A Once and Future Novelist: Next Stop, Palookaville

“A Once and Future Novelist” series continues, wherein, after much time and life, the author grows dim while the writer vanishes.

“No doubt a certain number of those trained by our schools are great painters, poets, playwrights, performers. If they also have stamina, let them attempt a professional career. They will face a life of solitary toil and repeated disappointment, of problematic reward and fitful success. A few of them will eventually achieve affluence and world renown. In colleges and art schools the young should be taught what ‘the glorious life of art’ is really like. It has not changed in 500 years; it fills the biographies on our shelves. It is a test of endurance, willpower, and maniacal faith in oneself.”

                                                            —Jacques Barzun

[Author’s Apology: At the risk of alienating new readers—which would otherwise represent a mortal sin in a writer’s theology, though perhaps it’s only a venal one when the serialization takes place online—I prefer not to begin with a recap of events covered in the previous two installments, and hope that those coming upon this for the first time will find sufficient reason to review the earlier pieces.]

      After three unsuccessful years of representing myself, which involved really nothing more than querying practically all large and quite a few mid-size publishing houses on my own behalf, I came to the somewhat dispiriting conclusion that I would have to change my strategy and find an agent.

      One of the many things that amuses me about that youthful time was my failure to recognize what now seems to me like a startling contradiction between what I’d expected to achieve in the world of literature and the manner in which I attempted to achieve it. In hindsight, it appears to be an unacknowledged conflict between the romantic and the idealist.

      For instance, the fledging writer’s romantic notion of the future most certainly included “affluence and world renown.” In other words, celebrity, but in its most tasteful, literary form; a steady trek up Olympus, where the glorious life of art’s solitary toil was spelled with the occasional honors, perquisites, and a certain amount of fame in certain kinds of circles.

      At the same time, this idealistic quirk about remaining aloof to some of the commercial conventions of writing and publishing, of representing myself, of doing it “my way” (that, admittedly, was really a matter of making things up as I went along), was completely antithetical to attaining any kind of literary celebrity. How to expect such emoluments and marketplace distinctions without employing professionals, the very people whose job it is to achieve such things for a creative artist?

      Regarding the notions of fame, I must say in my own defense that pursuit of it had never, ever been my motivation for writing, not even distantly. There are far easier and shorter paths to that. Novels are an entertainment medium, however, and I was not insensible to the possibility, however slim, of a windfall somewhere along the way. I can only imagine that I believed, on some level, that the work itself would somehow do the selling, the promoting, the distinction-making.

      But my Thoreauian march to some cockamamie inner drumbeat had to end. I wasn’t a literary agent, I certainly couldn’t do the job of one (nor had I the temperament for it; I discovered that selling myself was a painful activity), and why should I spend so much of my writing time pounding on doors that were effectively closed to me—writing time that, due to a variety of evolving changes in my personal life, was getting harder to come by?

      At this point, it wasn’t the prospect of having an agent that troubled me, it was the process and effort of acquiring one. I had already started a new book, a novel called Phoenix. More than three years had passed since the publication of The Florentine Papers. While I had by no means lost my affection and hopes for Desire, it had nevertheless moved on into its “administrative” phase, in my mind. I wanted it out. I wanted it off my desk. I wanted someone, somewhere, to be reading it. At the same time, I still didn’t regret my decision to leave my publisher. The current state of affairs seemed like a bothersome but not insurmountable setback.

*

      In my first or second batch of queries, I received an encouraging response from an author’s rep at John Hawkins & Associates in New York. He wanted to read The Florentine Papers so I sent him a copy, though I felt somewhat squeamish about it. I had written TFP ten years before. By now, I was slightly embarrassed of my acquaintance with that writer: his gall, his excesses, his ham-fisted composing—I felt some ambivalence about my complicity in all that.

      But the rep must have found a glimmer of something salvageable, for two weeks later, I received another missive complimenting me on TFP and requesting the complete manuscript of Desire. Oboy, oboy… I considered going to New York myself, armed with manuscript and lawn chair, to deliver it personally and then camp outside their offices to wait for an answer.

      Desire, as I’ve mentioned, is a somewhat larger-than-average novel. (It doesn’t tip the scales, but its 800 manuscript pages will probably translate to about 450 pages in print.) I expected to hear nothing within the first three, four weeks. In fact, I preferred to hear nothing during that time. Any response arriving sooner than a month meant that they’d only had to read a hundred pages or so before deciding against me. As far as I was concerned, the longer it took, the better.

      Week seven, had I to endure it, no doubt would have been the “anger” week. (The stages of waiting to hear about a piece of submitted writing does slightly resemble the Kübler-Ross model for dealing with tragedy.) But one spring afternoon, shuffling the day’s clutch of mail with growing disappointment, the telephone rang.  It was the rep from John Hawkins.

      “Look,” he said, “I really liked The Florentine Papers, but I really love this book, Desire.”

      “That’s great,” I said.

      “Really. In fact, I’d have to say that I’m something of a fan of yours now. I think it’s a super work.”

