The consolidation of the book publishing industry continues apace, with the recent merger of the two behemoths Penguin and Random House just the latest development. In this climate, the story of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the fiercely independent publisher (even after it was no longer privately owned) of authors like T.S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor and Joan Didion, has particular resonance. In “Hothouse,†Boris Kachka writes about FSG’s star authors, and about the three men â€" Roger Straus, John Farrar and Robert Giroux â€" who made the company a success. In a recent e-mail interview, Mr. Kachka discussed what he learned about literary legends, his approach toward reporting gossip, resisting nostalgia and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
You’ve covered publishing as a journalist for years. Why did you choose to write a book-length history of Farrar, Straus & Giroux?
In 2008, I wrote a long piece about the myriad troubles and difficult transitions facing the industry. It meant taking a look back at how publishing used to work, and it came out the very week that, a) Lehman Brothers collapsed, and b) Robert Giroux died. A literary agent called me up and made me aware of that second fact. She thought there was a book in it â€" perhaps a cultural history hinging on FSG. I called a couple of sources, including Lorin Stein, then an editor at FSG and now the editor of The Paris Review. The agent Lynn Nesbit â€" no friend of Roger Straus’s â€" told me Straus had dictated an extensive oral history. I realized that if you were to write the history of one publishing house, you couldn’t do better than FSG.
Since the book covers midcentury business in New York City, there have been comparisons to “Mad Men.†If cable TV decided to adapt “Hothouse,†who would you cast as Straus and Giroux?
I think, for the older Straus and Giroux, Dustin Hoffman and Anthony Hopkins might be ideal. Al Pacino and Kevin Spacey could do nicely in a more cartoonish version. On the younger, improbably handsome end of the spectrum, I think Josh Brolin has the Straus swagger and Colin Firth, Giroux’s Anglophile repression.
Did researching and reporting the book change your opinion of any of the major authors in it, who include Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth?
I suppose I’m surprised about how clear-eyed they were about their relationships with a publisher who chronically underpaid them. Sontag and Wolfe were always haggling for more â€" not necessarily more money, which they usually didn’t get, but more time, more favors, more backing in public and private.
Did you have a line in the sand for gossip? Were there any juicy tidbits you didn’t publish for delicacy’s sake?
Sure I had a line, and sure I left things out. I required a firsthand source â€" not necessarily someone who was in the bedroom, but someone who’d spoken to whoever was in the bedroom. Call it credible hearsay. In addition, I held myself to the Hippocratic oath. You’ll notice that many affairs have only one party named. There’s no need for the reader to know the unnamed party; it doesn’t add anything and it will take something away from someone else â€" their privacy, their well-being, their ability to sleep at night. There were other, still more damaging facts that didn’t make it into the book at all. They belong only to the people who suffered through them.
You write in the introduction that recounting the company’s history “inevitably flirts with nostalgia,†since “the art and the craft of bookmaking seem to be under grave threat.†You then dismiss that as a “simplistic story line†but seem to agree that FSG did something uniquely well, which no one does now. So do you accept the nostalgic view or not?
A nostalgic story would argue that things were better back then in most ways, and I don’t think I do that. That’s one of the reasons I started in part with Roger Straus’s roast-like memorial service. A real tribute to someone’s life has to include his flaws, and a real history has to reveal the bad old days, too. Anchoring the story, I hope, is a view of history not as a straight line â€" up or down â€" but as a series of trade-offs.
Mia Tran Boris KachkaWhat could Straus have usefully learned or borrowed from the corporate publishing model that he didn’t?
There were all kinds of efficiencies that his son tried to bring to FSG, and which Galassi [the current FSG publisher Jonathan Galassi] eventually succeeded in bringing. There were even simple accounting procedures that Straus resisted out of nothing more than stubbornness and old age. There are many benefits to meetings of the sort he despised â€" post-mortems on the publication of a book that didn’t work, for example. And, agree with them or not, auctions are just a part of publishing. He resisted participating in them for far too long out of principled cheapness â€" which is kind of an oxymoron.
Who is Peggy Miller, and what is her importance to the story you’re telling?
Peggy Miller was Straus’s personal assistant and the one in the office he trusted above all others. She was his constant companion in a highly social business. She knew him almost as well as his wife did, and his family resented her for it. She stood â€" physically â€" between Straus and his son when both worked in the office, a situation that surely contributed to the failure to keep FSG in the family. And in later years she mentored a younger generation, passing on Roger’s values to editors brought up in very different times. She edited his oral history and the company archives, deciding what was left to posterity, and what, as she told me, “I’ll take to the grave.†She’s pretty important!
I’m curious about some of the FSG books that were widely read and praised at the time of publication but have (mostly) faded from the book world’s collective memory. Did you read some of these books? Any in particular you would recommend people track down and read?
I suppose Jean Stafford isn’t read too much today, and I really enjoyed her novel “The Mountain Lion.†It’s got a lock-jawed, laconic bleakness that’s hard to imagine finding in a contemporary American novel. It’s been reissued by New York Review Books, but I see Stafford having a potentially bigger revival.
I also can’t recommend Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian†highly enough. It’s quiet and sometimes bone dry, tending to adopt the earnest epic tone of its ancient Roman speaker. There’s little irony in it, just straight-up classical lyrical brilliance powerful enough to draw you into an alien mind and time.
Mr. Galassi recently wrote a response to your book in New York magazine, where you’re a staff writer. He said, among other things, “maybe the Good Old Days are always more inspiring, more golden, less weighed down by drudgery, because the drudgery is precisely what we let ourselves forget.†How did you feel about all of what he wrote?
I think he’s responding to the elegiac and wistful note on which I end the book, which I know irked him a little. Galassi wrote a good, fair, magnanimous review, given the obvious and clearly stated conflicts, but I think that in citing me for shortchanging the FSG of the present, he shortchanges that very portrayal. The closing chapters highlight several important writers â€" Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Roberto Bolaño â€" whose careers have thrived because FSG remains so committed to, and successful at, producing top-notch literature. Perhaps there could have been more of that, but as Galassi himself concedes, the good old days were pretty interesting. And I don’t want to put anyone through more than 350 pages on the history of a publishing house, no matter how unique and fascinating.
