The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (39 page)

After Leavis left, the vice chancellor assured the director of public prosecutions that
Ulysses
would not be taught at Cambridge. Just in case, Seward asked a few questions about Dr. Leavis, and rumors spread to the English faculty. As well respected as F. R. Leavis would become, the rumors, he insisted, never left. Decades later, newer faculty members at Cambridge would ask about the cloud of “disfavor” surrounding Professor Leavis. They all received the same answer. “We don’t like the books he gives to undergraduates.”

23.

The people who published modernist writers were either magnanimous cultural gatekeepers with eccentric tastes or gamblers willing to pursue younger authors and risqué manuscripts. Horace Liveright was a gambler. Though
Ulysses
was too risky for him, Liveright published several daring books, including
Aphrodite
, George Moore’s
A Story-Teller’s Holiday
and D. H. Lawrence’s
The Rainbow
. He exemplified the publishing industry’s changes after the war. He was a high school dropout with a drinking problem, but he was brilliant and adventurous and he spotted talent early. Liveright began publishing Ezra Pound in 1920, and he brought out the first books of Hemingway, Faulkner and Dorothy Parker. Unlike everyone else, he advertised heavily, and his ads had testimonials from Hollywood stars and fonts that blared like billboards.

In the 1920s, publishing was close to the center of the nation’s emerging celebrity culture, and Liveright had a hand in putting it there. He invented the book-launch party. Well-known authors could expect to draw crowds, and Boni & Liveright authors—like grumpy Theodore Dreiser and wild man Eugene O’Neill—blended seamlessly in an office that buzzed with actresses, showmen and bootleggers. The office’s cocktail parties started in the early afternoon. Tommy Smith, the editor-in-chief, knew everyone in town—actors, philanthropists and brothel madams. He would mix Pernod with eye-watering bootleg liquor so strong that the rim of sugar on the glass would barely help you choke it down. Arthur Pell, the accountant, gave Horace Liveright false account statements and hoped that dire numbers would curb his lavish expenditures. Boni & Liveright was a company without brakes.

The vice president was twenty-four years old. Bennett Cerf was a wide-eyed newcomer, and the excitement of Boni & Liveright was exactly what he had hoped to find in the publishing world. After graduating from Columbia in 1919, he became a stockbroker on Wall Street, but he always wanted to be in publishing, and when a college friend, Richard Simon, left Boni & Liveright to start his own publishing house with Max Schuster, Simon claimed he could get Cerf’s foot in the door.

Liveright didn’t want Bennett Cerf for his business experience. He wanted him for his money. Cerf’s mother, an heir to a tobacco fortune, died when he was sixteen and left him $125,000. On top of that, Cerf had made a small fortune speculating in the stock market, and Liveright needed more capital. The company wasn’t keeping up with its royalty payments, and Liveright was financing a Broadway play he was producing (one of his bad gambles). When he met Cerf in 1923, he told the young man there was room for rapid advancement. “If you’d like to start with style, you could put a little money into the business.” For a $25,000 loan, Bennett Cerf began his publishing career as the stylish vice president of Boni & Liveright.

To Cerf, Boni & Liveright meant the Modern Library, the imprint he associated with books like
Moby-Dick
and
The Scarlet Letter
that he had discovered in college. The Modern Library was Albert Boni’s idea. He and Liveright wanted to put together an inexpensive series by cutting the costs of publication rights, and Boni’s solution was to merge copyright-free classics with second-run editions of quality books whose sales had flagged and whose rights could be acquired for a bargain. Among the first twelve Modern Library books in 1917 (which included works by Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson), only four of the writers were living, and most of the titles had no American copyright. They looked for titles with the potential to sell in small, steady numbers for years. As it turned out, there were plenty. After the war, their retail prices soared from sixty to ninety-five cents per copy, and yet the Modern Library remained one of readers’ most economical options. By the mid-1920s, the series was the backbone of Boni & Liveright’s profits.

