The Novel Read online

  ‘You sure know how to kill a celebration, Mr. Yoder. Our work’s on schedule, and I’d like you to come up here next week to discuss the first five chapters. If you agree with my modest queries, you can go home and start your drudgery.’

  ‘At this stage every change I insert makes the final work a little bit better. That’s not drudgery.’

  ‘A few minutes ago you sounded as if it were. Now I want you to fetch a glass of wine. I have mine here, and we’ll drink a glass to good old Italy.’ I complied, for I liked this brash, outspoken woman, and as my glass made a clinking sound against the telephone we both cried: ‘Salut!’ If I were to lose Ms. Marmelle I would be lost.

  In the four days before I could get to New York Miss Crane called twice in her more reserved way to inform Emma that the Reader’s Digest was considering Walls, as she called it, for a major selection in its popular Condensed Book series, and to reveal that a mysterious Japanese-Israeli film outfit had expressed interest not necessarily in Walls but in my work generally. She said: ‘I’ll be watching this one carefully. They have no track record but they do seem to be well funded.’

  Coincidentally, that same afternoon Ms. Marmelle called to say that Kinetic had been in repeated touch with an Israeli book publisher who wanted to bring out Stone Walls but would need some kind of financial concession because of the cost of translating it into Hebrew. ‘Help them,’ Emma said without pausing to consult me. ‘We like people who like books, and their people produced one of the great ones.’

  To get to New York for business consultations with my Ministering Angels, I followed a set routine. In my younger days I had enjoyed hopping into my car and barreling along what were then considered the superhighways that carried me from Bethlehem through the Holland Tunnel and into Manhattan, where I parked my car in the same garage, trip after trip, for $2.50 a day plus a $.50 tip. As I grew older and the highways became more crowded, with the parking fee jumping to five and then seven dollars, I did what most sensible drivers in Dresden were doing. I drove myself in my old Buick to the nearby intersection of Rhenish Road and the Interstate, parked my car there and caught a commuter bus that whisked right through the tunnel and into the huge bus terminal on Forty-second Street, from which I could drop into the subway and catch a branch line of the Eighth Avenue that delivered me almost underneath the offices of Kinetic Press. A brisk walk through half a block of underground passages took me to an elevator that hoisted me to the eleventh floor, where Ms. Marmelle’s office would be waiting with a comfortable chair in which I could sit talking with my editor.

  It was a civilized way to travel, and on most mornings I used the two-hour trip to read some book on Mennonite backgrounds or the causes of the eighteenth-century flood of German immigrants into Pennsylvania farmlands. On this January morning I did no reading; instead I reflected on a subject that constantly perplexed me: How different the last few weeks have been for Yoder Senior compared with what they were twenty-four years ago for Yoder Junior, who was just starting out as a writer. Dear God, how I sweated out those fearful days when I had submitted my manuscript and waited.

  And when they finally did report they didn’t like it very much, ‘but let’s get together and see if it can be salvaged,’ I drove out of the farm gate at seven, confident that if anyone could straighten out a difficult manuscript I could, but when I reached the spot where I could first see the towers of Manhattan, courage fled.

  My editor, a woman much brighter than I, scared me, but she was most helpful, and together we whipped the manuscript into shape. But as it moved through the process of bookmaking I began to learn what fear really was, for I wondered if any critic would bother to review the book or any reader to buy it. None did.

  It was hell before death to watch the book appear, flutter like a wounded bird and die. And to experience the same disaster four times! Those were not good years.

  Remembering those destructive days, when one book after another failed, forced me to drop my head against the bus window and hide my face lest someone see my embarrassing tears. Finally I blew my nose and said to myself: If Emma hadn’t had her teaching job, what would we have done? Just as important, if Kinetic hadn’t stayed with me through the bad years, how would my life be ending now? But as I asked this, and the last farms near Somerville in the center of New Jersey vanished, giving way to the strip development that would continue to Manhattan, I brightened while shaking my head in disbelief and a kind of cynicism: Today what happens? Before the manuscript has been edited, or transferred into galleys, or assumed the form of a completed book, its future has already been determined. Publication abroad, probable sales to interested agencies at home. Maybe three hundred thousand first printing and hopefully many of them ultimately sold.

