An interview with Jonathan Galassi, the 2008 Maxwell E. Perkins Award Recipient
By Center for Fiction Director, Noreen Tomassi.
What led you to publishing?
After college I thought seriously of becoming an academic, but I decided I didn’t want to submit to deconstruction and other theoretical approaches to literature that were in vogue at the time. I was interested in contemporary writing and wanted to be involved with writers. I knew some people who had gone into publishing and thought I would try it. And, as I often say, I’m still trying.
My first job was at Houghton Mifflin in Boston and I liked it immediately. I liked talking to authors about their work and I liked the practical nature of it—turning a manuscript into something concrete. I liked the salesmen, I liked the designers, I liked the physical nature of books, and I’ve always liked the office atmosphere, the communal feeling of it. Publishing wasn’t snooty and cold and hierarchical the way I imagined graduate school to be. It was a way of being close to writing that was less analytical and more practical, but also of being intimate with authors. Luckily I found a place at Houghton Mifflin, a house that was very tolerant of my interests. They let me start a new poetry series there, for example—something it’s hard to imagine happening today. It was a great place for me to grow up and into the business. And they sent me to their office in New York after a couple of years, which was where I wanted to be.
So you were happy with your choice?
Yes, I remember vividly the first great manuscript I read: Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone. I couldn’t believe how enthralling it was—and how beautifully typed! It was the best-typed manuscript I’d ever seen—and I’ve had the pleasure of telling Bob Stone that. I thought, Wow! This is publishing! I get to read this masterpiece in typescript (this was before the days of word processors). That overwhelmed me. I was just an editorial intern reading along with other people, it was already under contract, but the experience was deeply, deeply exciting for me. Of course, it took many years to find another manuscript that good.
What do you see as the central work of a good editor?
The editor’s task is to help the author to come as close to the Platonic ideal of the book as possible, to intuit what the writer is really up to and help him or her shape the book to that end. There are many different ways of editing, and in fact I find I do less line editing than I used to. I’m far more willing to go along with the author now. When I was a young editor, every word had to be “perfect.” Now--though I still deeply love line work—I find what’s most useful probably is talking to the authors about what they’re doing and reacting to what they say and what you read and giving them honest, constructive feedback. One thing I’ve learned as an editor is that authors pay very close attention—maybe too close--to what you say. There’s a burden and responsibility in that that can be chastening. And of course, if you’re inconsistent in your focus, you can say the wrong thing. Actually, I often think it’s useful to an author for the editor to be wrong about certain things. That lets the author be right, understand that he or she has final control over the work.
In any case, what an editor ought to be for an author is a silent partner or an interlocutor or sounding board, someone who is there and cares almost as much as the author does about the book. No one can care as much, needless to say; but I find it’s very rewarding to give the author that kind of that deep attention and support, to love their baby with them--be its godparent, as it were. It forges a very strong bond.
At this point are you working only with established authors?
No, because discovery is still so exciting to me. I remember reading The Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen. I read the first paragraph and I was blown away by the decisiveness and beauty of the sentences and a certain etched quality of the narrative. Reading it, I was amazed that someone so young could have written something so powerful. I felt an incredible sense of having come upon something extraordinary. I remember sitting with him in this very room [at the Union Square Café] and saying to him, “You have everything it takes to be a great writer.” I had a similar experience with Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. The poetry of those stories is incandescent; I can remember some of it to this day—it was literally searing.
I’ve found many times that, as I’m reading something very good, I get very tense as I go along because I don’t want to be disappointed. The sceptic in me is fighting my growing aesthetic and emotional investment in what I’m reading, in a sense, and the tension mounts as I read—I don’t want to be disappointed, but I’m afraid I will be. And when in fact I’m not, it’s an incredible catharsis. I remember having just that feeling when I was reading the manuscript of Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow, and thinking, “If the judge did it, I won’t be able to publish the book.”
In any case, everything else comes out of that primal attachment to the work. I remember reading the The Virgin Suicides. I knew Jeff Eugenides because he worked at the Academy of American Poets, with which I was associated, and I asked to read his book as a friendly gesture. And I was amazed by how great it was, how original and witty and moving, and immediately knew I wanted to publish it. That’s how editors become so deeply invested in the work and why they feel so passionately disappointed when they lose a book at auction and can’t put their love into action.
It is wonderful when the curtain parts and a writer emerges. I’ve had that experience again recently with C.E. Morgan, a young writer from Kentucky whose brilliant first novel All the Living we’re going to publish in the spring.
Have you always been able to publish what you wanted?
At Houghton Mifflin, I was the junior editor and perhaps the mascot to some degree, and I felt very loved there, but I also was frustrated, feeling they weren’t taking my books seriously. I thought more could be done with them; I was a young man in a hurry. When I went to Random House, I expected, naively, that in such a powerful house they would be able to do much more for my books. And that turned out to be exactly the opposite of the case. They were a big machine, and needed bigger things to put through their system. As a result, they weren’t so interested in authors starting out. That was part of the story, but it was also true that such a big and complicated place was never a comfortable fit for me. We did publish some interesting things, though. Alice McDermott’s magical first book, A Bigamist’s Daughter, was published there. It was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, but that was a bigger deal to me and Alice than to Random House, somehow.
