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ОглавлениеChapter 1
Constructing the Postwar Art Novel: The Making and Marketing of The Sheltering Sky
I’m sorry about my agent—both for your sake and mine.
—Paul Bowles, in a letter to his publisher, James Laughlin, April 7, 1949 (In Touch 201)
Keep up your standards. It is better to be read by 800 readers and be a good writer than be read by all the world and be Somerset Maugham.
—James Laughlin, in a letter to Delmore Schwartz (qtd. in Gussow D19)
He was one of the least troublesome, most gentlemanly clients I had, really a nice man. Despite our friendship, he always addressed me as “Miss Strauss.”
—Helen Strauss, Bowles’s agent, on Paul Bowles (152)
Apologies for his agent, Helen Strauss, are a recurring feature of Paul Bowles’s letters to James Laughlin in the months leading to the publication of The Sheltering Sky, Bowles’s first novel, by New Directions, Laughlin’s company, in December 1949. The apology above, like most of the others, is given for no apparent reason. There is no sign that Strauss did anything that warranted an apology; if Bowles complained to her about her conduct with Laughlin, there is no record of it. As it turned out, Bowles’s association with Strauss far outlasted both his friendship and his business relationship with Laughlin, suggesting that the apologies are better understood not as genuine expressions of regret (or not solely as such expressions) but as Bowles’s attempts to affirm his detachment from business matters—the agent’s purview—and thereby ingratiate himself with his publisher, who, as his advice to Delmore Schwartz indicates, counted himself not as a businessman but as a patron of avant-garde artists.1 At the time of these letters, Bowles had not established himself as a novelist, and before Laughlin agreed to publish The Sheltering Sky, the manuscript had been rejected by numerous publishing houses, so Bowles’s desire to stay on Laughlin’s good side is understandable. Long before the publisher markets a novel to the public, the novelist, particularly the yet-to-be-published novelist, must market himself or herself to the publisher.
In his letter, Bowles goes on to say, “I should have known better than to sign up with Eddie Cantor’s and Jack Benny’s agent. Except that I was ignorant at the time of the entire species” (In Touch 201). In fact, Strauss did not represent either star, but her employer, the William Morris Agency, did. Bowles defends his decision to hire Strauss on the grounds that his lack of interest in such things left him incapable of making the “right” decision; paradoxically, according to this logic, only someone interested in such mundane matters (only someone of a commercial bent) would know enough to not hire an agent so invested in the commercial. Bowles’s next letter, dated April 30, 1949, continues in this vein: “I’m sorry the agent business has been so harassing for you…. I do need some sort of link with New York, naturally” (203). The agent is here cast as the necessary consequence of Bowles’s expatriation to Tangier. Again, the novelist justifies his attachment to the world of commerce by presenting it as the necessary consequence of his self-imposed detachment from that world.
If Bowles’s apologies for his ties to commerce are paradoxical, they are not idiosyncratic. As Pierre Bourdieu writes, “The literary and artistic world is so ordered that those who enter it have an interest in disinterestedness” (“Field” 40). Perceptions of the writer’s artistry depend in part on the perceived distance he or she maintains from what Bourdieu calls the “economic world”; it is thus in the writer’s interest to disavow this world, to announce his or her lack of interest in the commercial.2 More specifically, Bowles’s apologies reflect the changing cultural and economic status of the novel at the start of the 1950s. Between 1948 and 1955, two-thirds of American homes acquired television sets (Spigel 1), spurring predictions of the demise of the literary novel and high culture.3 At the same time, notwithstanding these predictions, the combination of the postwar economic boom with a sharp increase in college attendance—and even the growth of the mass-media industries themselves—presented the book trade with an unprecedented opportunity to expand, to sell more books to more people than ever before.4 The book trade, in a transitional moment between its prewar past as a decentralized cottage industry and its post-1960 future as a small piece of multimedia corporations, exploited this opportunity in part by marketing individual novels, and at times the novel in general, as something other than—something more special than—a mere commodity.5 In this regard, the book trade’s response to the emergence of mass culture throughout the 1950s mirrors the gesture of Bowles’s apologies to Laughlin in 1949—strategically, if somewhat disingenuously, advertising to a growing, increasingly literate audience of consumers the book’s separateness from the world of commerce.
In this chapter, I treat not just Bowles’s apologies but also the story of the writing, publication, and reception of The Sheltering Sky as a means to illuminate the complicated set of negotiations among the book trade, culture critics, and mass-culture institutions in the early postwar era. After falling out of print in the 1970s, Bowles’s first novel has been of interest to scholars over the past decade as a recovered masterpiece of postwar alienation, conducive to revisionist studies of the 1950s as an anxious rather than a placid decade; Bowles’s entire oeuvre, now back in print, has garnered renewed attention as texts well suited to queer and especially postcolonial readings.6 In its own time, however, the novel was something different: a best-selling “art novel”—to borrow Mark McGurl’s term for the post–Henry James, self-consciously artistic novel—sprung from what was then an unusual and in some regards accidental collaboration between mass-and high-culture institutions. The Sheltering Sky was hardly the first art novel in American literary history to achieve immediate commercial success. But when viewed in its institutional context, the context of what Theodore Ziolkowski calls “the totality of agents performing specific tasks in the production, distribution, or promotion of literary works” (10), the story of Bowles’s success is emblematic of a generally overlooked aspect of its moment in literary history, a moment when both high-and mass-culture institutions began to realize the salability of the idea of the avant-garde or “art” novel—the growth, that is, of a market large enough to support a novel marketed as such. It is not surprising that the emergence of this type coincides with the emergence of the art-house cinema; in the era immediately after World War II, the book and movie businesses found relatively small but reliable audiences for products marketed as art rather than as entertainment.7
Bowles is an ideal figure with which to trace this development because the trope of detachment (what Bourdieu calls “disinterestedness”) was a hallmark of his life and literature. But only because he was a well-known figure in avant-garde artistic circles long before he had published a novel was he able to make that detachment work for him. When Bowles first left the United States in 1929, after a single semester at the University of Virginia, he was already a published poet, having had his work included in the March 1928 issue of transition, a little magazine, alongside James Joyce, André Breton, and Gertrude Stein. He was seventeen years old at the time. Bowles idolized Stein; when he visited her in France in 1931, it was as a fledgling poet in search of a mentor. Stein, happy to oblige, exerted her influence in two important ways. First, she effectively shattered his poetic ambitions by telling him his poetry showed no promise.8 Second, more constructively, it was on Stein’s advice that Bowles visited Tangier for the first time, in 1931. He made that trip with his other mentor, Aaron Copland. Copland showed interest in Bowles’s music, and Stein showed none in his poetry, so Bowles abandoned poetry and became a full-time composer on his return to New York in the 1930s. He now divided his time between work for the Broadway stage and “serious” composing—working in the same artistic and sometimes the same social circles as Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Benjamin Britten (with whom he briefly shared an artist’s residence in New York, along with, among others, W. H. Auden). Bowles was inspired to write again by his wife, Jane Bowles, whose novel Two Serious Ladies was published in 1941. He wrote short stories in which, as in his novels to come, his own detachment was inscribed. This is true not just in the sense that they portray alienated Americans searching for a more authentic existence in northern Africa and Central America but also in the sense that the narrative voice always stands far apart from the sometimes grotesque violence it describes. Before he became a novelist, Bowles’s distance from conventional American culture was already a pronounced aspect of both his biography and his writing.
