The Lousy Racket: Hemingway, Scribners, and the Business of Literature.

Curnutt, Kirk

The Lousy Racket: Hemingway, Scribners, and the Business of Literature. By Robert W. Trogdon. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007. 320 pp. Cloth $39.95.

Fifteen years ago, James L. W. West III published an article in Sewanee Review entitled "Did F. Scott Fitzgerald Have the Right Publisher?" For most scholars, this was the heretical equivalent of asking whether Jesus might have fared better as a Buddhist or Mohammed as a Unitarian. Even today, two decades after Charles Scribner's Sons merged with Macmillan and then was bought out by Simon and Schuster in 1994 and reduced to little more than a boutique imprint, the once venerable firm continues to exert a myth unlike any other in publishing circles. General readers to whom such important American industry names as James T. Fields, Bennett Cerf, Pascal Covici, or Nan A. Talese mean nothing know of editor Maxwell Perkins--and not because Perkins brought J. P. Marquand and Alan Paton to the house, either. It thus seemed a poke to the eye of literary legend for West to ask whether This Side of Paradise might have been an actual bestseller as opposed to a succes de scandale had a competing publisher with a more daring business approach rolled out a massive print run on the red carpet of a publicity blitz. Who else but Perkins would have stuck by Fitzgerald through his penurious years? Who but Scribner's would have printed Tender Is the Night at the bleak height of the Depression? Who would have encouraged The Last Tycoon knowing fully and sadly well that its author was unlikely to last to its completion?

In the end, West's provocative essay was less the critique of Scribner's methods that its title suggested and more a reminder to fellow scholars that publishing was--and always will be--a commercial endeavor. As any number of frustrated writers can testify, how a book is distributed and advertised often plays as much of a role in the making of reputations and readerships as any measure of its quality. Between production costs, promotion, and the always abstruse accounting methods by which books are discounted, returned, and--the worst fate this side of being pulped--remaindered, publishing continues to be one of the snakier capitalist shell games. Few in the profession, including the bean counters, are able to do more than cross their fingers and hope the ledger ends up more black than red. And yet that very financial ambiguity in many ways creates a space for "literature" to exist in a commercial environment--because there is an ingrained expectation that the majority of one's seasonal list will not turn a profit, publishers are (or used to be, anyway) more tolerant of losses. Often the goal is only to make enough to keep creditors at bay until next year's batch hits bookstores.

Publishing used to be a gentleman's business, in other words, and writers used to benefit from that fact. However flustered Fitzgerald may have been by Scribner's inability to justify why Paradise peaked at just under 50,000 copies when his celebrity made him one of the nation's most recognizable writers, he was unwilling to leave Perkins for another house with more panache for exploiting his fleeting flapper cachet. He knew that the proximity of his name to Henry James's could only elevate his reputation long term, and he also understood that another firm would cut him the minute his Bernices outgrew bobbed hair.

Reading Robert W. Trogdon's The Lousy Racket, I was so reminded of West's essay that I kept wondering whether "Did Ernest Hemingway Have the Right Publisher?" might be an appropriate subtitle for this admirable study. The question is equally sacrilegious, but for different reasons--arguably, Scribner's only had commercial expectations for Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and, perhaps, The Great Gatsby (1925). The popularity of Paradise caught the firm off-guard, and Fitzgerald's first two story collections, Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), performed quite handsomely for a genre that was essentially considered a loss-leader for novels. By the time of Tender and Taps at Reveille (1935), publication was a de facto favor meant to maintain Fitzgerald's spirits; nobody anticipated making money from his work anymore. Hemingway was a different case. Once A Farewell to Arms (1929) broke the l00,000 mark (at the beginning of the Depression, no less), Scribner's was always eager for the next blockbuster, and they had to support vanity projects like Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Green Hills of Africa (1935) before hitting it big again with For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Then came a long period of inactivity (the entire 1940s) and the critical disaster of Across the River and into the Trees (1950) before The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Would another publisher have weathered such dry spells for the prestige of the Hemingway name? Would another agree to publish a trifle like The Torrents of Spring (1926) for the chance to later do a writer's "true" debut novel? And sight unseen at that, as The Sun Also Rises was when Perkins first signed Hemingway?

