Book Case Page 3

  While I stayed silent, she framed a qualification. “But you should also know that Bryce’s dream is nonsense. If you don’t want to see him hurt, you should not encourage him to indulge his fantasies. And if you truly care about him, you’ll keep me apprised of what you’re up to. Otherwise, you may end up doing more harm than good.”

  With her final caution, Margaret left the room. A moment later the door opened once again. Bryce Chatterton walked to the chair his wife had vacated and sank to a comfortable slant, hands locked behind the sandy hair that crossed his head in tangled wisps, loafers and argyles perched like tropical birds on the corner of his desk. According to his wife, this was Periwinkle’s final hour but Bryce looked less like the captain of a sinking ship than an eager mariner who’d just sighted a new world.

  “Another legend launched,” he said. “I feel like Max Perkins must have felt the day he brought out Thomas Wolfe.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “I’m kidding,” he said when he saw my look, which let me get comfortable as well—I’m uneasy with people who take themselves too seriously, which means I’m uneasy a lot these days. I sank to the chair across from him, crossed my legs, and took the measure of my old friend, to see what time and his wife had done to him.

  As they had been a dozen years before, Bryce’s clothes were woolly and professorial, but now they were designed by Ralph Lauren, not assembled from a thrift shop. His body was still rotund and soft, less dissipated than untended, more bearish than porcine. Because his face was amply fleshed, it was sufficiently unmanageable to betray every nuance of his emotions, which had previously been extravagant but now seemed languid and serene. From my inventory, I was prepared to conclude that, more than most people I knew, Bryce Chatterton had thrived during the decade just past. But just as I was awarding him this unspoken accolade, his expression sagged toward melancholy.

  As though I’d just admired it, he gestured angrily at the clutter. “It’s not as impressive as it looks. By the time a manuscript winds up here, it’s already been rejected by every publisher worthy of the name.”

  “I doubt it,” I said, just to be saying something.

  “Hell, Marsh, I don’t publish books, I publish authors. If a manuscript is even remotely promising, I call the writer in to lunch. If I like him—or, more precisely, if I want him to like me—I publish. If not, I don’t. Behind the façade, essentially I’m a welfare program. I lavish Margaret’s money on souls who have less claim to her bounty than the homeless wretches who camp in Golden Gate Park or the Civic Center Plaza.” Bryce groaned heavily in an effort to cast off his sudden depression. “It was a nice party, anyway; Matilda was thrilled. Did you meet anyone interesting?”

  I shrugged. “Colt Harrison.”

  Bryce shook his head. “The eminent critic for the Chronicle.” The encomium was insincere. “I’m surprised he showed—usually Colt only writes up a collection after it’s been reviewed in American Poetry, so he’ll know what he thinks about it.” Bryce worked with the thought, then softened. “Poor Colt. He has his place; the problem is, it’s on a soap box, not on the book page. He has no concept of the difference between good verse and bad and lacks the vocabulary to articulate it if he did. All you need to do to get a favorable mention from Colt is parrot his politics—Colt doesn’t want to read about the world that is, he wants to read about the world that he thinks ought to be. Unfortunately, his politics are somewhere in the shadow of George Will’s. It’s the shame of my profession that such politics have become de rigueur.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “If literature couldn’t put a stop to a nincompoop like Reagan, or expose the cruelty and corruption of the Visigoths who worshipped him, then what the hell can it do?”

  “I think that’s a job for journalism, not literature.”

  “Both, Marsh, both. And both have failed us miserably.”

  Bryce pondered his adjudication for another moment, then reached into his desk, pulled out a cigar, and lit it, as if shrouding himself in toxic gases would shield him from the failings he had just described. When he offered me one, I shook my head.

  “What were you talking with Margaret about?” he asked once his stogie was merrily befouling the room.

  “Literature, of course. She asked if I’d read the new Danielle Steel; I asked if she’d seen the latest Tom Clancy.”