  These days a book can be a success before it even appears. Book clubs, movies, television serialization, it all becomes so big. So unimaginable. And so damnably unfair. As everywhere else in America, the poor get poorer, the rich get richer. It’s not good, it—is—not—good.

  Despite my firm conclusion that American publishing was falling into disarray, I had not the vaguest conception of what might be done to stop the decline, and I could only lament: ‘The time is out of joint …’

  When I entered the familiar offices of Kinetic Press I felt as if I were a member of the firm, for in recent years they had done well by me, and I acknowledged the debt I owed them for having stayed with me till my books began to sell. As I rode to the eleventh floor and left the elevator to go to the office door bearing the small metal plate with the name YVONNE MARMELLE, I felt that I was where I belonged. This was home.

  Knocking gently, I pushed open the door and saw the woman to whom I owed so much. Slim and well groomed, with the New York look of one who had grown up knowing city ways, her personal appearance, the acquired part, was somewhat French, as befitted her name, but her manners and speech were strictly Manhattan.

  When she saw me she jumped up from her chair, ran forward and gave me a huge embrace: ‘Oh, Mr. Yoder, not ten minutes ago Book-of-the-Month Club called. They’re considering Stone Walls for their main October selection!’ She danced with me for a few moments to celebrate this quantum leap in her efforts to get my last book off to a dramatic start.

  I found her effusiveness embarrassing, especially since on the bus my mind had been brooding about exactly this sort of inflated success. I looked past her shoulder at a remarkable painting that for me summarized what publishing was about. It showed a silk-screen reproduction of a feathery Monet landscape, which on the face of it had nothing to do with publishing, but those in the know shared its professional secret. Now I went to the Monet, unhooked the wire from the long glass-headed nail on which it hung, and turned it over, suspending the reversed painting from a tiny loop that had not been visible. With this maneuver the significance of the painting was revealed.

  The back had been covered by a rectangle of the composition board artists use, and on it a chart had been lettered by someone who knew his job:

  As the two who had been responsible for achieving these dramatic figures, Ms. Marmelle and I studied the data and shook our heads in disbelief. Then she showed me a feature she had added since my last visit: a heavy cloth that could be dropped to mask the last three lines giving the figures for the books following Hex: ‘I don’t want our experienced writers to know the advances we pay someone like you, especially if the man looking at the board has just been told that we can’t allow him more than eleven thousand on what promises to be his next turkey. And I don’t want young writers to get blinded by the royalty figures for your last two books.’ She added: ‘I may bring the artist back to make that last column Total Royalties Paid. As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, that would include foreign payments, book-club sales, any sales of subsidiary rights that come in, and on your books they can be amazing.’

  At this point she dropped the heavy cloth and we stood before the chart contemplating the first five lines. For her part, she refrained from cover
ing herself with glory for having fought so vigorously with Kinetic’s top management to give me one more chance and then another and another. The figures spoke for her.

  I had sometimes caught hints of the struggle she had maintained to keep me alive, for fragments of conversation were burned into my soul:

  1967: ‘Mr. Yoder, I did everything humanly possible to move Grenzler because I know it’s a fine book. I failed.’

  1973: ‘Mr. Yoder, the very best I could do was another seven hundred dollars, but when I yelled, “I’ll give him one hundred dollars of my own,” they raised the ante to eight hundred dollars.’

  1976: ‘Mr. Yoder, listen to every word I say. You’re going to be one of our best writers. Mr. MacBain isn’t quite sure. Our salesmen don’t believe it and I suppose your wife doesn’t. But I do. Advance sales on Shunning are deplorable. But to hell with them. Go home and start that new book we talked about. Make every word sing, because this can be the one that breaks the logjam. You’re a writer. Trust me.’