Perhaps the first thing that The Lousy Racket clarifies is how contradictory Hemingway could be about his own career ambitions. On the one hand, unlike the Ezra Pounds who loathed the mass audience, "[h]e wanted his works to be read by as many people as he could reach and thus had to balance the demands of art with those of a popular audience" (1-2). And yet that balancing act did not mean he was willing to pander to the marketplace. Even while knowing that "his experimentation was lost on most readers and that the so-called common reader wanted something different [than radical modernist fiction]" (6), he nevertheless drew a line in the sand on matters of language, publicity, and subsidiary deals when they might "influence the way he wrote" (3). Essentially, Hemingway wanted to have his cake and eat it too, and that, as Trogdon reveals, often placed Perkins in a tricky balancing act, at once discouraging the star author from alienating mainstream audiences (as in the famous "c-s-r" contretemps in A Farewell to Arms [82]), while encouraging him not to stray too far from his true metier, fiction, amid the often gassy travel/sportsman yarns of the Green Hills era (158).

The generous excerpts from the Hemingway/Perkins correspondence cited in The Lousy Racket testify to Perkins's patience in dealing with Hemingway's grousing about advances, royalty rates, and sales statements. In return, Hemingway often pretended to lack sound business sense--a pretense that seems especially facetious when it dovetails with veiled threats to move elsewhere should Scribner's prove unwilling to pony up: "Will you be prepared to advance me $6,000 on the book of stories[?]" he asks in reference to Winner Take Nothing (1933). "This is ... the minimum that will hold poor old Papa's affectionate loyalty. The advance ... is less than the sale on day of publication of this last $3.50 masterpiece [i.e. Death in the Afternoon]" (128).

Such exchanges puncture the myth that book making is a collaborative enterprise between writers and publishers. Instead, writers are contracted labor often left in the dispiriting position of having to beg for their bread and butter. They may create the goods that go into the marketplace, but they still work for the interests who produce them. One of Trogdon's three helpful appendixes makes a worthwhile point: whatever his fame and stature, Hemingway never finagled a royalty rate higher than 20 percent out of Scribner's. Even on a "$3.50 masterpiece," that's a whopping 70 cents.

Those familiar with Trogdon's previous essays and his valuable collection Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference (Carroll & Graf, 2002) have been anticipating this book for some time now. Having studied with two of the best--Michael Reynolds and Matthew J. Bruccoli--Trogdon demonstrates his own mastery of at least two valuable scholarly traits undoubtedly learned at the hands of these mentors. From Bruccoli he has inherited a no-nonsense style of presenting facts and figures--right down to the decimal point--that recalls the old (but by no means antiquated) William Charvat school of scholarship on the profession of American writing. Thus, we learn that while Scribner's printed "a total of 101,500 copies" of Across the River and into the Trees, "25,701 copies of the novel [were] still on hand" six months later, not counting the "'somewhere around 10,000' returns" that Whitney Darrow, head of the sales department, reported to Charles Scribner III.

 [T]he firm had sold 93,738 copies, paying Hemingway a royalty of
 $50,960.70. (In 2005 terms, this amount would equal $395,037.82.)
 The chart also records that there were no sales after this date.
 The discount Scribners gave bookstores and jobbers at this time was
 44 percent of the list price (i.e., they sold copies of Across the
 River and into the Trees for $1.68). The firm would have grossed
 $157,479.84 on these 93,738 copies. After paying Hemingway's
 royalty and the $20,000 advertising cost, the firm would have had
 $86,519.14 left to cover its other expenses. (240)

For those of us lackadaisical about balancing our own checkbooks, the recitation of such accounting can be intimidating, and yet it also proves strangely fascinating, for the economics of the book business provides a perspective on Hemingway's output not typically found in extant biographies. Reading such passages, several questions come to mind. Did Scribner's consider that $86,519.14 a healthy return on its investment? Most likely not, Trogdon implies. Would average readers regard that $1.68--$13.28 in 2005 dollars, by the way--as a reasonable price for a badly flawed book? And who are those booksellers who would dare to return 10,000 copies of Papa?

