When a publisher wants to demean or break a writer and is a coward who doesn’t dare act openly, the thing is so easy that it’s almost shameful that he should set out to do it. The New York publishing house of Harper & Brothers is known to have had an unavowed desire to rid itself of Herman Melville, the author of Moby-Dick, after the disappointing early sales of that novel, one of the pinnacles of the genre, and the obtuse, parsimonious reviews it received in most of his country’s press (in England it was more favorably received). So when Melville gave them his new book, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, the Harper brothers, rather than simply reject the text, resorted to the cowardly technique of offering him an impossible contract; its most humiliating difference from previous contracts (Melville had already published Omoo, Mardi, Redburn and White-Jacket with them) consisted of giving him less than half of his habitual percentage, that is, twenty cents on the dollar rather than the customary fifty, after the publisher’s costs had been earned back, which would happen only after the sale of one thousand one hundred and ninety copies. Melville took a couple of days to think it over and, inexplicably to the Harpers (and no doubt to their disappointment), accepted their paltry offer, for reasons that remain unclear. However, he postponed the final due date for the manuscript, went back to work on it and inserted three somewhat artificial chapters that sketched a bitter satire of the literary world he found himself forced to survive in, fictitiously settling the score with his publishers and detractors, especially one of the latter named Duyckinck. Though these chapters contain brilliant passages, the novel was the worse for them, to the point that in recent years versions of Pierre have been published without these additions meant to inflict vengeance or humiliation. The Harpers, finding themselves with a volume considerably more extensive than expected, raised the book’s price to $1.25 from the dollar that was initially planned, and Melville’s share to 25 cents per book, keeping him in the same contractually agreed upon misery. As was to be expected and feared, the reviews that greeted Pierre were even more boorish and contemptuous than those of Moby-Dick (Duyckinck aired his wrath but pretended not to have recognized his portrait, an ignoble response, he should have abstained from comment), and the brothers H not only did not support or defend the book after the first attacks but launched unnecessary, underhanded chastisements from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, behaving in this respect, as well, like terrible publishers and inscribing themselves in the annals of aberrant conduct, since it was their duty to protect their author and their book. And thus, with the unfortunate Pierre, began Melville’s decline as a novelist; he never again published anything in the genre that was comparable to his previous achievements, though he did publish some of the best stories in the history of literature, such as Bartleby and Billy Budd, the latter only posthumously and in an unpolished version he completed not long before his death, which came forty humiliated years after the appearance of Moby-Dick.
Except for the infinite difference in merit, I suffered what was, in a way, a disparagement even worse than the one inflicted on the great Herman Melville, for when I gave Todas las almas to the publisher who did publish it in its day (and still retains it against my will by means of an advantageous contract that he got because of my naiveté and consideration and the friendship I then had for him), his offer was even more offensive than that made by the brothers H to Mr. M for Pierre (dear God, those initials), especially given that my previous novel, El hombre sentimental or The Man of Feeling, had generally received good reviews in Spain and France and had sold in quantities more than sufficient to cover the advance and yield, as well, no small profit to this publisher, I would prefer that his name not appear in these pages. Despite the healthy balance of my accounts, despite the almost three years that had elapsed since El hombre sentimental and the fact that Todas las almas was eighty or so pages longer and would therefore be sold at a higher price, the publisher in question offered me an advance 25% lower than the previous one. At the time I chalked it up to his legendary tightfistedness and his feudal concept of publishing, which undoubtedly did have their influence, but now, in light of even stingier and more scandalous later events and with benefit of hindsight, I cannot think that my case was very different from that of Herman Melville or that I was treated any better (which would have been an additional injustice to the creator of the white whale), especially since in addition to making so offensive an offer, the publisher had one of his more capable employees write me a long letter raising all sorts of objections to the novel—generated and inspired by the boss, who had already presented me with some of them over the phone, in vacuous and indecipherable form, eloquent he was not—which, in my view, were every bit as simplistic as they were convoluted. If he didn’t write the letter himself it must have been due to his aloof nature and his tendency to open fire unexpectedly while crouching low behind his ramparts, and because, much more of a shopkeeper than an intellectual, despite his efforts to the contrary, he didn’t generally feel comfortable reasoning or arguing (he was ill-equipped for those functions) and much preferred obduracy and shamming. With an innocence inappropriate to my age, I listened to his objections as if there were some truth or thought behind them and even took one of them into account; the rest were belabored or misguided and I ignored them, though I was not then or now the right person to refute or deny the undoubted defects of my books. Believing myself to be dealing with a friend and even—good God—a father figure, I wrote to the publisher that “since you are who you are” I was prepared to accept the same advance as I had three years earlier for the novel that was eighty pages shorter, but not a lower one. Feudal as he was, he must have taken this for insubordination and defamation, no doubt thinking I was a seditious ingrate. I didn’t realize that what he probably wanted was to stop publishing me altogether or to undermine my confidence, and, like Melville, I finally accepted his unfair and unacceptable terms (it must have been a disappointment to him, and I wasn’t getting fifty percent or even the twenty percent that wounded the father of Moby-Dick like a harpoon thrust, only the customary, absurd ten percent of our time); and accepted them again several times more for later works, with a good faith so troubling that the only possible conclusion is that I was and may still be—I don’t know—a chump or patsy of the first water. Looking back, I must infer, however, that Todas las almas was not liked by its publisher, who thought it a desultory piece of work and published it grudgingly and just in case, though now there is no way he will release or free it from the oppression all my titles endure, ground beneath his medieval heel and subjugated by his vinegary editorial imprint (I don’t know when that imprint will finally be out of my sight).