The Agent
One way of considering the postwar relationship between mass culture and the novel in the early postwar era is to ask how and why an avatar of detachment like Bowles became associated with Helen Strauss and the William Morris Agency, and, equally important, why Strauss and the agency showed interest in Bowles. The answers to these questions can be found in the simultaneous growth of the book business and the mass-media industries over the first half of the twentieth century. Before writing his novel, Bowles wanted to publish a volume of short stories, but editors at Dial Press told him that to publish such a volume an author needed two things. First, the author needed a published novel. The reason seems clear enough: short-story collections by unknown authors rarely sell well. Collections by established novelists, however, at least have a chance to justify the publisher’s investment.9
Second, the author needed an agent. “According to them,” Bowles writes in Without Stopping, “an agent was essential; they offered to telephone then and there to make an appointment with one for me” (274).10 In itself, this requirement suggests a significant but infrequently noted shift in the literary field. The original purpose of agents was protection, to make sure that the publisher treated the author fairly. The advent of the literary agent is in this sense a consequence of the modernization of the book business: as the business grew more profitable and more complicated, the relationship between publishers and authors became more impersonal. Authors, according to the agents’ pitch, as artists and not businesspeople, needed representatives to ensure that publishers did not exploit them. Not surprisingly, therefore, when literary agents first appeared on the scene in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, publishers denounced them as the scourge of the book business, in terms that mirrored antiunion rhetoric from factory owners of the same era. The agent’s interest, so the publishers’ rhetoric went, was neither in the well being of the book business (without which there could be no books) nor in the quality of the individual finished product, the book. From the beginning, publishers and sometimes authors negatively identified agents with the commodification of culture, casting the agent as the serpent in the book business’s familiar fall narrative, who corrupts the previously pure process of book production by interfering in what was a gentlemanly and nurturing publisher-author relationship.
By mid-century, however, as Dial Press implicitly told Bowles, the publisher-agent relationship had changed: agents, although still charged with protecting the business interests of the authors they represented, had come to serve a necessary function for publishers as well; agents did much of the work of finding commercial writers and weeding out unsuitable ones. As the publishing industry expanded after World War II and as the number of prospective authors and manuscripts increased exponentially, agents came to be useful as “screens” for publishers, “winnowing good books from bad” (Coser, Kadushin, and Powell 287). By mid-century, as Bowles’s experience suggests, the agent served a double role. Now that the agent no longer served just as a protector of the writer, the hiring of the agent became an important part of the process of novel production and an added hurdle in the construction of a literary career, necessary to legitimize the writer in the eyes of the publisher.11
This consideration of literary agents from the publisher’s and author’s perspectives should not obscure the basic truth about them: their trade is opportunistic, and their existence signals the belief that there is money to be made. That agents became increasingly prominent in the literary field shows the commercial potential of that field, and that potential was tied not just to the growing reading public but also to the growing connection between the book and mass-media forms. A telling and little-noted sign of the growth of the book trade is the fact that, in 1944, the William Morris Agency formed a literary department.12 William Morris, then the second-largest theatrical agency in the United States, was noted not just for its sizable stable of talent but also for its ability to adapt to shifts in the cultural market; not only did it leave its competitors behind in making the transition from vaudeville to movies, but it was also the first agency to recognize television’s potential.13 The agency’s decision to establish a literary department signifies both the growth of the reading audience and the book trade’s developing relationship with mass-media industries. The decision to hire Helen Strauss to head the department reflects these two developments: in her previous job as a story editor for Paramount, she was charged with finding and buying from authors stories that were suitable for filming and with convincing writers to write such stories.14
Strauss’s decision to leave Paramount for William Morris testifies to both the growing commercial opportunities afforded by the literary field and the opportunism of the agent. In her memoir, Strauss characterizes the relation between Hollywood and the book business at the time of this decision: “Each of the big film companies was buying approximately fifty pieces of material annually—novels, plays, magazine serials and short stories…. They bought more than they needed, more than they could produce, not knowing what they would or could do with it. They bought everything. They gobbled up the best-seller lists and the bulk of magazine fiction” (39). Strauss left Paramount for William Morris because she felt it would be more lucrative to represent authors than to work for the studio, given the studios’ seemingly unending willingness to spend on movie material. Her choice to become a literary agent was a winning bet on the economic future of the book business.
That Strauss’s motives were explicitly financial puts her decision to represent Bowles in its proper context: she evidently saw in his literary endeavors a chance to make money. In the light of Bowles’s unconventionality and relative anonymity—he had at the time no commercial credentials, but he did have what might be called highbrow credentials—that judgment is fairly striking. When an agent takes on a client, that agent is gambling that the client will succeed commercially. Business capital comes with the ability to make salable recommendations to publishers, who then make the financial investment in publishing the book. If the book fails commercially, the agent’s ability to secure advances for other authors, and thus the agent’s bottom line, will be damaged. Bowles, moreover, was not the exception among Strauss’s clientele; her list of authors would come to include such literary stars as Archibald MacLeish, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Robert Penn Warren, Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas, and Leon Edel. Fears of mass culture in the 1950s were often based on the notion that the masses would coarsen or debase literary culture (if they had not already done so). But just as the emergence of the art cinema signified the emergence of an audience for serious film that Hollywood studios would soon try to exploit, Strauss’s decision to take Bowles and other literary stars on as clients suggests that institutions of mass culture perceived (rightly, it turned out) a growing audience for the literary, a niche market waiting to be tapped.15
Not only the agent saw commercial potential in Bowles: within ten days of her hiring, Strauss secured for him an advance for a novel from Doubleday, “one of the authentic colossi of the industry,” in the words of publishing historian John Tebbel (112). Bowles’s new position in the field of literary production was enviable: he was represented by the biggest Hollywood agency and was to be published by one of the biggest houses—all without having written a word of his novel or even come up with the idea for it. The idea did not come until after he received word of the advance, which he used to fund the trip to Tangier and the Sahara that inspired the writing of the novel. This chain of events (the hiring of the agent, who secures the advance, which pays for the trip that leads to the inspiration, idea, and writing of the novel) suggests again how integral these disavowed aspects of novel production—agents, advances, commercial publishers—had become to the construction of the novel, even for, if not especially for, the novelists most vigorously engaged in efforts to suppress their ties to them. The kind of detachment embodied by Bowles’s sojourn to the Sahara is not cheap; it can only occur in the context of some attachment to the business world. At the moment in literary history when the novel was receiving from both New Critics and the New York intellectuals its closest critical attention as a distinctive form of artistic production, its institutions were becoming increasingly intertwined with other, more consumer-oriented forms of culture.16
Bowles’s literary career was set back when Doubleday rejected his manuscript for The Sheltering Sky. The publisher told Bowles that what he had submitted was, simply, not a novel.17 It is best not to make too much of this assessment; as Bowles himself concluded with evident satisfaction in his autobiography, Doubleday’s rejection was likely a (regrettable) assessment of The Sheltering Sky’s commercial prospects, a curious one at that, given that the novel is much like the short stories on the basis of which, presumably, along with Strauss’s recommendation, Doubleday gave him the advance. Doubleday’s assessment of the book, that is, is likely not an intentional application of genre theory to a specific text. But the language of the rejection does suggest the role of publishing houses in the construction of genre conventions, in determining what constitutes a novel and what does not. In strictly material terms, if no publisher is willing to deem The Sheltering Sky a novel, then it is not one.