  1980: ‘Mr. Yoder, I couldn’t sleep last night. Hex tells the story. If we miss this time, Kinetic will probably drop you, but I’m telling you that if they do, they drop me, too. I’ll take you to some other house with me, and sooner or later we’ll do it. But toward morning I did fall asleep, and so help me, I dreamed that Hex was going to knock them silly. Let’s pray that the shrinks are right and that dreams do count.’

  It had taken thirteen years of heartbreaking labor before we published a book that earned back its meager advance, and if Ms. Marmelle had not questioned my stubborn insistence on excessively building the backgrounds of characters and their milieus, I could never have acquired my skill in writing books that readers would cherish. The first five lines of the chart constituted a portrait of two people who’d had faith in their convictions.

  ‘Do you want to see the figures I’ve penciled in as guesses for your last line?’

  ‘Don’t hex me.’

  ‘They’d be reassuring.’ But she put the paper away, for she had learned that I liked to hear neither bad news nor good. As I had said in the bad days: ‘I write books. Things happen to them. In my mind the two facts are not related.’ I had tried never to rail against the public’s indifference when it ignored my early novels nor rejoice when it embraced my later ones: ‘I write books and allow them to find their own levels of success.’

  But she had one bit of news that she knew would give me as much quiet satisfaction as it gave her when it was faxed from Kinetic’s London agent: ‘Recent interest in Yoder’s “Grenzler Octet,” as it’s being called in Europe, has enabled us to sell the first four novels to three countries that passed them over before, and Shunning by itself to four additional publishers who are now viewing it as perhaps his finest novel. I think I can guarantee that Hex will be a steady new best-seller across Europe.’

  We did not linger to gloat over this good news, for we were two battle-scarred veterans constantly aware of the perils; I knew that a writer’s reputation was only as good as his last book, while she had seen numerous examples of editors who’d had great successes but whose current stable of writers were producing nothing. Each of us had a lot riding on Stone Walls and we knew it.

  So I was attentive during the nose-to-nose session that morning when she hammered at me from a page of notes detailing the things she had not liked in the opening sections of Walls: ‘I like this story very much, Mr. Yoder, but I think it contains a weakness so serious it might damage sales.’ That last word irritated me: ‘You had adequate proof in those first years that sales don’t worry me.’

  ‘They worry me, but let me phrase it in a way that I know does worry you. The fault I’m speaking of, if not corrected, would cause your readers to be disappointed,’ and now I had to listen.

  ‘Your story line is solid, but its level is so exalted you’ve forgotten to create suspense. And the reason, I think, is that instead of focusing on your characters, you go chasing after abstractions. Because of this, I think the novel would profit from a subplot in which the reader could get involved.’

  Although her ideas irritated me—and seemed almost an intrusion on my terrain—I’d had similar sessions with her on my other books and had found her to be right most of the time, so I had to listen, even though I did not like what I was hearing: ‘How can I do it?’

  ‘First, cut. Cut a good deal of the long middle section. That’ll provide space for the subplot.’

  ‘I don’t have one. What lines are you thinking along?’

  ‘No specific suggestions at this point. I’m just asking you to consider it.’

  ‘Hmmm. I’ll think about it.’

  She continued: ‘Oh yes, a technical point. You do not differentiate your female characters enough, and the problem arises, I think, from the fact that you do not take time to describe and define them carefully when they first appear. Nail them down. I don’t advocate Fenimore Cooper’s device—always a blond heroine opposed to a brunette villainess—but I suppose if we talked long enough that’s what it would come down to. Use the Cooper trick, but mask it with switches and changes and sudden revelations.’

  ‘I agree. Next?’

  ‘You aren’t going to like this one, but I can operate only on gut feelings, and I’ve had warning signals. If your readers have already read seven, or even only the three big novels, they pretty well know where things are in the Grenzler district—what a Pennsylvania Dutch farm looks like—how the landscape influences the behavior of the people who occupy it. You may have too much land and too few people. I think you could profitably cut sharply or even eliminate things like the long passage on why the geology of Berks County dictated how the dam should be built. And when the Troxels are forced to sell their farm, we know they’ll feel despondent. Show that through their emotions toward one another, not their grief at leaving a particular field that had been in their family since 1690. We already know that, we’ve been over it with the clubfooted uncle. I’d cut the descriptions and get on with the story.’