The traits Trogdon has picked up from Reynolds are equally valuable: how to arrange, dramatize, and pace a compelling narrative through the swirl of such facts and figures. Minimizing the critic's own interpretive presence and allowing characters to speak without interference are key. In the hands of a Marxist theorist, telling the story of how The Sun Also Rises was packaged and promoted might easily result an interminable bog of superstructure analysis intended to prove a tendentious cultural point about the desire of Charles Scribner's Sons to escape its stodgy reputation with this racy expatriate tale. Instead, Trogdon prints a memo from Scribner's editor William Cary Brownell that speaks volumes:

 We were speaking of the only other fastidious houses the other
 day. But our range is wider our business larger in scope and our
 sympathies broader. Of an occasional slip in holding our equally
 strict standards we might excusably therefore be more tolerant
 ourselves and expect friends to be--especially as we have no
 material or moral interest in incurring the reproach of pedantry by
 exercising a censorship over what the Time Spirit not only accepts
 but calls for.... [A]ccordingly, we might go ahead and see what
 happens. A single mistake would not be fatal and would be a guide
 for the future. (38-39)

Suffice it to say, Perkins did not tell Hemingway that some at Scribner's regarded Sun as a potential "slip" or "single mistake." Instead, what emerges from such excerpts is a sense of the often overlooked supporting cast at the House of Scribner, including not only Charles II and III (curiously, IV receives only cursory mention here), but Brownell, Darrow, advertising-man-turned-copy-editor Wallace Meyer, Scribner's Magazine editors Robert Bridges and Alfred Dashiell, and even Perkins's secretary, Irma Wyckoff. (Perkins's internal memos regarding Hemingway's blue streak had to be handled gingerly during dictation so as to not offend Ms. Wyckoff). While Perkins rightly dominates the narrative, Hemingway's work benefited from the input of this talented staff--often in ways that he neither fully understood nor appreciated.

Illuminating the business angle of Hemingway's career through a chronological survey has one drawback. What is truly new in The Lousy Racket may not always stand out, even to informed readers. Those with a thorough knowledge of the biographies may take for granted the more familiar chestnuts, such as Hemingway's hardball strategy of writing The Torrents of Spring to force Horace Liveright to free him from his contract so he could join the Scribner's fold; his sarcastic ire over the blanks in A Farewell to Arms ("the operation of emasculation is a tiny one--It is very simple and easy to perform on men--animals and books--It is not a Major operation but its effects are great" [69]); the HEMINGWAY'S DEATH galley slug that so spooked him while correcting the proofs of his Spanish bullfighting book; and Leland Hayward's brokering the Life publication of The Old Man and the Sea. Assuming one knows these stories inside-out can lull one into failing to appreciate less-publicized anecdotes. For example, as Trogdon notes, Hemingway despised Whitney Darrow "because he thought Darrow did not work hard enough to sell his books and was too quick to place them with cheap reprint houses" (11). That irritation boiled over in 1931 when two such houses, the Modern Library and Grosset and Dunlap, licensed reprint rights for Farewell with Scribner's, a deal that to Hemingway was tantamount to "saying good bye to all further income from its sale for an outright cash payment" (94). Perkins's reply was conciliatory but unswayable as he lectured his now bestselling author, the market for a $2.50 book had been exhausted, and it was up to reprint houses to serve the $1.00 masses. (This was before the widespread popularity of paperbacks in the late 1940s).

Hemingway's later and highly uncharacteristic willingness to shape For Whom the Bell Tolls to appeal to Book-of-the-Month-Club readers is also fully explored. Beginning in early 1940, not only did Hemingway for the first time allow Charles III and Perkins to read a novel while in the composition stage, but he also proved more amenable to suggestions for revision, including "modify[ing Robert] Jordan's thoughts on masturbating in chapter 31 because Scribner had been bothered by it" (213). Trogdon even suggests that it was Charles III and not Perkins who pushed the BOMC sale. "I suppose you have heard of the good fortune that has befallen Ernest," Perkins wrote to Fitzgerald in September 1940 (barely three months before Fitzgerald's death). "[The BOMC represents] the stamp of bourgeois approval. [Ernest] would hate to think of it that way, and yet it is a good thing, practically speaking" (213). Trogdon even gives due notice to the quirky typos and gaffes that made their way into print. How many of us knew that somebody at Scribner's printed salesman's dummies promoting Hemingway's 1937 novel, To Have and To Have Not? (179). While the publisher never made a similar mistake with The Beautiful and the Damned, it did, much to its chagrin, briefly issue a press release for a novel called For Whom Tolls the Bell (207).

