The devil and daniel sil.., p.2
The Devil and Daniel Silverman, page 2
“Gore Vidal spoke at Faith College?”
“No, he was supposed to speak last New Year’s. So you see what kind of league I’ve got you in here. Some caliber, wouldn’t you say?”
“But Vidal didn’t speak?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“No idea. It was canceled.”
“He canceled? Why?”
“Actually, they canceled.”
“Why did they cancel?”
“I talked to his lecture agent. She says they were never told. But get this. They paid him the whole $20,000, no questions asked.”
“$20,000? He got twenty grand? How come I only get twelve?”
“Because, bubeleh, your name ain’t spelled g-o-r-e-v-i-d-a-l. For you I shouldn’t even be getting half as much.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“We have to deal in cold cash realities here, Danny. You’re getting three-fifths of Gore Vidal’s fee. Do you sell three-fifths what he sells print on the page?”
“But you don’t know why they canceled?”
“Nope. They canceled and paid the fee. Now that’s class.”
“Well, look, can you get them to cancel me and pay?”
“Sorry, love. I think that is also the privilege of best-sellers.”
2
Number One Bestseller
Ah, but he had once been a best-seller—if only by the skin of his teeth. In the early eighties, the twenty-one year old Daniel Silverman, second in his graduating class at Brandeis and full of beans, published a first novel that registered on the literary landscape like a flea on the Richter scale: one week at number ten on The New York Times best-seller list. It scrambled onto the list two days before Ronald Reagan was sworn into the presidency, an event that meant nothing to Silverman who, as a smug young aesthete, took pride in rising above politics. There were those who talked about a “big chill,” but for Silverman these were cheery, warm times. “It’s morning again in America,” had been that year’s winning campaign slogan. Well, it was surely a great good morning for Daniel Silverman. By the arcane statistical protocols of the publishing industry, the momentary merchandising blip that had boosted him onto the lower rung of “the list” qualified his book to be labelled in all further printings as “Number One Bestseller.” At lunch one day with his editor and agent, Silverman had been naive enough to observe this anomaly. “You know,” he said, “my book isn’t actually, really the number one best-seller. It’s number ten.”
There was laughter. His editor then informed him: “There’s no such phrase in the publishing industry as Number Ten Best-seller. Who would buy such a book?”
“Well, I think it’s pretty good simply making the list,” Silverman confessed.
His agent corrected his enthusiasm. “The thing of it is, there’s a psychology about lists, Danny. Being tenth on a list of ten reads ‘last’ to the public.”
“Right. Like ‘number two’ means second best,” his editor added. “Once you’ve got a list, you’ve got to be at the top or forget it. It’s actually better to be off the list than to be number two even. That way people think maybe you’re too good for this list, maybe you’re on some other list.”
“But even so,” Silverman insisted, “it isn’t exactly true to say that I’m the Number One Best-seller, is it?”
To which his agent, sighing as if he had been asked to explain why one came before two, replied, “You’re misreading. See the big numeral one on the cover? That means you are one of the books on the best-seller list. From now on, that designation will always be part of your literary identity.”
This was true. Even when sales of his novels descended into the low four figures, Silverman continued to be introduced at conferences and lectures as Daniel Silverman, Number One Best-selling Novelist. He soon learned that his hosts liked to see things that way. They liked to talk superlatives, and superlatives take on a momentum that overwhelms critical judgment. After all, who wants to introduce their guest as “Daniel Silverman, a writer of minor importance whom you probably never heard of?” Or “the author whose books go out of print before they reach print.” There was, in fact, a certain psychological advantage to introducing an author as “A Really Major Writer You Better Not Say You Never Heard Of.” That usually forced those in attendance to behave as if of course they knew this world-famous author’s books. At first, in response to these exaggerated introductions, a still-confident Silverman would offer a smiling disclaimer, something like “Slight correction: not yet number one.” That soon became, “Actually not quite number one.” And then, “Well, almost number one.” And finally, as of four years ago, total silence. For, oh, how he had come to cling to that distant distinction! In these leaner days, he wished it had been branded on his forehead.
