The devil and daniel sil.., p.3
The Devil and Daniel Silverman, page 3
“The whale,” Sutton interrupted. “Moby Dick there—he’s doing the talking?”
“Yes, but we don’t call him Moby Dick. We call him Shirook Han Omura. That’s his name in Whalish, see?”
“Whalish?”
“The natural language of the whales. He speaks in Whalish.”
“The whale is speaking Whalish? Which means like what? The book is written in . . . not English?”
“Of course it’s in English,” Silverman snapped, letting his impatience show. Christ! Wasn’t the man listening? Just because I’m a minor client, he can’t rent me ten minutes of attention? “As I said, there’s an author’s note that explains the book is translated from the Whalish.”
“Not good,” Sutton said woefully.
“What—not good?”
“Author’s note. That’s a killer. It tells you right up front this is a hard read. I never buy books with notes from the author.”
“Well, maybe we can do without that. The readers will catch on. The important thing is the footnotes about the semiotics of the animal mind, see?”
“Oh.” Sutton had an oh like a rabbit punch. It knocked the wind out of you.
“What ‘oh’?” Silverman asked, tense now with frustration.
“Footnotes.”
“Yes, footnotes.”
“A novel with footnotes. That’s worse than an author’s note.”
Silverman had expected trouble about the footnotes, but he had his retort ready, a clever pedantic maneuver designed to outflank his semi-literate agent. “Salinger put footnotes in his novels. Lots of them. There’s one about Kierkegaard even.”
Sutton wasn’t impressed. “Yeah, well, Salinger. That was back then.”
“I’ve been compared to Salinger. Once. Once I was compared to Salinger.”
“Because of your footnotes?”
“Well, no.”
“Look, I’ll tell you the truth, Danny. I never read Kierkewho’sits. I never read Salinger, not past the cover copy, which is what sells the book. Now you tell me he’s got footnotes, for sure I’m not gonna read him. Okay? Footnotes—that’s a killer.”
“In this case, it’s a highly original literary device to explore an alien consciousness, which is. ...”
Silverman stopped in mid-sentence, allowing a pause to develop between Sutton and himself. The pause welled up like water rising below decks in a sinking ship. Into this pause there flowed a moment of suspense that felt like a scene straight out of a romance novel. The loyal wife—in this case Silverman—waiting to be told about the other woman. “Danny, I’m gonna be candid with you,” Sutton finally said. “I won’t be handling any more of your work. I can’t do you any good any more. The best advice I can give you is: fire me, please fire me. Find a better man. You need somebody who’s more literary. You know me, I’m a mercenary slob. Definitely you need another agent who is worthy of your footnotes.”
Silverman coughed his way into one, two, three sentences beginning with “but,” discarding each in turn as too hurt, too angry, too resentful. Then he fell silent. He had no idea how to continue. He realized that a vein had been cut; he was bleeding to death. Sutton picked up the beat. “Please believe me when I say this is about nothing but money, lousy old money. I like you, man. I like your work. Hey, we’ve been through some great books together. I’m sure you’ll bounce back. Look, it’s not you, it’s me. I’m on to something really big. That’s the way I am, you know. Not an idealistic bone in my body. So hate me.”
Silverman didn’t want to hate him, he wanted to leap across the table and grasp him so he couldn’t get away. Instead, as coolly as he could, he dutifully asked the Is-she-beautiful? question. What was this really big thing that now threatened to leave him abandoned?
Sutton suddenly warmed to the subject like a hungry man who had been waiting through the small talk at a tedious banquet. Finally dinner was being served; he actually smacked his lips. “This is such a kick,” he said with a mock-embarrassed laugh. “You know I’ve been working with Bobby Wilcox?”
No, Silverman didn’t know. “Who’s Bobby Wilcox?”
“Where’ve you been, man, under a rock? You ever go on-line?”
“Well, no, not that much. I use a few university card catalogs.”
