17
When a publisher wants to demean or break a writer and is a coward who doesn’t dare act openly, the thing is so easy that it’s almost shameful that he should set out to do it. The New York publishing house of Harper & Brothers is known to have had an unavowed desire to rid itself of Herman Melville, the author of Moby-Dick, after the disappointing early sales of that novel, one of the pinnacles of the genre, and the obtuse, parsimonious reviews it received in most of his country’s press (in England it was more favorably received). So when Melville gave them his new book, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, the Harper brothers, rather than simply reject the text, resorted to the cowardly technique of offering him an impossible contract; its most humiliating difference from previous contracts (Melville had already published Omoo, Mardi, Redburn and White-Jacket with them) consisted of giving him less than half of his habitual percentage, that is, twenty cents on the dollar rather than the customary fifty, after the publisher’s costs had been earned back, which would happen only after the sale of one thousand one hundred and ninety copies. Melville took a couple of days to think it over and, inexplicably to the Harpers (and no doubt to their disappointment), accepted their paltry offer, for reasons that remain unclear. However, he postponed the final due date for the manuscript, went back to work on it and inserted three somewhat artificial chapters that sketched a bitter satire of the literary world he found himself forced to survive in, fictitiously settling the score with his publishers and detractors, especially one of the latter named Duyckinck. Though these chapters contain brilliant passages, the novel was the worse for them, to the point that in recent years versions of Pierre have been published without these additions meant to inflict vengeance or humiliation. The Harpers, finding themselves with a volume considerably more extensive than expected, raised the book’s price to $1.25 from the dollar that was initially planned, and Melville’s share to 25 cents per book, keeping him in the same contractually agreed upon misery. As was to be expected and feared, the reviews that greeted Pierre were even more boorish and contemptuous than those of Moby-Dick (Duyckinck aired his wrath but pretended not to have recognized his portrait, an ignoble response, he should have abstained from comment), and the brothers H not only did not support or defend the book after the first attacks but launched unnecessary, underhanded chastisements from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, behaving in this respect, as well, like terrible publishers and inscribing themselves in the annals of aberrant conduct, since it was their duty to protect their author and their book. And thus, with the unfortunate Pierre, began Melville’s decline as a novelist; he never again published anything in the genre that was comparable to his previous achievements, though he did publish some of the best stories in the history of literature, such as Bartleby and Billy Budd, the latter only posthumously and in an unpolished version he completed not long before his death, which came forty humiliated years after the appearance of Moby-Dick.
Except for the infinite difference in merit, I suffered what was, in a way, a disparagement even worse than the one inflicted on the great Herman Melville, for when I gave Todas las almas to the publisher who did publish it in its day (and still retains it against my will by means of an advantageous contract that he got because of my naiveté and consideration and the friendship I then had for him), his offer was even more offensive than that made by the brothers H to Mr. M for Pierre (dear God, those initials), especially given that my previous novel, El hombre sentimental or The Man of Feeling, had generally received good reviews in Spain and France and had sold in quantities more than sufficient to cover the advance and yield, as well, no small profit to this publisher, I would prefer that his name not appear in these pages. Despite the healthy balance of my accounts, despite the almost three years that had elapsed since El hombre sentimental and the fact that Todas las almas was eighty or so pages longer and would therefore be sold at a higher price, the publisher in question offered me an advance 25 % lower than the previous one. At the time I chalked it up to his legendary tightfistedness and his feudal concept of publishing, which undoubtedly did have their influence, but now, in light of even stingier and more scandalous later events and with benefit of hindsight, I cannot think that my case was very different from that of Herman Melville or that I was treated any better (which would have been an additional injustice to the creator of the white whale), especially since in addition to making so offensive an offer, the publisher had one of his more capable employees write me a long letter raising all sorts of objections to the novel — generated and inspired by the boss, who had already presented me with some of them over the phone, in vacuous and indecipherable form, eloquent he was not — which, in my view, were every bit as simplistic as they were convoluted. If he didn’t write the letter himself it must have been due to his aloof nature and his tendency to open fire unexpectedly while crouching low behind his ramparts, and because, much more of a shopkeeper than an intellectual, despite his efforts to the contrary, he didn’t generally feel comfortable reasoning or arguing (he was ill-equipped for those functions) and much preferred obduracy and shamming. With an innocence inappropriate to my age, I listened to his objections as if there were some truth or thought behind them and even took one of them into account; the rest were belabored or misguided and I ignored them, though I was not then or now the right person to refute or deny the undoubted defects of my books. Believing myself to be dealing with a friend and even — good God — a father figure, I wrote to the publisher that “since you are who you are” I was prepared to accept the same advance as I had three years earlier for the novel that was eighty pages shorter, but not a lower one. Feudal as he was, he must have taken this for insubordination and defamation, no doubt thinking I was a seditious ingrate. I didn’t realize that what he probably wanted was to stop publishing me altogether or to undermine my confidence, and, like Melville, I finally accepted his unfair and unacceptable terms (it must have been a disappointment to him, and I wasn’t getting fifty percent or even the twenty percent that wounded the father of Moby-Dick like a harpoon thrust, only the customary, absurd ten percent of our time); and accepted them again several times more for later works, with a good faith so troubling that the only possible conclusion is that I was and may still be — I don’t know — a chump or patsy of the first water. Looking back, I must infer, however, that Todas las almas was not liked by its publisher, who thought it a desultory piece of work and published it grudgingly and just in case, though now there is no way he will release or free it from the oppression all my titles endure, ground beneath his medieval heel and subjugated by his vinegary editorial imprint (I don’t know when that imprint will finally be out of my sight).