New Directions
Doubleday’s rejection, a footnote in most accounts of Bowles’s career, nonetheless triggered a chain of events that altered the reception of his first novel and probably altered perceptions of his entire career.18 In the short term, it put Bowles in a precarious position because, as a first novelist with no commercial track record, he was asked to return Doubleday’s advance.19 The manuscript then “went through a bad year of being turned down by every publisher who saw it.” Finally, Bowles reports, he “sent it to James Laughlin, at the other end of the publishing spectrum” (Without Stopping 292). In his preface to the novel, Bowles emphasizes that “it was I, and not my agent, who finally sent the typescript to New Directions, and fortunately he liked it and agreed to publish it” (6).
Bowles’s version of this story is noteworthy. By signaling that his manuscript was accepted only when the agent was bypassed, Bowles links the story of the novel’s publication with the mythic bygone era alluded to earlier, before agents arrived on the literary scene, when publishing was gentlemanly and the author’s relationship with the publisher was direct, personal, and concerned solely with art. The makers of art novels and the owner of the avant-garde publishing house in the early postwar era would repeatedly connect their productions to an earlier age of purportedly unmediated aesthetic judgment, to a time when there was no institutional apparatus and no intermediaries (agents, for example) whose concern might be something other than the aesthetic quality of the text. In this respect, the key phrase of Bowles’s account is “he liked it,” where the assessment of commercial prospects (if not application of genre theory) that governed Doubleday’s decision to reject is replaced by something more ineffable: the taste of a single, discerning reader.
That reader is James Laughlin and, to understand the making of The Sheltering Sky, one needs to take stock of Laughlin’s unusual place in the postwar literary field. Although it is important to understand that New Directions occupied a different place in that field than did Doubleday (it was, as Bowles rightly puts it, “at the other end of the publishing spectrum”), it is equally important to see that the marketing strategies used by New Directions proved to be not all that different from those of the larger companies. A useful point of departure is the grammar of Bowles’s above account—“I … sent the typescript to New Directions, and … he liked it” (emphasis mine). Bowles’s use of the pronoun “he” to refer to New Directions is understandable; the publishing house was perceived to be a one-man operation. “I don’t have any business acumen,” Laughlin once said. “I am not good at deals and can’t cope with agents” (“History” 222). Just as Bowles, in his letters to Laughlin, disavowed the agent in order to maintain his avant-garde status in the eyes of the publisher, New Directions achieved its cultural status in part by disavowing the trappings of the modernized publishing house. Laughlin, heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune, had founded the company in 1936 after his mentor Ezra Pound told him he had no future as a poet (his experience with Pound is much like Bowles’s with Stein) and would be more “useful” (Pound’s term) as a publisher of Pound and his friends (Laughlin, “New Directions” 21). Starting as Pound’s patron, Laughlin cultivated a reputation as the publisher who would publish what no one else would, a patron to the avantgarde whose interest was neither in best sellers nor politics but in art itself.20
This reputation suggests in broad strokes what Bowles’s account of Laughlin’s decision to publish his novel suggests in miniature: that without the aid of financially motivated intermediaries Laughlin discovered great, unpublished writers, and that through his discernment and concomitant indifference to financial matters put them into print.21 Laughlin and New Directions writers have an interest in telling this version of events, as it allows both to accrue maximum symbolic capital from their association with one other, and they have done so frequently over the years.22 Laughlin in particular railed against the literary world’s collaborations with mass-media corporations, railed that is against the very apparatus that Helen Strauss represented: “Every day,” he wrote in 1946, “some new and more disgusting ulcer forces its way into the skin of the putrefied body—just yesterday I read in a trade journal that Warner Brothers have established a special department to ‘inspire ideas’ for writers to make into books and later into pictures” (qtd. in Barnhisel, James Laughlin 96–97). The poet Donald Hall summed up this version of Laughlin-as-aesthete best in saying that Laughlin chose which works to publish based on two assumptions: “the assumption of quality and the assumption that these books would not sell in the marketplace” (275).23
But two, related ideas are left out of this assessment of Laughlin’s importance, and both need to be considered if we are to understand the story of The Sheltering Sky. First, the network of writers who recommended other writers to Laughlin muddies the picture of him as the solitary man of taste. Second, the surprising profitability of New Directions by the end of the 1950s—after almost two decades of losses, Laughlin’s company began to turn a profit—must alter our view of Laughlin as a nonbusinessperson whose books would not sell. Some New Directions books did sell, and the method of advertising the book by not advertising it (Hall’s description of Laughlin, first printed in the New York Times, as someone who cared only about aesthetic quality and who presumed failure in the marketplace, exemplifies this method) would prove an effective marketing strategy for novel producers in general. It was a way to distinguish the book from the mass culture that intellectuals attacked, even as, as Bowles’s example suggests, the emergence of mass culture enabled the composition and publication of literary novels. The situation of New Directions in 1949 was analogous to Bowles’s fledgling career as a novelist: on the verge of finding commercial success by producing works that were, as Leslie Fiedler derisively described Bowles’s fiction, “intendedly highbrow” (502). The Sheltering Sky, published at the end of 1949 as New Directions entered its first profitable decade, was to become a prototype of a kind of literary-commercial success in the 1950s.
