Another catalyst was a question repeatedly asked when I was in high school, viz: Your old man’s a shrink, right? Is he a Freudian? I had no idea (how would I?) and finally asked him outright, “Pop, are you a Freudian?”
“It’s a silly question,” he responded.
When I asked why it was a silly question, he pondered and then said, “Because it is no more possible to discuss the history of psychoanalysis without starting with Freud than it is possible to discuss the history of America without mention of Columbus—or the Vikings. But to suppose that nothing has happened since the Vikings is to be pretty rigid, pretty doctrinaire. When a patient comes to see me, I listen to what they say, I listen to how they say it; I am especially interested in what they do not say. In addition, I look at their body language, how they dress, whether they tend to show up on time . . . I am in short, searching for clues—from them—as to why they are not happy. And against this data, I apply some measure of clinical experience to interpret these clues.” I interrupted to observe that this sounded rather like detective work. “Very like detective work,” he conceded, and at that instant, I realized who my childhood hero, Sherlock Holmes, had always reminded me of: my father. From there, I fell to wondering how much Arthur Conan Doyle had known about the life and work of Sigmund Freud.
The answers were surprising. Doyle and Freud were essentially contemporaries, dying within nine years of each other in London, Doyle in 1930, Freud in 1939. Both were doctors; in fact Doyle had spent six months in Vienna (Freud’s home) studying ophthalmology. Enticingly, Freud’s first paper extolling the virtues of cocaine as an anesthetic during eye surgery had been written in collaboration with two eye doctors, Koenigstein and Koeller.
Cocaine. That was the real connection. Doyle probably never used the stuff—although it was not then illegal—but in making Holmes a cocaine fiend, he was treading in (pre-Freudian) Freudian waters.
Back in New York when I had first begun thinking about these coincidences, what I had contemplated was a nonfiction piece of research on the subject of Doyle and Freud, but I’m hopeless without a story. By the time of the Guild strike, years later, the book had pretty much taken shape in my mind as a Holmes pastiche.
A Holmes pastiche must play by its own set of rules, the main one being that you write as Watson and imagine the Holmes stories to be true. Doyle is relegated to the subordinate status of Watson’s “literary agent.” Under this umbrella there is room for all sorts of playful speculation. Resolving Watson’s hilarious inconsistencies—was he wounded in the arm or leg during the Battle of Maiwand in the second Afghan war? was the landlady’s name Mrs. Hudson or Mrs. Turner?—you can take on Holmes and women; Holmes and music; Moriarty and Higher Math; the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus, and on and on. There are at least two full-length biographies of Holmes, one of Watson, and even one of the landlady, for chrissake. There’s a series of novels about Professor Moriarty; another series about Irene Adler, “The Woman.” Walk down Baker Street in London and see plaques everywhere claiming to be the original of 221B, the most famous address in the world. At the time of this writing there are not one but two—count ’em, two !—annotated editions of the complete Sherlock Holmes.
Of course no one I knew personally was interested in this stuff, besides me. They weren’t interested in Sherlock so how could they begin to be amused by what I was finding hilarious?
Once I got to work I quickly discovered that banging away—which is to say using my trusty Smith Corona—didn’t work when trying to write like Arthur Conan Doyle. The typewriter encouraged a different sort of rhythm. I found I had to write the thing longhand, at least for the first draft. It was an interesting experience, getting tactile with the twirling tails of R ’s, furiously dotting I ’s, and slashing the crosses on T ’s.
When I had finished, I felt that at the very least I had finally written something publishable. The question was how to go about it.
For starters I sent the manuscript back to the East Coast of IFA and asked their literary agents to read it. After what seemed an eternity, a well-known book agent got back to me.
“There’s no point in my reading this,” she advised me. “I’ve never read any Sherlock Holmes, so how could I tell if this was any good?”
As was typical of me at the time, I said what I thought: “Putting aside the astonishing fact that you’re a literary agent and have never read any Holmes, I’d have to say that if this book depends on your knowing any other book, it’s a flop already.”
