he had been planning a spring trip to Paris, the city of his youth, to celebrate his recuperation. The last conversation I had with him was on an autumn afternoon when he phoned to tell me how much he loved following an orchestral score on his lap while listening to his iPod. “Robert knew this satisfaction,” he said, then reminisced about his years training to be a lyric tenor in Paris.

  John’s memorial reception was held in early December in the imposing Masonic Hall of the Grand Lodge building on West Twenty-third Street, where John Hawkins and Associates had sixteenth-floor offices. Moses Cardona, John’s appointed successor, had put up a display of photos on a table, and here I found myself head to head with someone else gazing on a youthful self. It just happened to be an old photo of the two of us, head to head at a dinner party at his and Cynthia’s apartment in the 1980s.

  Grand Masonic Hall

  “I love it that the setting for this freemasonry among people of the book was the Grand Masonic Hall in New York on the night we were celebrating the life of my agent and confidant of forty-three years.”

  “Weren’t we cute?” he said. “Look at all our hair!”

  It was Steve Rubin, president and publisher of Henry Holt. We had not been in touch since he and Linda Grey at Bantam had lost the auction to Morrow for A Southern Family. I was surprised that Steve would even speak to me, yet we were to spend much of the evening together catching up on publishing and personal lives (we had both lost our partners) and discussing books. He now published Hilary Mantel. He told me he was going home to watch House of Cards (the English one) again on DVD, and when I got home to Woodstock I watched it again, too, and thought of Steve.

  Just before Christmas, I answered the phone. “This is a voice from the past,” said Nancy Miller, who had left Random House when I was in the middle of writing The Red Nun. She had been spun around in the great publishing maelstrom herself but recently had become the editorial director of Bloomsbury USA. She had run into Steve Rubin, who told her, “You should call Gail, she’s about to finish a book and wants a new publisher.”

  The book was Flora, my fourteenth novel, which I have given a chapter of its own because it represents a new beginning.

  “Can I read it? Can I buy it?” asked Nancy, with the playful élan I had so missed.

  Of course, Random House had first right of refusal, and they did make a good offer. Moses Cardona and I told them we wanted to start on a new page, and I received a warm note from Jennifer Hershey, who said she understood and that she would keep an eye on my backlist with them.

  This brings the dance chronicle up to date. I love it that the setting for this freemasonry among people of the book was the grand Masonic Hall in New York on the night we were celebrating the life of my agent and confidant of forty-three years.

  The Wings of the Dove

  THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A PUBLISHER

  She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in . . .

  —Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)

  Whenever I reread that strenuous novel, I always pause during its opening sentence (which goes on for a while longer) and remember Linda Grey, my publisher and editor at Ballantine Books from 1992 until 1999: six years, in all, which represents about one seventh of my years as a published writer to date.

  We met for our last dinner on a rainy January evening in 1998 in Manhattan, to celebrate my completion of Evensong, the final novel of a two-book contract with Ballantine, a part of the Random House group. It was a low-key, dutiful evening—for both of us, I think, except for the unforgettable personal story she told me.

  While the story Linda told me about herself that night was to compress itself over the years into a perfect little horror story of thwarted vocation, the rest of our dinner dissolves into a few dreary memory wisps. We had been given a large room to ourselves because of Linda’s chain smoking. We sat side by side on a banquette with the table in front of us. The overhead lighting was too strong for flattery or illusions on either side. Linda had walked from work and I had walked from my hotel. Both of us were tired and trying to cover it up.

  Last night, when I had to resort to past diaries, those regulators of misremembering, to help me substantiate this piece of writing, I was astonished how much I had forgotten of the depressing backstory leading up to that dinner.

  Linda had inherited me when she moved from Bantam Doubleday Dell to take over Ballantine. This required some good sportsmanship on her part. In her previous job as publisher and editor in chief at Bantam, she had twice been the losing bidder, with Steve Rubin, for two-book contracts for my novels. Now she had become president and publisher of Ballantine, and there I was waiting for her, along with the two books Susan Petersen had won away from her! Nevertheless, Linda told Hawkins that she would like to be my editor as well as my publisher. (“I trained to be an English teacher, you know, John.”) Except for one fumble early on, which I will describe in the next chapter, she was a meticulous and caring editor.

  In her role as my publisher, she sent me on two coast-to-coast book tours, one in the spring before the publication of The Good Husband (1994) and the second to coincide with the book’s fall publication. The first tour was to, as Linda put it, “reacquaint you with booksellers from Atlanta to San Francisco.” My last novel had come out as recently as 1991, which I didn’t feel was exactly the distant past, but maybe the publishing powers, ratcheting up everyth
ing in order to keep abreast of the spinning world, had decided that readers were getting more impatient. The second tour was to assure this book would make the bestseller list, as had my previous four novels, and earn back the advance her predecessor had paid. Linda herself accompanied me on the bookseller tour and sent her second in command with me for the publication tour. No expenses were spared. (I have yet to meet the equal of that bathroom and shower at the Peninsula Beverly Hills.) The novel got some negative reviews and did not make “the list,” though the next one, Evensong (1999) did. But by the time that second book was finished Random House had been bought by the German company Bertelsmann, and Linda wrote a formal letter to my agent saying that, alas, my two-book contract was not going to earn out and she could spend no more money on marketing Evensong.

  Rather than see my stock plummet further, my agent and I offered to give back foreign rights to Random House and forfeit some of my advance in return for ads and promotion that we would specify. I also hired my own publicity firm. Evensong was scheduled for publication the following spring. Linda believed in Evensong’s story, even though, from a marketing point of view, “religious angles can be tricky.” She believed in the characters, that is, after she had convinced me to make Margaret’s husband less “passive-­aggressive.” She commissioned a young painter to do the jacket art, which was to be a rendering of the tiny mountain town where Margaret is a pastor. (“I want the feel of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, but I want the village to have a Southern mountains look.”)

  This was how things stood with us the night of the dinner. I don’t remember us talking about Evensong, maybe we’d already said everything we needed to say over the phone and in letters and faxes, but the forgotten topics I found in the diary were as follows: