My Reading Life Read online

  Yes, we got some things right.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE BOOK REP

  In 1972, when The Water Is Wide was published, the sales representative, Norman Berg, made a visit to my home in Beaufort to offer valuable advice about how I was to conduct myself as a young writer making my way into the labyrinths of a business I didn’t understand.

  Until I met Norman Berg, I had not yet developed a philosophy of writing, nor figured out the strategies I would need to be a writer of consequence for many years to come. Norman lacked any sense of frivolity or lightheartedness when the subject was either books or the writing life, and his dedication to the world of language was like a pure stream inside him. He was a hard man who dismissed fools without conscience or regret. His mouth was a thin line underscoring a disapproving face, and it lay closed beneath his brow and nose like a lesser blade in a Swiss army knife. A meticulous man, he carried a love of order to extremes sometimes. His books were chosen and arranged with care. When a book he revered went out of print, he would republish it under his own NSB imprint. His volumes were jacketless but sturdy, and Norman displayed an almost religious affection for the books he rescued from oblivion. Because of the Norman S. Berg publishing house, I read The Education of Henry Adams, South Moon Under by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra, and Frederick Ayer’s Before the Colors Fade: Portrait of a Soldier, about George Patton. Norman was a passionate reader and an unflinching loyalist to those books and writers who had struck him with their inner brilliance. His reputation preceded him, as had warnings from editors and other writers cautioning me about Norman’s pugnaciousness, his opinionated closed-mindedness, his caustic nature, and a negativity he could spread at will like a black pollen that could harm the confidence of any young writer. I ignored the warnings and welcomed Norman into my life. Since he would be the man pushing my books to Southern booksellers, it seemed reasonable that I make legitimate diplomatic inquiries into bringing Mr. Berg into my camp. I found his seduction effortless.

  Like most men of wintry, implacable reputations, Norman was a solitary figure wounded by his own self-inflicted capacity to cut himself off from all opportunities of friendship. He had made a fetish out of solitude and a virtue of his impatience with small talk and his unwillingness to tolerate the company of the unread simpletons he encountered on his journeys throughout the South. The world of books was a sacred grove to him.

  Because his personality was so off-putting and his manner so sharp-cornered, it took me years to welcome him into my life as a mentor and companion. Though he worshiped writers, he could not keep from trying to break their tender spirits and mold them into artists worthy of his dark imprimatur. His championing came with a price. From the very beginning Norman longed to turn me into a writer I was never born to be. It was Norman’s deepest wish that I take a thousand pages of my overcaffeinated prose and cut it down to a hundred pages of glittering, hard-boiled writing that would shine in its elegant completeness. He wanted me to write a book using all the delicacy and craft of watchmakers hunched over springs and wheels as tiny as semicolons. My attraction to the colossal and the elephantine offended him. Like many editors before and after him, Norman became a head cheerleader for restraint and economy of style. Ever since the English language in all its vertiginous, high-hurdling glory had been passed down to me by a word-stung mother, I had enjoyed getting my hands dirty anywhere the language would grant me a letter of transit. Norman would argue for the elegance of understatement. Countering, I made what I thought was a compelling case for overreaching, the wonders a writer could coax from his or her talents if they approached a blank page with their imagination afire and unbound.

  “Don’t you want to matter?” Norman Berg asked me on the veranda of my house on Hancock Street in Beaufort. “Don’t you want to be part of the literary discussion? Don’t you think about your place in literature?”

  “No, I haven’t thought about any of that, Mr. Berg.”

  “Then what do you want?” he asked me. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because I want to be remembered.”

  “You don’t write well enough to be remembered.”

  It was not the last time Norman Berg would hurt my feelings, but I thought his early criticism would offer a firewall when I made my timorous way in the world of New York publishing. From the earliest days of our friendship, he brought me books that he believed I should read before daring to impose my own puny visions on an unsuspecting American public. Norman brought me the books of new writers who had impressed him with their debut novels. Because of Norman Berg, I had read Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, Don DeLillo’s Americana, and Paul Theroux’s Waldo before I was published by their publisher. I felt then and I feel now a deep affinity with those writers who appeared in that first fall list with me. Each time he would visit me from Atlanta, Norman Berg would bring me dozens of books, and I could gauge his pleasure as he quizzed me about each author, making sure I could present ample evidence that I had read every book he brought into my house. When he quizzed me about the contents of a book, there was always a competitive sting to the queries. Books seemed to bruise rather than edify him. Because they were true to life, they could seem harmful to Norman, as though he were picking up live jellyfish from a tidal pool. There could be no mastery or understanding without pain. Whenever we sat down to discuss literature, I knew he would tolerate no introduction of frivolity into the conversation. Books were a matter of life and death in the world of Norman Berg. He was an easy man to dismiss and a hard one to love. In the end, his great solitude tamed me.