An excellent argument, you might say, except that she’d hung up before she could hear it. Always making friends and influencing people.
I thought about my dilemma. I knew one person in the publishing business, Jim Nederland, whom I had met when he was the editor of a novel by my old professor, Peter Arnott. Nederland was at Macmillan.
I tucked the manuscript into a suitcase and splurged on a ticket to New York. When I reached the city it was pissing rain and Nederland didn’t work at Macmillan anymore.
A reasonable person would have called first. It never occurred to me that people moved from job to job in the real world. My father was a doctor; he stayed a doctor.
“Is he still in the publishing business?” I asked the puzzled receptionist at Macmillan as I dripped a large pool of rainwater before her fancy desk.
She rather thought he was and gave me the directions to another publisher, across town.
By the time I reached Hawthorne Books, I was sopping wet. Nederland was surprised to see me.
“What brings you here?” he wondered, helping me off with my wet things.
“I’ve written a novel,” I explained brightly.
“Oh.” I studied him as he gingerly hung up my coat. The “oh” was oh so-studiously neutral.
“What do you mean, ‘Oh’?”
He shrugged. “This is a nonfiction house,” he explained. “I’ve tried to get five novels accepted here—they’ve all been turned down.”
My turn.
“Oh.” I had a cup of coffee in his office while I collected my thoughts, then rose and said, “Look, I’m leaving this book with you anyway. Frankly, I don’t have any choice; I don’t know anyone else in the business.”
“I understand.” He walked me to the elevator, and I got on the plane and flew back to Los Angeles. Win some, lose some.
I was pretty surprised when four or five days later I got an excited phone call from Nederland.
“This one they’ll publish.”
“Really?”
“Really. Wonderful fun.”
Wonderful fun. Wow. Lemme think.
“Uh, Jim, let me, uh, let me think about this.”
“We’ll offer you six thousand dollars for it.”
Wow. That made two wows in a row.
“I, uh, need to figure some stuff out here . . .”
“Don’t keep me on tenterhooks.”
“I’ll try not to.”
I hung up, rather stunned, and explained matters to Kelly.
“Now what do I do?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean I’m damned if IFA is going to collect ten percent from a deal they didn’t lift a finger to help, but I need someone who knows about this stuff.”
“Good point.” We thought about it some more.
“Why don’t you give it to Tom and ask his advice?” Kelly suggested.
“Good idea.”
In theory, Tom was my lawyer, a guy I’d met at a party somewhere who was in entertainment law. He said he’d be my lawyer if I ever needed one but I never had. You have to be halfway successful to need a lawyer. It was a year since we’d met. I hoped he remembered me.
I called him at his law firm and explained the situation to him. He was intrigued.
“Who’s Hawthorne? And let me see your book,” he added.
A few days later he was on the phone, sounding pretty excited.
“Listen, I’ve read your book and I’ve researched Hawthorne. They’re a nonfi
ction house; the book’ll get lost there. You can do better.”
This was happening too fast for me.
“Hey, wait a minute. They’re offering me six thousand dollars and I haven’t made that much money since—”
“I know, I know. Trust me on this.”
“But what about Jim Neder—?”
“He’ll understand, believe me.”
“What about IFA?” My agency.
“Fuck ’em. They weren’t there for the kickoff.”
Which is how Tom Pollock, for many years the head of Universal Pictures, became my literary agent and how I did very well indeed. He worked for a straight commission, a deal he must have regretted, since I got a great deal of lawyering for the rest of my life without fees.
The next thing I knew, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich had bought my book for ten thousand dollars.
That was when my troubles with the Doyle estate began. I could now digress with a long explanation of international copyright law and why and when the United States adopted the Berne Convention, but suffice to say the copyright issue and permission to publish my book from the heirs and assigns of Sir Arthur dragged on for months. There’s a saying: Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise. If I had known all the difficulties that would have ensued regarding the rights to Holmes, I probably would never have attempted the book in the first place.
