If you want alcohol on this walk you have to go into hotels (the Mark or the Carlyle on Madison) or go further afield to the bars of Third Avenue where you’re spoilt for choice. Though it’s worth remembering that you can go into any New York restaurant and just have a drink at the bar without any problems. There used to be a bar on Madison called the Madison Pub — a dark semi-basement — but it closed recently. Things come and go with astonishing swiftness in New York and the Upper East Side is no exception: in the last two years I’ve seen an entire skyscraper rise up from Park Avenue to dominate the view from my hotel room. A favourite cafe closed (where reputedly you could get the best espresso in Manhattan); a famous landmark bookstore — Books Etc. — went, almost overnight. But this walk up Madison and down Lexington seems to me to contain, for all its regular and sudden transformations, something that remains a representative mixture of the whole city. Fashion, commerce, philanthropic art, the quaint, the banal, the unique, the down-and-dirty, high culture and nail parlours.
It’s all down hill from Hunter College’s crossroads. Students mill about smoking, sprawl on the steps. They seem all to be foreign, reminding you of this city’s polyglot heritage, the welcome it gives (or gave) to immigrants. And indeed many of the shops on this last stretch down to 63rd and the hotel reflect that ethnic mix: pizza joints, kebab houses, Korean nail parlours, Chinese take-aways. And just at the end at the last block is A&B Stationers, home, it seems, to every foreign newspaper and magazine you could ask for. The British papers arrive twenty-four hours later and it seems bizarre, at six o’clock on a New York evening, to see the racks outside filled with the Guardian, Independent and the Telegraph. Bizarre but therefore somehow normal in this place, if the paradox doesn’t seem too forced. Nothing, in New York, is really surprising, when you come to think about it — once you’ve got over your surprise.
2000
The Eleven-Year War
12 May 1986-27 March 1997
It is 1985. I am thirty-three years old and I have just hit pay-dirt (that’s to say the modest seam of low-grade ore that is available to the literary novelist). My second novel, An Ice-Cream War, has just been published in France (under the title Comme Neige au Soleil) and it is a bona fide bestseller. I have been on a legendary book programme on French TV called Apostrophes, during which the equally legendary host, Bernard Pivot, has offered personally to reimburse any reader not captivated by Comme Neige au Soleil. “Adieu, la sereine neutralité,” cry the French newspapers. Pivot, whose integrity and scrupulous disinterestedness is renowned, has astonished everyone by his overt and candid enthusiasm for my novel and the whole affair has become a news event. For ten hours at the Paris Salon du Livre in the Grand Palais I sign copies to a never dwindling queue. My publishers, Editions André Balland, cannot believe what has happened. Champagne bottles are opened, euphoria reigns. It’s a literary gusher — the book sells and sells. High on the bestseller lists, it racks up the sales figures: 30, 40, 50,000. On and on it goes, selling, in its first year, over 100,000 copies.
Now, foreign publishers have an easier fiscal ride than domestic ones. In Britain, your publisher presents accounts twice a year and pays the royalties owing at the same time. Abroad, the norm is different. A year after publication the figures are added up, and three months after that the cheque, if one is forthcoming, is delivered. My advance for An Ice-Cream War was approximately £2,000. I knew how many copies it had sold and it didn’t take a mathematical genius to calculate that, fifteen months after publication, with sales of over 100,000, I was due a pretty significant royalty cheque. Authors may grumble at the delay in these payments: the book makes all this money but the publisher doesn’t have to settle with you for over a year (what happens to the interest?) but that is the nature of the beast, la règle du jeu: just be grateful that for once your luck held up.
A year later the reckoning was made: Editions André Balland owed me a royalty payment of £57,400.
This was, in 1986, a significant sum of money (it still is, in 2001). Susan, my wife, and I had already taken this into account — in other words we had spent it: we knew exactly what role it was to play in securing the essential underpinnings of our lives. My third novel, Stars and Bars, had been published in 1984 and I was already underway with my fourth, The New Confessions, a long book that would take me over a year to write. The French money, the French windfall, would keep the ship afloat.
But no cheque appeared on the date when it was due. I rang my agent: can we chase up the French money, please (my agents were taking a 20 percent commission)? I remember vividly that afternoon when the return phone call came: I was in our house in Fulham, it was after lunch. I picked up the phone. “Hello, Will? Bad news, I’m afraid…”
Editions André Balland would not, could not, pay.
My journal, 12 May 1986: “Problems with Balland. They say they won’t pay. A scandal. I will sue them and leave them, I will write to French newspapers and expose them.” That’s all. My journal, I should say, is a resolutely pragmatic document, a simple record of my working life rather than anything more grandiose or self-conscious. Still, that note of intemperate bluster doesn’t truly reflect the feelings of massive frustration and anger I felt. There were moments — twenty-minute spasms — when I wanted to kill. I simply could not believe that this had happened to me — all this effort, all this work and then the tantalizing prospect of the just reward snatched away. Moments of rage as pure as I had ever felt alternated with periods of quietistic resignation: of course, you were never going to receive this money, you fool, you dreamer, I would say to myself — the world doesn’t work like that. But at base — au fond—it was the injustice of it all that was rammed home (and ate at my soul) that afternoon and subsequently. Over a year after the huge success of the book, with — it has to be said — everybody else taking their profits (booksellers and publisher) long before me, the reckoning day had finally arrived and the author — that hapless creature tethered forever at the end of the food chain — had to be paid his 10 percent royalty. And it was not forthcoming.
What was to be done? I turned to my agents. Now, it can be argued (I would argue) that a literary agency has to provide two fundamental services in order to justify the 10, 15 or 20 percent commission it charges: namely, one, sell the client’s work and then, two, collect all revenues owing. The initial obligation had been discharged — now they had to tackle the second.
My agent flew to Paris — she was easily frustrated by the publishers — she sat for two hours in the lobby but no one was available to see her. She returned empty handed to London and angry letters were exchanged. The publishers claimed she was harassing them and that their Canadian distributor had gone bust, leaving them short of cash.
My journaclass="underline" 15 May 1986: “[my agent] flew to Paris today to see Bal-land. It seems they are not the slightest bit embarrassed. To the dermatologist: my psoriasis is running riot.”