  In the spring of 1972, Norman picked me up in Beaufort and took me on a sales trip through the Carolinas, and beyond. He wanted me to understand the world of bookselling from the top down, so he insisted that I accompany him on a trip where he would sell my book The Water Is Wide to stores around the South. He instructed me to study the fall list and to hunt for clues that would let an owner know how important the publisher considered my book to be in the grand scheme of the fall season. According to his reckoning, my book was the tenth-most-important book that would be published in the next sales cycle.

  “Your book’s not a big-ticket item for Houghton Mifflin,” Norman said. “I can guarantee you that much. How many copies are in the first printing?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You make it your business to know. Your agent should’ve told you. The first printing’s only five thousand copies. It won’t even sell that many.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Experience,” he said. “You want to know about books. I deal in cold facts.”

  He drove me to Charleston, where he let me sit in as he sold his fall list to the Book Basement and the two elegant men who ran the store in the shadows of the College of Charleston. Since I had gotten to know the men slightly as a cadet and had become a regular customer since my graduation, I was relieved when they ordered five copies of The Water Is Wide and irritated when Norman tried to talk them into reducing their order to three books.

  “You can always reorder,” Norman said.

  “Mr. Conroy’s firing was covered well in the press,” the first man said. “We’re comfortable with that order.”

  Next, we drove over to King Street and I entered Hugeley’s bookstore, a much larger venue than the Book Basement. Hugeley’s bristled with Citadel connections, so they had never ordered a single copy of The Boo, my self-published book that rankled the rare sensibilities of the Citadel power structure by my championing a commandant they had fired for his corrosive effect on discipline within the corps of cadets. Mr. Hugeley was detached rather than personable when he met me that day, but he ordered two copies of the book, which felt like a victory of the smallest sort to me.

  “You made enemies at The Citadel,” Norman said as we walked back to his car.

  “It wasn’t hard to do.”

  “Why would they get mad ove
r The Boo? It’s unreadable. A piece of shit is the best thing you could say for it.”

  “It’s mine. That’s the best I can say for it.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s yours and it’s the worst thing you can say for it.”

  At night we camped in his Airstream trailer and he always tried to choose campgrounds where he could hear the sound of flowing water. He also loved the sound of an agitated surf or the struggle of an incoming tide as it surged against the wind—against the hardened shoulders of a Carolina sea island. He cooked quail and rice and gravy on a propane stove. At night, he talked about the books that had changed his life. He had ordered a case of wine, a Chianti, and he insisted that we drink from fine stemware and eat our meals on good china. Always, Norman pulled guard duty for the importance of civilization as a cure-all for the encroachments of chaos into the human condition. Before he cut out the lights, he would play recordings of Mozart’s piano concertos as we read from books he collected in the small but well-considered library he had gathered for our sales trip into the American South. It was somewhere outside of Spartanburg that Norman discovered that I had never read the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and he launched into an aggrieved monologue about my lack of preparation to embark on my life as a writer without a working knowledge of Tolkien’s great descent into the dense mythologies of his own imagination. Armed with a hard-earned ignorance that I tried to camouflage with bravado, I foolishly argued that Tolkien wrote books for children and a cult of frothy adults who never took the time to grow up. With considerable skill, Norman eviscerated every argument I threw at his windshield as I tried to break the stranglehold of a writer I’d never read. He trounced me soundly as he introduced me to the many pleasures of Middle-earth and the immeasurable courage of hobbits. As he dragged me through the perils of Frodo’s quest, he spoke of the dark and brutal authority of the ring of power, and the gathering of the ceaseless evil in Mordor. I didn’t know a single thing Norman was telling me about and my embarrassment over being caught in such a bald-faced, unnecessary lie stung me deeply. But I let Norman’s passion for Tolkien steady me. In an endangered land of dwarves and elves and wizards, I listened to the story of creation and the unseen world told once more by a writer with supernatural, unsurpassable gifts. I let the story possess me, take me prisoner, feed me with the endless abundance of its honeycombed depths. It is a story that rules me. In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of primacy of story. I’d rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers. Writers of the world, if you’ve got a story, I want to hear it. I promise it will follow me to my last breath. My soul will dance with pleasure, and it’ll change the quality of all my waking hours. You will hearten me and brace me up for the hard days as they enter my life on the prowl. I reach for a story to save my own life. Always. It clears the way for me and makes me resistant to all the false promises signified by the ring of power. In every great story, I encounter a head-on collision with self and imagination.

  Though Norman Berg was not a good storyteller, he carried the day with his ringing, high-strung defense of Tolkien’s works. Outside the hills surrounding Asheville, Norman told me that a good novelist wrote about the whole, known world each time a word was written on a blank page.

  “You claim to be writing your first novel.” Norm said it in a voice that let me know he didn’t believe me.

