At random, p.12
At Random, page 12
In 1941 our fall catalogue announced a change in our presentation of Remembrance of Things Past:
One of the most successful publishing projects in the history of Random House was the four-volume set of Proust’s lifework, published in 1934. When the time came to reprint this set again, however, the publishers wondered whether the $12.50 price might not be discouraging to many thousands of readers who would otherwise be anxious to have a complete Proust in their libraries.
What we had done was to compress the complete work into two volumes which we could offer, boxed, at five dollars. The Book-of-the-Month Club used this set as a dividend and distributed over two hundred thousand copies. Meantime, we had gradually been adding, a novel at a time, the seven volumes to The Modern Library, until they all became available in that inexpensive series. Today Swann’s Way, the first of the seven, still sells well in colleges, but demand for the others has dwindled. Someday, I am sure, there will be a big revival of interest in all of Proust.
Book-of-the-Month Club mailing, 1941 (17.1 illustration credit)
The very successful Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—written, of course, by Gertrude Stein—was published in 1933 by Harcourt, Brace. Shortly after it came out, my friend Carl Van Vechten suggested that we ought to publish some of her earlier work. I cabled her in Paris at once, with the result that we added Three Lives to The Modern Library that same year. Then early in 1934 we published the libretto of Four Saints in Three Acts, the opera she did with Virgil Thomson.
I first met Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas in Paris, when Harold Guinzburg and I were on our way to Egypt and Russia.
DIARY, April 20, 1934:
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April 21
After getting our tickets for Cairo at the Airways office, I rode over to Gallimard’s office. (They are the French publishers of Marcel Proust, and I wanted to explain what we proposed to do this Fall with Proust in America: a four-volume set complete for ten bucks.) Mr. Robert Avon, the American manager, however, was away for the day (chutzpa!) and I explained as best I could to a half-witted subordinate.
Walked up the Boulevard Raspail to 9 Rue Huysman, the abode of Helen and Giorgio Joyce, and had a most delightful lunch with Helen, Giorgio, Harold, Mr. and Mrs. James Joyce, Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Jolas, and Mr. Paul Leon. Joyce was in rare good humor, obviously delighted with the job we had done this winter on “Ulysses.” I promised that we would send him 7500 dollars at once on account of royalties due him July 1, in order that he might have it before—or if—the dollar dropped further (it moved up to 15.05 today in French currency, making the franc worth almost 7¢—against 4½¢ when I was in Paris in 1930).
I left the Joyces at 3:30 and went round the corner to 27 Rue de Fleurus, where I spent an hour in the famous studio of Gertrude Stein, with Miss Stein and Miss Toklas, surrounded by countless paintings of Picasso and Matisse. Gerty was very pleasant and very voluble, and when she got around to trying to sell me the 4 or 5 hundred copies she had left of her early books (published by herself with the imprint “Plain Editions”), she reminded me very much of Edna Ferber. While this negotiation was in progress, Miss Toklas’ imposing mustachio quivered with emotion, the while she interposed nervous comments intended to help drive the bargain home. I promised to consider the project when I got back to New York, and shifted the conversation back to safer ground: Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel, “Tender Is the Night” and Miss Stein’s latest artist discovery—a young Englishman named Francis Rose.
At 4:45 I left—regretfully—and taxied to the Gare de Lyons.
During my visit I suggested that Miss Stein and Miss Toklas come to America in the fall of 1934, when we would be publishing her next book, Portraits and Prayers. We wanted to make a big fuss over it—and over her! She decided to come—her first visit to the United States in thirty-one years. I promised we’d get her enough speaking and writing assignments to pay all her expenses.
Carl Van Vechten and I went to meet her at the dock, and when she and Miss Toklas disembarked, it was a front-page story—something we never expected. The papers thought this visit might make an unusual feature story and sent down their cleverest reporters to meet Gertrude Stein, whose writings were a great joke to many people. “A rose is a rose is a rose.”