Toward the end of his life, Laughlin spoke proudly of his willingness to publish writers other than the ones Pound recommended, but almost every writer he published was recommended by a more established writer: “Most of our writers have come to us through recommendations of another writer friend” (“New Directions 34).24 Most famously, Pound recommended his friend William Carlos Williams.25 Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, already out of print and little acclaimed when New Directions reprinted it in 1946, was recommended by T. S. Eliot (31). Delmore Schwartz brought in John Berryman. Kenneth Rexroth brought in Denise Levertov (Rexroth 61). Edith Sitwell recommended Dylan Thomas, and Williams recommended Nathanael West (Hall 274). A telling example is the one that did the most to make New Directions a profitable company after twenty-three years of losses: Henry Miller, himself recommended by Pound years before, advised Laughlin to publish Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, which Laughlin professed to dislike.26 On Miller’s advice, Laughlin published the novel in 1951, and it went on to become New Directions’ best-selling book.
The William Morris Agency’s decision to establish a literary department and Helen Strauss’s decision to leave Paramount to become a literary agent together constitute one version of the story of the postwar growth of the book trade, one clearly linked to the growth of the mass-media industries. The surprising profitability of New Directions in the 1950s—propelled by sales of Siddhartha, the popularity of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, and the academic acceptance of Pound (itself triggered, according to Laughlin, not by the inherent greatness of Pound’s poetry but by New Directions’ publication of Hugh Kenner’s The Poetry of Ezra Pound in 1951 [“History” 224])—is another version of the same story, linked to the growth of the educated reading public and surely the growth of the modern English Department.27 And although New Directions might seem far removed from the economic world of William Morris, the role of intermediaries in the company’s success somewhat belies the notion of Laughlin as the solitary man of taste. Laughlin asserted that he couldn’t “cope with agents,” yet he relied on Pound, Miller, Rexroth, and Schwartz, all of whom fulfilled the double roles of the agent that arose as the book business expanded over the course of the century. As Strauss was for Bowles and Doubleday, they were at once advocates for writers and screens for publishers, helping to get the writer into print and assuring the publisher that the writer was worthy.
Thus New Directions’ rise to profitability is not just a story of talent, good taste, and indifference to commerce winning an underdog’s battle against the forces of homogenization, commercialization, and bad taste, though there were elements of all that, and though Laughlin’s belief in the aesthetic superiority of the works he published, his dislike of Siddhartha notwithstanding, is unquestionable. New Directions’ rise is also a story of independent wealth; the publishing industry’s low barriers to entry; and, most important, a network of poets, playwrights, and novelists functioning as agents and scouts, legitimizing one another’s work, and then capitalizing on one another’s success and on a growing market for serious literature. New Directions did not “find” avant-garde writers; writers who wrote for New Directions became avant-garde by virtue of their association with fellow New Directions writers and the New Directions imprint (which stood for nonideological, noncommercial aestheticism), and they did so at a time when conditions for writers deemed such were most favorable.28
All of which brings us back to Bowles, who as a first novelist in 1949 linked the commercial field of William Morris with the aesthetic field of New Directions. As noted earlier, Bowles’s account of how New Directions came to publish his novel excludes any mention of intermediaries between him and Laughlin and in fact emphasizes that Strauss was not involved, attributing the company’s decision to publish to an old-fashioned notion of aesthetic appreciation. But this account leaves out the role of Tennessee Williams, probably the most important player in the story of the publication and reception of The Sheltering Sky.
Williams was a close friend of both Laughlin and Bowles. Laughlin became Williams’s publisher after they struck up a conversation at a cocktail party (“his only literary discovery with a social origin,” according to Hall [275]) and discovered a common interest in Hart Crane’s poetry.29 Bowles, who first met Williams in Acapulco in 1940, years before the latter achieved literary success, had done what amounted to an enormous favor for him, composing music for The Glass Menagerie for its Broadway production in 1944 on short notice (one weekend) and perhaps without a contract.30 Just after Bowles had submitted the manuscript of The Sheltering Sky to Doubleday, he returned to New York to compose music for Williams’s Summer and Smoke.31 According to a lengthy Publishers Weekly feature on Laughlin drawn from an interview with him, it was Williams who asked Laughlin to read Bowles’s manuscript after Doubleday and many others had rejected it: “The Sheltering Sky had been turned down everywhere when … Williams brought it to [Laughlin]. Laughlin read the novel, was delighted by it” (Berkley 28).32 Williams was, in short, Bowles’s agent in deed if not name and, if not for his intervention, it is likely that New Directions never would have published Bowles’s novel, not because Laughlin did not like it but because he probably never would have read the manuscript.33
It is impossible to know how The Sheltering Sky would have been received had it been published by Doubleday, but it seems fair to say, at least, that with the New Directions imprint The Sheltering Sky became a different novel than it would have been had Doubleday published it, legitimized by a different set of institutions within the literary field and thus received differently. In the week of its publication, in December 1949, none other than Tennessee Williams wrote an exceptionally favorable review of it in the New York Times, never mentioning his friendship with the author and the publisher or any role he may have played in getting the novel published. In that same issue of the Times, the New Directions poet William Carlos Williams, with whom Bowles had corresponded as far back as 1931, included The Sheltering Sky at the top of his list of the year’s best books.
In the context of this story, it is not hard to understand why Bowles apologizes to Laughlin for his agent. After all, Strauss was hired specifically to get Bowles published, but in the end Bowles secured a publisher only when he bypassed Strauss—a publisher, moreover, who disdained the commercial anyway, rendering the Hollywood agent superfluous if not detrimental to Bowles’s literary career. So it might have seemed, at least, to Bowles, who had already been rejected by numerous publishers and likely saw Laughlin as his last chance to become a novelist (to say nothing of whatever animus he might have had toward more mainstream parts of the book business, of which Strauss was his last remaining tie, after those rejections). Just as an art film gains status as such by being shown in an art-house theater, the failure of The Sheltering Sky to be accepted by the modern world of book publishing and the subsequent embrace it received from New Directions, so-called patron of the avantgarde, mark The Sheltering Sky as an art novel even before its publication and regardless of its form and content. The story of its tortuous path to publication, moreover, seems like a prewar, modernist parable about the marketplace’s inability to recognize high art and the subsequent need for some form of patronage if high art were to survive.
Promoting the Novel
As it turned out, the market did recognize The Sheltering Sky, quickly rendering the modernist parable inapt. Commercial success was immediate, and the novel spent ten weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Less than two months after The Sheltering Sky arrived in bookstores, Life magazine, much maligned as a bastion of middlebrow culture, featured Bowles, complete with photograph and a factual error (the caption says that he is unmarried) in a two-page spread as one of “four new writers.” Bowles, according to Life, “hit a financial jackpot” with The Sheltering Sky (“Four New Writers” 35). By the time the novel left the best-seller list, it had sold nearly 40,000 copies, at a time when the average debut novel sold 2,000. In 1951, Signet published a paperback version that sold 200,000 copies in a year (Sawyer-Lauçanno 287).
