This is the text of a paper I presented at the Modernist Studies Association annual conference, which this year took place in Brooklyn, New York, not far from where James Purdy lived for many years. Since I don’t have plans to develop this particular presentation beyond what it was, I thought it might be fun to share it here.
Modernist Memories, Precarious Writers: Representations of New York Publishing in James Purdy and Samuel Delany
From our perspective within an era of hypercapitalized, conglomeratated publishing, with few writers of fiction able to make a living from their work and the most effective book marketing tool being the social media app TikTok, it is easy to look back on previous eras as golden ages of publishing. We might sigh with nostalgia at the thought of the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, when writers were able to be celebrities — Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, and Susan Sontag all regularly appeared on the covers of magazines and on television talk shows, contributing to the idea that in the United States it is possible for someone to be both public and intellectual. Those writers likely did not imagine themselves as living in a golden age, however; the lived reality of everyday life seldom feels ideal.
Perhaps the era we look back to with the greatest nostalgia, the era that most easily stands as a symbol for both all that is possible and all that has been lost, is the literary marketplace between the two world wars. This was the time of legendary journals such as The Dial and The Little Review, the time of Sylvia Beach at the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, the time of editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s, the time of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. It was a time when writers could make a good living simply from selling short stories to magazines because magazines like The Saturday Evening Postand Collier’s paid more money for stories than any publisher pays today — in dollars unadjusted for inflation, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s regular story rate of $1,500 to $4,000 would only be paid today by magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, magazines which publish less fiction now than they did in the days before television, video games, and the internet competed for readers’ attention.
Though all golden ages are likely more golden in retrospect, there is a truth to the modernist era offering a certain ideal of the literary marketplace, especially in terms of what got published and how. Certainly, writers struggled with types of censorship that we do not today — the trials of Ulysses, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and The Well of Loneliness are, for the time being, behind us — but as Beth Luey notes in an overview of publishing in the U.S. from 1890 to 1970, it is not unreasonable to say that “the interwar period was … a golden age of editing” (562). Luey’s time period of 1890 to 1970 is one we might call, generally, that of modernism and its aftermaths, though with Dan Sinykin’s recent book Big Fiction in mind, we might want to extend that time to 1980 or 1981, when the forces of conglomeration in business and publishing definitively brought an end to many of the practices of editing, marketing, and distribution familiar during the modernist era. Major publishers had been bought by larger companies, the distributor Ingram introduced practices that made it easier for bookstores to order large quantities of books, book sales were in consistent decline for the first time, creative writing MFA programs were proliferating, popular genres such as romance and fantasy were dominating sales — Sinykin shows that while few of these changes were good or bad on their own, the size and rapidity of developments in the world of publishing produced a synergistic effect that permanently changed the ways books were acquired, edited, marketed, sold, and even the ways they were written and read.
The effect on writers was profound. While popular writers like Danielle Steele and Stephen King achieved phenomenal fame and wealth, what was known as the “midlist” began to fade away — books that sold enough copies to more or less cover their costs (or at least have their costs covered by the income of a company’s bestsellers) became less and less appealing to the large corporations that now owned publishing companies. For serious writers of what gets called “literary fiction”, universities became essential patrons, though as we all now know, universities themselves were far from immune to the economic and ideological forces that destroyed the midlist as an at least marginal way of living for serious writers. With the adjunctification and neoliberalization of higher education, and with the ongoing war against the humanities, the future for writers is precarious and bleak.
Two works that engage in very different ways with this reality are James Purdy’s 1964 novel Cabot Wright Begins and Samuel R. Delany’s 2007 novel Dark Reflections. Both are books about writers, writing, and publishing in New York City, but their similarities end there. Delany’s Dark Reflections is the story of a black, gay male poet, Arnold Hawley, from the late 1950s to the first few years of the twenty-first century. Arnold Hawley has published books of various kinds, including writing a pornographic novel under a pseudonym early in his career, and he has worked as an adjunct professor, but when we first meet him, late in his life, he is not particularly well known and he has very little income or savings, his work in both the literary world and the world of academia having grown less and less remunerative over time. Delany, who was born in 1942 and published his first novel in 1962, avowedly wrote Dark Reflections with young writers in mind, intending it as a kind of fictional companion to his 2005 nonfiction collection About Writing. It is not an autobiographical novel — Arnold Hawley is in many ways the opposite of Samuel Delany, who is a novelist and not a poet, who retired as a tenured professor from Temple University, and who never felt the sexual repressions that Hawley suffers — but the landscape is familiar to Delany from his own work and that of his friends, and the novel consequently has more about the publishing industry and everyday life of a writer than any other I know.