  Bryce ignored the burlesque. “She was complaining about money, I’ll bet,” he speculated glumly.

  “Maybe a tad.”

  He closed his eyes. “She’s been saying she’s going to close down Periwinkle. It would serve me right, of course—I’ve treated her more like an underwriter than a spouse for years. Sometimes I think she suspects I’m seeing another woman, even though the only women in my life are those up there.”

  His finger anointed the books on the shelves that surrounded him, lingering long enough to suggest the relationship was indeed lascivious. As if buoyed by the possibility, his eyes flipped open and his expression brightened. “But if you come through for me, Marsh old buddy, Margaret’s funk won’t matter.”

  “Which brings us to why I’m still tasting the Sunday Punch.”

  Bryce nodded. “I wanted you to come to the party so I could give you a feel for why I care about all this so much. Gridlock may be silly—hell, all my books may be silly—but the impulse behind them isn’t silly. The desire to express yourself in the written word, to arrange the language in ways it’s never been deployed, to perpetuate what you’ve learned about life—that’s the best use of our brain there is.”

  “Literature’s fallen out of favor, hasn’t it? People seem more interested in facts these days.”

  Bryce wrinkled his nose. “What they want is consolation and expiation, and that’s all most of the so-called fact books give them. People don’t avoid fiction—good fiction—because it’s false, they avoid it because it’s all too true. A great novel is a mirror that shows us who we are; unfortunately, these days that’s not something many people want to know.”

  Bryce’s face reddened with ardor. “The truly great lives are fictional lives, Marsh: Hamlet, Anna Karenina, Silas Marner, Ahab—even Jesus. The Bible is the best-selling novel of all time, after all. The little monk in Lyon who chose which gospels to include in the New Testament was the world’s first great editor.”

  “That burst of blasphemy could get you tarred and feathered in certain states of the union.”

  “You know what I mean, Marsh. These are the lives that illuminate; these are the lives that suggest who we should aspire to be; these are the truest stories.” Bryce paused, then cooled to a simmer. “It’s stunning how many people want to write, you know. After TV has stolen the time we used to devote to reading, and movies have made us bored by anything but group sex and spatter murders, and politicians have so emasculated the language its glories have become mundane, people still want to write novels and stories and poems. How many unsolicited manuscripts do you think I get over the transom each year?”

  I shrugged. “A hundred?”

  “Five times that. And a big house like Random gets maybe five thousand. None of which they’ll publish. Which leaves a lot of left-overs for people like me.” Bryce stopped bending a paper clip into the shape of a triangle and looked at me earnestly. “I really don’t want to lose Periwinkle, Marsh. You’ve got to help me keep it.”

  “I’d like to,” I said honestly. “Maybe it’s time for you to tell me how.”

  Bryce nodded, then reached into his jacket pocket, took out a key, and unlocked the bottom left drawer of his desk. When he straightened he was cradling a stack of paper in his hands, a ream of it at least, gazing on it as fondly as if it were his newborn offspring. “This is the Holy Grail for a man like me, Marsh. At least I hope it is.”

  “What is it?”

  “A novel. A good one, maybe even a great one.”

  Behind his glasses, Bryce’s eyes slipped away to the vision of a life of fame and fortune and, since it
was Bryce, of the satisfactions that come with the belief that one has added to the small store of truth in the world.

  “I still don’t understand,” I said finally. “What is it you want me to do with it?”

  The question tugged him back to the world of schemes and plots, the world of debts and obligations—the world in which I made my living. “I want you to read it.”

  I laughed. “I have to tell you there aren’t a lot of people who buy books based on what I have to say about them. In fact, every time I lend a book I’ve liked to someone, they invariably hate it. And forget to give it back.”