This success needs to be contextualized in a few ways. First, accounting for the sales of a novel, particularly a first novel by an unknown author, is tricky. Publishers cannot reliably predict which of their products will sell. For this reason, they overproduce, publishing more books than they know the market can support, assuming that of ten titles, one or two will sell well. This is publishing’s version of the Pareto-Zipf distribution, or the 80/20 rule, according to which “20 percent of products account for 80 percent of revenues” (Anderson 130–31). Once the publishing house gets an indication that a book is selling, it can throw its promotional muscle behind it in an attempt to ratchet sales upward and, if the system works right, the sales of that book subsidize the others that failed to sell.34 It is a mistake to draw firm conclusions about the literary world from the sales of a single novel.
In addition, in the context of the postwar explosion of mass culture, it is worthwhile to remember just how small 40,000 purchases really is. That The Sheltering Sky was a best seller means simply that it sold a lot of books relative to the sales of others and it attained enough success to be profitable because the production of books is relatively inexpensive. Bowles’s association with the William Morris Agency exemplifies the links between the literary and mass-culture fields, but even as these links grew the readership for a typical best seller would be dwarfed by the audience for a television show; only in the rarest of cases would a book achieve what might be called “mass” success. The novel’s success, however, is of interest as an example of the way disavowals of the market could be commercially exploited. The relative success of The Sheltering Sky suggests that, contrary to the hand-wringing over the emergence of mass culture in the 1950s, the conditions that produced the emergence of mass culture were not antithetical to an increase in the number of readers or the survival of serious fiction; that hand-wringing—a significant aspect of both the promotion of the novel and the novel itself—would prove a good way to reach the book-buying audience.
Laughlin once remarked, “Advertising is useless for highbrow literary books, a waste of money. Word of mouth is what sells books, and it is reviews that get word of mouth started” (“History” 224).35 But when the reviewer is a friend of both the publisher and the author and functions as the de facto agent for both, the line between advertising and reviewing becomes blurred. (In fact, the text of New Directions’ paid advertisements for Bowles’s novel draws on Williams’s review.) Williams, moreover, trades on his literary fame to promote his friend’s novel; Gore Vidal writes that Williams “wanted to be helpful to The Sheltering Sky so he asked the New York Times to let him review it” (Point 238).36 At the time of the review, A Streetcar Named Desire had only recently completed a two-year run on Broadway. An assessment of the success of The Sheltering Sky and of the role that the review played must begin with Williams’s own literary celebrity.
The review serves as an unusually clear window onto the way the art novel could be promoted in a commercial context: advertising the author’s “disinterestedness,” his disavowal of audience. At the heart of the review is an idea about art in the age of mass culture and corporate capitalism; the idea is that artists and art are becoming rare because career demands and career possibilities interfere with the aspiring artist’s development. Williams begins his review by generalizing about the career of the American writer: “In America the career almost invariably becomes an obsession. The ‘get-ahead’ principle, carried to such extremes, inspires our writers to enormous efforts. A new book must come out every year…. I think that this stems from a misconception of what it means to be a writer or any kind of creative artist. They feel it is something to adopt in the place of actual living, without understanding that art is a byproduct of existence” (“Allegory” 7).
The implication is that whatever writers produce in an age of intense career pressures and career opportunities, it is not art. Williams’s notion that the career precludes the production of genuine art combines the discourse of Huyssen’s “great divide” (the idea of a “categorical distinction between high art and mass culture” [Huyssen viii]), most famously promulgated by Macdonald, Greenberg, and Horkheimer and Adorno, with ideas later famously articulated in popular sociology texts like David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and William H. Whyte Jr.’s The Organization Man (1956), critiques to which the American reading public proved enormously responsive. According to Riesman and Whyte, Americans had lost what had been their defining trait—“rugged individualism”—as economic changes (particularly the ascendancy of the corporate business structure) conditioned them to be far more responsive to the needs and desires of others than were nonconforming Americans of the nineteenth century. American writers, in Williams’s review, have analogously lost the ability to produce “art” (categorically distinct from the nonart they do produce) for similar reasons. Artistic expression is rare because the career has erased and replaced the self.
What makes Bowles special, according to Williams, is his willful avoidance of this self-and thus art-destroying careerism: “Bowles has deliberately rejected that kind of rabid professionalism,” enabling “his growth into completeness of personality” (“Allegory” 7). Williams draws attention to Bowles’s advanced age of thirty-eight and asserts that his artistry results from the fact that Bowles has waited until the time was right for him to produce a work of art—though we know that he set out to write a novel at the time that he did as a means to getting his short stories published and only after Helen Strauss secured an advance for him. The point here is not to deny Bowles’s artistry on the grounds that he fails to meet Williams’s criteria; rather, it is to point out that the idea of detachment from career concerns is perhaps less a precondition for artistry, as Williams would have it, than a constitutive aspect of artistry in Williams’s time, one that springs from the actual growing connection between the literary field and other cultural and economic fields, and as such a selling point. The review reflects and depends on Bowles’s place in what would prove to be a commercially viable network of literary production, and in it Williams celebrates an ideal of artistic detachment and congratulates Bowles for meeting that ideal. This irony is compounded as the thrust of Williams’s praise is repeated in the fullpage advertisement for The Sheltering Sky that New Directions placed in the Saturday Review on December 31, 1949. “Bowles is that rare thing,” the advertisement declares, “a writer who waited to live life before he began to write it.”