The minute I got to Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), I felt at home. What I wanted to do and what they did best somehow felt like exactly the same thing. There was a long string of years when we published lots of new authors, and it was a huge amount of fun—the old system was still operative; advances were relatively modest, and the independent bookstores could still make a literary book into a bestseller. From 1986 until 1994, when FSG was sold to the Holtzbrinck group, it was a scrappy and interesting, mavericky place, the last of a certain kind of independent publisher—and though the business as a whole has changed, I think FSG still feels pretty much that way today. We have our ups and downs, but I’ve been very happy doing what I do here. I have never felt any disjunct between what I believe in and what FSG stands for. It was then and has remained the perfect place for me. This is my 23rd year here.
How central is new fiction to FSG now?
It’s always been and continues to be central to our self-definition . Fiction—and poetry—remain at the very heart of our list, though we are also publishing more non-fiction now because that’s where readers’ interests have gone.
Why do you think that is?
I think it has to do with what’s happening in the world. People want to “know” things, want to be informed, and they read less than they used to in general–especially fiction. They’re also less susceptible to being told what to read by critics and more influenced by their friends or public figures. All these factors add up to a world where non-fiction is a more popular than ever. It’s a more immediate informational experience than fiction. I continue to be surprised, though, that people say they read non-fiction because they want to read something that’s true--because for me the real truth is in art, though it takes a deeper reading and another level of contemplation to get to it. It’s work. And people may be more passive, more occasional as readers than they used to be.
Maybe they also feel that the time they devote to a novel is not productive time.
Yes, I think people do have less time—and a lot more entertainment options, a lot more gadgets, to fill it. But if you look at the FSG list, you’ll see that there continues to be a lot of great fiction on it. Of course, we don’t publish everything we want. Like all houses, we compete for books and we lose books that we would like to publish all the time—including some that have been honored with the Sargent Prize. That’s the nature of the business. But we do often get the chance to publish great fiction. Part of our appeal, I’d hazard, is that authors want to be with other authors they feel some connection to. And if you are consistent as a publisher in your approach to authors and to publishing their work, that gives you a leg up with a certain type of writer.
What excites you or attracts you to certain type of writer?
The kind of fiction that interests me is fiction in which the voice of the author is paramount and the writing is precise. You can see it in the kinds of writers I work with—they tend to be very controlled. It’s true of my taste in painting as well; I tend to like linear rather than painterly painting. So a manuscript where no word is out of place or unnecessary attracts me—that’s my natural bent.
Are there classic novels that are such good examples of great writing and the well-made book that you think a young writer starting out must read them?
A young author I worked with decided when writing her first novel to read the first books by all her favorite writers. So she read, for example, Roderick Hudson by Henry James. The point was that the great novelists didn’t start out as magisterial figures but as young artists feeling their way, like her. I thought that was a brilliant thing to do. So I’d recommend that strategy, rather than particular books.
I also think that part of the problem in publishing fiction today is that there’s a kind of triumph of hope over experience. Publishers will spend large amounts on a first novel because the author hasn’t failed at anything yet. As a result these young first novelists are over-valued and are forced to perform better than they should have to at the point of entry in their careers because so much is riding on them. And I don’t think that’s how careers are made. Real authors grow as they write. They get better. The current system—with large advances for debut novels--works against that. People can have a showy debut, then their next book is disappointing, and they’re suddenly nowhere. The old-fashioned way is much better—modest progress.
Yes, at FSG, you tend to stick with you with your authors . . .
But there’s pressure against that. There’s the force of what’s fashionable in the marketplace. When Susie has patent leather shoes, all the other kids in the class want patent leather shoes, so it takes a lot of fortitude to forego patent leather and stick with your sneakers. I don’t blame agents because agents are responding to the pressure they feel from their clients. It’s a systemic problem. The only person you can really blame is the publisher. I think that mentality and the impulse to bet on a bestseller early in a career goes against the sense of development and growth that is what encouraging art is really all about. It’s a long game.
Of course, there’s always a small cadre of authors that get these big hits and keep producing them, and they encourage the illusion that it’s a game of chance rather than an arduous process. But writing is a very cruel sport and some people are disappointed in their attempts at it—though they shouldn’t be, because writing anything serious is an honorable endeavor, and the attempt itself is worthy of our respect. Someone asked T.S. Eliot, who after all was a publisher as well as a poet, “Is it true that most editors are failed authors?” And Eliot said, “I suppose so, but so are most authors.” The number of people who can actually write something that makes a real difference is bound to be small, and only posterity—not we--will decide who, in the end, was really significant. In a way, knowing that should take some of the pressure off. It’s a wonderful thing to aspire to, but to set your whole life on it is a big risk. And yet the only people who do succeed are the people who really take the risk. And often they don’t do it in the first book, or the second.