James Purdy was born in 1914, a couple months short of twenty-eight years before Samuel Delany was born, but because Delany started publishing so young and Purdy suffered at least a decade of rejection before publishing much of anything, Purdy’s first books appeared on shelves only a few years before Delany’s. Cabot Wright Begins was Purdy’s third published novel, and in its basic concept, at least, it seems designed to attract attention and condemnation: it is the story of people who seek to write the biography of a man, Cabot Wright, who has recently been released from prison, having been convicted of raping hundreds of women. The risqué and, indeed, offensive premise was used by Purdy’s publishers to drum up interest in the book from everyday readers who might not be persuaded to buy his novel solely from the good reputation among the literary elite that his earlier books had created. What such readers would have made of the actual book is hard to tell, though if they expected something even mildly pornographic they would have been disappointed, because the novel is, at heart, about the impossibility of writing much of anything about Cabot Wright, even when the entire New York publishing industry demands it. It is not a book about sex at all; it is a book about the crassness of American culture, a culture terminally blighted by the priorities of business over art. With its various frame stories, Cabot Wright Begins is complicated, but it is not especially subtle: the character of Cabot Wright represents the rapaciousness of an American literary landscape dominated by the values of big business.
In Purdy’s novel, there is no overt reference to an earlier golden age, but there is a strong sense of the characters living in a fallen, corrupted era. The publishing industry as represented in the novel is a world of constant change, where fads and fancies appear and disappear so quickly that by the time a book about Cabot Wright is actually published, the public has moved on to other scandals. The book’s final line is a sentence of dialogue from one of the characters who contributed to much of the imagined biography we read within Purdy’s novel: “I won’t be a writer in a place and time like the present” (252). Cabot’s last name is spelled like the latter half of shipwright or playwright, a maker of something, but it is a homonym of write (and right), and this is a novel in which even the most crass and commercial writers struggle to know where to begin. One cannot be even a hack in a society that seeks nothing but money from art — art, in Purdy’s novel at least, is never fast enough to keep up with ever-growing greed of American society.
In both Cabot Wright Begins and Dark Reflections, the characters are failed by whatever present they inhabit. In Purdy’s novel, the characters fail because they have attached their hopes for fame and fortune to a mirage — Cabot Wright, they discover, has amnesia, lacking not only a memory of his crimes but of his entire life and identity. It’s easy to miss in the text, but everything we know about him before he is discovered living in an empty apartment in Brooklyn is the product either of sensational media reports or the imagination of the characters. Cabot Wright may or may not have been as terrible a criminal as he was made out to be, but that determination is not what interests Purdy. What interests Purdy is the extent to which Cabot Wright is who society wants him to be. In looking at the novel within the context of 1960s “black humor”, Steven Weisenburger assesses the situation with Cabot Wright’s crimes efficiently: “His aggression is not psychological but cultural, a condition so general as to symbolize the system of commerce itself” (118). Cabot Wright is the pure product of America, a free-floating commodity, a blank slate in the form of a person, a blank page accepting the scrawl of hucksters, voyeurs, yellow journalists, robber barons, corrupt police officers, moralizing judges, amoral politicians, ambitious publishers, and aspiring novelists alike.
