FATE, LUCK OR FORTITUDE: A BRILLIANT CAREER

Shortly after the Second World War a young European arrives in New York City.  His English is pretty imperfect, but he needs a job.  After employment agencies turn him down, a friend helps him compose two ads for the New York Times.

The ads identify, with minimal fanfare, a “nineteen-year old Frenchman looking for work.”  Despite his hopes for a deluge of mail, our lad receives only two letters – one for each ad, and both from the same person.  The letterhead reads “Authors and Publishers Representative.”

While one invites him to call for an appointment, the other suggests he come for an interview on a particular day.  Suspecting his English may be too shaky to manage a phone call, he decides to show up in person.

So at the appointed hour he finds himself ushered into the office of the head of the company, a lady who had traveled widely and spoke several languages.  Wanting to practice her French, she engages him in that language.  Once the interview is concluded, she says: “I think I’ll probably offer you the job, but I wrote to one other person from whom I haven’t heard yet.”  Whereupon our hero pulls out the second letter.  “I’m that other person,” he says.  And that’s how he got the job.

I leave for you to decide whether serendipity, persistence, or cleverness played the largest role in that initial success, but this nineteen-year old lad was George Borchardt, literary agent to the best of the best for fifty-plus years and counting.  Although in those early days, he confessed himself often astonished to be in a job where he was paid to read books, he eventually became the literary agent for an enormous array of first-rate talent.  First came the Europeans: Samuel Beckett, Elie Wiesel, Margueurite Duras, Eugene Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Ian McEwan, among others.  American novelists like T.C. Boyle, Robert Coover, Claire Messud, and Susan Minot were added to his list, as well as poets like John Ashbery, Robert Bly, and Philip Schultz.  Non-fiction writers like Stanley Crouch, Tracy Kidder and Kate Millett came aboard as well and, oh, yes, the estates of Hannah Arendt, John Gardner, Aldous Huxley, and Tennessee Williams.  Plus – of course – the aforementioned Samuel Beckett.  Clearly, Borchardt has nursed the careers of some of the past half-century’s most brilliant writers.

His interview in a recent issue of Poets & Writers, from which this information comes (Sept/Oct, 2009), is actually quite inspiring.   Cognizant as Borchardt certainly is of how things have changed in publishing since those early days – and in particular how difficult it is now for authors – he also suggests that plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.  The writer’s path has never been smooth, he insists, any more than it has for painters, dancers, actors, or other artists.  He cites the difficulties he had in placing Beckett at first, his early inquiries yielding responses like, “Pale imitator of Joyce” or “Unreadable prose.”  And he mentions as well that Cezanne’s first paintings were laughed at and Van Gogh sold only one canvas in his lifetime.

Apparently George Borchardt, once he’s impressed with your talent, is an easy man to like.  T. C. Boyle, one of his current authors, once called him “the most wonderful man who ever lived on this earth.”  Exaggeration maybe, but hey!  Not bad for a kid from a war-ravaged continent, who barely spoke the language.

Share this post:
Facebooktwittermail
This entry was posted in On Writing, Publications, Whatever. Bookmark the permalink.