If the New Directions advertisements take their cue from Williams’s book review, Williams might be said to take his cue from the novel he was reviewing. In the review, Williams’s attack on the contemporary writer and his notion of the conditions that make art possible—“They feel it is something to adopt in the place of actual living, without understanding that art is a by-product of existence” (7)—are nearly identical to Bowles’s narrator’s account in the novel of why Port, the novel’s protagonist, who has pondered a career as a novelist, does not write: “As long as he was living his life, he could not write about it. Where one left off, the other began, and the existence of circumstances which demanded even the vaguest participation on his part was sufficient to place writing outside the realm of possibility” (200). The two passages appear to express opposite ideas. Williams asserts that “actual living” is a prerequisite of writing, while Bowles’s narrator suggests that living and writing are mutually exclusive, that as long as one is living one cannot be a writer. The confusion stems from the fact that Williams and Bowles use the word “living” in opposite ways. In Williams’s review, “living” signifies detachment, whatever one does when not pursuing one’s career. The novel suggests that Port could not be a writer because he was not detached enough; here “living” means engagement, the “vaguest participation.” The point for Williams and Bowles (or at least for Port) is that engagement of a certain kind is fatal to artistry.37
Thus the novel itself articulates a version of the “great divide” discourse that Williams used to promote it. Indeed, the novel is more uncompromising than the review: whereas Williams finds art to be possible provided one ignores the demands of the career (thus allowing for the possibility of Bowles’s achievement), the novel seems to assert that even deep in the Sahara, good writing will be impossible. Port’s decision to forgo a necessarily compromised kind of writing signifies at once his capacity for artistry and the impossibility of artistry, a contradiction made possible by the equation of artistry with the refusal to engage. If Port, the self-proclaimed “traveler” (as opposed to mere tourist, a distinction crucial to the novel as a whole) who chooses death in the Sahara over life in New York, is not detached enough to write, no one could be. But where does this leave Bowles, and what does this say about the status of The Sheltering Sky as a work of art? That somehow the novel’s declaration of the impossibility of art becomes a source of the novel’s artistic stature, rather than an implicit statement of the novel’s inevitable artistic failure, is itself a kind of marketing triumph.
That triumph rests on the problematic notion that Port and Bowles are alter egos. Williams was the first of many to make this claim: “Were it not for the fact that … [Port] succumbs to an epidemic fever, it would not be hard to identify him with Mr. Bowles himself” (7). But Port’s death is not an accidental difference between author and character. The novel hints that it results from his refusal to be immunized by Western medicine before the trip; to the extent that this refusal constitutes another, supreme rejection of the West, it is an important part of Port’s character. The novel’s view of art is more extreme than the review’s, ultimately because Port, by virtue of his quasi-suicide and his refusal to write, is a more detached version of Bowles. The paradox is that, as the romanticizer of Port’s detachment, Bowles gains symbolic capital from it, even as he exemplifies, in writing and publishing a novel, what Port rejects. Symbolic capital accrues not from detachment but from the representation of and advertisement for detachment.
The Commercial Interruption
The relationship between this symbolic capital, or artistic prestige, and the representation of detachment becomes clearer in the chapter in which Bowles delineates Port’s attitude toward writing, not just because of the view of art it espouses but also because of the way it interrupts the narrative and thereby undermines what is distinctive about its form. At this point, Kit and Port are in a truck on their way to Sba, alone, and Port is sick with the typhoid that will eventually kill him. The chapter opens this way: “As he lay in the back of the truck, protected somewhat from the cold by Kit, now and then he was aware of the straight road beneath him. The twisting roads of the past weeks became alien, faded from his memory; it had been one strict, undeviating course inland to the desert, and now he was very nearly at the center” (198). The description of the “undeviating course inland” captures not just Port’s feelings about the trip but also something of the logic of the novel and the process by which it was composed: “It would write itself, I felt certain, once I had established the characters and spilled them out onto the North African scene” (Without Stopping 275). As Bowles described his own method, he never knew what would happen next in his novel because it always depended on what happened to him that day.38 A distinctive feature of this method, and an important part of Bowles’s aesthetic, is that he does not attempt to develop his characters’ pasts. In the plot of the novel as in Port’s own conception of his journey, memory is faded and the story moves forward only.
In one of the first looks at the novel, John W. Aldridge suggested that Port and Kit’s lack of a past was a sign of the author’s immaturity; to Aldridge, the novel’s nihilism was unmotivated and therefore uninteresting (186–87). But there was a rationale for it. On principle, Bowles disdained the idea of character development. He conceived of the Sahara as the main “character” of the novel; his purpose was to show the ways in which the desert could make any of us, regardless of our history, culture, or class, submit, and he appeared to regard the awareness of this fact of human existence as supremely important: “The destruction of the ego has always seemed an important thing. I took it for granted that that was what really one was looking for in order to attain knowledge and the ability to live” (qtd. in Stewart 152–53). The kind of Jamesian character development that Aldridge sought would undermine the point Bowles was trying to make about the ego because it would draw attention to those aspects of human existence—job, personal relationships, class—that Bowles deemed superfluous and deceptive.39 The ties between his disinclination to develop his characters’ pasts and the form of the novel are summed up by the Kafka quote that serves as the epigram for the final section of the novel: “From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached”; that Bowles identified with this kind of forward movement is apparent in the title of his autobiography: Without Stopping. Port’s unwillingness to stop traveling signifies his (the character’s) detachment from conventional American life; the novel’s unwillingness to stop—that is, Bowles’s refusal to develop his characters—signifies the same for Bowles.
At just this point in the novel, however, two-thirds of the way through and immediately after announcing Port’s journey as “strict” and “undeviating,” Bowles does what both his aesthetic and his characterization of Port would seem to dictate against: he stops and turns back, offering the novel’s only glimpse of Port and Kit’s pretrip past. Much of what one might expect in the first chapter of a more conventional novel, about Port’s family and career, for example, is given to us here, and these are just the kinds of details that Bowles would be expected to disdain as irrelevant to his thesis about what we are beneath the dress of Western civilization. Something about this flashback is decidedly unnovelistic, as it comes without any impetus from the plot. So what is this scene—this uncharacteristic look back—doing here? Coming so late in the novel, Bowles’s decision to “stop” cannot be said to serve the conventional character-developing function that he disdained; rather, it serves the strategic function of advertising Port’s (and, by extension, Bowles’s) detachment by transforming it into a theory of the (im)possibility of art in the postwar age. The point would hardly be worth making but for the fact that the flashback constitutes a concession to the conventional storytelling methods the novel otherwise eschews and the absence of which, throughout the rest of the novel, is meant to signify the novel’s artistic integrity. Art requires a kind of detachment made impossible by the demands of contemporary Western culture, the novel suggests, but Bowles can only make that point, and implicitly make his case for his own artistry, by using those conventional, nonartistic methods. The flashback is like a commercial interruption, a built-in advertisement for the novel and its author.
In that advertisement, the narrator recounts actions that took place before the start of the novel: first, Port’s rejection of a career in New York, then the insistence of immigration officials that he identify his profession on his arrival in Africa. Port’s refusal to answer brings to mind Williams’s assertion that Bowles “has deliberately rejected … rabid professionalism”; the episode as a whole recalls Williams’s assertion that Bowles has achieved artistry by forgoing career concerns. Kit tells the immigration officials that he is a writer, and Port is intrigued: “The idea of his actually writing a book had amused him. A journal, filled in each evening with the day’s thoughts, carefully seasoned with local color, in which the absolute truth of the theorem he would set forth from the beginning—namely, that the difference between something and nothing is nothing—should be clearly and calmly demonstrated” (199). Port’s vision of a writer is a solitary teller of unpleasant truths, a notion of a piece with Bowles’s own reputation but far removed from the growing network of literary production that enabled Bowles’s sojourn. Just how solitary is soon made clear: “He had not even mentioned the idea to Kit; she surely would have killed it with her enthusiasm.” Writing is serious work; the remark suggests that Port is rejecting the trappings of literary success, the admiration of a fan thrilled not necessarily by the quality or “truth” of the writing but by love of the romantic figure of “the writer.” Port elaborates moments later: “Kit would be too delighted at the prospect; it would have to be done in secret—it was the only way he would be able to carry it off” (199). Port conceives that the fan’s admiration precludes good writing.