  Bryce waved me off. “There are lots of small presses like mine in the Bay Area, Marsh. Dozens. Most of us run on a shoestring, and most of us don’t survive more than a few years—the mortality rate for small publishing houses is worse than it is for health clubs. We’re competitive with and jealous of each other, but we have one thing in common—we want to make a splash, to make both a reputation and a profit by publishing more and more books by better and better authors. We not only want our lists reviewed in The New Yorker and The New York Times, we want to discover the next John Irving and Amy Tan.”

  I enjoyed his extravagance. “Do these dreams ever come true?”

  Bryce’s eyes glowed like the neon blossoms in the sign outside. “Amazingly enough, occasionally they do. The most recent example is right over in Berkeley. For years the North Point Press was a lot like Periwinkle, publishing mostly stuff by friends and scholars. Then wham. They do Evan Connell’s book on General Custer and the memoirs of a hitherto unknown adventuress named Beryl Markham, and all of a sudden they’re big-time. Hundreds of thousands of copies sold. Expensive copies—hardcover and trade paper copies.”

  Bryce paused for breath, then regarded the loaf of papers in his hand with something close to awe. “The reason I asked you to stop by tonight is, I’m convinced this could make it possible for Periwinkle to do the same.” He fondled the manuscript another moment, then thrust it toward me like an alm.

  I hesitated, because Bryce’s fervor had made me uncertain I was worthy of its custody, because his wife’s caution had made me leery. But when Bryce didn’t withdraw the offer, I took the pile of paper from his hands and put it in my lap. Bound with twine and rubber bands, it was weighty and oddly soft.

  I read the title—Homage to Hammurabi—then looked at Bryce. “I still don’t understand what you want me to do with it.”

  “That’s easy.” Bryce’s smile was tinged with a desperation I had seen most recently in the eyes of his wife. “First, I want you to read it. And then I want you to find out who wrote the goddamned thing.”

  They are called the children of privilege—by this apparently is meant that they bear the burdensome privilege of wealth. They came to me possessing the grossest opulence along with perspectives more limited than an urchin’s. Never nudged beyond the narrow focus of their time and class, most were satisfied to remain as secure and stunted as the day they arrived at St. Stephen’s. But for the few who were eager and able to sample the fullness of the world in which they lived, particularly the inner world of people far different from themselves, it was my pleasure—indeed, it was the highest achievement of my life—to open doors.

  My tools were books—Sometimes a Great Notion, Manchild in the Promised Land, The Winter People, them. And for the handful ready to face the full foulness of the truth, I offered Child of God, Last Exit to Brooklyn, A Garden of Sand.

  Some were never the same thereafter.

  Which was of course my purpose.

  Homage to Hammurabi, p. 47

  3

  By the time I fully appreciated what Bryce Chatterton was asking me to do, there was a smile on his face as broad as his belly.

  “You’re telling me you’ve got the greatest thing since Gone With the Wind on your hands,” I said, still feeling for the scope of my undertaking, “but you don’t know who wrote it?”

  Bryce clasped his hands in front of him. “That’s right.”

  “In other words, you’ve got the book but you don’t have a contract to publish it.”

  “Right again.”

  “How did you get it? Through the mail?”

  Bryce shook his head. “It just showed up one day. Bound just like it is now—with twine, not even a wrapper around it.”

  “When?”

  “About a month ago. Someone evidently came in when the receptionist was off to the ladies’ room and left it on her desk. For all I know, twenty other publishers got copies the same day. That’s one of the reasons I want you to get on this right away.”

  Bryce leaned forward in his chair. The freckles at play above his brow seemed to contract into a solid sphere. “I know I’ve let things slide between us, Marsh. I know I should have kept in touch more than I have, and that it’s shitty to call you only when I need help. But …” His excuse was encompassed in the slow cycle of a sigh. “I’m just trying to say that I’ll understand if you don’t want to get mixed up in this.”

  Bryce was right—he should have kept in touch—but, paradoxically, the token nature of our recent contacts made it easier for me to work for him. As I told his wife, I hate to mix business with friendship, but whatever Bryce and I were now, it spawned fewer conflicting loyalties than that.