      “Wow,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”

      “Here’s the thing,” he continued. “Even though you’ve already published a novel, because it was with a small publisher, as far as the larger publishing houses we deal with go, you’re still an unknown author. You’re a first-time novelist as far as they’re concerned.”

      “I see.”

      “It’s going to be difficult to sell a book like this from a first-time novelist. It’s long and complex.”

      “Yeah, well… I could cut it down, maybe. I don’t know by how much, but I could try.”

      “No,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t know what you could possibly cut. It’s all of a piece. It’s long, but it’s tight, and I can’t think of anything I read in there that didn’t belong. It all fits together.” (It strikes me now, at this very moment of writing, that his comments may be the nicest thing I ever hear about the book.)

      “Okay. Well, I’m glad that you think that but… so, what do—” I paused, wondering if I should say “I” or “we”. “What do we do?”

      “Do you have anything else?”

      “Anything else? Another novel?”

      “Yeah.”

      I told him about Phoenix. I'd been working on it for about year, but had only written 100 pages to that point; I’d had some recent issues that were making it difficult to find writing time, and it was not as far along after a year as it otherwise might have been.

      “But it’s a lot different from Desire,” I said. “I mean, I consider it so. More mainstream, I think. All set in the present day. Won’t be as long. At least, that’s my intent, to keep it modest in length.”

      “That sounds great,” he said. “Send it to me. I’ll get back to you.”

      I sent along the hundred or so draft pages, anxious to hear what would come of it all. While the rep’s interest was unquestionably gratifying (why would he say that he’d become a “fan” of mine if he didn’t intend to take me on), I was a bit puzzled over how matters would proceed from this point.

      He called me again a little over a week later.

      “This is good,” he said. “The new novel, it’s good stuff, and I think I can definitely sell this. It’s more mainstream, like you said.”

      That was good news, but the new novel was far from done.

      “This is what we need to do,” he said. “You need to finish this book. Finish this novel, and I can approach some publishers about getting you a deal. We’d rather do a deal, anyway, than just sell a single novel. What we’ll do, probably, is negotiate a three-book deal. That way, we’ll get Phoenix published, and then we can publish Desire, and then, I think, do a re-issue of The Florentine Papers.”

      I liked the sound of it all: a “three-book deal.” It had a solidity to it, a professional seriousness, not to mention longevity.

      All I had to do to get my novel published was write another one.

*

      I spent the next eighteen months adding another grueling hundred pages to the new novel, reaching approximately the halfway point—grueling not because I found the writing difficult but because growing responsibilities and obligations left me with less and less time to write.

      And then I stopped.

      Some things happened. A riptide of personal circumstances and misfortunes dragged me wildly far from the world I had been quietly occupying up to that point. Enormous changes with unexpected consequences. Upheaval. Life exacting its vicissitudes.

      In the midst of all this, I considered writing to be the one reliably solid, immutable part of myself, the thing that would sustain me through these unbidden but inexorable sea-changes: a refuge where I could rest, catch my breath, and gain some perspective on the long journey back to shore.

      But it wasn’t. Or, at least, it didn’t work that way for me. Trying to maintain the steady progress I had made up to that time was more like the caught swimmer’s impulse to fight directly against that current. The more I fought the pull, the farther it dragged me away.

      Sorry for the vagueness and abstraction, but the specific circumstances are not important to the story. In what I can only ascribe to the lingering effects of immaturity and perhaps, still, remnants of arrogance, I lost my way precisely because I thought I would never lose my way. Often it seems that moment one begins to need something more than ever is the moment that something begins to drift beyond one’s grasp.

      And we’ve beaten the sea metaphor quite to death.

*

      During the long process of getting my life back in order, which encompassed several years, I wrote very little. Even personal correspondence, something at which I had been ridiculously prolific for a couple decades, fell off precipitously.

      I added to the new novel in dribs and drabs, but often weeks would go by between opportunities to sit down and compose. And those times were often consumed with reacquainting myself with the work, struggling to get back into its flow: a lot of throat-clearing activities, but no real momentum re-established. I felt like I had to learn to write all over again. No, it was something more. I felt like I had to learn to write like me all over again.

      And I didn’t know exactly how to do that. I wasn’t blocked so much as lost. I read back over so many of the things I’d written before life slewed out of control, and puzzled over how I actually managed to compose what I had. It wasn’t the words or the language so much as the thought—my thought—sinuous and streaming and uncoiling out on the page in a way that I could only envy. Everything now seemed exhaustingly chaotic.

*

      You just don’t know what life will deal you or how you’ll respond. One day you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and the next day you’re walking around with a peg leg and a parrot.

      I’d lost that “maniacal faith in oneself,” and more or less stopped writing. Friends, acquaintances, and family regularly asked me about it: “Are you still writing? Are you working on a book?” And I always said “Yes, sure, I’m always writing something. Things are coming along.” It wasn’t true, but it was easier than trying to explain.

      So many years had passed since I’d had the last phone conversation with the John Hawkins Agency that it was as if it had never happened. But the notion planted by that whole episode, that I would have to write another book in order to publish the one that I’d already written, had assumed a lapidary quality. Back then, I was just an unknown writer; these days, I was a former one. No one would be willing to take a chance on that, and who could blame them?