In Dark Reflections, Arnold Hawley is doomed for entirely different reasons. Instead of chasing the latest publishing trend, he aligned himself with high culture. He didn’t even associate himself with one of the artistic movements that might have brought him more renown. “His lonely and ascetic principle,” Delany writes, “was: art is the one human enterprise in which, when you are doing what everyone else does, you are doing something wrong” (278). This principle made Hawley invisible to the world: his poetry was not in a popular style and he had no peers with whom to articulate a way of reading and being read. While as a young writer he had a certain ability to be seen as a contemporary of better-known writers, and to soak up knowledge of his contemporaries simply by existing alongside them, such status is brief in any life:
Graduate students up to thirty-five Arnold could generally impress with his downright encyclopedic knowledge of the Beats, Bukowski, Black Mountain, the Berkeley and San Francisco Renaissance, and the confessionals — all of which he’d done nothing in particular to absorb, save a little reading […] a little gossip. (Thirty years ago it had been Pound and Eliot. Sure, today most of the kids had read them. But there was nothing mysterious, nothing magical left in them.) He’d breathed in that information from the same air of time that had aged him. (69)
Arnold is thinking this when he is sixty-eight years old, which means sometime in 2004, since Delany gives Arnold’s birthday as March 15, 1936 (29). Thus the thirty years ago he refers to as the time when Pound and Eliot were mysterious and magical, recollected with ease and admiration, would be the mid-1970s, a time when books such as Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971) were still new and exciting in certain corners of literary and academic culture, and when Arnold was himself just past age thirty-five.
The time that Arnold Hawley felt Pound and Eliot were still mysterious and magical for young writers fits right into Dan Sinykin’s chronology for the last gasp for the structure of publishing that dominated the modernist era, the structure that would be dismantled by the rise of conglomeration. The forces that would make the conglomeration of mainstream publishing so powerful were already in place, though, by the time Purdy wrote Cabot Wright Begins, as that novel so vehemently demonstrates and as Sinykin anatomizes, tracing the start of conglomeration to 1960, when the Times Mirror Company — which owned the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the television station KTTV, and other media — bought the mass-market publisher New American Library (NAL):
The previous year — 1959 — Random House became the first major house to go public and used the influx of cash to acquire Knopf in 1960. In 1961, it acquired Pantheon…. In 1966, RCA, an electronics company, acquired Random House. Doubleday acquired radio and television stations in 1967, and the New York Mets in 1980. Time Inc. acquired Little, Brown in 1968. A Canadian communications company acquired Macmillan in 1973. Bantam went to IFI, an Italian conglomerate that owned Fiat, the car company, in 1974. Simon & Schuster went to Gulf + Western in 1975, Fawcett to CBS in 1977. (5)
And, as Sinykin says, “it hardly stopped there” (5).
For Purdy in Cabot Wright Begins, the beginnings of conglomeration further the immiseration of the American cultural soul, an immiseration that he suggests goes far back beyond the present era in the novel and may be a defining element of the American character, but is accelerated and metastasized by publishing companies’ push for the next big bestseller and the hottest fad. When everything becomes about money, any last trace of meaning and fulfillment becomes impoverished.
Through the character of Arnold Hawley, Delany demonstrates the long effect of this impoverishment, which in the novel is quite literal. After a lifetime of publishing and teaching, Arnold has little reputation, few pleasures, and no financial safety net. His life is unique in its particulars but familiar in its outline, particularly for people from marginalized groups: in Arnold’s case, black and gay. Sticking to modernist aesthetic and ethical principles in a post-modern age, he has ended up not a member of bohemia, but of the precariat, the detritus of the American dream.
These are not hopeful novels. Cabot Wright Begins concludes with all its writer characters committing the artistic suicide of silence. Dark Reflectionsends with wistfulness, nostalgia, and a sense that if there is integrity anywhere, it is in the modernist commitment to whatever we might mean by art’s autonomy — the devoted practice of artistic creation, regardless of audience, regardless of money, regardless of bourgeois comfort. However, we, the readers, are not the novels or their characters. From Purdy’s vehement, coruscating, outrageous satire we can find the energy to imagine otherwise, to imagine a world in which writing and publishing infuse the culture with meanings beyond commerce. From Delany’s careful attention to the details of a life lived for art, we can see the tools we need and the pitfalls that await us.
A new review of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction at The Los Angeles Review of Books by Hilary Plum makes a number of valuable points about the limits of Sinykin’s analysis, with one of the biggest limits being its focus on large corporate publishers, with little acknowledgment of the importance of small, university, and independent presses to the literary landscape. The careers of James Purdy and Samuel Delany bear this out. The modernist golden age of publishing, whether myth or reality, continues to inspire small press publishers to this day, and it is no surprise that it is small and academic publishers such as Valancourt Books and Wesleyan University Press that have helped keep the integral writing of people like James Purdy and Samuel R. Delany in print for today and, perhaps, the future.