Tunner presented a greater obstacle than Kit to Port’s literary ambitions. Port attempted to write at the beginning of the trip but found himself unable to produce anything because “he could not establish a connection in his mind between the absurd trivialities which filled the day and the serious business of putting words on paper.” He attributes his inability to write to Tunner’s presence, which “created a situation, however slight, which kept him from entering into the reflective state he considered essential” (199). Tunner constitutes “the circumstances which demanded even the vaguest participation on his part,” the engagement fatal to artistry. In this respect as in many others in the novel, Tunner is crucial. The novel’s explicit theory of art in “the mechanized age” is a theory of the cultural problem that Tunner purportedly represents. But to the extent that Tunner is a problem in the novel, the representation of Tunner as such constitutes a profitable solution to the problem of how to preserve an idea of high art in the age of mass culture; it is through the depiction of the flight from Tunner that Bowles shows Port and Kit’s—and his own—escape from the West.
From the start of the novel, Port and Kit cast themselves as sophisticated travelers (again, as opposed to tourists) whose desire it is to find a place as yet untouched by the war and, more generally, by the West. The tourist “accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking” (14). The distinction matters not so much because it accurately captures Port’s essence but because it is so clearly essential to Port’s own sense of his identity. Port and Kit are highbrows, members, as Williams notes in his review, of the New York intelligentsia. After Kit laments that “the people of each country get more like the people of every other country. They have no character, no beauty, no ideals, no culture,” Port replies, “‘You’re right…. Everything’s getting gray, and it’ll be grayer. But some places’ll withstand the malady longer than you think. You’ll see, in the Sahara here’” (16). Port is the expert, the artist, the intellect, and Kit—the fan—submits to his intellectual vision of the world, responds emotionally and intuitively to it, and attempts to live up to Port’s ideals.
Tunner occupies the bottom rung of the hierarchy, and it is often through their attitudes toward him that Port and Kit define themselves. Moreover, although Tunner has not received close attention from Bowles scholars, the entire plot of the novel turns on Port and Kit’s attraction to and repulsion by him.40 What attracts and repulses Port and Kit is best captured in Kit and Tunner’s exchange as the trio arrive in a town even less civilized than the one from which they’d come. Says Tunner, “One thing I can’t stand is filth,” to which Kit replies, “Yes, you’re a real American, I know” (112). This is the role Tunner plays in Port and Kit’s lives—the American, the reminder of what they have tried to escape, the reminder of what they are better than. Tunner is, finally, the tourist (which is just another way of saying he is an American). He has not, as Port and Kit perceive that they have, abandoned the identity his home country has given him. Thus the novel’s first description of him: “He was a few years younger [than Port and Kit] … astonishingly handsome, as the girl [Kit] often told him, in his late Paramount way. Usually there was very little expression of any sort to be found on his smooth face, but the features were formed in such a manner that in repose they suggested a general bland contentment” (15). Bowles’s intention seems to be to paint Tunner as the unworldly American, but if Tunner is so American, what is he doing in the Sahara? Why does he want to listen to Port and lust after Kit? The narrator’s answer to this question is typically abstract: “With them as with no one else he felt a definite resistance to his unceasing attempts at moral domination, at which he was forced, when with them, to work much harder; thus unconsciously he was giving his personality the exercise it required” (67). Far from being an intellectual, Tunner enjoyed the company of those he perceived as such: “Tunner was essentially a simple individual irresistibly attracted by whatever remained just beyond his intellectual grasp.” Port and Kit are in Africa to see the Sahara. Tunner is in Africa to see Port and Kit. He is a step removed from their highbrow primitivism; he is their audience, and it is as such that Port both wants him near and ultimately runs from him.
Tunner’s character is at least nominally modeled on George Turner, an American whom Bowles had met during an earlier foray into the Sahara. A more meaningful source for Tunner’s character might be the idea of the “middlebrow,” a staple of postwar American culture. The great fear of postwar intellectuals was not mass culture itself; for Macdonald and Greenberg, lowbrow fare for those who had no interest in (or ability to appreciate, as they would probably put it) “real” culture was just fine. As Macdonald put it, “If there were a clearly defined cultural elite, then the masses could have their kitsch and the elite could have its High Culture, with everybody happy. But the boundary line is blurred” (“Theory” 61). Middlebrow was what blurred that line. As such, it was a threat to the categorical distinction between art and nonart so crucial to the novel, the review, and the idea of highbrow art in the age of mass culture. “A tepid, flaccid Middlebrow Culture,” Macdonald wrote, using rhetoric that seems borrowed from anti-Communists, “threatens to engulf everything in its spreading ooze” (63–64); the image clearly suggests, as does Port’s refusal to write, that soon “high” art will vanish, in this case consumed by what Macdonald called midcult and masscult. The metaphor also suggests that middlebrow needs to be understood as both a demographic fact and an artistic problem, a form of cultural production and an audience that would happily consume it. Macdonald cited Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the work of Thornton Wilder, and Mortimer Adler’s Great Books volumes as examples of middlebrow culture, all commercially successful products for educated people. It was the growth of the market for products such as these—the same growth that led Doubleday to give Bowles an advance and that made New Directions a profitable company—that, to Macdonald, threatened high culture.
Port’s refusal or inability to write while engaged with Tunner is telling in this context. For if Tunner is attracted to the intellectual challenge of Port and Kit, it is equally clear that for Port, at times, Tunner serves as a surrogate American audience. At the start of their journey, against Kit’s wishes, Port offers a detailed account of a dream he has just had. Afterward, when they are alone, Kit upbraids him for telling “‘that dream in front of Tunner.’” Port responds incredulously: “‘In front of him! I told it to him, as much as to you’” (19). And Tunner wants to hear about it. Not long after Port shares his dream with Tunner, Kit is seduced by Tunner on the train. Bowles’s narrator notes that “Kit and Port … both resented even the reduced degree to which they responded to his somewhat obvious charm, which was why neither would admit to having encouraged him to come along with them” (67).41 Both Kit and Port wanted Tunner to join them in Africa; neither wants to admit it. In Port and Kit’s relationship with Tunner we see both the middlebrow audience’s desire to consume high culture and the debased desire of the supposed highbrow for an audience. Until Port and Kit flee from Tunner, the novel suggests, they have not truly left bland, contented America.