Sutton blew out an impatient puff. “Come on, Danny, cross the bridge into the twenty-first century. Wilcox is the literary genius of our age. This’s the guy who invented the input array frame when he was only fourteen years old—one of these inspired hacker kids. Don’t ask me what it is. Me, I’m the worst computer illiterate you’ll ever meet. All I know is Intel bought the patent for seven figures. Works sort of like a spreadsheet, only with personal data. That’s where the literature comes in, see? These frames, what they are is a bunch of standard storylines sampled from writers like Danielle Steel, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, biggies like that. Bobby’s got their style down pat, you’d be amazed. We’re franchising all of them as CEAs.”
“CEAs?”
“Chief Executive Authors. You know, titles like Danielle Steel’s Passion Master, Tom Clancy’s Strategic Imperative,” Sutton answered, hissing on the final s. “That’s a couple of our latest. The program writes ninety-five percent of the book. You always need a little adjusting here and there; we hire part-time college kids for that. All the CEAs are in for is that final comma-S.”
“That’s called an apostrophe,” Silverman said caustically. “You mean apostrophe-s.”
“Yeah? What d’you know? We’ve all been calling it a comma. I wonder why Danielle never picked up on that? So what happens is customers log onto Authors@Large.com—you’ve heard of that? No? Hey, wake up and smell the coffee. That’s our web site, four million hits per month. Customers log on and decide what kind of story they want to be in: Romance, action, gothic, legal procedural, all like that. Then they fill in a personal profile: name, age, gender, job, education, where they were born, etc., etc. Plus a whole lot of likes/dislikes. Food, movie stars, car, clothes, baseball team, and so on. Also there’s x-rated stuff on sexual preferences, erogenous zones, fetishes, fantasies. Incidentally, all the demographics become our property; worth their weight in gold for on-line marketing. Finally we dump the profile into one of Bobby’s frames and zip! like magic, you become a character in the story—sort of like sidekick to the hero. For thirty bucks a copy (we call that the co-author’s discount) the whole thing gets printed out like a real book, with your picture on the cover along with Clancy or whoever as ‘author’s creative consultant.’ You see the appeal. All these poor jerks all over the world can chase spies, shoot up bad guys, screw the movie star of their choice. It’s been a thing of beauty, watching the dot-com go va-voom. We’ve already got, let’s see, there’s the Steele’s, the Clancy’s, and, oh yeah, there’s a Ludlum’s—The Venezuelan Infraction—three books on the best-seller list.”
“Really? I never saw those titles on the Times list,” Silverman observed suspiciously. Was Sutton making this up?
“No, not that list. That’s the snob list. Nobody at the Times wants to admit what people are really reading. Their Book Review is a joke; completely out of touch with the non-reading public. Novelty books, porn, inspirational stuff, how to talk to your goldfish. Non-books for non-readers, that’s where the large green is. Wacko medicine, there’s a winner. You know: how to be happy with your hemorrhoids, that sort of stuff. The Times? Won’t give a nod. So who cares? What we’ve got cooking here is more than books. This is an industry. That call I got? The one I cut off so I could give you my undivided attention? The dot-coms are having a feeding frenzy. Barnes & Noble’s offering 40 million to take us over. This is the NHT, Danny. It’s really all I’ve got time for.”
For the life of him, Silverman couldn’t understand what Sutton was talking about. Something about computers—computers that wrote books. What did that mean? In Bookville, Silverman’s private point of reference for all things literary, nobody used computers. Most of the residents of his imaginary writers’ colony used quills and pens and wrote by candlelight. Since childhood, that had been Silverman’s sentimental vision of great writers at work. Shakespeare scratching away with a dripping duck’s feather in some dark corner of the Mermaid Tavern, Balzac scribbling with a stubby pencil in a noisy Paris bistro, Jack London toiling away on the back of an envelope in a crowded saloon or a bustling train station. What more did genius need? True, there were a couple Bookvillians who preferred to use typewriters, second-hand Underwood portables with that open top that revealed the greasy strike-bars, rattle-traps that pounded out nearly illegible sheets of paper from a bone-dry ribbon. That was how he saw Hemingway at work, a hard-drinking professional hammering away at the clattering keyboard, scattering typo after typo across the page while he dropped cigar ashes down his shirt front. That was as much technology as Hemingway required, or Dreiser, or Steinbeck. Real literature arrived in the world splotched and messy, elegant but only semi-legible prose that others, dedicated editors, would have to struggle to read. And they would struggle, loving what they read all the more for the effort. True, Silverman himself now used a word processor, but as a matter of principle there was only one font he would commit to paper. Courier, that was all real writers needed. Courier plain old ten-point-nothing. Could anybody even imagine Dostoyevsky or Zola writing in Bernhard Fashion?