The novel in question, his lone literary triumph, was titled Analyzing Anna. The title was deliberately ambiguous, Anna being both the subject and object of the analytical episodes that made up the story. The conceit of the work was that Anna spends most of the book analyzing her analyst rather than being analyzed by him. The subtitle made that clear: The Strange Case of Sigmund F. The novel was the story of the world’s first psychoanalysis as told from the viewpoint of the patient, the dark lady whom Freud referred to in his papers as Anna O. There actually was an Anna O. She was a Viennese social worker named Bertha Pappenheim who suffered through occasional bouts of hysteria, but finally settled down to a productive career. In the annals of psychiatry, Anna O. was famous as the great man’s ur-neurotic. Most of Freud’s theories were worked up on the basis of her case, especially his most shocking sexual hypotheses. Freud found Anna witty, attentive, flirtatious, and more than normally willing to let off lots of repressed steam. He liked her, but when she left his care she was as batty as ever, the basis for much of her resentment in Silverman’s novel.
A quasi-glowing review on page three of The New York Times compared the novel’s young author to J. D. Salinger. Well, what the critic actually said was, “a style distantly reminiscent of Salinger.” Silverman had been aiming more at Evelyn Waugh, but, listen, to be mentioned alongside Salinger, even distantly. . . . That gained the book a movie option. There were plans to star Marlon Brando as Freud with possibly Barbra Streisand as Anna. Once the book got associated with stars of that magnitude, its sales—in the paperback edition—took off skyward. Later that year, he was a Book of the Month selection, well, an alternate added only after the movie deal was announced—but even so. Over the next five years, negotiations on the option spiraled around and down and finally, as is the wont of film deals, out of sight into the great black hole of literary expectations. All that really came of the option were a couple of expensive dinners in Hollywood where the author met, first, a drunken screenwriter, and, second, a very much drunker screenwriter. The first screenwriter, who never wrote a page, spent the whole dinner rehearsing his professional woes and finished by warning Silverman, “the way the directors screw my scripts over is the way you can bet I’m gonna screw your fuckin’ book over, buddy.”
The second screenwriter, who actually wrote seventy-six pages of a script before he died of congestive heart failure, had a very special take on Analyzing Anna. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this thing of yours,” he informed Silverman during a 2 a.m. phone call, “It’s this Anna character. Do you realize that the whole thing’s presented from her point of view, for God’s sake? Who cares about her point of view, a psychotic, ugly female? Freud, that’s the viewpoint. Freud.” This approach to the story resulted in half a script that bore no likeness whatever to the book. Silverman was secretly glad to see the option fizzle. But Analyzing Anna remained the work he was best remembered for; it had been his literary meal ticket ever since.
The book also established the literary weight and style that marked the rest of his writing: solid middle-brow exercises in mordant but good-humored social satire. In this case, the story was written in the form of Anna’s diary. The opening pages were still warmly received at readings. Silverman knew them by heart. “All right, I admit it,” Anna declares. “I have a few problems. Who hasn’t? You should see some of my lady friends. They can’t even get out of bed. Me, at least I’m getting along. I earn a living. I am invited to parties. I go to the theater. I am courted, I am courted by highly eligible gentlemen of good reputation. If I am not married, that is by choice, for I could be, yes, I could. Meanwhile, I have a vocation. And isn’t that the real problem, dear doctor? That I am not the helpless little hysterical mouse you are so used to? True, now and then I lose control, I giggle, I blush a little. Is that a disaster? There are men who think this is cute. Not dear Dr. Freud, of course. But listen, if anybody has problems, it’s poor Sigmund. That cigar, for instance. Who does he think he’s fooling? Here I am, gagging on the smoke, I complain I’m dying of asphyxiation, but all he has to say is, ‘And what does it remind you of, my cigar?’ I tell him, ‘it reminds me of a turd and it smells even worse.’ He thinks I don’t know what he’s writing down? Not turd, but penis. This man, he can’t see past his dong. The cigar is a penis substitute, he thinks. So what am I to make of the fact that you’re the one smoking it, dear doctor?”