The negotiations took so long, in fact, that I sat down one day at my typewriter and wrote another book instead, one that wouldn’t have legal problems attached to it. Called Target Practice, this novel, too, had a long gestation period, followed by a terribly short actual writing time: three weeks. The story was an attempt to discuss the Vietnam War (a subject that had been percolating in my brain since college) in the guise of a Lew Archer-type detective story. Detective stories, at least to that time, had always struck me as far removed from any external reality with which the rest of us were familiar. They took place in their little villages or country houses or mean streets, or wherever, but they never seemed to intersect with real headlines (not until the late Ross Macdonald, and his headlines were always local).
My novel was another pastiche, to be sure, this one based on Macdonald and Raymond Chandler instead of Doyle. Me hiding behind other people’s faces again. It was not a bad story, however, and did what I set out to do, namely address issues of moral culpability related to Vietnam in the guise of what Graham Greene called “an entertainment.” It was nominated for an Edgar Award in the category of Best First Mystery Novel (didn’t win). I dedicated it to my father.
Along the way to publication I learned a thing or two about the publishing business. Still spinning wheels while waiting for some kind of resolution with the Doyle estate, Harcourt Brace Etcetera agreed to published Target Practice. My editor was a swell gentleman named Ed Barber, and he worked on both Target Practice and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. On Target Practice I had no difficulty with the editorial process, but my Holmes novel proved more tricky.
“Here’s what I have done,” Ed wrote in his cover letter, accompanying the “edited” version of my book. “Although your novel is supposedly written in the 1890s” (actually, it was supposed to have been written in 1939, but let that pass) “it is actually being penned for readers of 1974.” (So far, so good.) “So what we need to do in editing, is present the illusion of a period novel, while keeping in mind the fact of its contemporary readership.”
I had no problem with any of this until I read Ed’s version of my story. Here I found myself on the horns of a classic dilemma: first-time novelist’s instincts versus those of experienced editor. Whose judgment should I trust—his or my own?
I was luckier than some writers in similar situations; because my book was itself an imitation of something else, I had a preexisting yardstick by which to measure the success or failure of my effort. Since my editor’s version of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution didn’t read like Arthur Conan Doyle and my original did, it was easy for me to decide to insist on something much closer to my own draft.
Besides, always let your failures be your own. The world is full of advice; you must pick and choose what is useful or relevant versus what is merely safe and/or familiar. There’s no getting around instinct; pray you have some.
Ed Barber left Harcourt Brace for another company (there seemed to be an awful lot of this lateral movement in the publishing business), which didn’t publish fiction. Déjà vu. That left me with Julian Muller as my editor, the head of Harcourt. Muller (famous for having published Auntie Mame when everyone had turned it down) told me not to expect too much from Target Practice. It was, after all, another book among thousands competing for the public’s attention.
I sat listening in his office, puzzled and, I suppose, hurt. I certainly hadn’t expected Target Practice to set the world on fire, but I wasn’t sure I relished hearing about its lack of prospects from its publisher. I may have mumbled something to that effect.
“Look,” Muller went gamely on, “if you want to write a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” Only the word he used instead of “mighty” was “commercial.”
Harcourt wasn’t (seemingly) able or interested in helping me to resolve my dilemma with the Doyle crowd. And now I began getting calls from Juris Jurjevics, of all people, the man who had edited The Love Story Story when he was at Avon Books. He was now with E. P. Dutton, and someone had slipped him a copy of my novel.
I explained that I had a deal with Harcourt. He asked how much they were prepared to pay me. I told him. Jurjevics said he would top the offer by a thousand dollars. I told Tom.
“Wait,” said Tom.