“But this . . . this isn’t even remotely literature,” Silverman protested with as much controlled indignity as he could manage. Could he, perhaps, in what was clearly shaping up to be their last conversation, wring at least a muted note of remorse out of his ebullient agent? No, he couldn’t.
Sutton gave a melancholy sigh. “I’ve been hearing that from every writer I talk to. What can I say? Some people catch the wave and some don’t. The truth is, Danny, publishing’s become a whole different universe since your time. On-line is where it’s at. You could see that coming years off. I mean once they invented the spell-checker, who needed editors any more? Now that we got the Web, who needs publishers?”
In his mind, Silverman, trapped between resentment and desperation, was scrambling madly to put his life back together before lunch was over. “I don’t get it,” he confessed to Sutton. “When did all this happen? How could so much have changed since my last book?”
An expression of authentic compassion came over Sutton’s face. “I know, I know, you’re a literary author. It’s hard to break the habit. And who knows? You could get lucky. There’ll always be some quality that slips through the controls. But that’s a crap shoot, my friend. I wouldn’t bet on it. Believe me, the future is wall-to-wall digital.”
Silverman wanted to protest, but it was as if Sutton was talking a foreign language. “But I can’t just. ...”
His agent took pity. “Look, I’ll do what I can for old time’s sake, okay? There are probably a couple agents around town who still handle print, some of the older guys. When I get back to the office, I’ll look up some names. But, listen, take my advice. Whatever you’re working on, try to turn it into some kind of computerized crap.”
Sutton did pay for the dessert. Mango sorbet. Two scoops.
After his agent left, Silverman sat stunned and brooding at the table. He found himself struggling to hold off a sense of vertigo as a long, downwardly-spiraling, lightless tunnel stretched out before his imagination. At last he shook himself awake. What was this bottomless abyss he was staring into? Oh, yes, it was his future. As he rose to leave, he caught a reflection of himself in the polished surface of the napkin holder. But it wasn’t his face. It was a dinosaur looking back.
In the nine years since the event he remembered as The Last Lunch, Silverman hadn’t been able to find another agent. A few of those he approached remembered that Analyzing Anna had been much praised, but not in a way that helped. “Oh yes, great book,” they were likely to observe in a hurried phone call. “Very literary. Let’s see, that was what? Nearly twenty years ago. Well, it’s been a long time between books, hasn’t it? . . . Oh, you have? . . . . Seven books since then. . . . Well, you have been productive. I guess I sort of lost track of you.” The word of doom. When, in desperate self-defense, Silverman discreetly mentioned that he had been a number one best-seller, potential agents had the uncanny knack of recollecting as clearly as if they were reciting yesterday’s baseball scores, that he had not been the number one best-seller, not really, not actually. “Actually, you were about five or six on the list, right? For how long? A month or so, as I recall.”
“Yes, something like that.”
Three books back, ever-helpful cousin-in-law Hanna offered to take a stab at agenting, but she had no talent for it. She was even less literary than Tommy Sutton had been. “Why couldn’t you write a cookbook?” was the level of her advice. Besides, she lost her temper too easily and then she started talking dirty. Once, at a luncheon, she got so incensed with an editor from Viking she had told him he could go fuck himself if that was the best offer he could make for a number one best-seller. That was the end of the luncheon and the deal.
So now Silverman was his own agent—the world’s worst, next to Hanna. That was because he acted from desperation and accepted humiliating terms.