The people who continue to write because they don’t have any choice . . .
Those are the people who should do it. I think authors deserve to be honored for that tenacity, and supported, too.
What are your thoughts about the impact of electronic devices like the Kindle on publishing? Are you worried?
The Kindle is apparently a happening part of the market now. I’ve fooled around with it and it’s not a beautiful object by any means. To me, it looks like an Etch-a-Sketch. It doesn’t have any of the erotics of reading—the smell of the paper, the look of books on the shelf. But people’s tastes change. This change seems to be happening somewhat faster than I thought it would. It seems that in the last year more and more people have gone in that direction, though I suspect it will slow down now, with the crisis we’re in
I feel in general that far too much human energy is spent bemoaning change. It’s better to have an open mind about it. During our lifetime, I think there will be multiple formats of everything. The book won’t go away, though people do love their toys. Of course, when you talk about content delivery, it’s easier to talk about that in regard to non-fiction, but fiction is a kind of information, too. So people will be reading Jane Austen on their i-phones, God forbid! In fact, we’re getting Sony readers at FSG this to read manuscripts on.
And it’s true that publishers are in the business of books, but they are really in the business of stories, aren’t they?
Yes, of course.
I love books, old beautiful books, the smell of books, the feel of them, beautiful bindings, that attachment is real and satisfying . . . but all those things are not enough if . . .
the book in the beautiful binding is no good. You don’t love a lousy book, do you?
No, I don’t love a lousy book, no matter how beautiful.
Only certain books are wonderful--the ones that have a wonderful story, wonderful writing inside them.
In the music business, they didn’t believe that the formats would change so fast—they didn’t expect the change to overtake the industry so quickly and decimate it and even in the last couple years, I don’t think anyone expected that Tower would close and EMI and other major labels would lay off so may people. Is the publishing world approaching that same situation?
A lot of what happened in the music business happened because of the ease of file-sharing, and also because the music industry wanted to preserve a higher price point. And that’s what proved impossible, as people figured out ways to share content for free.
This price point issue is very important to publishers—and to authors. One of the dangers of the Internet is that people think that content and information are free. An entity like Google encourages this view because they want to cycle all information through their system as a vehicle for advertising. That is a very significant threat to the notion of copyright-- which is, after all, a protection for authors, a way of fostering creativity. It’s a very big problem.
Do you believe the publishing world is getting ahead of that curve?
I’d say we’re struggling to stay ahead of it. Authors and publishers need to work together on this. One of the arguments is that because you don’t have physical costs when you produce a digitized book, it shouldn’t cost as much. But the fact is that you do have the development costs of working with the author and creating the text and vetting it properly and presenting it and designing it and marketing it. The physical printing of the book is a small part of the total publishing.
So that’s the challenge? Getting people to understand that and moving the market to embrace that the cost will be higher than they want?
People should be willing to pay for value. That’s what the word means.
As this year’s Maxwell Perkins Award recipient, tell me your thoughts about Perkins as a model.
I think that he set the modern standard for involvement with authors. His relations with each author were different; he adapted his approach to give each what he or she needed, and I find that’s what is most impressive about him. He may also have lived vicariously through his authors, and I don’t think that is so healthy. He had an unhappy life and his work with authors was his refuge, and that’s a bit sad. Empathy with the author is key, though. He didn’t try to impose his ideas on them; he tried to draw things out of them that were already in them and that was his genius--that empathetic sense.
It can be a fraught relationship between editor and author . . .
Sometimes. Each relationship is different, depending on the people involved. In the course of my career there have been a few times when I’ve said things I wish I hadn’t said—given wrong advice, misguided life counseling, etc., of course. But I have gotten very close to some of my authors—they’ve become personal friends. I do think, however, that an editor/author relationship is not first of all a friendship. It’s in some ways deeper than that, but also more reserved.
Is it possible to be a good editor to an author you dislike?
Sure. Because when you’re doing the work on the manuscript, you’re in there with the author and responding as intensely and wholeheartedly as possible. You’re giving yourself to that person. You can’t like all people equally, but you can still bring your whole self, your best self to the work.
You are a very fine translator and poet. Do you ever think of giving up your “day job” and devoting yourself solely to those things?
I don’t. I really love my job and I don’t begrudge the time spent on it at all. I love almost all aspects of working in publishing. I love the other, too—poetry and translation--but I’m a social person as well as a solitary. I love being with other people and enjoy the collaborative aspects of publishing.
So you feel you have the right balance?
Yes, more or less. I don’t write as much as some people, but I try to remember poets like Elizabeth Bishop, who was my teacher and a great model for me. She didn’t write very many poems; she just wrote a lot of really, really good ones. I don’t compare myself with her as to talent, but I do think one can try to write and do other things, worthwhile things, too.