When Cerf started his new job, Liveright was ignoring the Modern Library to focus on potential best sellers written by headline-producing authors. Zane Grey, Peter Kyne and Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson—you couldn’t beat authors like that. The series became less interesting over time. When Liveright halfheartedly tried to acquire Joyce’s
Portrait
after refusing to publish
Ulysses
, John Quinn balked.
A Portrait
was too modern. Being on the Modern Library’s list, Quinn said, was a sign of a writer’s decay, “a declension into the sunset preceding the dark night of literary extinction.” Liveright was insulted. He reminded Quinn that the Modern Library included some outstanding contemporary authors: Max Beerbohm, Gustav Frenssen, Andreas Latzko and Arthur Schnitzler. That list made John Quinn’s point exactly.

—

BENNETT CERF BECAME the imprint’s de facto editor, and it wasn’t long before he began thinking about owning it. He had his chance sooner than he expected. In May 1925, Cerf booked a trip to London and Paris for his twenty-sixth birthday. It was, as he wrote in his diary, “a trip I’ve dreamed of for years.” Before he left, Horace Liveright met Cerf at a midtown speakeasy. Liveright had a few drinks beforehand, and he was nervously clenching his scotch. As Cerf recalled it, Liveright’s father-in-law was breathing down his neck because he owed him portion of the seed money for the publishing house. Liveright had a few mistresses he liked to pamper, and he was apparently worried about what a disgruntled father-in-law might use as blackmail. “Oh, how I’d like to pay him off and get rid of him.”

“One very easy way to pay him off,” Cerf said, “is to sell me the Modern Library.” Cerf expected Liveright to laugh and continue griping, but instead he asked, “What will you give me for it?” When the other executives found out that Liveright had made a deal to sell their primary source of steady income while half drunk at a speakeasy, they were livid. Liveright insisted that he was selling the list at its peak (it sold 275,000 copies in 1925), and Cerf had to fight an entire committee to keep his deal alive and sign the contract before his ship disembarked at one in the morning. In the end, Liveright prevailed, and the Modern Library belonged to Bennett Cerf.

They agreed on two hundred thousand dollars, the highest price ever paid for a reprint series. The only problem was that Cerf didn’t have the money, and the contract required him to have it in three weeks, as soon as he returned from his trip. With time running out before his departure, Cerf called up a Columbia friend, Donald Klopfer, who hated working at his father’s diamond-cutting business. Cerf offered to put up the remainder of his inheritance if Donald could find the other half of Liveright’s price.

“Where the hell am I going to get a hundred thousand dollars?”

“That’s your problem,” Cerf said, “but it’s got to be in cash.”

—

BENNETT CERF AND DONALD KLOPFER set up an office of six people in a loft building on Forty-fifth Street. Their desks faced each other, and they shared a secretary, as they would for years to come. Where Cerf was a charismatic deal maker, Klopfer was fastidious and patient—Cerf thought of him as “one of the nicest men that ever lived.” They worked on the Modern Library nonstop for two years, personally visiting booksellers along the eastern seaboard, finding new buyers, redesigning the covers, the bindings, the colophon, everything. They added a new title to their catalog every month, including works by Ibsen and Joyce in 1926. While the catalog was more adventurous, the Modern Library as a whole became substantially
older
.
The list doubled in ten years because it was growing in both directions.

But Cerf and Klopfer wanted more than backlist titles. They wanted a publishing house that would acquire new manuscripts just like Boni & Liveright. They were kicking around a modest version of their idea in front of Rockwell Kent, a celebrated commercial artist, when Cerf suddenly said he had a name for it. “We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random. Let’s call it Random House.”

Kent loved the name, and he drew the humble house colophon that would eventually adorn millions of books all over the world. In its first years, Random House tapped into the burgeoning market for expensive limited editions
by reprinting deluxe versions of Modern Library books. Melville’s
Moby-Dick
and Voltaire’s
Candide
could be illustrated, printed on high-quality paper, expensively bound, numbered in lots of a thousand and signed by the translator or a well-known illustrator like Kent. The luxury editions would sell to book collectors at a dramatic markup—Sylvia Beach’s strategy for the first edition of
Ulysses
became a new business model. What began as a way for dirty books to elude the police was, during the boom years of Wall Street, a mainstay of the publishing industry.