Gertrude proceeded to handle that bunch of fresh photographers and newsmen like the master she was. She was the publicity hound of the world—simply great; she could have been a tremendous hit in show business. They wrote funny stories about her, but they were mixed with love and admiration, because she was a great woman—a woman of authority. When she talked, she talked as plain as a banker. She knew what she was talking about, too, and all the incomprehensible mishmash appeared only in her writing. The press met a very direct, brilliant woman.
We took her to the Algonquin, and she immediately began telling me all the people she wanted to meet. She just took me over, and for the two or three weeks she was in New York, I was her slave. She ordered me around like a little errand boy.
I remember the morning after their arrival, Gertrude and Alice Toklas came to the Random House office. On the third floor of our building there was an employment agency for cooks and maids; it was a very elegant agency, patronized by all the society people. When Alice Toklas and Gertrude Stein walked into the elevator, the operator took one look at them and didn’t even ask any questions; he dumped them off on the third floor. They finally got to our office, with Gertrude highly amused. It didn’t bother her a bit. She said, “That damn-fool elevator boy thought we were a couple of cooks and put us off at the employment agency.”
The mighty Alec Woollcott demanded to meet Gertrude, so I had a lunch for them in my apartment. As was his custom, Woollcott kept interrupting Gertrude until she stopped him cold and said, “Mr. Woollcott, I am talking.” Woollcott actually shut up. She disputed him a couple of times, and he said, “People don’t dispute Woollcott.” She countered, “I’m not people; I’m Gertrude Stein.” Woollcott was delighted, and they got along wonderfully. She disarmed everybody.
Next thing we knew, she was invited to the White House, where she stayed for a weekend. She became the rage, the big success of the season in New York, but still for a very limited audience. I wangled an NBC coast-to-coast interview for her and I acted as M.C. Miriam Hopkins came with us to the studio. (Miriam adored Gertrude, and Gertrude adored Miriam. She had Miriam running errands for her, day after day. It amused her—having a movie star calling for her shoes and having her clothes dry-cleaned. She ordered everybody around, and got away with it. Miriam thought she was the greatest thing that ever came down the pike.) I started the radio interview by remarking, “Gertrude Stein, here you are on a coast-to-coast hookup. This is going to be your chance to explain to the American public what you mean by these writings of yours.” I added, “I’m very proud to be your publisher, Miss Stein, but as I’ve always told you, I don’t understand very much of what you’re saying.”
She replied promptly, “Well, I’ve always told you, Bennett, you’re a very nice boy but you’re rather stupid.”
On a coast-to-coast hookup! The studio audience let out a howl, and believe me, I didn’t kid around with Gertrude for the rest of the interview. I was very respectful. She was superb, especially when she started explaining herself.
As we left the studio Miriam said, “You were wonderful, Gertrude. You sure shut Bennett up pretty fast. How much did you get for it?”
Gertrude said, “You mean they pay for this?”
I quickly explained, “There’s no pay for this sort of thing—it’s the best publicity in the world to get a coast-to-coast prime-time network interview.”
Gertrude Stein (18.2 illustration credit)
Miriam, who was a devil, disagreed. “Bennett ought to be ashamed of himself,” she declared. “Gertrude, don’t you ever go on radio again unless you get at least five hundred dollars for it.”
So that became Gertrude’s demand. We could have gotten her on a lot of shows for nothing and sold a lot more of her books, but Gertrude said, “Miriam said I should get five hundred dollars. I won’t do it for less.” That marked the end of her radio career.
Gertrude’s lecture tour was a great success—front-page news in every city she visited—so we rushed production of a book containing the complete lectures so that we could publish it while she was still in America. Just before Gertrude and Alice were to depart in early May, I gave them a big farewell party which lasted until about four o’clock in the morning. As she was leaving, Gertrude told me how much she loved seeing her writing in print and asked me how I felt about it. I told her that anything she wanted to see in print, we would do.
