Lover. Bertha Harris
Fiction by Women.” June said Daughters was feminist. Then Parke threw her glass at the restaurant wall, and we were asked to leave.
I was delighted. I was finally in the cast of an opera; somebody definitely throws a glass against a wall during La Traviata. In the street, Parke told me to swear that when people asked me why I published with Daughters, I would not tell them it was because Daughters was feminist; I was to say, instead, that I published with Daughters because, like Random House, Daughters gave big advances. I understood her point. Parke was equating feminism with impoverishment; I was ashamed of being poor. I swore to defend big advances to the death.
About ten days later, they took me to dinner again. They explained that what I would get by publishing with Daughters was a guarantee that Lover would never go out of print; none of their titles, they promised, would ever go out of print. No publishing company on earth could offer that guarantee but Daughters.
I more or less fell on my knees and cried, I am thine! Most writers will understand how I felt, though few are as naive as I was. I knew, of course, that Lover wasn’t going to be a bestseller, or even come near bestsellerdom: effeminate aesthetes like me don’t write bestsellers. But I hoped that given time, plenty of time—maybe twenty or thirty years—a first edition might be bought out. Daughters, according to the partners, guaranteed that time. When the euphoria wore off, questions occurred to me. How could Daughters make that promise? If, just for example, the partners died, then what guaranteed the future of the company promising in-print eternity?
Parke and June laughed my questions off. I was too unworldly, they told me; I didn’t understand how businesses operated. They were right. I was unworldly, possibly even other-worldly. Far from understanding how businesses worked, I did arithmetic by counting on my fingers. I was ordered to stop worrying. I decided to stop worrying and become a true believer. I felt safe with June and Parke, as if my time for being a beloved child had at last arrived. I was happy to let them have Lover; I feared that neither Lover nor I was good enough for them.
The only regret I had in publishing Lover with Daughters—and I suppressed it, it seemed audacious—was that Lover would not be reviewed by the New York Times, whose policy then, and for some time to come, was not to review original trade paperbacks. But the physical beauty of the Daughters’ editions was well worth the loss of the Times. The elegantly designed covers and the dimensions (eight and a half by five and a half) of Daughters’ paperbacks have now been adopted by nearly every good publisher—Virago, for example—both here and in Europe, but it was Daughters’ designer, Loretta Li, who created the look.
When I finished Lover, Parke and I had dinner again. I handed over the A&P brown paper bag containing the manuscript and Parke gave me a company check for ten thousand dollars, the same advance, Parke assured me, that Random House gave its authors of third novels. Harcourt, Brace’s Hiram Haydn, in 1969, had given me one thousand, six hundred dollars for my first novel Catching Saradove, and two thousand three years later for my second. I was giddy with the thrill of big bucks at last. Parke suggested we do some drinking and dancing over at Bonnie & Clyde’s, a movement bar on West Third Street, to recover and celebrate. After a few hours, we realized that we didn’t have Lover; one of us had left the only complete copy of the manuscript under the restaurant table. We found our waiter reading it. “Hot stuff,” he said.
I thought Daughters was hot stuff. Parke and June thought Daughters was hot stuff, and with good reason. As far as I know, they were the only women around at that time who were putting so much money where feminism’s mouth was.
I’m extravagant in my affections while they last. Compare me, if you will, to Tosca or to the family dog: I’m the very model of the cheap date. Parke and June led me to believe (that is, they lied to me) that they were gambling every cent they had on Daughters. Parke, for instance, had given up her law career to work full-time for the company’s success. I imagined what June had given up; what I imagined her giving up was what I would have spent a fortune on if I’d had one: Europe, with special attention to Italy and France. My eyes glazed over with hero worship. When people started complaining to me that June tried to ram her politics down their throats and slapped them upside the head, in a manner of down-south speaking, when they failed to swallow her very hard line, I would try to explain away their indignation by urging them to look, June could be whiling away pleasant hours in Paris right now, or soaking her tootsies in the Bay of Naples, or lounging in a gondola—but instead … so the least we can do is be tolerant. Nobody swallowed my line either.
After I gave June and Parke Lover, I gradually handed over most of my life to them and to Daughters. I justified my self-abandon by maintaining that I was merging my personal with my political in an area (writing and publishing) for which I was most suited. I thought how lucky I was that they wanted me.
Since 1972, I’d had full-time employment at Richmond College of the City University of New York, where I taught in the Women’s Studies program. I had other serious, time-consuming responsibilites, both professional and personal, as well. I had been, except emotionally, a self-sustaining adult since I was sixteen. But in 1976, shortly after Lover was published, June asked me to take on all her editorial work so that she could write full-time. Without pausing to consider when, with both a full- and a parttime job—and a life—I would find time to write myself, I accepted. My mother’s chief contribution to my upbringing had been to beat my legs and back with a walking cane every time she thought that I was, in her words, “showing off” or giving the appearance of believing that I was “better than other people.” By the time I met June and Parke, I had become so adept at self-effacement that I could make myself disappear at will. My mother told me that because of me, she’d been cheated of everything she ever wanted. I am, to this day, very careful never to compete with other women; I will go to any amount of trouble to help a woman get what she says she wants; if I must sacrifice something I want in the process, so much the better. Sometimes this behavior is mistaken for feminism; it is penance.
I understood immediately that it was more important for June to write than for me to write. June, I would eventually realize, also thought that it was more important for her to write, so much more so, in fact, she would have preferred that I stop writing altogether.
After a while, Parke and June began pressuring me to resign from my assistant professorship at Richmond College and work exclusively for Daughters. Neither offered me an ordinary reason to do so, such as a salary equal to what the City University paid me, health insurance, a pension—nor even an extraordinary reason. I was supposed to do it simply because they wanted me to do it. No mundane consideration prevented me from giving them what they wanted, it was rather a fear of being eaten alive combined with the twitchings of some half-paralyzed adult instinct for survival that kept me full-time at Richmond until 1976. But I wondered why they wanted me around full-time, and for what? Daughters simply didn’t have enough work to justify my full-time employment unless I added most of Parke’s work—bookkeeping, mailings, dealing with the printers, etc.—to my editorial duties, and this was clearly impossible. As we all knew, I was inept with money and the arithmetic that handling money demands; Parke, furthermore, would never have put the secrets of the company’s account books into my hands.
But in 1974, when they were leaning heavily on me to say it out loud—I am thine! —I was, in any event, nearly always on duty at Daughters in one way or another when I wasn’t teaching. Parke was running the ordinary day-today business of publishing with intelligence and keen competence; distribution, however, was an on-going problem for her, fraught with stress and anxiety. Except for gay and women’s bookshops (and there were then relatively few), other, general-subject book dealers and their customers were still wary of taking a chance on such unfamiliar, sometimes openly lesbian, writing. The grand design for Daughters that June and Parke had conceived—beating Random House at its own game—was being continually frustrated in the marketplace.
Nor were women, movement women, living up to the partners’ expectations as book buyers. I think now that it’s possible that neither Parke nor June, sheltered as they were from the exigencies of ordinary women’s lives, ever fully understood that, for most, buying books was an unconsidered luxury; although