A Once and Future Novelist: Exile on Vain Street

[Author’s Note: To anyone reading this that doesn’t already know, author and Gather member Patry Francis has been composing a great series on Gather called “Diary of a First Novelist.” I mention it because 1) the series is well worth reading, and 2) I most likely will overlap with Patry on subject matter from time to time, and I just want to acknowledge her work, lest anyone think I’m trying to “cut Patry’s grass,” as we used to say, and poach in the territory she has already covered in her thoughtful and well-considered way.]

Let’s review. In my previous post, I discussed how I, at the tender age of 30, sans agent and a useful understanding of how the world of book commerce really works, had fortuitously secured a small publisher who brought out my first novel, The Florentine Papers, and optioned my newly completed second novel, Desire. I went on to confess, with what I hoped was the utmost transparency, my rash, brain-feverish, addlepated, hubristic (add your own suitably unflattering adjective here) decision—visions of Joseph Pulitzer dancing in my head—to sever this still-fresh relationship and, like a runaway newlywed, peddle my big new book to some big time publishers. (The visions of a dancing Joseph Pulitzer alone should have been enough to alert me that something was amiss.)

The punch line to this youthful adventure is that now, 16 years later, Desire will finally be published courtesy of a print-on-demand publisher and the author’s own funds.

In the summer of 1991, I withdrew my novel from my willing publisher, Gibbs Smith, and, listening exclusively to the imperfect entreaties of my inner munchkin (an arrogant know-nothing), hit the road in search of New Oz.

The first presumptuous thing I did in the still-hopeful stage of this doomed odyssey was call in a favor. A dozen years before, while attending the University of Pittsburgh, I had studied under and made the acquaintance of the novelist Donald Harington. A protégé of William Styron and a mentor to John Irving, Harington is a prolific American novelist whose body of work has been tragically under-read and underappreciated.

Harington had been kind to me, extremely receptive to my class work, and endlessly encouraging. (My brief tutelage under him warrants its own essay at some point.) When my publicist at Gibbs Smith asked me if I knew any authors who might be willing to read The Florentine Papers to provide “advance praise” for the jacket copy, Donald Harington was the first name I gave him. A dozen years had passed since we’d had any contact, but much to my amazement, Harington remembered me, readily agreed, and provided an enthusiastic and flattering book jacket endorsement.

Far more flattering, in hindsight, than the work deserved. But here’s something that one learns as one matures into this business. Writing fiction is hard, and making a living from writing fiction is unfathomably harder if not more or less impossible in this day and age. One comes to realize fairly quickly, when one’s product has been nominally accepted and distributed to the wider world, that writing is not a contest. We’re not in competition with our mentors or contemporaries. How could we be? We’re all trying to accomplish the same thing—to write good books and find readers who will enjoy them—and we each have a responsibility as part of this earnest fraternity to promote and encourage one another to the extent our conscience allows. At the time, Harington’s laudatory words merely pleased and flattered me. But I suspect that, given my puerile self-regard at the time, in some part of my brain I also figured I was deserving.

Still in debt to his generosity, I nevertheless took the occasion to draw on it once more. I wrote Harington a letter explaining my current situation and what I was embarking on. He was supportive, encouraging as always, and provided me with an introduction to a senior editor at, as they were known at the time, Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich.

Could it be this simple?

*

I had one upcoming reading left slated for later in the year, a new authors night at a local bar, sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh English department. An instructor there had heard my name through some channel and invited me to read. (Because I was an alumnus, the university bookstore manager had featured my novel in their front window that spring and summer; the kindness of local strangers was an ongoing surprise and delight to me.) I intended to use the reading to debut Desire, and hoped to hear something encouraging from HB&J soon in order to announce its impending publication.

A local arts education institution, the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, had hosted a reading for me in the spring, and following that, they approached me about developing a creative writing course for their adult arts curriculum. They wanted to add language arts to their offerings, and my vanity would not permit me to decline. Fall was not far off, and I had begun preparing my creative writing course with ever-increasing anxiety—I had no experience teaching anything to anyone.

But a month had passed since I’d sent off Desire; I expected to hear from HB&J any day now and was excited over the prospects. It had been a whirlwind year so far; so many things happening, all of it involving writing, authorship, fiction.

Could it be this simple? 

No, of course not. I had, once again, gotten lucky, but was fast approaching the end of the line as far as luck went. Back in 1991, a situation still persisted in the publishing world that in just a few short years would be gone forever. That is, it was still possible (not likely, but possible) to find an editor willing to read an unsolicited manuscript that wasn’t first vetted by an agent. But of course that hadn’t even transpired in my case. I had drawn on the generosity of a known and respected novelist to have that soon-to-be-forever-locked window of opportunity opened a crack, and I crammed my doorstop of a novel in without delay—all 800-plus dot-matrix printed pages.

And HB&J, perhaps from the sheer weight and audacity of the intrusion, politely passed. What? As amusing as it sounds, and embarrassing as it is to say, I was truly shocked. Weren’t senior editors supposed to be discerning?

Meanwhile, the brief tide of personal and professional activity surrounding the publication of The Florentine Papers had abruptly ebbed. I’d done all the local interviews and gotten all the local press I was going to get. Reviews had ceased trickling in. Sales had topped out at about 2,300 give or take, and Gibbs Smith was receiving no more orders.

Desire, in all its heft, was back on my desk, a monster waiting for its master to apply the proper amount of inspired voltage to bring it creaking, stiff-legged, to literary life. But at the moment, I was overwhelmed with the demands of my writing course, and the amount of reading and writing it required of me (mostly because of how I’d moronically structured it). I’ll get this under control, I thought.

One day, as winter approached, I received the new holiday catalog from Daedalus Books, one of my favorite discount book companies. Flipping through the fiction pages, I saw my novel, The Florentine Papers. I had been remaindered. TFP’s last weak blip on the book world’s radar.

*

I spent the next three years doing the heavy lifting of trying to find a publisher for my manuscript, spending many hours querying, printing, copying, posting letters and synopses and—only once or twice—advance chapters. If that window for the unrepresented writer remained opened anywhere, with anyone, I couldn’t find it.

Sometime in the formative years of my authorship fantasies, though I cannot say how or why, I had acquired the notion that there was a certain righteousness in representing oneself. It probably had something to do with coming of age in those halcyon post-War days of American fiction, not only reading the writers who I imagined as my precursors, but also reading about them: Truman Capote, still a teenager, getting his first acceptances for two stories in the mail on the very same day; Gore Vidal writing his first published novel, Williwaw, at the age of 19 and publishing it at 21. And who wouldn’t want to have a career like John Updike’s? Getting a job writing casuals for The New Yorker in his early twenties—his boyhood dream and the only job he ever held before shortly leaving to write novels, poems, stories, and criticism full time, keeping his own counsel, bringing out a title a year more or less, all under the steadfast Alfred A. Knopf imprint, all set in his beloved Janson typeface.

There seemed something more dignified and noble about conducting one’s career in this fashion, something more… well, literary: being in the business of literature but not of it, of remaining somewhat aloof or above the scrabbling fray of commerce. I’d make my own arrangements; I’d conduct my own business. For whatever reason, this struck me as a way of making my career more completely and genuinely mine.

Well, guess what? went the voice in my head, You were conducting your career in this fashion, and with the very first important decision you had to make, you made a bad one. You fled your publisher. Get help. 

I would have to find representation. I would have to take what seemed to me another step backward and find an agent.

Next: Next Stop, Palookaville.