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Confessions of a reluctant publisher.

Article Excerpt
My first publishing interview was with the editor of a skin magazine. I got the man's name from my stepfather, from whom I had been estranged for ten years; he had swiped my mother's little insurance brokerage and I remembered, from summer work there, that he had a few clients with the words publisher or publication in their corporate name. I knew no one else who had any connection to that world. The editor's office walls were papered with overlapping photographs of women who lacked clothes and preferred contortionist positions. The man himself weighed at least four hundred pounds, had thin hair greased and flat against his skull, and dressed like a thrift shop with an unsnugged tie; as I entered, he deftly putted a golf ball thirty feet across his office rug and into a device shaped like a vagina.

I thought of my four infant children and all the unpaid bills and dunning threats, and of Austin Warren, the great ascetic scholar under whom I had written my doctoral dissertation on an obscure New England poet who believed that his poems had been dictated to him by the Holy Spirit. So committed was Jones Very to this belief that when R. W. Emerson--who edited the first collection of Very's poems--wanted to change a letter here, a comma there, Very refused to let him do so. The poems were not his to change. This led the great dry Transcendentalist to utter one of his rare witticisms: "Cannot the Spirit parse and spell?" Since my dissertation was an edition of Very's poems, I had wrestled for many months with the same errant dictation from the Divine Afflatus.

I was thirty-two, I had been a full-time professor of English at Hunter College for three years, starting at $100 per week, and I needed a second job. I was mad for literature and lit by the prospect of sharing my passion with the young for the rest of my life; I did not consider giving up the classroom--nor did I for twenty-odd more years. But I was desperate. Jones Very might think that "The hand and foot that stir not, they shall find / Sooner than all the rightful place to go," but I needed a job sooner than that and a more aggressive approach to salvation. But the skin route just seemed too bumpy for me. I could not do it. Randomly, I decided that regular trade-book publishing--if I could squeeze open a door--was probably a wiser compromise.

I had no book or editing experience, and no knowledge of who published what, so I simply made a list of 103 book publishers in the Hunter College library and wrote to them all. Only Herbert Michelman, editor-in-chief at Crown Publishers, responded. He told me I could start the next day on a two-week trial. On the third Wednesday, a few days beyond the trial period, I met him in the men's room, asked if I were supposed to stay on, he nodded, and I did, for sixteen years.

The first thing I noted about this book publishing was that Rebel Rookie and The Negligent Doctor were not Melville. I felt like an outsider then and still had a touch of that feeling when I left the publishing world. Though I have a degree from the Wharton School, I am not a natural businessman; my shape shift to literature, and ten years of obsessive reading, may have fixed that. And my critical affections lie with older work; frankly, I never grew comfortable with that odd tug between author and editor, across the range of talent. At Crown I was assigned a manuscript by a famous general's son who would not change one of a hundred lines like his unforgettable "And then they began the foreplay." He was the supreme example of absolute artistic integrity without a trace of talent, almost as if he (like Jones Very) believed someone else had dictated the book.

Crown was a freewheeling arena and I tried to make a place for myself in it, and within the industry, rewriting a lot of the mediocre books that came their way in those days, trying to learn this new trade, find worthwhile books from the unsolicited piles and from agents, edit with the hand of Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, save authors from themselves and maximize their strengths and find the best way of bringing them into the world; I also wanted a list all mine and chose the little specialized world of fly-fishing, about which I was passionate. Every afternoon at 5:10, so I could get to my 5:40 class, I'd race up to Hunter, though once a term, as if I was in a Kafka parable, the Lexington Avenue subway skipped Sixty-eighth and Seventy-seventh streets and ended on Eighty-sixth, and my classroom would be empty by the time I got there. I held both jobs full time for sixteen years,...

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