A Likely Story

Monday, March 21st

Disaster! Jack Rosenfarb QUIT this morning!

This is the worst thing that can happen in the publishing industry, bar none. It is worse than a bad dust jacket or a low ad budget or even another book on the same subject coming out two months ahead. It is much worse than a libel suit or a Publishers Weekly slam or a paperback auction to which nobody comes.

Here’s the problem. Your average publishing company is the last existing model of the feudal system at (semi)work. Every department is its own fiefdom, jealous of its windows and its telephones and its supplies of paper clips. No one is in overall charge, no one. Publishers themselves have nothing whatsoever to do with books — would you expect Mr. Standard to hang out with his toilets? — and what the hell do employees care?

Publishing is the only industry I can think of where most of the employees spend most of their time stating with great self-assurance that they don’t know how to do their jobs. “I don’t know how to sell this,” they complain, frowning as though it’s your fault. “I don’t know how to package this. I don’t know what the market is for this book. I don’t know how we’re going to draw attention to this.” In most other occupations, people try to hide their incompetence; only in publishing is it flaunted as though it were the chief qualification for, the job.

Out of the thousands of people in an entire huge publishing empire, the only one who cares at all about your book is the editor who bought it. He spent the company’s money, he made a commitment, and his ongoing reputation — within the firm and within the industry — depends for the moment on your book. When the flacks in publicity fail to tell the difference between the “Today” show and WBAB, Babylon, Long Island, it is the editor who strolls down the hall and chats with the nitwit there. When the art department gives you a jacket that would have looked tired on a Literary Guild selection in 1953, it is the editor who gently suggests that maybe somebody other than the associate art director’s roommate might be the best illustrator in this case. When the salesmen scratch their heads and say, “I dunno how to pitch this book. What is it, anyway?” it is the editor who explains what the goddam book is, in words clear enough for each salesman to deliver (as though his very own) to book dealers across this mighty land. When the accountant behind the publisher’s desk decides four thousand back orders aren’t enough to suggest a second printing might be in order, it is the editor who crawls across the Persian rug and says, “Please, Murray, please.”

No, the writer cannot do this for himself. Who in the publishing company will listen to a writer? The writer can be expected to be emotional and non-businesslike about this child of his; only the editor can be accepted as a hardheaded professional.

When the editor who bought the book leaves the company before the book is published, the winds blow very cold. In the trade, such a book is called an “orphan,” and the word barely suggests the Dickensian — nay, the Hogarthian — horrors that await such a creature. Who shall defend these pitiful pages? Who shall raise this tattered banner from the Out basket? No one.

A new editor is “assigned” to the book, the way homework is assigned to reluctant schoolchildren, and the futility is evident in the word itself. What commitment has this assigned editor in this book? None. How much time and thought will he divert to it from the books he chose for the company to publish? Guess.

My gravedigger hasn’t been assigned yet. Jack Rosenfarb is to stay on for two more weeks, tidying up his affairs. He assures me he’s very excited about the new job that has been offered him by the pay-TV company. May he rot in hell.

And things had been going so well. Jim Davis contributed a drawing of Garfield in a Santa suit that’s so charming and cynical at the same time that I’ve almost lost my hatred for that cat, and Gahan Wilson’s drawing of a Christmas tree decorated with any number of tiny hanged men, women and children gave me pause at first, but the more I look at it the more I like it. (I considered asking him to redo it in color, but on second thought that might be dangerous.)

The writers haven’t been lax, either. Truman Capote came through with a “Christmas Eve on Death Row” that is touching and strong and a million miles above the staleness of the subject. Arthur C. Clarke sent along a wonderful story about another Christ being born to another species in another galaxy, and John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a reminiscence of a childhood Christmas in Canada that made me smile all day after I read it. Jerzy Kosinski’s fantasy about a couple of children living inside a kaleidoscope at the North Pole is maybe a touch too cute, but it looks as though he wrote it all himself, and I’m taking it. I don’t know quite what to think about Kurt Vonnegut’s submarine story, “Captain Nemo’s Christmas,” and just last Friday I sent it to Jack Rosenfarb for his opinion. Now, of course, he can take his opinion and shove it.

I have also received several polite turndowns, from (or from the secretaries oft Helen Gurley Brown and Annie Dillard and Gerald Ford and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Joan Rivers and Isaac Bashevis Singer (“It is not my subject; I’m sorry”) and Jonathan Schell and Jamie Wyeth. The “How much?” letter has been received from Ann Beattie. E. L. Doctorow, Richard Nixon, Tom Wolfe, John Simon and Calvin Trillin. A brief typed note from Mickey Spillane said, “You gotta be kiddin.” I wrote him that indeed I was not.

Isaac Asimov has sent me another article, this one on the calendar dating of Christmas. I’d already told him I was taking the aerodynamics-of-the-sleigh piece, so I don’t know why he sent another, but he did; anyway, I liked the first one better, so I sent the calendar piece back.

In the middle of all this, Pia Zadora’s agent phoned to say his client might be persuaded either (a) to give me a Christmas-theme photo spread, or (b) to contribute a Christmas song she’d written. I said I’d take it up with the staff.

As winter fades, it’s becoming harder and harder to think about Christmas. Here it is the end of March, little round pregnant buds protrude from every branch, there’s a smell of mud and mildew in the air, spring is on the way, and in the apartment hallway Bryan and Joshua simultaneously play baseball and soccer. The sight of a pair of boys dressed in Mets caps and first baseman’s mitts kicking a soccer ball back and forth is rather too heartwarming and Norman Rockwell for somebody who’s spending all his waking hours with Christmas anyway, but there they are.

On the other hand, it is nice the way those two boys get along. My Bryan is nine and Ginger’s Joshua is ten, and I think maybe they have the best alliance of any of the teams involved in this over-extended family. As is so often the case, their relationship started when they went to bed together. Ginger and I don’t have a lot of extra space in this apartment, so whenever my kids stay over Bryan bunks in with Joshua. (Eleven-year-old Jennifer, who does not hang out with eight-year-old Gretchen, sleeps on blankets on the floor in Gretchen’s room on those occasions.) The boys early discovered a mutual interest in sports and truly rotten television reruns, and have been fast friends ever since. I think I may have to take them to the Mets opener.

But what’s going to happen to The Christmas Book? With Asimov and Capote and Kosinski and Rooney and Vonnegut and Clarke and Galbraith and Davis and Wilson, I’ve already got name-strength; they can’t let the book languish now, can they?

Sure they can.

But they’ve got so much money committed.

Sure they can.

But it’s such a great idea.

Sure they can.

But I’m working so hard.

Sure they can.

But it’s their one best hope for a Christmas book.

Sure they can.

Sure they can.