  I looked at the manuscript, then rubbed the top sheet between my fingers. “This doesn’t feel like a photocopy; I think this is the original.”

  Bryce seemed relieved at my shift to a professional perspective. “I think so, too.”

  “Which means you may be the only one who has it.”

  “Maybe’s not good enough, Marsh. I’ve got to have the exclusive right to publish the book in this country.”

  “And the author has to have some money.”

  The reminder of the reciprocity of contracts seemed jarring to him. “Yes. Of course.”

  “How much?”

  Bryce fidgeted, more uneasy than uncertain. “What do you mean?”

  “How much would you pay to publish Homage to Hammurabi if the author walked in the door right now?”

  Bryce plucked a letter opener off the edge of his desk and wielded it so menacingly I was glad I wasn’t a fledgling novelist trying to negotiate a deal with him. “If Periwinkle was the only house in the game,” he speculated finally, “I’d offer an advance of five thousand dollars upon signing the contract.”

  “Pretty piddling, isn’t it?”

  “I know, but that’s about average for first novels these days.”

  “You mean that’s all he gets?”

  “No, that amount would be an advance against the usual author’s royalty of ten percent of the cover price, escalating to fifteen percent for each copy of more than ten thousand sold. I’d keep an even split of paperback and book club money, and twenty-five percent of the money from foreign sales, all such rights to be sold by me.”

  “An author only gets ten percent of the price of a book?”

  “Right.”

  “That makes it about as profitable as farming.”

  Bryce nodded. “For most writers that’s exactly the way it is. The Authors’ Guild did a study a few years back—the average annual writing income earned by its membership was less than six thousand dollars.”

  “What about movies and TV?”

  “Those rights would remain with him.”

  “Or her, as the case may be.”

  Bryce shook his head. “It’s a him. No question.”

  “You mean you think you can tell if a book was written by a man or a woman?”

  “Sure. Can’t you?”

  “I never thought about it before.”

  “It’s pretty easy to do these days, since neither gender seems to care if the other reads its stuff or not. Sexual politics is fiction’s biggest problem, I think—both sides suffer because of it. You’d think they’d want to reach out to the other sex. To enlighten them, if nothing else. But all they seem to want is applause from their gendermates.”

&nb
sp; Bryce gave me a chance to add something. When I didn’t, he went back to business. “I suppose I might pay a second five thousand upon submission of a completed manuscript as an incentive of sorts. Though in my experience, to a writer of this quality, money is seldom the prime motivator.”

  I held up the stack of papers resting in my lap. “You mean this isn’t the whole thing?”

  Bryce shook his head. “You’ll see when you read it—I’m sure there’s a final section to be added. Before committing to publish, I’d want to see the conclusion, to be sure it delivered on the promise of the first two sections.”

  I nodded, then asked a question motivated as much by my own interest in the subject as by the requirements of my job. “What if other publishers started bidding? That’s the way it happens sometimes, right?”

  “Occasionally. If the author’s lucky.”

  “So how high would you go?”

  Bryce gazed once again at the books that surrounded him. The placid look on his face indicated that over the years they had offered him the only security he had ever found.

  “I’m like the gambler who’s down to his last chip, Marsh—it’s make or break time. Which means I’d give him all I’ve got.”

  “How much is that?”

  He shrugged. “A quarter of a million, maybe.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Not at all. The big writers command lots more than that these days—Michener, Clavell, Irving; Tom Wolfe just signed with Farrar, Straus for an advance of six or seven million for a novel that isn’t written yet, and that wasn’t even the highest bid.”

  “Do the publishers make money on those books?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Then why do they pay so much?”

  “Because they think they have to, because the big-name books are the only ones stocked in the chain stores, which means they’re the only books most people read. That’s why the little literary novel doesn’t have much of a chance these days. Even if it’s published, it’s almost impossible to find an outlet that will stock it.”