Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (24 page)

“We’ve got to see Princeton Keith,” Bernie pointed to that part of the letter which attempted to dim their hopes. “Something tells me they’ve sent him to the cleaners.”

17

REJECTION BY THE GOETHE OF PUBLISHERS

I
feel like the hollow space inside a statue,” Princeton Keith told Mrs. Bickle and Bernie, as they sat in his Park Avenue apartment on whose dazzling white walls hung the latest paintings. Princeton’s bags were packed, and Princeton’s accent had lost nearly all its New York edge. If not pure Southern Illinois, it was no longer Eastern.

“We’re all going home. Isn’t that a goddam note?” Princeton touched his temples with an ice cube.

“What title did you finally give my novel?” Bernie inquired suddenly. Princeton Keith gazed at the Chicago novelist benevolently, but didn’t reply. He swallowed more of a pink drink he had not asked his guests to share. It might, they realized, be medicine in any case. Indeed after each sip, he coughed.

“Al Guggelhaupt,” Princeton recited, “in many ways
is
New
York.
New York today. He’s not one man, mind you, but eight or perhaps eighteen. Changes personalities as the light is modified from dawn to dusk, mixed of course with our atmospheric gravy here in Gotham. Has ruled, old Al has, American publishing as few men have. Granted, he made me. Now he’s broken me. Does he stand for anything, Al Guggelhaupt? Yes, he does.”

“Forget it all, Princeton dear,” Mrs. Bickle got in while the editor coughed desperately after another nip at the pink drink, and then soothed his throat with an outside application of the ice cube.

“Al Guggelhaupt believes he resembles, and as a matter of fact does resemble, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Ever hear of him, Bernie? Of course you haven’t, so drink and shut up.” Princeton shot angry thunderous looks out in the direction of Madison Avenue. “I would be the last to deny he looks like Goethe, whom I never finished reading anyhow. But Al also resembles Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, known to fuckers of the past as the Kaiser. As age has dried Al up, making his extreme height a bit bowed, and his fifty-dollar luncheons have suited him up with a better than average pot, he also resembles Bismarck, the moulting William Jennings Bryan, and in the belly the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte. In other words, look at him at any stage of his development and you see a bloody bully. I drink to the bastard in genu
I
ne admiration, if horror,” and Princeton raised his pink drink, though he changed his mind and did not quaff it.

“I’ve seen him, this great man in publishing,” Princeton intoned, “stand before his 10-foot Italian mirror in his Park Avenue cathedral room and mutter the patronymic
‘Goethe’
as he gazed at himself. Of course, Guggelhaupt, though a culture-hound of the first order (in this resembling his great counterpart in British publishing, a Jew who embraced Christ at the age of 40 as his Personal Savior, I refer to the late Clyde Wagenknicht), has always been passionately wise in dollars and cents. During the Depression, when the world of thoughtless intellectuals admired his bringing out books nobody thought would sell because they were both dirty and well-written, Al G. even then never lost a real dollar on a book he published… Now he’s through with life, I know the signs, and his cashiering of me is the tell-tale give-away. No, he wants to lie down in an early grave of roses, he considers he’s been the Goethe of publishers, and that’s enough. He wants to give up, and so he’s sending me packing—there are my goddam bags I’ve had ready against this contingency for twenty-five years—after him promising me I’d share in his distributed empire.”

“Oh, Princeton, sit down,” Mrs. Bickle finally said, after he had risen and staggered over to them.

“I’ll sit down, my fine bitch, when I’ve come to you in this story,” he replied. But he sat down, eyeing Zoe, then said: “God, you fucked your life as thoroughly as anyone can.”

“True enough,” Mrs. Bickle replied, “but please don’t get any drunker,” she warned him, “if that pink and red drink is spirits.”

Disobeying her, Keith rose again, came over to where Mrs. Bickle sat, and kissed her on the crown of her head.

“This little lady,” he began speaking in the tones he had always used at the National Best-Seller Book Awards, usually engineered by him, “this little lady has given her all to literature. Married a writer of talent, and kept her own greater talent in the kitchen where nobody could smell anything but her cooking. You’re too goddam good for everybody,” he told her and sat down.

