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publishing

The Mechanical Angel, by Donald Friede (1948)

Publishing used to be a much different business, and no one could better attest to that than Donald Friede. After being kicked out of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, a job in the stockroom of Alfred A. Knopf convinced him that he wanted to be a publisher. The novelist Manuel Komroff (little read today) then hired him as his assistant in the production department of Boni & Liveright, t
one of the hot publishers of the early 1920s. Soon after, thanks to a small fortune from his father’s exclusive rights to sell Ford motorcars to Russia (until the Revolution, of course), he was able to walk into the office of Horace Liveright and buy his way into owning half the company. It entitled him, as he puts it, to “a ringside seat at a show that has never been equaled, and probably never will be: the literary explosion of the 1920s.”

And not just the literary. Still flush with his father’s cash, he bankrolled the avante-garde composer George Antheil, whom he’d met when the two of them were rushing to witness Charles Lindbergh’s landing at Le Bourget airfield after his successful solo crossing of the Atlantic (just a minor event in Friede’s frantic narrative). He brought Antheil and his wife back to New York, rented Carnegie Hall, and kept signing checks for the composer’s ever more grandiose notions (towering skyscraper backdrops, a real firehouse siren, a wind machine). The plan was for Antheil to debut for the American audience his Ballet Mechanique, debuted the previous season in Paris, along with his Jazz Symphony. Up to the last minute Antheil was coming up with new ideas and Friede was running around trying to materialize them.

The actual performance turned out to be one of the great disasters of musical history. With all the last-minute changes, the musicians were ill-rehearsed, the music too jarring for much of the audience, and then the wind machine ran amok and subjected the front rows to a minor hurricane. News of the fiasco devastated Antheil’s musical career for years. As Friede recalls,

He hated me so very much that a few years later, under a nom de plume, he wrote a detective story about me, in the opening pages of which he had the reader discover me dead in bed, a knife stuck in my back. In the balance of the book he managed to kill off my mother, my wife, and my brother, as well as a psychiatrist whom he had met through me. It was a very thorough job and had excellent cathartic results, as our present friendship proves.

Friede was able to turn his attention back to publishing. Boni & Liveright, along with other American publishers, were enjoying a moment almost never experienced since Gutenberg invented moveable type: “There were simply not enough books being printed to supply the demand.” Publishers were chasing after every writer worth his salt and more than a few who weren’t. Some of the worst books credited to Maxwell Bodenheim and Heywood Broun, for example, can be attributed to the desperation of publishers who would take anything of 40,000 words or more and slap it between a pair of boards.

Donald Friede, off in search of new manuscripts in the late 1920s.

But frenzied quest for manuscripts didn’t develop the best critical judgment. Fried turned down the rights to Charles Lindbergh’s memoir of his flight, We. “No thanks,” he said. “He’ll be forgotten in six months.” We went on to become one of the biggest bestsellers of the decade. He rushed to Paris to try to persuade James Joyce to give him the American rights to Ulysses. He felt he’d win over the author by presenting him with an exclusive American edition he’d had printed just for this meeting. Joyce opened the book, noted that the colophon page credited Friede as the copyright holder, and cooly dismissed him.

That was one of a string of missed opportunities that led Friede to wander out to Chicago to meet the bookseller Pascal (Pat) Covici, who was starting to create his own literary empire. The pair got to brainstorming and Friede returned to New York with plans to set up a new publishing house: Covici-Friede. Covici and his wife moved east, and soon a five-person company (Covici, Friede, their wives, and a stock clerk) was established on West Forty-Fifth Street. Unfortunately, what they lacked was a catalog. For 1928, they relied mostly on very expensive limited editions of tasteful erotica (sketches by Alexander King) and reissues of The Sweet Singer of Michigan by Mrs. Julia Moore, which Friede admits was “probably the worst volume of poetry ever written by anybody, anywhere.”

They courted Theodore Dreiser, passed on a thousand-page first novel called O Lost! that went to Scribner’s, fell into the masterful hands of Maxwell Perkins, and emerged two years later as Look Homeward, Angel. Slowly, they began to sign better books and better writers. Wyndham Lewis (when people still bought his books) and Joseph Moncure March’s boxing poem The Set-Up. Their breakthrough came when they bought the American rights to Radclyffe Hall’s then-revolutionary lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Condemned as obscene in England, the book had to pass the scrutiny of the New York Court of Special Sessions, but the court ruled it acceptable and its scandalous reputation made it an instant bestseller.

Flush with pride in their critical judgments, they then listened in rapture as Ben Hecht laid out his ideas for the book that would be his magnum opus, certainly the greatest of the Great American Novels, to be titled Deliaga. As Hecht’s chapters dribbled in, however, his creative desperation was only surpassed by their dread that they’d bought an unpublishable heap of yecch. Having already sold hundreds of copies as pre-orders, they grabbed a Hecht short story that was lying around and talked him into padding it out to become A Jew in Love.