Yet whatever fate it deserved, the novel did not meet with bad fortune, though there was at least one person who qualified it as garbage and the worst book of all time, which is surely not without some merit. It has, in any case, been translated into nine languages, and must have sold about 140,000 copies by now, in its various editions and languages, and this publisher has—grudgingly, no doubt, and just in case—collected his very succulent, advantageous percentage on the sale of each one of those copies, with some recent exceptions (the figures are his, of course; what other figures do I have access to?). But one can learn from great masters like Herman Melville even in their darkest, most resentful hours, and it’s not worth the risk of farther spoiling a text by having someone figure in it at length who doesn’t deserve even to have his full name stated here. However greatly my books and I may suffer from his deeds and omissions and wiles, it makes no sense to dedicate any more space to this businessman than to the Harper brothers, who were, when all is said and done, real publishers, capable of literary equanimity. The mere mention of that other H darkens these pages, making them somewhat sordid, while making me somber and rancorous and prone to committing verbal outrages, and, after all, between him and the nineteenth century brothers H there lies at least the same distance as between the poor Mr. M of those days and the other M who speaks here.
Even in
sordid matters there is always, despite everything, some comical element that can be put to use, and if I’ve used the adjective “vinegary” it was purely out of love for precision and strict adherence to the truth. I learned not long ago, from some occasional visitors to the publishing house (but maybe they were joking), that in all of its rooms there was, on at least two successive days, a strong, persistent and extremely unpleasant smell. When the firm’s employees were questioned as to its origin, it seems that they, with no apparent embarrassment, told the stunned visitors (one of whom may have been a foreigner, for even greater dumbfounded-ness) that the boss and his wife, his chatty wife, had, on the advice of some shaman, unholy madman, or witch doctor, which they followed to the letter, placed, half-hidden beneath the furniture and bookshelves, saucers of salt and vinegar to neutralize and ward off by this mixture the voodoo hexes I’m supposed to have cast on their company—apparently any success or prize I receive is experienced there as a curse, a disaster, and a cause for gnashing of teeth; if they only knew—or perhaps it was my poor dead grandmother from Havana who did it, a goodhearted and cheerful woman such as I’ve hardly known since. However, if all this really is in earnest, I haven’t managed to find out whether the dishes contained a kind of off-white pasty substance or a urine-like liquid with the salt dissolved and invisible, or perhaps, if they used rock salt, with granules floating in it. Be that as it may, and in either case: a stench and a vile thing. Very rational people indeed, healthy and argumentative, in no way primitive or totemic or prone to fits. I don’t know whether the witches’ brew has been removed by now—to the relief of staff, visitors and authors—in view of its total ineffectiveness in recent times, which have been far more sour and vinegary than piquantly salty, to the point that the company is beginning to be known by a pun that may be too unfortunate. Though to tell the truth, I don’t think it is.