By 1929, Random House had issued dozens of deluxe limited editions. Their 1929 edition of Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
sold out immediately at one hundred dollars per copy. Yet even then, Cerf and Klopfer were unaware of how advantageous their position was. When the stock market crashed, the Modern Library catalog of ninety-five-cent classics not only carried Random House through the Depression, it helped them increase their market share. They sold a million books in 1930 (four times their first year’s sales) and turned a profit every year. The company that Cerf and Klopfer bought for two hundred thousand dollars was sold in 1965 for forty million.

—

THE MODERN LIBRARY
dominated the market before the paperback revolution in the 1950s because it thrived on making prestige accessible. Cerf advertised it as “a collection of the most significant, interesting and thought-provoking books in modern literature.” The pitch was tailored to the country’s changing readership. College enrollment in the United States doubled every decade from 1890 to 1930, and students typically bought the inexpensive but durable Modern Library editions for their classes. But it wasn’t just the number of college students. It was the way they read. When Cerf was at Columbia, the Great Books movement was incubating in the university’s English department. Professors like John Erskine envisioned a two-year survey of the Western canon that, when it was instituted in 1920, the university described as a “Reading of Masterpieces of literature in poetry, history, philosophy and science.” The reading list included works from Homer, Plato, Dante and Shakespeare. This sounds like typical fare, but having biology students read masterpieces outside of literature’s disciplinary constraints (and there were plenty) was not something universities generally did before 1920.

Erskine’s idea was to “treat the
Iliad
, the
Odyssey
, and other masterpieces as though they were recent publications”—they transcended centuries and bore directly upon contemporary lives. Masterpieces showed readers that the chaos of modern life was a part of the larger pattern of human civilization. The Great Books movement was, in other words, a syllabized version of
Ulysses
. Both within and beyond universities, people began thinking that certain books illuminated eternal features of the human condition. They didn’t demand expertise—one didn’t need to speak classical Greek or read all of Plato to benefit from
The Republic
—all they demanded was, as Erskine put it, “a comfortable chair and a good light.” Bennett Cerf absorbed the ethos of reading great books as contemporary texts during his college years, and he was inspired by a freshman course on contemporary British authors (Rudyard Kipling, Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells), which extended the great literary continuum to the present. The Modern Library catalog was, to some extent, an homage to Cerf’s undergraduate education.

And so much the better. For the Modern Library provided a ready-made curriculum for a generation of upwardly mobile people who were either nostalgic for their college years or who wanted the cultivation that college offered—people like Bennett Cerf and Horace Liveright themselves. The Modern Library offered commodified prestige with the illusion of self-reliance. Readers could have the benefits of institutional culture without the institutions. They could rise above the masses by purchasing a dozen inexpensive books. Cerf changed the Modern Library’s colophon from a cowled monk working at his desk to a lithe body leaping in the air with a torch held high. Reading classics wasn’t about scholarship. It was about freedom and the promise that the individual’s light could illuminate the world.

The prestige of reading great books appealed to a postwar population that was anxious about the future of Western civilization and liable to think of itself as the bearer of that civilization. American readers wanted to imagine contemporary American writers entering the Western canon just as the country was emerging onto the world stage. The Modern Library was where William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker and Sherwood Anderson rubbed shoulders with Aeschylus, Milton and Cervantes. The catalog managed to make literature both cosmopolitan and patriotic.

None of this was planned. The Modern Library had begun as a gimmick. In 1915, Albert Boni sent a tiny copy of
Romeo and Juliet
bound in imitation leather to Whitman’s Chocolates and suggested they include the tragic love story in each of their boxes. Whitman’s placed an order for fifteen thousand copies. Tiny books were a novelty item, and when Boni realized he could sell the books without the chocolate he began retailing his Little Leather Library at Woolworth’s for twenty-five cents (a set of thirty cost $2.98). He went into business with Liveright in 1917, and together they expanded the series, augmented the format, raised the price and began calling it the Modern Library. By 1930, the series was selling over a million books a year.