Doomed perhaps as of the moment that then friendand author about to be, Olaf Hansen, proposed Urizen [Blake’s compound ofReason and Horizon] in lieu of the original Hyperion; which, it so happened,was in use by a reprinter in Connecticut, a cease and desist arrived as soon asthey got wind of us… and if only I had looked at Blake’s illustrations I wouldhave known what was in store for this hubristic enterprise: Urizen in chainsunder water, desperately coming up for air… Poor poor Reason… author MichaelHamburger was displeased.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Urizen
http://facstaff.uww.edu/hoganj/contents.htm
http://books.google.com/books?id=fXs02FwnB58C&dq=the+book+of+urizen&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=HeLXSuLnGIvKsAOPuomZBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBUQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=&f=false
http://images.google.com/images?dq=the+book+of+urizen&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&resnum=4&sa=N&tab=pi&q=the%20book%20of%20urizen
Prophetic of Urizen’s fate was not only Blake’simagery, but future author Wolfgang Schivelbusch coming out to visit me atRockaway Beach, I lived in a studio apartment right by the Atlantic, as delegateof partner Schulz [in Europe in a film editing room] to discuss the publishingprogram and - after I agreed that “social history” could be added to the focusof the firm while fiction and belle letters were off a programmatic screen – “Wolf’s-Gait”marching - as only an East Prussian can march - straight straight straight intothe pounding surf which turned him near instantly upside down, Wolfgang losinghis glasses – imagine walking into the surf with your reading glasses on –getting an instant headache and Barbara Becker, the partner’s American hippiegirlfriend [a.k.a “slave girl”], having to drive him straight back to the bigcity. I forgot who else witnessed the event besides Judith Thurman, but therewere a few others and we found the event memorably amusing, and kids that wewere did not imagine that it might be prophetic. Wolfgang turned out to have afar more interesting mind than gait, then, and finally getting his TheIndustrialized Traveler [as The Railway Journey] into print wascertainly one of Urizen Book’s highpoints.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Schivelbusch
However, Wolfgang had to sue to get Schulz, whoseproject this was, cracking on it.
Urizen had its most minute origin in myrealization at my first Frankfurt Book Fair, in 1964 [I was a scout for SeymourLawrence who had taken me with him from the Atlantic Monthly Press to AlfredKnopf when he became editor in chief during my year in Europe] that the onlypeople having fun seemed to be publishers. However, I had no ambitions to be apublisher at that time, and even the founding of Urizen came more out of forceof circumstance - if I had found the right publisher to work for it might neverhave happened. In 1964 I was co-editor with Fred Jameson of a literarymagazine, Metamorphosis, whose publisher was Michael Lebeck [whichceased once the exceedingly well educated Michael Lebeck joined a Sufi sect andstarted lifting imaginary rocks inside his head!]. I tried as much as possibleto work from home, freelancing as a reader for no end of houses, for ColumbiaPictures, the Book Find Club, as a scout, as a translator, in Europe and theU.S., for Suhrkamp Verlag, then I worked for Farrar, Straus, again chiefly fromhome; out of an office of my own at my own pace as an agent for Lantz-Donadiofrom 1969 to 1971; and most unhappily for one extremely well paid year forMcGraw-Hill 1971-1972; then for three fairly productive years mostly at home asan editor at Continuum Books, Seabury Press. – Thinking more about my equivocalapproach to becoming a publisher, Arthur Rosenthal and I once entertained aproject after he sold Basic Books, and when at Lantz-Donadio when therepresentation of foreign publishers was not doing the trick, and Suhrkamphaving made itself unrepresentable, I discussed the idea of becoming a full-fledged agent with Robbie andCandida: there were some thing you could get done along that way, and I had meta lot of fine agents by then, especially those who represented foreignpublishers. The influx of émigrés had not only changed the intellectualclimate, but also that of U.S. publishing which was becoming considerably lessprovincial. Jason Epstein at Random House pointed out that editors came in witha high-powered list of writers – a pointer to the kind of musical chairs thatis played in the current situation of high-powered agents, high-powered editorsand huge advances, and the Hollywood-like side of conglomerate publishing. Anyof that was most improbable unless I hi-jacked Candida’s authors! Still,looking back, there seem to have been occasional surges of entrepreneurship. Ihad met quite a few people in publishing by then whom I liked quite a bit, theaforementioned Arthur Rosenthal, Sam Lawrence, Bill Koshland at Knopf, GeorgeBraziller, Michael Bessie, Fred Praeger where my uncle George Aldor then becamepublisher after Fred sold his firm to Britannica and went skiing in Boulder. Therewere other whom I might have consulted later.