Other, more gracious, honorable and mentally stable publishers welcomed the novel hospitably outside of Spain, though there was always some small obstacle or minor change, which was either accepted or avoided by a stroke of luck. Gilles Barbedette, of Rivages, a magnificent and enthusiastic editor who knew everything about Nabokov and whom I miss enormously six years after his death at the unjust age of thirty-six from the slow and murderous virus, felt that the title, translated literally into French—Toutes les âmes—did not work well in that language, in which, true enough, there do not exist two different words like the Spanish “ánima” and “alma,” with the worst of the less secular connotations reserved for “ánima.” Without giving it much thought (finding a new title for a book that already has one involves doing oneself a small violence), I decided it would be called Le Roman d’Oxford, which he approved of and which had been my way of referring to the novel while I wrote it, in letters or conversations with Eric Southworth and Daniella Pittarello, the only two people who were abreast of my designs from the beginning (in fact, it was in Daniella P.’s house in Venice, facing the back of the Scuola de San Rocco and the canal or rio delle Muneghette, that I wrote a good part of the book). That was what I was still calling it, “la novela de Oxford,” when I came down from the second floor and said to Daniella, day after day, in a grave voice and with a half-smile on my lips, “Non so come continuare,” and she would answer, “Dai, dai.” And I went on calling it that for a while still, even after it was finished, to the point that when I finally turned the manuscript over to Vinegar & Salt, Inc. for their consideration and final (retrospective) disdain, on the first page, as a working title, was simply N de O, and it didn’t receive the title it has until the poet Álvaro Pombo informed me one night in an authoritarian manner, and without having read it: “A novel that takes place in Oxford must necessarily be entitled Todas las almas, no matter what it’s about,” and I listened to him. Back then we saw each other often, we almost never do now.
In Germany, as well, the title didn’t seem very convincing to Piper, the Munich publishing house that brought it out, and they added an innocent subtitle whose cheapening effect I was unable to gauge at the time since I don’t know German. Alle Seelen oder die Irren von Oxford, they called it, which apparently means All Souls or The Madmen of Oxford (I want to believe that the equivalent word is not even more odious, something abominable like “screwballs” or “nuts”; I was speaking inaccurately when I said I accepted all the changes). Fortunately, in a more recent edition from the Stuttgart-based firm of Klett-Cotta, the book recovered its more sedate and less screwball name.
As for England, the problems there were of another order. After a firm decision to buy the novel was made by the daring and resolute Christopher MacLehose of Harvill—then part of the gigantic Collins group, but now independent again and going by its former name, The Harvill Press—the corresponding contract took far too long, disturbingly long, to arrive. Finally I made so bold as to inquire after it, rather nervously, since it takes no effort to imagine my excitement at the prospect of seeing, for the first time, a book of mine in the language from which I had translated a number of very difficult books since that first rural-descriptive (but fortunately not gallinaceous) one, and I received the odd response that Harvill was awaiting “legal authorization” from the corporation’s lawyers, who were studying the text very thoroughly before giving the go-ahead to its definitive acquisition, “since it is a roman à clef,” and the publishing house could not risk some future lawsuit. In the words of MacLehose himself, whom I hadn’t yet met, they had to make certain that my book did not contain any “intentional or involuntary” crime. Once again I watched as reality struggled to incorporate my novel into its sphere, and I felt obliged to communicate to Harvill, in a letter of February 23, 1990, that All Souls was not at all a roman à clef or an autobiographical account, but simply a novel tout court, and a work of fiction; that there was no accurate portrayal in it of any member of the Sub-Faculty of Spanish at Oxford University or of any other real person, living or dead, with the exception of John Gawsworth, who, once again, had been taken for the most fictitious and least worrisome element in the book; that “certain characters have, at most, a mixture of traits taken from more than one real person and—primarily—from my own inventive faculty or imagination”; that “the situations and events described in the novel are not real and, moreover, very few things in it are presented as real. To give an example, the scene in which the character named Alex Dewar questions a Russian ballet dancer is only a product of the narrator’s imagination and is presented as such. Much of the book is only supposition or conjecture on the part of the narrator with whom, incidentally, the author cannot possibly be identified, since I am, for example, unwed and childless. Of course,” I added, “all of this does not necessarily prevent readers from believing that they recognize or can identify some of the book’s characters with real people, but I don’t see how that can be avoided. As you know, people tend to think there is much more autobiography in novels than there normally is.” Then I went so far as to contribute a (weak) argument against the possibility of a lawsuit: “Finally, it is, in my opinion, improbable that any member of the Sub-Faculty of Spanish would attempt to sue me or Collins (Harvill) over this novel. It would be ridiculous, not to say scandalous, for Hispanists (that is, people who have dedicated their lives to the study and promotion of Spanish literature) to attack a Spanish book or prevent its publication in English.” And I suggested that they consult with Ian Michael, who in a private letter to me had expressly maintained that there was no reason to speak of it as a roman à clef, something that, in his capacity as chair of the department, he was well-positioned to see and know. (I avoided mentioning his little joke, in that same letter, of calling his colleagues by the names of the characters.) Christopher MacLehose responded by thanking me for my explanations and clarifications, which would undoubtedly help to smooth the way, though they did not alter “the legal situation,” and therefore he preferred to wait for Ian Michael’s response to the inquiry that had indeed been made of him.
