Publication date:  27 September 2000

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The Zones

My plane was already flying when I remembered as Andrei Nadein, editor of the YES magazine, shortly before the departure, in the corridor, on the run, casually, shining the way he should, they way it all should happen, let drop a remark, "And yet, how are names brought into repute in literature?.. How do they emerge?! It's a pity we don't have time. You will tell me later, won't you?" - 10,000 meters turn the air into the optics that Zeiss himself little dreamt of, even at dawn. I was sure I would tell.

With optics matters do not stand better, I said to myself in the plane meaning an opportunity to step back and cast a glance. There's no backing out of it now and there seems to be no need to speak on this subject. Every day 'names' emerge, books are published, articles are written, discussions are held, tactical battles turn into strategic confrontations and investigations, the rumour machine rustles, and so on. The usual airplane magazine was lying on my knees, a glass of famous red wine was quietly crawling along the table like a snail up Fuji. Either occasionally or not, the magazine opened at an article that consisted of stories about overwhelming writers' successes. The headline read, "Become a Superstar with Your First Novel." The imperative carried the idea, "No problem." A short introduction to the stories of star fates explained soundly that the elevations were only possible (no disputing!) due to "the efforts of publishers, powerful marketing and mass-media, which can turn a debutant into a successful writer and millionaire in one night." However, the protestant ethics pulled in its horn a little later. The conclusion said, "Superstars do not spring from nothing (no disputing!), any success is preceded by long years of persistence, hope and work."

No, I haven't read the Oxford student Richard Mason (Drowning People, 1999) but the story of his success jingles like Christmas foil in the wind. This novel, his first one, one fine morning appeared in 20 countries simultaneously, and this very morning a contract was concluded for the picturization - "the superactive international industry marketing machine dealt excellently with the task". However, when "skilled agents" get down to the business, the process of transformation into a millionaire speeds up appreciably. The impressive example is Donna Tartt who gained $450,000 by the first publication of her Secret History in 1992 and besides earned $500,000 for the right to issue the novel in a pocket edition. To leave nothing to anyone else, Alan Pacula personally acquired the picturization rights. As for Johanna Rowling's affair, it needs no comments at all.

And yet I have a feeling that names are not 'made', they arise like ghosts, like smoke and mist - apart from other spheres of industry, which produce desirable articles: watches, potatoes, perfume, cars, clothes, brilliants, flats, brand names etc.

Production of a book is actually a carefully planned complex of procedures and operations that naturally involves a number of invariable components. The Author and the Publisher must occupy primary positions in this process. And what about the relations between them? Imagine that both of them disappear leaving only their relations behind in the frosty air. The smile of the Cheshire Cat. Syntax, so to say.

Back to the Legend

Consider for example the writer Paul Auster. His story is as simple as a soldier's song. "The funny thing is, as a young person I was trying to write prose, and I wrote a lot of it." But in the 70's I was swept up in a lot of silly social activity, and then came the time of poetry, France... (from an interview).

But here's a footnote: This was the time of Lydia Davis, his first wife, the best translator of the 'serious' French literature into English. She has to her credit translations of almost all Maurice Blanchot's works, high-grade poetry etc. The second footnote: The marriage disintegrated, nightmare times were coming. Times of payments for the rent, telephone, coffee, metro and so on. Everything comes at once. Unimportant events, the little nothings of life suddenly take on the meaning of inevitability. On February 23, 1981, Auster recites his poems on the 92nd street. There he meets Siri Husvedt. As it was written afterwards, he "met a tall Norwegian girl" born in Minnesota. A year later Random House publishes his sampler of French poetry of the 20th century and simultaneously The Art of Hunger, his book of essays, quietly appears in England (Penguin will republish it in 1993 and make a fuss). No fame, no proposals from Philip Glass, no films - just friendly congratulations.

However, as it stands out from reliable sources, the acquaintance (can one reckon it as a motive?) with Siri Husvedt actually marked the return to his child plans of writing fiction. The contours of the archipelago that later acquired the name of City of Glass (more precisely, of the first part of a trilogy) were termed by the author "a love letter in the form of a novel". (A usual practice - just remember Pauline Reage who wrote quite hastily with an eye pencil a love letter to Jean Paulhan, which came down to us under the name of Story of O).

Several wrong number calls to Auster in the deep of night strain the string of intrigue in a twinkling. Tchekhov would have certainly made it break - solely for the single mournful sound. This is what the first lines of the novel are about. About a mistake, about a name that turned out to be not a property of its 'owner'.

The Draught

Auster offers the manuscript to seventeen publishers (it seems to me he even offered it to James Laughlin, the permanent 'captain' of New Directions, but I am not sure, to tell the truth) and each time meets with a reasonable and weighty rebuff.

The eighteenth one was Douglas Messerli (Sun & Moon Press, LA).

Douglas accepts the first part without hesitation. And this allows Auster to catch his breath and start writing the next two parts.

In 1988 he completes Ghosts and then finishes Locked Room in 1987. [The first part of the trilogy was published long after in the Russian magazine Innostrannaya Literatura. But when I brought around the whole trilogy and the publication rights in 1988 none of St. Petersburg publishers saw any way to publish the book. This year talking on the phone with Vadim Nazarov, director of the Amphora publishing house, I reminded him of my long-ago suggestion to incorporate Auster in the plan of the Severo-Zapad publishing house. To this his said, "You always go ahead of time. Today it would be quite pointful." We laughed a little.]