And still Silverman loved being a writer, loved every vibrant, self-absorbed minute of it. He liked being inside his own head, working out angles and variations on stories. Fine-tuning a plot had for him the sensual reward of craftsmanship, the admiring hand on leather or wood. He joyed in writing even when he knew he was at work on a lost cause of a book, a great, lopsided literary disaster that would hit the water and capsize like a badly engineered battleship. It was still his story, a piece of his life. He even relished the long spells of writer’s block he frequently suffered because he knew, somehow, he would break through and break free, and the words would come spilling out, a release much like orgasm long delayed. It was his love of writing that made him so vulnerably desperate. Because he knew in the marrow of his bone that he couldn’t give up this addictive pleasure—even if he had to go begging in the streets to support his habit.
There had been small compensations along the way as he wound his way down and down. Last year he came across a story reporting that Tommy Sutton’s Authors@Large.com had gone bust. It was listed among the ten dot-com companies that had tanked most disastrously in the general Internet debacle; it ranked after recently defunct enterprises named Goldfish.com and Funerals.com. At the time, Silverman wondered if Sutton might be willing to take him on again as a client. But when he placed a call to New York, he got a recorded voice telling him to “check our web site and send us an e-mail.” He went no further.
Now, with bankruptcy hounding him, Silverman could get by only by offering courses at the university extension. His reputation was still visible enough to get him a creative writing class. Which meant he spent several hours a week correcting punctuation, doing what he could to save the semicolon from extinction. But he still wouldn’t choose to be anything but a writer free to roam the fields of his mind. And he knew he was good, even if reviewers and editors begrudged him the recognition. He was especially good at one thing that had frankly surprised him, but had stuck with him all along. He could sure write a convincing woman. On that score, even female reviewers had been impressed by how deftly he, speaking throughout Analyzing Anna in the first person, had handled the subtleties of a woman’s sex life. He had been struck by that, too, all the more so as he launched into a second novel (I, Emma), telling the story of Emma Bovary from Emma’s viewpoint. The seductive passivity of these nineteenth-century, middle-class women, their practiced coquettishness, their obsession with fashion and cosmetics, their nagging insecurities about body image (the hips, the waist, the bust, again the hips)—all this came so naturally to him.
“I wonder why that is,” he asked himself. “How come I find it so easy to get inside the female mind?”
On a book tour for I, Emma, he passed through San Francisco and met Marty.
Then he knew.
3
The Whole World Isn’t San Francisco
Silverman stood in the front hall and sniffed. He sniffed hard. The scent on the air, lingering from early that morning, was luscious, a tantalizing blend of vanilla, brandy, and home-baked pastry. The finest ingredients lovingly combined. Marvelous. But it was the wrong smell.
Three times a week, Marty filled the apartment with the lovely fragrance of Maurice’s A Votre Santé Madeleines. Baking under the name of Maurice—the pseudonym offered just that hint of the Gallic so dear to San Franciscans—was his day job, or rather his break-of-day job as he liked to put it, his major means of earning during the increasingly long spells between casting calls. He was now up to seventy dozen Madeleines a week. Even if he started in at two in the morning, he was pushing the limit of what their tiny kitchen could handle. A couple dozen more and he would, as he put it, “have to turn seriously commercial.” He had been threatening to make the leap for the past three years—from the time his recipe for Madeleines, a skillful adaptation that eliminated the egg yolks and substituted a secret fat-free shortening, had won an award from the city’s leading health-food magazine. There were few gourmets who could tell the difference between A Votre Santé and its high-cholesterol rivals. Ordinarily, Silverman found it a privilege to enter the home where the healthiest Madeleines on the market were made. But pastry wasn’t what he expected today. This was ribs night. What he wanted to smell was the dark side of Marty’s culinary talent, his utterly unwholesome barbecued ribs. By this time in the day, the aroma of spiced and charring pig should have crowded out the last fragile vapors of that morning’s baking. He sniffed again. Not a trace. Four in the afternoon and no ribs cooking. That could mean only one thing. Trouble.