Port and Kit’s solutions to the problem Tunner presents are extreme: not just not writing but also madness (in Kit’s case) and death (for Port). Bowles’s narrator seems to endorse this result: “It was all right to speed ahead into the desert leaving no trace” (200). Without stopping, as it were: leaving no trace is preferable to necessarily compromised communication or engagement. But Bowles is attuned to the paradoxes of this view and the economics on which they depend. Ultimately, there is one reason that Port has the opportunity to not write. That reason is mentioned just once, in the middle of the novel’s out-of-place look back, so quickly it might be missed: “Since the death of his father he no longer worked at anything, because it was not necessary; but Kit constantly held the hope that he would begin again to write” (199, emphasis mine). This is the only allusion in the novel to Port’s having aspired to being a professional writer at one time. Bowles thus marks the all-too-prosaic point at which it becomes possible to detach oneself from careerism: when one can afford it. Port’s inheritance functions as a kind of antipatronage. Usually, patronage is understood to free the artist from the demands of the commercial marketplace and thus to pursue his or her own artistic vision. Here, Port’s inheritance prevents him from the need to write at all in a world where even writing for no one in the Sahara is corrupt. As noted, the promotion of The Sheltering Sky depends on the association of Port with Bowles; in that Port’s financial situation allows him to detach himself from matters of commerce, he is also, coincidentally, a bit like James Laughlin.
Career Moves
Port’s flight from the Tunners of the world resonates in the context of the publication and success of The Sheltering Sky. The growth of middlebrow America, understood as a demographic fact rather than a cultural judgment—that is, as the growth of the population of educated culture consumers—was the condition of possibility for Bowles’s career as a novelist and for the writing of his first novel, the reason that Helen Strauss and Doubleday (however briefly) showed interest in and invested in him, the driving force behind New Directions’ commercial success. Bowles capitalized on the opportunity afforded him by the growth of this audience by writing a novel depicting the uncompromising flight from it and, in so doing, created a blueprint for intendedly highbrow novelistic success in the 1950s—a novel that achieves success in the consumer-culture market by depicting the bankruptcy of that market. Ironically, the cultural problem that Port and Kit try to escape was more than just subject matter; it was what enabled the novel’s writing and publication in the first place.
The links between the novel’s meditation on art and audience, on the one hand, and the shifting institutional relation between novel production and the larger economic and cultural fields, on the other, become clear in the story of The Sheltering Sky’s rocky path to the best-seller list. The novel was an immediate success when it arrived in bookstores in late 1949, but it did not reach the best-seller list until January 1950. The reason for the delay is that Laughlin had only 3,500 copies printed when the book was first released; they sold out quickly, but he did not print more until the year’s end. It is at this point that Bowles grew disenchanted with Laughlin’s disavowals of the market. As Bowles recounts in the preface, written fifty years later yet with his ire for Laughlin still evident: “Because his accountants had already filed income tax returns for 1949, he could not risk showing a profit on an item that he had already written off as a loss (since his interest in publishing was literary and not commercial), and so he restricted the edition to 3,500 copies instead of the 10,000 which Publishers Weekly had recommended. It came out the second week of December, but holiday sales were limited to what was available” (6).42 The story Bowles tells is confusing because it offers two separate reasons for Laughlin’s initial refusal to print more copies. First, he suggests a curious tax-related reason, that because Laughlin had already written the novel off as a loss, increased profits would mean he would have to redo his tax returns. Parenthetically, however, and perhaps sarcastically, Bowles hints at a second reason: Laughlin did not want to print more copies because his interest was “literary,” not “commercial.” The rest of Laughlin’s career, and of course his subsequent printing of more copies of The Sheltering Sky, suggests that Laughlin was not averse to selling a lot of books. He was, however, noted for being a lax businessperson, preferring skiing to taking care of business matters. It is possible that he simply missed the opportunity to sell more books in December due to inattention or because he underestimated the demand for the novel. Whatever the cause, the dispute over the printing of the novel likely accelerated Bowles’s departure from New Directions.
As noted earlier, Bowles hired an agent and decided to write a novel only after Dial Press told him he could not publish a volume of his short stories without having first published a novel. The success of The Sheltering Sky put Bowles in an ideal position in which to have this volume of short stories published. The details here are sketchy but suggestive: we know that Bowles orally agreed to let Laughlin publish the volume and then reneged and moved on to Random House, a much larger publishing house, prompting Laughlin to threaten a lawsuit (which he apparently never filed). Bowles’s stated reasons for leaving New Directions vary. He tells the early version of the story in an April 1950 letter to Vidal: “It was orally understood that the volume was to be done by [New Directions], until I got a cable from [Helen Strauss] saying that she had a far better offer from Random House and strongly advised me to take it” (In Touch 218). Characteristically, Bowles shifts the burden of a financially motivated decision onto his agent. But in another letter, written thirty-four years later, Bowles offers another explanation for his move: Laughlin’s “principal reader, David McDowell, left at the end of December [1949] and went to Random House” (521).43 Bowles here claims he left avantgarde New Directions for powerhouse Random House for specifically literary reasons, to maintain a tie with a literary collaborator. Bowles’s two explanations for his move to Random House are not irreconcilable; both may be true. The luring of both Bowles and McDowell away from New Directions by Random House—Bowles as an established, now legitimate novelist and McDowell as a legitimizer of texts, himself now legitimized in and by the mainstream book world—epitomizes how ripe the postwar book market was believed to be for avowed avant-garde detachment from the market.
The moves of Bowles and McDowell barely affected New Directions; its formula—literary writers and an avowed indifference to commerce—had met its historical moment and its success continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, although larger publishers poached talent and marketing strategy from New Directions, New Directions cemented its own profitability by following the leads of some of those larger publishers. As Greg Barnhisel notes, Laughlin’s decision to produce New Directions books in the new “trade paperback” format in 1954 ensured the company’s commercial success (161–62). As conceived by Jason Epstein at Doubleday, who developed the idea for Anchor Books in 1953, soon to be followed by Knopf’s Vintage Books, trade paperbacks were less expensive than hardcover books, so they could reach a wider audience of readers; unlike mass-market paperbacks, however, which were produced on a cheaper grade of paper and which had attached to them a lowbrow reputation, trade paperbacks were printed on higher-quality paper and were sold in finer bookstores.44 The trade-paperback format allowed New Directions to market its highbrow fare to a wider audience. In the early 1950s, the distance between mainstream and avant-garde publishers was shrinking as the audience for books produced by both was growing. As the next chapter shows, even publishers of mass-market paperbacks would reach for that audience.