  “I have,” I said, having written the first pages to the book that would become The Great Santini.

  “Does it tell me everything I need to know about leading a good life?” he asked. “And I mean everything.”

  “No.”

  “Then throw it away. It’s not worth writing.”

  “I’m twenty-six years old, Norman. I don’t know everything in the world yet.”

  “That is good,” he said, softening. “At least you know that much. Keep writing. If you’re lucky you’ll have one or two important things to say before you die.”

  “Here is one of them,” I said. “Fuck you, Norman.”

  His laughter took us all the way to the campsite outside Asheville. I discovered early that he liked it when I fought back wherever his distemper turned surly or mean-spirited. He found my resistance to his manifesto on literature stimulating when he talked about books. Self-doubt was a country of origin to me, but Norman entertained no such uncertainties about himself. He believed that good writing contained the irrefutable answer to every question that could plague mankind’s toilsome journey beneath the stars. Before we went to sleep at night, he would walk me out to show me a full moon, its silver captured in the tossed slipstream of a mountain river. “Always know which phase the moon is in,” he would say. “Keep up with the transit of planets. Know everything. Feel everything. That’s your job as a writer.”

  “What’s your job, Norman?”

  “To suffer. To feel everything in the world. But it dies inside me. I have no gift. I can’t write. That’s why I’m driving you crazy.”

  On that trip, Norman cut a deal with a bookseller somewhere in the mountains, maybe Virginia, maybe Tennessee. I was struck blind by the impetuous desires of my own ego in those days, and the wonderfulness of my own self. Norman walked me into a small store on a hilly street and introduced me to an elderly man who seemed less than dazzled at the prospect of meeting me. In fact he was brusque, discourteous, and I took an instant dislike to him. I could tell he wasn’t about to write to his mother about his good fortune in meeting me. Then Norman Berg tossed a surprise in my lap that still amuses me almost forty years after it happened. At the time, I felt bushwhacked and sold down the river. Norman had just sat down in the back room of the bookstore to sell the fall list when he tossed his notes and paperwork and catalogs toward me.

  “You’ve seen me do this, Pat,” he said. “You sell the list. Let’s see if you’ve got what it takes to be a book rep. We know you can write a book; now let’s see if you can sell one.”

  Though I protested such a slick betrayal, I was caught up in the imaginativeness of the setup and the boldness of the jest. Mimicking all that I had seen Norman do for a week, I launched into a sales spiel for the most important books on the list, the books the publisher had the most invested in and whose success the future of the company depended on for its financial health and survival. I made the case for the nonfiction books by John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger and wrote down my first two orders, which were modest though respectable. Turning to the novels on the list, I delivered thumbnail sketches of the pleasures each book provided, though I’ve a slender memory of not having read a single work of fiction that I was attempting to sell to the crusty man who cleared his throat in annoyance with every presentation I made. Finally, I came to the existential moment when I was offering my own book The Water Is Wide for this unpleasant man’s impartial judgment. I described a young man going to teach on a Carolina sea island back in 1969, the first white teacher who ever taught black children in that part of the world. The kids were in terrible trouble, but the man thought he could teach them and make a difference in their lives.

  Even I could decipher the amateur quality of my presentation, but I got surprised in the middle of my delivery when the man said, “Who gives a damn?”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “I don’t care. What should my readers care what happened to a bunch of black kids on an island no one’s ever heard of?”

  “The book is kind of well written,” I said.

  “Kind of? It’s kind of well written? That’ll stir the souls of my readers. It sounds like a total bore. Pass.”

  “Pass?” I echoed.

  “Yeah. Pass. I don’t want to order a single copy of that book. It’s not for me. I can’t think of a soul who’d buy it.”

  “But there’s a publicity campaign that’s pretty good.”

  “Pretty good? Not good enough. I pass. Let’s go on to the next book.”

  I finished selling the list in
a barely controlled rage and gave a shameful performance in presenting the backlist, which I always found impressive. By the time I left that bookstore, I was ready to whack the living daylights out of that smug, hostile bookseller who had taken such grotesque pleasure in my humiliation.

  “You set me up, Norman,” I complained over dinner that night.

  He laughed and said, “I sure did. I thought you were too smart to fall for that little trick. I was wrong.”

  “You knew he was going to pass on my book.”

  “Yep, I set it all up. He didn’t own that store. He’s a retired rep. Did it as a favor to me.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “You’re the only writer in America I know of who’s ever sold a list for his publishing company,” Norman said. “It makes you rare. Time will tell if it makes you exceptional.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “Now you know how hard it is. Reps are going into bookstores all over the country trying to sell your books. No one knows who you are. No one gives a shit. Your book depends on the reps falling in love with your book. They’ve got to fall in love with your language, your story—they’re selling the spirit that lives in your book. If it has a spirit.”