So Random House became Gertrude Stein’s official publisher. I continued to be frank with her about how bewildered I was by her writing, and when I wrote the jacket copy for her books I was equally frank with the public:
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She once began a letter to me with “My dear dumb ox Bennett,” but it was nonetheless full of warmth and affection. She knew how I felt about her, and I expressed it clearly on the jacket of her novel Ida, where I described myself as “a publisher who rarely has the faintest idea of what Miss Stein is talking about, but who admires her from the bottom of his heart for her courage and for her abounding love of humanity and freedom.”
The last time I saw Gertrude was in June, 1936. I was staying with Jo Davidson, the sculptor, and Gertrude invited both of us down to her château in Bilignin in the South of France for a weekend. Jo Davidson had turned down many of her previous invitations. He said, “I can’t spend a whole weekend with those two crazy women. They’re wonderful fun and I love them. But for a whole weekend—not on your life!”
Somehow I managed to talk him into coming with me. According to Gertrude’s original instructions, we booked airplane tickets to Lyons, where Gertrude and Alice were to meet us. At the last minute she called up and said, “Go to Geneva; it’s closer.” Well, that meant one more hop after Lyons. We flew over the Alps in a little single-motor plane, and practically turned upside down en route. Jo got violently sick. Every time I turned to look at him, he was shaking his fist at me, he was so furious. We finally got down at Geneva, and Alice and Gertrude were waiting for us, laughing gaily. Gertrude said, “After I called you up, I found our home was much nearer to Lyons!”
We had to clear customs, of course, from Switzerland into France, which wouldn’t have been necessary if we’d gone to Lyons. There was a great deal of excitement because Gertrude was bossing the customs people around. Then we started off, with Gertrude giving directions. She was a great back-seat driver. Alice Toklas did the driving. Gertrude got us lost completely—we went through one village three times. The third time the people waved at us, and Jo Davidson was going crazy. We finally arrived at Gertrude’s villa. Everybody in town looked on Gertrude as the boss lady. People came to her with all their troubles—sicknesses, births, deaths, divorces, anything at all. Gertrude ruled the roost.
The way she got the villa is a typical Gertrude Stein story. She and Alice were motoring down through Southern France, and they had lunch in this little town. They were looking for a place to buy, and somebody showed them a château, which was near a big army post. It was perfect, but they were told that it was not on the market because some wealthy army captain owned it, and he had kept himself stationed there by refusing promotion. Gertrude decided she had to have that place, so she went back to Paris and began raising hell because this fellow had been neglected. He was immediately promoted to colonel, transferred—and Miss Stein got her villa.
Alice did the cooking—she was a great cook—and we had a wonderful weekend. I have in my study a little sketch that Jo Davidson drew of me while I was sitting in a deck chair out in the garden at Bilignin with Gertrude’s poodle “Basket” at my feet.
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Not long after that visit, the coming of the war put an end to my travels. With Alice, Gertrude withdrew from Paris to Bilignin after the fall of France. She sat out the war there, but she was working all the time; and soon after the liberation of Paris in August, 1944, we received a new manuscript from her.
Since Macmillan had just announced the publication of Forever Amber with a glamorous picture of Kathleen Winsor on the front cover of Publishers Weekly, we followed with a page of our own that announced Gertrude Stein’s forthcoming book and featured a photograph of her and Alice B. Toklas that had been taken during their American visit. Gertrude was just as amused as everyone else was. I don’t think I’ve ever met a better sport.
When the book came out in February, 1945, the title had been changed to Wars I Have Seen. It was Gertrude’s account of what life in France was like under the German occupation, during which most of it was secretly written, and of what happened when the Americans arrived; it sold better than any of her previous books. The following summer we brought out Brewsie and Willie, her story of the conversations she had with the many American soldiers who came to see her after the liberation, when she had moved from her country place back to Paris. Five days after publication, on July 27, 1946, Gertrude died in Paris at the age of seventy-two.