“I’m coming now to us,” he put on an immense pair of spectacles and looked blindly about the room. “Al had given the go-ahead sign, mind you, before he disappeared into Prague or some other place he and Corinna, his wife, always got into without visas, unlike the rest of the citizenry. Mind you, before he disappeared into Hungary or Georgia, he had given me the nod on Cabot Wright, said he felt the country was ready for a book on rape, that he believed the times were ready for it, and if the times were ready, the Establishment would be ditto. Mind you in the ’Twenties every stylish sex book had his imprint. Guess he thought he was going to live over those elegant old pervert days with Cabot,” he turned to Mrs. Bickle briefly.

“Al Guggelhaupt, in other words, turned on an avenue of green lights for Cabot Wright.
‘Have him jab them in every paragraph’
were his exact words. Oh, he and Corinna have the language of hardened pirates
chez eux,
let me tell you. Goethe, you know, was queer for kitchen sluts, perhaps that’s what old Al would like to live up to at heart.
‘We’ll buy it!’
was the last thing he said to me before he jetted to Europe, speaking of course of Cabot Wright.
‘We’ll buy it, Prince
!’…

“When he comes back, I see the nasty ambiguous turn to his lip, the little that emerged from beneath his Bismarck mustache. I knew then he’d been hobnobbing with old Doyley Pepscout, the king of the daily reviewers, who believes, if you know the New York literary scene, and I know you don’t, that prayer and money should entirely take the place of the thyphallos—which means stiff cock, Bernie, in Greek. Al Gug-gelhaupt, who would not have spit on a Doyley Pepscout in the ’Twenties when he was the publisher of high-class Parisian smut, goes to him, and says, ‘Doyley, favor me by reading this book and level with me. Is this a book you think you can praise in your column? Be frank, man, and level.’

“And now hear this, kiddies. Doyley Pepscout wrote the following report for our Goethe.” Princeton Keith pulled out of his tight-fitting jacket a sheet of onion-skin, and read:

“I am pleased and grateful, my dear Al—can you hear old Doyley’s nasal Cleveland, Ohio twang?—that you should think enough of me as a critic—dig that, him as a critic, when the last novel he finished reading was
Freckles
—to submit to my consideration your proposed novel
Indelible Smudge
—there’s your title, Bernie. It is my melancholy duty to inform you, as I would inform the readers of the great family newspaper for which I have written over a quarter of a century, that the author of this work, at best only mildly entertaining, has continued the growing threat of degeneracy and unhappy endings in fiction. There is not the least question of a doubt in my mind that rape can and perhaps should be treated in literature. But it cannot be treated as Mr. Bernie Gladhart has done in
Indelible Smudge
. Nowhere has he shown the relationship of the youthful rapist to happy older people whom we meet every day in offices and homes, and to a happy America. We are fed only on deviation and mordant thoughts without any higher note. The ending is even less edifying than the bulk of the book. I regret to say that this sordid, often obscure book, without visible motive or meaning, is dispiriting, disquieting, sordid, and utterly without reader-appeal. It is, however, well written and uses an extensive vocabulary, so that I found myself consulting an unabridged dictionary. The vocabulary, however, is an unrefined one, and had better not have been employed.”

“Goethe Guggelhaupt of course was studying my face as I read Doyley Pepscout’s review,” Princeton Keith explained. He then went on to recreate the great scene of rejection by the Goethe of publishers.

“
DO YOU REALIZE,
” Al Guggelhaupt said, “and I see you do not, that if he says the book can’t be sold, it cannot. Do you see, sir, the death-warrant in Pepscout’s last sentence?
Indelible Smudge
is dirty
and
well-written. Do you get that? That’s the combination means no Fifth Avenue bookstore will take it, no book club, no book award group even will touch it. You’ve again violated protocol and produced a dirty
hard
book.

“But just to show you that I didn’t accept Pepscout’s word as final, I called in, all the way from his farm in Connecticut, America’s greatest high-brow critic in belles-lettres, Talcum Downley who, as you know, discovered the Flat-Foot School of Writers some years ago, and could hardly be considered morally squeamish. In his youth he worked at manual labor on the railroad, so he knows men and his own virility has been proved by marriage and family. Yet what does Talcum Downley tell me?”