The Letter

From: arkadi dragomoshchenko
To: Messerli Douglas

With all my best - arkadi dragomoshchenko

The Reply

Sat, 5 Aug 2000 13:28:35 -0700 (PDT)

P.S.: I want to particularly thank you for your brilliant and touching response to my prose poem using your poetics. A truly stunning work!!

Reminiscences

As is evident from the letter, Douglas Messerli is somewhat immersed in melancholic thoughts. "In those days..." - the expression apparently gives away a yearning for some golden days that are long past. However, having stated the conditions that allow a book to be rated among the works of the 'quality literature' (at this point the publisher starts to most subtly simulate a writer - one should also consider the fact that Messerli himself is a poet and a playwright), that is, having drawn the line, overstepping which a writer runs a risk to become an outcast (to fall short of accepted standards of intelligibility/complexity), and what is more, having guessed how far it is allowable to a writer to go beyond the sphere of publishers' interest, Messerli concludes his letter with (quite characteristic of his domain) complaints against book reviewers - one of the constituents of the super-fast industry marketing machine.

Should a 'reviewer' be also a critic? That's a different question.

Should a publisher be a 'critic'? It's difficult to say. One can suppose that a publisher is anti-Charon. That a publisher ferries shadows to the realm of the day, of corporeity, materiality, direct passage of time and money circulation. And that a publisher is thus ambivalent by nature, belongs to two worlds at the same time and incorporates them, just as a metaphor that gives reason to the existence of the literary fiction. It was evening.

Bavilsky and me were sitting at a hockey field near the Mechnikov avenue in St. Petersburg. I asked Bavilsky, "Dima, suppose there is an author. The author writes a book. Supposing the publisher wants this book to see the light of the day. What comes next? The times of great publishers, such as for example Kurt Wolf, are past. What is left and how do new names appear in what is left?"

"One determines the criteria of success and failure oneself," Bavilsky said, "not only in literature but also in life in general. Well... one just lives ones life, climbs the ladder and then just says, "To hell with it all!" and retires to a cloister because one appears to have felt unbearable discomfort all this time..."

"OK," I said to Bavilsky, "let's get down to the scene of our native names, my friend. There are resonant ones, there are cracked ones - they are just like jugs that were immured in temple walls in the old days for intensifying the acoustic effect."

"Well... Roughly speaking, Pelevin is more successful than Levkin. That's on the surface," Bavilsky replied. "But Levkin's hairsplitting art of constructing texts is far more valuable for his own life than Pelevin's void canon arcades..."

And we went on talking about the nature of swallow's nests, about one-legged football-players, about how to use properly the magic gift of turning tobacco smoke into the contours of future. I was drinking beer, Bavilsky said vodka was better. Being polite by nature I did not deny the advantages of this drink, my thoughts however changed direction. The star of Sergei Bolmat was rising in the amethystine twilight of the alleys and hockey fields.

Kuritsyn and Sasha Ivanov supported the star of Bolmat under the arm. Levkin kept on living in Moscow.

Kurt Wolf

He died in 1963. In all his born days he founded seven publishing houses on two continents. Kurt Wolf created a territory that was defined by names of Franz Kafka, Lou Andreas-Salome, Paul Klee, Robert Musil, Paul Valery and others. He must have been the first one in the publishing domain who started to invite famous artists to illustrate books.

As he wrote in one of his essays, first of all you must decide whether you publish the books that people should read or the books that, in your opinion, people want to read. Publishers of the second type, publishers who knowingly temporize with the tastes of the public are not subject to consideration here. "They are members of a different 'order'. Publishing activity of this kind demands neither taste, nor specific enthusiasm. You just supply the market with the products that are apparently needed, knowing well what makes lachrymal or some other glands work, what makes the heart of a sportsman speed up, what makes us sweat with fear.

However, we, publishers of another kind, are still trying - yes, our attempts naturally may seem insignificant at times - but we are trying to be creative. We want to gain readers over to the works that in our opinion deserve attention, we want to direct their attention to truly original works that have specific literary qualities, to the works that will not vanish in the future, however complicated and unusual they might seem, and it's true not only for works of literary fiction. Naturally, none of us is safe from mistakes, unfortunately we make mistakes more often than we would like to - sometimes in a manuscript of an unknown writer we see something that later dissolves or just appears to be lacking in the book. But it is the effort that counts - not success, as it may seem. Success is not a determinative in this sphere - most often success is just a pure coincidence.

It happened so that Max Brod designated me as publisher of all his written and unwritten works - this prospect seemed alluring to him then, but moreover, soon he sent to me a young man named Franz Werfel who soon after brought around his friend Franz Kafka.

Only a deaf one would miss the magic of the early Werfel, would not to be struck up by Kafka's prose... Kafka, Werfel, Brod, Hasenclever - these were the first authors published by Kurt Wolf Verlag".

The thought strikes me: we buy books because when we purchase them we purchase some magic objects that can't be interpreted in any way, objects that do not fit any conventional forms, objects, the intrinsic meaning of which constantly slips away from us although the effort needed for grasping it seems inconceivably small.

But it's a dream. And reading is a ritual of justifying the thoughtless or senseless act of appropriating a strange object, and bringing this act to another level, incorporating it into the grammar of conventional relations.

• This article in Russian

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Previous publications:
Gleb Morev, A Postscript to the Jubilee /05.06/
	Brodsky managed to break away from the age-long tradition and translate from a slandered exile, madman and victim into an intellectual trendsetter, rich traveller, university professor, winner of different prizes including the Novel prize, and owner of an honestly earned Mercedes. He created a new image of a Russian poet.

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