Had I had beensingle-minded, even half single-minded in the ambition to be a publisher Iwould have taken up the offer of a friend, way back in the 60s, to train as asalesman for Random House – and learned the ropes from the deck up. Instead Isort of knocked about and learned a lot that way. However, it was the unhappyexperience at McGraw-Hill, linking up with the likes of Joyce Johnson, LoisBermann and Stanley Aronowitz laid down the germs of the idea of a firm ownedby its employees and sharing profits, not that original an idea, as an agent Ihad represented Verlag der Autoren [aGerman authors, chiefly playwrights, collective, that was created during theGerman 60s, split off from Suhrkamp, and I had been present at its founding inFrankfurt and of a lot of upshots of practical New Leftism.]
I had followed WernerLinz’s siren song to McGraw-Hill when Suhrkamp had made itself unrepesentableby me and Lantz-Donadio and at a time when McGraw had bought the American side of theGerman firm Herder & Herder, and the idea was that I would start anAmerican equivalent of the famous Suhrkamp Verlag line “edition suhrkamp” as it looks now:
http://www.suhrkamp.de/reihen/edition_suhrkamp_6.html
http://www.goethe.de/kue/des/ddd/ddd/suhr/enindex.htm
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edition_suhrkamp
which “edition” – four new books month! - I had come to appreciate whileearning my Masters in Suhrkamp Kulturduring my two years unhappily representing the Grossgauner für Kultur Siegfried Unseld [and his impossible foreignrights disabilitator Helene Ritzerfeld – may the impossible twosome rest in thesame grave - in New York.
The year as senior editor at McGraw-Hill becamethe best paid but least effectual year of my life when the bunglers HaroldMcGraw and his sub-right person, Beverly Loo, could come up with nothing betterfor having lost a lot of money and face in having John Irving take them for afool of a Howard Hughes biography, but to take their chagrin out on their TradeDivision, which meant decimating Herder & Herder and many other well laidplans. A lot of people in New York during those days had one or two well paidyears at McGraw, it’s quite a list it makes.
The publisher of the McGrawtrade division was a nice man by the name of Levine who had founded asuccessful children’s book line, Golden Books [and so didn’t understand beansabout “edition suhrkamp” and the like]. Golden Books had become valuable toMcGraw because it was sold at every nickel and dime; editor in chief was onceWunderkind, Robert Sussman Stewart, delinquent author to be, a TV phenom who hadbeen editor in chief of The Atlantic Magazine at age 24, and would rave at meoccasionally on Park Avenue about “Object Relations”… Later I would come tounderstand something about what I call scientific animism. When he had gothimself a room in the basement of a building that houses nothing but analystswhere I did my psychoanalysis in the early 80s he would appear as “the badanalyst” in a dream – “Really, in this very building?” asked Dr. X whose and mybad side has thusly been consigned into a basement room where Sussman-Stewartno doubt was continuing to rave about this and that and phantasizing about writinghis biography of Anna Freud.
Being curious and havingnext to nothing to do in the huge shoe-box that McGraw Hill moved into duringmy tenure from its marvelous Art Deco building in the 40s by the Hudson [seephotos below] to the horrendous shoe-box at 6th Avenue and about 52ndStreet - not one window would open, no ion entered or left as your brain wentdead: I took the elevator to the floors occupied by the various manyprofessional magazine published under the aegis of McGraw-Hill and came torealize that among its writers and editors was a wealth of talent right thereon the spot for an enterprise that never happened and who wouldn’t have mindedto stretch.
The small group of Loisand Joyce and I, I’m sure I am forgetting others, tried out the idea of such asocialist and democratic firm but didn’t interest too many authors in it, butthe idea of increased royalties proved attracted. Although these features werethen written into the Urizen author’s contract not a one ever asked about themafter signing.