A week later Dutton had upped the offer by another thousand. And so on. Finally, since Harcourt seemed utterly passive in the face of my legal quagmire, I asked Muller to let me out of our deal. He didn’t seem to mind a bit and my Holmes book was now at its third publisher, E. P. Dutton, which energetically pursued the matter of obtaining permission from the Doyle estate to publish. No seven-per-cent solution, I promise you.
The book came out in August 1974, hard on the heels of Target Practice, which had been released in March. After years of drought (and I mean years), I had suddenly published two novels within six months. What happened next still strikes me as highly improbable. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution quickly appeared on the New York Times bestseller list in the number-ten slot and began inching its way north. Abruptly I was lifted out of obscurity and (comparative) penury. I was sought after for interviews; my name began appearing in print here and there, and the reading public, for reasons of its own, decided my book was one to read. Sherlock Holmes was in vogue. And so was Freud. The late Anatole Broyard, reviewing the book in The New York Times, was kind. He noted that after all the Freud bashing lately, it was a pleasure to see him portrayed as the hero for a change, furiously throwing coal into the boiler of a locomotive as if it were the work to which he had been born. Freud, for the record, bore only a superficial resemblance to the actual father of psychoanalysis; in the book, he was modeled after an entirely different father: my own.
I was having my fifteen minutes of celebrity.
The paperback rights to the book sold for an enormous sum. I was in my parents’ kitchen in New York when the phone call from Juris told me just how much. I went back to my coffee and related the figure to my astonished mother and father.
They looked at me, actually dazed. This was so far from what they had ever expected (or predicted) for me. It wasn’t that they weren’t pleased, but this was a totally different program. The fact that I had gone out on my own, kicked over the traces, and then succeeded beyond anyone and everyone’s wildest expectations (and let’s face it, those expectations were never particularly wild to begin with) was going to have psychological repercussions for every one of us. The sum I had just earned, for example, exceeded my father’s income for the same year.
My father had enjoyed the book, to be sure, but he had subjected it to the same rigorous editorial acumen he gave to all
my writing. It simply had never occurred to any of us—certainly myself included—that the thing was going to take off in this fashion.
I was even sued, the surest sign that you’re a success. It seems droll now, but at the time I was devastated when a doctor at Yale insisted that I had plagiarized an essay he had written about Holmes and Freud. I had certainly read his essay, as I had gratefully acknowledged in my Acknowledgments at the back of the book, for Pete’s sake. I also acknowledged a great many other articles and books, some of which had also suggested the link between Holmes and Freud—to say nothing of that conversation with my father.
I felt my success had been tarnished by the imputation of my honor. Old-fashioned word. Old-fashioned feeling, but there you are. I had done something on my own, brought it into being by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin, the first time I had even rung the chimes, grabbed the brass ring, amounted to anything in this world, and now I was accused of stealing it. What a funny feeling in my tummy. Like a knife being twisted there.
I defended myself and won, but even winning proved costly and time-consuming. There were lawyers. Depositions. Fees. The case was essentially quite simple since the facts, namely my exposure to the article in question, were not in dispute. The issue hinged on the definition of plagiarism, which turns out to be quite narrow. You cannot plagiarize an idea; you can only plagiarize the expression of an idea; in other words, the words. Did you copy the actual words? Of course I hadn’t. I had written a novel (arguably what this gentleman was kicking himself for failing to have done) and, using no words of his, had made a deal of money. Case dismissed.
He appealed. Lost again. It now seems axiomatic to me that if you are successful enough you will be sued. Years later, someone in Philadelphia sued Paramount over Star Trek VI. Claimed he’d thought up the whole thing. I ask you.
In The Seven-Per-Cent Solution I did not believe that I had written a great novel. I was twenty-eight and too old for that sort of self-delusion, but I understood that I had written a hugely enjoyable book and maybe that was what I was good for. From the vantage point of today the book’s virtues seem to me to be its cleverness and high spirits. They may not be “ultimate” virtues—the novel was by no means profound—but I think one may be justifiably proud of a clever, high-spirited book.
The View from the Bridge Page 5