  ‘I can’t agree. This is a novel about the destruction of the stone fences that defined a man’s fields—the stone walls of his barn that defined him.’

  ‘Do you think your readers are interested in that much ecology? They’re expecting a novel, you know.’

  ‘I hate that phrase your readers as if they were a special breed. If a book sells a million copies, its readers are apt to be pretty much of a cross section, don’t you think?’

  ‘I hope so, for your sake.’

  ‘I think my readers, as you call them, also have serious concerns, also wrestle with ideas.’

  It had always been like that with us; she had no hesitation in recommending the severest cuts or alterations, and I offered no apologies when I felt I had to reject any of her suggestions. This was not obstinacy; through the years I had built a vision of absolute clarity as to what a book must be: its size, the number of its chapters, and of supreme importance the significance of the theme, the characters, the plot, the manner of flow from start to finish and from one scene to another. Also the way the book would look—its binding, the color of its jacket, the look of its individual page. I did not talk about these things to others, not even to my wife or Ms. Marmelle, but I brooded over them constantly and it was my dedication to those visions that had sustained me through the bad years when almost no one but Ms. Marmelle believed I could write.

  The virtue was not all on my side, not by any means. Ms. Marmelle also knew what a book was, an object of beauty standing in racks in bookstores across the nation and the world, waiting to be picked up by buyers. She often told her writers: ‘It isn’t worth a damn unless somebody is bullied into realizing its merit and not only buys it but also says at the end: “I’d like to see what this guy does next time out.” That’s writing. That’s publishing.’ We had become a formidable pair, each instructing the other, each adding her or his magic to that confederacy of insight, talent, love of words, dedication to narration and skill in the managerial manipula
tion that produced fine books, and we shared an objective: to close the Grenzler series with a blaze of rockets. What we did not share, apparently, was the basic concept of the novel; she wanted to focus on characters and plot, I wanted to deal primarily with the land, the physical backdrop, that had served me so powerfully in the first seven novels.

  At lunchtime, at a quarter past one, we were tired from the morning’s concentration, and with pleasure at being out in the cold air, we walked briskly to an Italian restaurant tucked away on one of the side streets between Lexington and Third. There she recommended a light dish that she said the chef made to perfection, a tasty eggplant parmigiana. While we waited for it to arrive, she took my left hand and brought it to her lips: ‘A day of celebration,’ and I feared she was going to talk about some new sales triumph with Stone Walls, but she was thinking of something that she knew was far more important to me and, in a sense, to her: ‘To think that fifteen long years after we published The Shunning, knowing it was a fine book, the world is finally accepting our original evaluation. Frankly, Mr. Yoder, I feared it would die unnoticed, and I’m simply overjoyed that Europe is discovering it.’ Suddenly she flung her arms in the air and shouted so loud that others in the restaurant could not help hearing: ‘Whee!’ When customers stared as if to ask: What’s up? she explained in a voice that carried: ‘The good guys just won one!’ and several raised their glasses to salute whatever victory she had achieved.

  I laughed, not at her exhibition but at my oldest memory of The Shunning, which had to do with my wife’s family. I said: ‘I’d always known that Emma came from a rather motley background. Her maiden name was Stoltzfus, pure Amish from Lancaster County, headquarters of that strange and colorful people. Remarks she dropped accidentally led me to believe that her family had once been Amish, but they certainly weren’t when I met her. She was typical Mennonite, proven by the fact that Emma’s father operated a big garage in Reading, where his father had been a hidebound Mennonite, but also a sharp gentleman with a pfennig. I think Emma’s father and her uncle owned their garage, but at any rate they had enough funds to send her to Bryn Mawr, which was itself unusual for people who were Mennonites and Amish. When I met her she was Episcopalian.