“Of course. I’ll explain.
“Like you, I went out on my own early, although I did put in three years at university — I’d have done better at Newell Academy. All that my studies did for me was get me hooked on literature — not as a writer but as a reader, and there was no ‘practical counterpart’ for that! I decided to start a publishing house so that I could commission books that I wanted to read but didn’t yet exist. I didn’t know the first thing about business — selling was something I had to learn on the job. I did have the sense to spend a year as an apprentice with an established distributor, where I got to know something of the nuts and bolts of the book trade. After that I managed to wangle a couple of grants, one from a state agency, another from a private foundation, and brandishing these, I approached my bank — a perfectly respectable bank! — and actually secured a loan from them. I helped all this happen by displaying my college record and behaving as though I were a well-connected gent; my family was distinguished all right, but I kept them completely out of it. I was happy to have raised some capital by myself, although it depressed me to think that society’s finances were in the hands of such susceptible incompetents and that in my own small way I was aggravating a situation of general economic decay.
“No matter — I was on my own, and I survived. I rented office space. I engaged a secretary, a good-natured young woman of considerable intelligence who had no idea what she was in for. My year at the distributor had acquainted me with the names of many contemporary writers and what might be expected of them. My university acquaintances, efficiently climbing the hierarchies of the liberal professions, provided a network that made it relatively easy for me to contact the writers who interested me. You see, I was not looking to publish literature as it’s commonly thought of — no novels, certainly no poetry or plays. Imagination, yes — but imagination demonstrated in the way unusual people chose or were forced to live their lives, and those lives duly recorded by others if necessary but best by themselves.”
Paul, at this point, was no longer smiling. He had assumed a markedly sullen aspect, that as he listened to Andreas grew only glummer.
Andreas: “This was my one strength: I knew what I wanted, and I quickly learned how to get it. There were objective factors to exploit. At the time I started publishing, most writers were being paid pitifully little. I offered contracts that were generous in the long term: small advances but royalties at almost twice the going rate. I could afford this because thanks to the computer, production costs were low, I had only one employee to pay, and I could use direct advertising to promote my books. The arrangement also encouraged writers to produce something saleable.
“And it worked. Luck no doubt played a part — I’m all for that! We brought out a number of interesting works. An in-depth account of Raymond Norwood Bell, the North Carolina PFC who unwittingly shot and killed Anton Webern a few weeks after the end of World War II. The journal of Robert Walser’s sister, Fanny, who took him to the sanitarium where he supposedly committed himself voluntarily — she knew that he would admit to ‘hearing voices’ and thus inevitably be confined whether he wanted to or not. A confession by Hildegard Panzer, the author of the hoax whereby thousands of dupes in Germany and Argentina (and many neo-Nazis elsewhere) were convinced that Eva Braun and Evita Peron were one and the same person. A well-researched life of Elmer Brick, a celebrity architect, a friend of Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, who at the age of sixty won the Pritzker Prize having never built even one of his vaunted ‘humanizations of space.’ The tale of Alastair Ross, a longtime chairman of Lehman Brothers, member of the exclusive Knickerbocker and University Clubs of Manhattan, fabulous philanthropist and patron of the arts, father of four children by Ursula Manning, the offspring of one of the city’s oldest families, named debutante of the year at her coming out; and at the same time, a man with a parallel career as the anonymous and heretofore unidentified author of The Boom-Boom Saga, an irreverent and libelously scabrous depiction of the social world in which Alastair Ross was revered, now revealed in his own words to be an unscrupulous gambler drawn to high-stakes poker and faro, a devotee of opium and a major investor in its traffic, lastly a closet queer who participated regularly in New York’s well-organized network of orgies, where he went by the name of Sara Lee (Lee being the surname he used in his irregular life — he sometimes referred to himself as ‘Nates’ Lee, and he relished the company jingle, ‘Nobody does it like Sara Lee’).
“So that’s a sampling of my books, just to give you an idea of what I’ve done professionally. Which brings me to the possible collaboration between us that I mentioned when we first met. I can tell from the way you and your brother lead your lives that generating publicity is the last thing you want. All the same, your behavior, the rapport between you, is a unique phenomenon that I think deserves serious examination — your superficial similarity, which given your