Al Guggelhaupt here consulted a sheet in Downley’s own handwriting, later sent to Harvard for safekeeping: “I regard this book, my dear Guggelhaupt, as morally loathsome. Splendid writing, of course, but to no purpose. We must bring back America into publishing, Al! You know this, from talks down on the farm with me. And why, my good friend, if you have gone to the expense
and
trouble of having a novel written, why cannot it be extended to 800 pages, the only possible length for a novel? Al, you should recall the words of the distinguished Irish writer of anecdote-fiction, Boke O’Garrell: ‘It’s not quality we look for in a novel, but mileage.’ I’d go even further than Boke here, and employ a word not popular at the moment with other critics, a bit coarse perhaps, but a favorite of mine:
bloat
. I think we should bring back
bloat
into the novel, and have thought so for years. But in order to bring back
bloat,
we ought to remember the only subject a real American novel must always and perforce touch on is
war
. Our fighting men, and their loves as fighting men. Of course I discovered the Flat-Foot School of Writers, our young wanderers on the road, but it’s our fighting men—our he’s—that make the proper subject of American fiction. Forget rape, Al, and shelve this novel, or let one of the little forward-guard publishers have it, where it won’t be taken seriously. Admiringly yours, Talcum Downley.”

Al Guggelhaupt then stood over me, apoplectic, goggle-eyed, while I tried to think of something. I finally came up with, “Well, Al, one of the Greenwich Village publishers might take
Indelible Smudge
but we’ve obeyed those little matters of paragraphing and spelling, and that queers the book with them too.”

Then Guggelhaupt came up to me as close as you two kiddies are now. Shaking me by the collar, he screamed: “I have it on bona fide authority, Prince, that we are at least two years out of date here! With you as my editor, we’ve lost touch with the current! But before I go into the big question of the back-seat we’ve been riding in under your rule, let me tell you, I didn’t stop with just the opinion of Pepscout and Downley. I even called in Corinna who, as you know, is not a bit well, Bright’s disease, I’m afraid. At any rate, during the ’Twenties I never published a book without consulting her. Corinna had heard of the Cabot Wright case, and wanted to see it—a very unusual request for her. I let her read it, though realizing it was not her cup of tea, that there was actually nothing in it for her. Corinna was very calm, very judicious about the whole thing, I must say. She recognized that the obscene sections followed logic and verisimilitude—her exact words. Then she said she was violently opposed to my publishing it. Corinna said that neither as literature nor a work of scatology would it have a chance with the big public. The workmanship in presenting the rapes, while very fine, even akin to the highest talent, is not in tune with the literary Zeitgeist of the moment—Tim Raisin, for instance, would never go for it, and that practically spells death for any book in old-fashioned left intellectual circles, nor would the wide public care for a rapist who is not driven to the deed by reason of passion, poverty, race or creed. The rapist ought to love at least two of the women he subjects to his lust, while Cabot loves nobody.

“But don’t think,” Al continued, suddenly collapsing a bit, “don’t think I’d let even my own wife’s opinion lead me to a mistake in business. Corinna or no, I called in more people. I called in everybody, Prince, and asked from A to Z, what’s going on, what’s in style in fiction. I even called Doyley Pepscout again. He may be a frost as a man, but he has his ear to the ground as a newspaper pro, and though dirt and sex upset him, he knows what kind of dirt and sex is in vogue. Do you think any of the men and women I called in said rape was in vogue or a style in current fiction? I even telephoned old Cordell Bicks, great pink critic of the ’Thirties. He said, ‘My dear Guggelhaupt, I’m surprised you don’t know. Rape is certainly not in. It’s out, been out for years.’

“Do you hear that, Prince? Hasn’t been in vogue in publishing for years. And every mother’s son knows what is in vogue except you, my dear Illinois farmer’s son. Except you!”

“Brief me, then, Al,” I asked him and waited smugly for his answer.

“All right then, Prince, I’ll tell you what they told me. It’s pathetic you don’t know.” His voice trembled. “It’s the age of the black faggot and fellatio, that’s what,” he whispered. At heart, you know, both Al and Corinna are mid-Victorians and the smut they peddled in the ’Twenties was just French adultery, with a subsidiary plot or two of lesbianism, which really put it all back in the mauve ’Nineties.