A Novel Marketplace. Evan Brier
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