With the Great Depression now well upon them, Covici-Friede entered what Friede calls their “deadly serious, if-it-isn’t-proletarian-it-can’t-be-good phase.” And they had a good prospect for making headways with this line thanks to John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men. Unfortunately, not good enough. Their creditors came knocking and Covici-Friede closed in 1938. Pat Covici moved over the Viking and signed Steinbeck’s next big novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Friede decided to try Hollywood.

At this point, a good editor would have told Donald Friede to wrap things up. The subtitle of The Mechanical Angel is, after all, “His adventures and enterprises in the glittering 1920s,” and here we are in the late 1930s, when glitter was still a scarce commodity outside the movies. Friede also entered a long period of wandering, short-lived enterprises, and marriages (including to the food writer M. F. K. Fisher in the late 1940s) — none of which he discusses here.

Instead, he pads out the book with a series of thematic chapters (I know you’re dying to read about his hobby of building radios) and what must bluntly be called old fart pontifications. The giddy fun of the crazy world of publishing, art, music, and drinking in the 1920s gets rehashed for its moral lessons and neither reader nor writer are the better for it. There are about 240 pages and 19 chapters in The Mechanical Angel. Stop at the end of Chapter 11 and you’ll thank me.

The Mechanical Angel, by Donald Friede
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948

Brooks Peters recommends The Gilded Hearse, by Charles Gorham

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Gilded Hearse'Brooks Peters, who writes one of the most consistently interesting blogs around (www.brookspeters.com), passed along a plug for Charles Gorham’s novel, The Gilded Hearse, which sounds like a terrific guilty pleasure:

It’s not exactly unknown but seems to have been overlooked lately. Perhaps “forgotten” is a better word since I can’t imagine too many people putting it on their top ten lists. It’s a rather scathing look at the publishing business just before the early beginnings of World War Two. Set in Manhattan in 1938 (but published in 1948), it details a traumatic day in the life of a book exec named Richard Eliot who battles his own demons while depicting his circle of friends and business associates in a very unflattering light. The day is set against the backdrop of the Munich compromise which is not too subtly broadcast throughout the text whenever someone happens to turn on a radio.

The firm, Hutchinson’s, could be several well-known publishing houses of the era, complete with the white-shoe editors, the burly, brusque, hard-drinking salesmen and the neurotic, ambitious “suits” who handle the brash marketing side. None too subtle (the writing style is sort of a cross between Grace Metalious and A. J. Cronin) , it is nonetheless very revealing of past attitudes and mores, as well as a fascinating relic of a time when the publishing world was just beginning to turn corporate.

Gorham nails the ambiance of New York in the late 30s, the jazz bars, the sleazy saloons, the drunken book-signings in overly perfumed department stores, the overt anti-Semitism within polite society (in contrast to the genocide on the horizon in Germany), the sad, listless Village bohemians, and throws in a few hilariously drawn “fags” and “fairies” and one appalling lesbian stereotype to give the story some typical pulp grit and edge. One effeminate book editor named Graham Fatt, who swishes amid his Oriental art, keeps “a large jar of KY” in his purple-hued bathroom.

There’s also plenty of sex between heterosexuals, abortions, lecherous cads, adulterous wives fornicating on trains. One character admits she went “to bed” with a colleague, then corrects herself by saying “to berth.”

Cover of 'Make Me an Offer'The Gilded Hearse was also published several times as Make Me an Offer. Time magazine’s reviewer took a great big haughty sniff when the book first came out:

As an indictment of the book business, The Gilded Hearse is neither good burlesque nor significant exposure. Few readers will be surprised to learn that book salesmen often haven’t read the books they sell, that salesgirls in bookstores are often dumb, that book publishers are increasingly less concerned with literature than with bestsellers. Those with the kind of taste that Gorham deplores will be quickest to see that The Gilded Hearse is just superficial enough, spiced with just enough bedroom business, to make it a likely Hutchinson book.

Brooks sums up just why what Time dismissed as trash seems like a bit of tarnished gold today:

… I thought I’d share the title with you in case any of your readers are eager to take a trip back in time to an era when the book business was a relatively insular world, dominated by a lost generation of self-hating alcoholics and men on the make. All in all, a fun, if purely nostalgic, read.

“He Lived for Money, Women, and Power” trumpets the cover of one paperback reissue of The Gilded Hearse. Toss in drinking, classism, and bigotry to boot–ah, the good ol’ days.

Brooks also recommends another Gorham novel and promises a future post on his own site about Gorham’s life and works.

Gorham also wrote the early gay-themed novel McCaffery, about a lusty male hustler, which is equally graphic. I’m a big fan of his lurid style. It’s pulp fiction with a trenchant eye for detail and nuance, and an insider’s perspective. Gorham’s life story itself reads like one of his novels. I’ve been in touch with Gorham’s daughter Deborah, a noted scholar, about doing a piece on him for my blog, but have been wrapped up in too many things recently to give it my full attention. I hope to get it done soon.