Pause. Applause. And for sure when he finished, women would gather around to say “How true!” and tell him about their shrink.
Silverman now looked back wistfully on the period that followed his first novel. Those were “the Anna Years,” a time of bright reputation and good (if not great) money. Brashly ambitious and willing to travel to every literary occasion in the land, he was mentioned by critics as a worthy successor to various combinations of literary names that included Bellow, Malamud, Heller, Mailer, Gold, Salinger, Roth. Wonderful. But why were the names on these varied lists almost always Jewish, he wondered. That was odd. There were after all some Gentile novelists—a few decent second-raters. Was this in some sense condescending? Was he being ghettoized? How absurd. Why, he rarely thought of himself as Jewish. In fact, that was a bone of contention. Some critics claimed to detect elements of anti-Semitism in his derisive treatment of Freud, whom Anna snidely referred to as “the rabbi.” The novel, they said, fastened on the slings and arrows of prejudice poor Freud had suffered during his career and played his plight for laughs. This was true. It was a funny book. It turned Freud’s theories about sexuality into reflections of various Jewish child-rearing hang-ups. (Silverman still believed he had done a better job of exposing the patriarchal elements in psychoanalysis than any feminist assistant professors he had ever read—but let that go.) In any case, Anna really did call Freud her “rabbi.” He hadn’t made that up. And besides, if Philip Roth could get away with poking a bit of fun at his ancestry, why not Daniel Silverman?
The Anna Years now seemed hopelessly lost and beyond recovery, buried beneath a landslide of neglect. In the course of the last ten years, he had seen his career go from gentle subsidence to rapid decline to free-fall descent. On his last so-called, multi-city book tour (eight towns in northern California, southern Oregon, and western Nevada) he found himself being booked on after-midnight campus radio stations or on commute-hour talk shows where he was constantly in danger of being dropped to extend the traffic report. He knew better than to expect that the bored and ill-prepared interlocutors whom authors met along the literary trail of tears had read the book or even the dust cover, but they might at least get his name right. He was now being introduced so often by various combinations of Stein, Silver, Berg, Man, and Gold, that, when one interviewer apologized on the air for calling him “David Silverstein” for the third time, he mordantly responded, “Not to worry. Anything Jewish will do.” Despite the buffets, in his more pensive moments Silverman now saw that his years of success had brought him something more important than transient fame and a bit of fortune. With them had come a feeling of superb existential comfort, a rightness he found in simply being a writer. When Analyzing Anna scored high and thousands applauded his work, he knew he was where he wanted to be in life. He was at home in Bookville.
Bookville was a secret, the fantasy place that had filled his childhood with intellectual adventure. It started as his mother’s idea. One evening, after she had finished reading Winnie the Pooh to him, his mother asked him to think of the house where Winnie and all his friends might live. And four year old Daniel did. He thought it up and drew a picture of it. His mother told him that was so smart, so imaginative. Then she said, “Why don’t we think of a village where all the people in all the stories have houses as nice as that?” And after he had drawn the village, she said, “I know what. Let’s call it Bookville.” And that became the home where all the literary folk he met in books still lived, Long John Silver and Natty Bumppo, Jo and the little women, and later Holden Caulfield, Augie March, and Portnoy of the Complaint. Eventually, all Silverman’s own characters moved into town, living along streets in chronological order as they rose into existence. He had never mentioned this ongoing exercise in childish make-believe to anyone, not even to Marty. But Bookville and its inhabitants were still there whenever he came walking down the street, all the way back to Winnie and Eeyore.