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Long before Brewsie and Willie was published, we had a big important volume in preparation: Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, a wide representation of her work from 1909 to 1945, edited, with an introduction and notes, by Carl Van Vechten. Gertrude did not live to see it finished, but less than six weeks before her death she wrote a brief message for the front of the book. I was, to say the least, deeply touched by her concluding words:
Then there was my first publisher who was commercial but who said he would print and he would publish even if he did not understand and if he did not make money, it sounds like a fairy tale but it is true, Bennett said, I will print a book of yours a year whatever it is and he has, and often I have worried but he always said there was nothing to worry about and there wasnt. And now I am pleased here are the selected writings and naturally I wanted more, but I do and can say that all that are here are those that I wanted the most, thanks and thanks again.
Every publisher worth his salt has to publish poetry, even some that he knows he’s going to lose money on, and over the years we have done our share. The prestige this gave our company helped us on other fronts on which we also became active: finding younger playwrights and new American writers who had never been published before. We had started with Robinson Jeffers, and on April 25, 1934, The New Republic printed my letter announcing that Random House would become the American publisher of two young poets who had taken England by storm:
SIR: I have noted Alfred Kreymborg’s letter printed in your issue of April 4 asking why it is that no American publisher has yet imported sheets of Stephen Spender’s poems. I am pleased to tell you that there resposes in the Random House safe at the present moment a contract whereby Random House will publish everything that Mr. Spender writes from now on. We are not importing sheets, but are setting up the poems anew, since we have high hopes that Mr. Spender’s poetry will find a wide public in America. Incidentally, at the same time that we publish Spender, we shall publish a volume of another young English poet with exceptional promise—Mr. W. H. Auden.
A little later on, we signed C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice, so that in a very short time we had on our list the most promising of the young English poets. Auden stayed on with Random House, and it has always been a pleasure to publish him. There is more demand for Auden than for most poets, year after year, for his old books as well as his new ones.
W. H. Auden—early and late (19.1 illustration credit)
O’Neill had given us our start in publishing plays, and we had immediately begun our program of signing up playwrights. This was my secret love, of course—a way to feel that I had one foot in the back door of the theater. Besides, plays weren’t published much in those days—Samuel French was doing paperback editions, but they were mainly for actors—and the field was more or less open. We began to present plays as real books, attractively designed and hardbound, with illustrations of scenes from the actual productions, and we got them out while they were still running on Broadway.
We started off with George S. Kaufman, who had two plays in 1934. The first, which he wrote with Alexander Woollcott, was The Dark Tower, a successful melodrama, and we published it in January. Then, timed to its opening in September, we brought out the comedy Merrily We Roll Along, by Kaufman and Hart. (Moss Hart had had his first great success with Kaufman four years earlier, when Once in a Lifetime was produced. I had met Moss then, and it marked the beginning of a lifetime friendship.) Before long we were publishing such playwrights as S. N. Behrman, Sidney Kingsley, Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, Irwin Shaw and Arthur Kober. We continued to add others year after year, and we had our full quota of Broadway hits.
People thought and still think that I’m crazy to publish plays. They usually lose money, since most people find them hard to read and the audience is limited. Two cities—New York and Hollywood—account for about ninety percent of the plays that are sold, the other ten percent, I would say, being enough for the rest of the country. A certain number of people collect plays or anything to do with the theater, and some libraries buy them too, so even in the case of a total failure on Broadway, we can count on a sale of at least eight hundred. It’s unusual for a play in book form to sell more than two thousand, but there are always exceptions. O’Neill was a great best seller, and the first play we did of his, Ah, Wilderness!, sold over fifty thousand. In the 1930’s we had to sell only about fifteen hundred copies to break even, whereas now we have to sell twice as many, even though the price has gone up so much. So we’ve had to cut down on publishing some of the failures, which we used to do just to please people we knew in the theater. Playwrights all like to have their plays published in permanent book form, and they’ll fight for a play that runs only a week.
