Plan B: You mail me a check for two thousand dollars as a retainer for my services as editor and author during the coming year. This is not as an advance, just as payment for services to be rendered the publishing house. This plan must be put into effect within eight days or the check will have to be augmented by five hundred dollars. After two weeks have elapsed, there will be no more price rises because it will be too late. I will have gone to New York and transferred my services elsewhere.
This plan, too, does not strike me as being likely to win your approval. If it does not, I do not really care very much, I will prosper with more responsible characters who care less for skiing and insulting sensitive human beings.
Supposing then that you are not shrewd enough to seize upon either of these plans, there remains the question of previous agreements. Since I am an honest person, I am prepared to give you the two books promised you, the work of fiction and the sequel to Genesis, once you have kept some of your broken promises and made some new ones of an unfinancial nature.
Thus, Plan C: You must send me a complete accounting of my royalties, give me a contract for an introduction to Flaubert’s Three Tales to requite me for the Matthiessen business, write me a letter apologizing for your reference in various quarters to Gertrude and Emily as “those lice in Cambridge,” sign a statement saying that any such unfavorable remarks will void any contractual agreements entered into in the future, and pay me the fifty-seven cents a copy for each copy of my first book above the cost of publication, an item stated in our initial contract which, I am told, you have broken in a dozen ways, many of them stated in your succinct prose which Robert Fitzgerald once compared to Mozart.
I trust that whatever your emotions at the moment are, you will be reasonable enough to consider the fact that your criminal behavior is a matter which can be proven by other human beings and by your own letters. Meanwhile, I really don’t demand an adherence to any of these plans. You can just disregard them. Each of them is a request for what is my just due, but I am perfectly content to forget about them. But since you have broken our contract in various ways, I will then have to consider it broken. There is no publisher in the country who would not be delighted to publish what I write, and there are several who are prepared to prove in court that you have broken your contract, if you are foolish enough to start a costly legal struggle in which your method of behavior comes out into the open.
I have not yet signed a contract for America, America! and I do not intend to, unless equity is restored and I have a real guarantee that you will not in the future behave in such a fashion as to make life difficult for me: Such as abusing literary editors, applying duress on the eve of publication by threatening not to publish an already-printed book, losing mss. for months at a time, endangering my relationships with friends such as Matthiessen, insulting my wife (whose inefficiency was less than her predecessor’s and who in any case did nothing to warrant your touching tribute), disturbing me with reports of conspiracies, and not promoting a book properly (as in the instance of Genesis) because of spite or timorousness or penuriousness or skiing.
All of this is merely a postcript, you will recognize, to the period last March when you taught me a lesson once and for all by writing me of Plans A and B. And all I want by way of restitution is either peace to go my own way, or two, the guarantee that so far as I am concerned, you will recognize and act upon the profound truth that Honesty is the best policy. That is the reason that Plan A strikes me as the most brilliant of the lot.
Our six years’ association, so fruitful to you, so fruitful and difficult for me, opened with a letter in which you called me a crook. It continued by your opening a letter to me from Harcourt, Brace, a violation of the laws about the mail. It reached great humiliation when Gertrude and I were unloaded at Baton Rouge so that you might have more room for baggage and a whore. It achieved a height of torment when my translation of Rimbaud appeared, and although you behaved with much kindness then, nevertheless this would not have occurred if I had been with a responsible publisher and if I had not been forced by poverty to live at Yaddo, far from anyone to consult about my translation. Told of this poverty in the early fall, you sent me a check for $150., a handsome reward to an author who had just helped very much to give the publishing house and publisher an immense success. There is no need to continue with these memoirs; my purpose is to see that such episodes do not occur again.
I don’t think you have any idea of the amount of ill-will you have accumulated in important places. Thus, the fact that you did little or nothing with Trilling’s book is going to keep other critics who might do as well from writing in that series. You can always get the third-rate, but that will do no good, especially since the first-rate authors will write for others. What chance, for example do you think I have for the kind of success my book on Eliot ought to have, if you are too intent on skiing to make provision for new editions? I say nothing of the difficulty of merely buying a book from New Directions, such is the character of your office.
Once again, I refer to the fact that if you had been willing to listen to me, you would have published Karl Shapiro and Eudora Welty. As a perhaps last piece of advice, I suggest that you act quickly in order not to lose a poet, critic, playwright, editor and teacher who has added much to the prestige, prosperity, and character of New Directions. If you look with care through the new list or catalogue, you will see that so far as success goes, half of the credit is just sheer luck, half is divided in equal parts: One, your money and energy and ambition; two, my ideas, or the direction you went in because of my interests as a critic, or my initial success. You ought also to regard the list from the point of view of the possibility of another author, old or young, being capable of my many activities, no matter how much you promoted him. Williams, Patchen, Fitts, even Miller’s lucid pornography, or Harry Brown, Paul Goodman, Robert Hivnor, Tennessee Williams, and whatever candidate attracts you at the moment.
As a reward, I’ve received some fifteen hundred dollars, many psychological attacks, and the news that you speak of my former wife, to whom I remain devoted, as “one of those lice in Cambridge,” a remark not made in a moment’s emotion, but typed and mailed.
Now if you are really sensible, you will not resort to charm, or anger, or threats, or anything but the decent behavior I have outlined above; which will not cost you anything, if you wish to save money in that pathological manner which leads to many of your worst errors. Don’t take the trouble to break away from the pleasures of Utah in order to converse and dicker with me, because within two weeks it will be too late and you will learn as never before that Honesty is the best policy, it pays to be good, and you have cast a pearl away.
I remain devoted to you, although I don’t know why. If you want to take the alternative of just calling off all bets, then our friendship can continue and be renewed on an uncommercial and disinterested level, though Utah is quite distant. But the best beginning would be a check and an apology.
Yours affectionately,
Delmore
To Gertrude Buckman5
[Cambridge
Spring 1943?]
Dear Gertrude,
You have not heard from me because I went to New York on Monday night and to Princeton on Tuesday, trying to get away from the boredom and emptiness here. I should have thought of your letters to your mother, but I did not, and after much thought I did not try to get you in New York because it seemed unlikely that you would want to see me so soon, as I see by your letter where you tell me not to call you. I came back last night, although I was going to stay longer, because I had to run away from New York and Princeton, everyone was too unhappy or dead to bear, and be with.