The quasi-success of his first book made it possible to find an agent for the next, in fact a stunningly commercial agent: Tommy Sutton, who liked to refer to himself as the Willie Sutton of the publishing world. A young man of roguish good looks who delighted in a well-publicized, fast-lane lifestyle, Sutton made no bones about intending to become more famous than any of his writers. “Why not?” he explained. “Then you let the celebrity rub off on your clients. It’s part of what they pay for.” Though Silverman was a year older than his agent, Sutton insisted on treating him like a kid brother who needed to learn the facts of life. “After all,” as he liked to remind Silverman, “you’re from out of town.” Sutton had promised Silverman the moon and the stars, and he did come through with a terrific second contract, followed by three more that were at least decent enough to let Silverman stay home and write, which was the financial yardstick by which he privately measured success. And even when the contracts diminished, there were lectures, conferences, writers’ retreats to buoy up his spirits. If only this could go on forever.
But it didn’t. After three novels bombed in a row, Tommy Sutton gave him clear warning that he was in trouble. But not to worry, Silverman told himself. He was sure his next book would turn things around. That book was Deep Eye, the perfect concept: Moby Dick retold from the whale’s point of view. An animal story, a classic, brimming with action, the thrill of the chase, manly men. ... God! it was even ecological. This was hot, this was so hot, it was burning a hole in his brain. Psyching himself up to maniacal self-confidence like a daredevil motorcyclist out to leap the Mississippi River in a single bound, he flew back to New York to pitch the book.
“Oh, let’s not go to one of those greasy places with all the heavy food,” Sutton insisted, meaning anything better than an economy class restaurant. “I’ve been taking on too much cholesterol lately.” Silverman would have preferred to avoid having lunch anywhere. In his world, one’s lunching power with editors and agents was a leading economic indicator. He could never forget he had once—back in the Anna Years—been worth dinner at the Four Seasons. Alas! The last time he was in New York, his editor had taken him to the Starbuck’s in the lobby of his building. Sutton proposed that they meet “someplace where we can eat healthy.” This turned out to be, well, not quite a restaurant at all, but a “four-star Vegan cafeteria.” The place, located two doors over from Sutton’s office, was little more than a glorified juice bar, but so what? This was a working lunch, wasn’t it? Point was to get down to business. Right. So, moving rapidly along the serving line, Silverman wound up at the cash register several impatient people ahead of Sutton, who was carefully composing a build-it-yourself tofu, whole-grain and fruit salad. What to do? He paid his own tab. “Sorry. You should have let me get that,” Sutton apologized as they moved to a table in a not too quiet corner. “How about I bring us some wine? I think they have some of that non-alcoholic stuff.” Silverman, in a crisp tone that said let’s get down to some practical talk here, told him to forget the wine.
But he wasn’t even three minutes into his well rehearsed presentation when he heard a muffled beeping. Quick as a wink, Sutton whipped out a cell phone. It was an impressive move: twenty-first century quick-on-the-draw, the fastest phone in the east. “Give me a second here, Danny,” he said, turning away from the table. “It’s probably somebody bothering me about money. You know how that is.” Silverman couldn’t hear a word of the conversation, but he could tell it was indeed about money, much money. There was a fierce, hungry light that came into Sutton’s eyes when big bucks were in play. It was actually a beautiful sight to see: a man so intensely alive, so eagerly focused on the ultimate realities. It brought to mind Bernini’s ecstatic Santa Teresa speared through the heart by divine love. Silverman had not seen a twinkle of such elation during any conversation involving his books for, how long now? He couldn’t remember.
When he was finished, Sutton made a small production of pushing the off-switch on his phone. “See? There. Off—till we’re finished, okay? I only have ears for you.” But even with the phone lying dormant in his pocket, Sutton couldn’t hide his near terminal boredom. Still Silverman persevered. Deep Eye. The story that had everything. In his mind Silverman was running his list. Animal story, classic work, loads of action, thrill of the chase, manly men. . . . Oh boy!