The real discovery here, however, is the advertising figures that document what Scribner's spent promoting each Hemingway book. Another valuable appendix lists the exact amounts: from 179 print ads costing a total of $6,558.93 for Sun to a whopping 504 for Bell totaling $43,567.09 (260). Trogdon's research into the Scribner's archive demonstrates just how vital aggressive advertising was to the bookselling business. But if discovering that a paltry $3,360.79 went into The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories in 1937 raises the question of what Scribner's spent that same year on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's The Yearling (itself a BOMC selection)--alas, that question is beyond the scope of The Lousy Racket. What is not, however, is Hemingway's enduring belief that Scribner's perpetually shortchanged him when it came to promotion. An intriguing exercise for putting his displeasure in context is to calculate the percentage cost of each Hemingway volume's advertising against the profits it brought in. The budget for The Torrents of Spring, for example, was $796.54. Given that the total printing for the book was a mere 2,785 copies, Scribner's spent roughly 28 cents per copy (19 percent of the $1.50 purchase price) on pushing the book. After deducting the ads' cost and Hemingway's $500 advance from its total potential sales, the publisher was at best looking at a slim profit potential of $2,880.96--if the book sold every single copy (which it did not). More than any other evidence, such facts prove that Scribner's did not regard Hemingway as a cash cow.

Equally important is recognizing how ill-informed Hemingway was about the investment that went into his books. While the "scant notice and small sales" of the 1930 reprint of In Our Time did not seem to bother either the author or the firm (104), Hemingway was irate whenever he felt he was not being pushed hard enough. The most illuminating moments involve the books that, by any standard, must have struck Scribner's as difficult sales: Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa. In each case, Perkins proved a stern tutor on the economics of the book business. When Hemingway questioned the sales department's commitment to Death in the Afternoon, Perkins informed him (in Trogdon's words) that "the firm adopted a direct-mail strategy, sending out two circulars--the first to 161,000 people, the second to 10,000--in hopes of stirring interest" (124). Interest remained decidedly unstirred. Similarly, when the author blamed his editor for tapering sales of Green Hills of Africa ("Nothing was done to overcome the bad daily reviews by putting ads in those paper [sic] quoting from the good weekly reviews when it would have done some good" [166]), Perkins defended Scribner's strategy, which Trogdon bluntly summarizes: "Books that continued to sell well, the profits of which went back into the advertising budget, were promoted more extensively than books that did not. While this may have been good business, it could not have been much solace to Hemingway...." (167). By the time To Have and Have Not stalled at 39,038 copies--better than any previous book since A Farewell to Arms, but still nowhere near its six-figure mark--Hemingway assumed an air of exasperation: "Will you tell me, frankly, whether you plan to try to sell anymore copies of the book?" To which Perkins replied: "We spent $9,500 in newspaper and magazine advertising, and we sent out hundreds of thousands of lists and circulars and Bookbuyers. We sent out through our own store, and other stores, imprinted, 87,000 postcards announcing the book to individuals, to arrive on the day of publication.... We cannot push it [more] in any big way" (184).

Granted, Perkins's responses sound harsher when taken out of the context of his generally congenial correspondence with Hemingway, but Trogdon demonstrates why they need to be considered at this point in Hemingway studies. Such exchanges reveal Hemingway's misdirected anger at the ebb and flow of his popularity as well as his editor's tolerance for authorial bluster. Indeed, at no point did the impeccable Mr. Perkins fire back with the response that many authors receive today when they-complain that their publishers are not doing enough to bolster sales: "Write a better book."

The question thus remains: "Did Ernest Hemingway Have the Right Publisher?" The Lousy Racket emphatically says yes. By providing a richer and more in-depth angle on the Hemingway-Scribner's relationship than we have heretofore enjoyed, Trogdon's book reveals just how far the firm was willing to go to try to maintain Hemingway's audience, even in the 1930s, when his work seemed to push his readers away. It is highly doubtful that Liveright, Knopf, John Day, or any other of the more artistic houses of the period would have tolerated such valleys in hopes of another peak--much less market those valleys as much as Scribner's did despite knowing full well when Hemingway was lost in a dell of his own making. Sad to say, the economics of today's publishing no longer allow for such tolerance. The more the business of making books is corporatized and conglomerated in our media-synergized world, the farther such partnerships recede into the misty stuff of legend.

--Kirk Curnutt

Troy University, Montgomery