It’s easy to gu
ess that I immediately phoned Ian to persuade him, if necessary, to take my side, and I must say with gratitude that though he was in an ideal position to demand some compensation or perquisite from me in return for the endorsement that had been requested of him—season tickets for the bullfights at San Isidro, a leading role in a future novel, a guided visit to Madrid’s most vice-ridden neighborhoods, the publication of a pitiless attack on some rival professor—he did not. Once again he gave the impression that everything related to this book was, for him, a pleasant detour from his routine and thus a great diversion. But though he didn’t ask me for anything in exchange (which attests to his good faith) he did take advantage of the situation to spend a little time frightening and alarming me (which attests to his malice, but almost anyone would have done the same in his place). The British libel or anti-defamation laws, like all British laws, are overly governed by precedent and are therefore too broad and vague to allow anyone ever to feel safe. All it would take was for someone’s circle of acquaintances—for example, the students or colleagues of a professor—to believe they recognized that person in a character in a novel “with resultant hatred, disdain, discredit or derision,” and the real individual would be able to file suit against the book’s author and publishing house and have the suit accepted for consideration. “But how can that be avoided when it depends on the way readers read the book and not on the way the writer wrote it? Any lunatic can believe anything he wants, can’t he? Any paranoid could recognize himself, couldn’t he?” I was thinking of the woman who had offered to be my cleaning lady in a poetical telegram, had given me orders over the telephone, and had seen herself portrayed in a butler or an elevator. “There’s no way around it,” Ian Michael answered, well pleased with the peculiarity of his country’s laws, “there’s nothing to be done.” “What then?” I said, seeing my book banned forever in England. “How can it ever be known if the arbitrary identification has caused hatred or derision? I don’t see how,” I insisted. “It can’t be known with any certainty, since that depends, above all, on the perception of the injured party,” Ian answered, adding very smugly, “so there’s nothing to be done.” The term “injured party” was not at all humorous to me. “What then?” I asked again, this time with more curiosity than hope. “Then we must study the real possibility that those colleagues whom Oxford readers might possibly believe they recognize, with resultant hatred, discredit, derision or disdain, may institute litigation against you, their injurer.” He paused, to give greater drama to the results of his study, and it bothered me that he had called me their “injurer” on no evidence whatsoever. “I’ve talked it over with Eric,” he said, “and we agree on the main thing: we don’t believe any colleague would do any such thing, with one exception,” and here he mentioned a name, “who may perhaps believe he sees himself portrayed in the character named Leigh-Peele. It’s not that other people won’t think they see themselves in other characters, we’re all vain; even I think I recognize something of myself in the Irishman Aidan Kavanagh, though I’ve never displayed my armpits in public the way he does,” and here he couldn’t help letting out a quick laugh, remembering no doubt the scene in the novel when Aidan Kavanagh, wearing a Nile green vest over a strange sleeveless shirt, is dancing wildly in a discotheque and, throwing up his arms, exposes the two bushy tufts of his hirsute underarms, to the narrator’s shock and horror. “None of the others is rich enough to litigate,” he went on, “but he’s just inherited some money, we don’t yet know how much, from some distant, unmarried relatives (maybe church people, we’ll soon find out how much it is), and he could be tempted to do so. So you’d best take that character out of the English version, after all he’s very incidental, you only spend a paragraph on him, or you could at least change the name to avoid giving rise to a possible false association. And it wouldn’t hurt if you included a protectory preface like the one Masterman wrote some time ago.” I didn’t know who Masterman was, nor did I want to know just then. “I’ll send it to you. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll write to Harvill with my verdict and then I think they’ll consider themselves legally authorized for publication. You needn’t worry.”