Werner Linz who had sold the American side of the GermanHerder & Herder to McGraw-Hill, and after our trying to interest my thenfriend Jerry Leiber who and Mike Stoller had their offices at the BrillBuilding of Tin Pan Alley fame, eventually found the Episcopal Seabury Press tobuy out Herder & Herder from McGraw and split it into its respective religious and profane wings, Crossroadsand Continuum Books, Seabury Press [Werner spent a lot of time with Bishops,too much I think] and after a six month trip halfway around the world and backon the Hellenic Splendor during whichI read several steamer trunks full of books and translated two volumes worth ofEnzensberger essays and one short Handke play, Quodlibet, and writing mydiary in the form of letters to the squeeze in New York, and absorbing a lot offoreign ports and being overwhelmed by India, I had a job as Senior editor atContinuum at 43rd and Lex and only had to be at the office once ortwice a week; and with six month of clean air in my lungs decided to live bythe Atlantic in the Rockaways near Rijs Park, which kept me pretty much but notentirely out of harms way and working well 5 days a week. And a lot of finebooks got published, Adorno, Aronowitz, Larry Birns The End of Chilean Democracy [my test of whether a book ofdocuments following on the heels of a horrendous event of that kind might findreaders interested in the dirty details: no!], Las Casas, two volumes ofEnzensberger essays, Gertrude Kolmar, Paul Sylbert, Michael Schneider, Handke etc.etc. Quite a few good eggs got laid by this cuckoo at Continuum Books, howeverI could not publish fiction, Werner Linz, for whatever sensible reason or not, wasnot an authors’ publisher, and when he cut my big money book, Leiber/Stoller’s ThisWas Rock and Roll, which then got done I think by Colliers and didexceedingly well for them [50 k copies printed, Urizen got the remaining 5 todistribute later], and Linz was generally starting to cut back in 1974… and myleftish – well educated by translating and publishing Michael Schneider’s Neurosisand Civilization, the summa of the heady and confused thoughts of that day.Neurosis and Civilization [and having a lot of old left blood flowing inme, too, since childhood, and having been if only briefly a member of both themarble and tile workers unions] was flowing at a Christmas Party at futuremultiply delinquent womanizing author Andrew Arato’s place on McDougal Street,I happened to say, we were discussing the state of publishing, the rather largegroup was, I was sitting on the floor, I said to someone by the name of Schulz [who called himself Schulz-Keil] and whom Iknew to be bright and have some business sense, you and I ought to start apublishing firm some time.
I had met Schulz, orrather he had come to my office at Lantz-Donadio with some side-kick of his in1970 or 71 and wanted the rights to direct a couple of early Handke plays atB.A.M. I could not have been happier. I think I must have just stopped troopingaround NY with a hippie troupe doing the same, I had worked with Herbert Berghofand E.G. Marshall on a couple of Handke projects, the ones in Kaspar andOther Plays, at the HB Studio, but nothing besides two two weeks runs andworking with these two splendid people had come of that. Schulz was certainly anactive and social person, lots of parties, also on the roof of his loft at 65West Broadway. When he first appeared in my life he had a hippie beard and wasdressed in a kind of hippie clown suit of greenish-mauve velvet made by hisAmerican hippie girlfriend Barbara Becker. He had an unruly wild beard, nicelykempt now, and looked far older than he was, a receding hairline at age ofabout 25 that made him look like a 40 year old at least. There were alwaysinteresting crowds at these parties, and he had an interesting group of Germanfriends too, nothing to suggest, at least to me, that it would come to this, inclown suits of a different kind:
http://www.schulz-keil.faithweb.com/
Saying things you sort ofsay off hand, such as my saying “woof” to a big wooly dog in Fairbanks back in1960 at a party and the dog taking my face into its maw and my ending up withits owner as my girlfriend tending my wound comes to mind because I finallydecided, have found a way of writing about Alaska, after dwelling on the effectthat Handke’s A Slow Homecoming had on me… the look in Schulz’s, thelook – the proverbial dagger look - he shot me, told me I had hit pay dirt if Iwanted it; as I then did about four months later when I wanted out from underLinz.
On leaving Lantz-DonadioI had handed Schulz my representation of V.D. Autoren, Hanser, Rotbuch Verlag,Residenz in Salzburg - Suhrkamp had turned him down as my successor, theypicked a lovely older, via Sweden, émigré, Kurt Bernheim. I never asked Unseldif he had sensed something that I did not, Handke certainly had, or if they simplywanted to hook up with an established agent. At any event, they made a verygood choice and I became very fond of Kurt as I did of a number of otherGerman-Jewish agents, Robert Lantz, Joan Daves, Max Becker [who represented me],Sanford Greenburger, Sr., Elizabeth Marton. Schulz had taken his job,especially the scouting part of it quite seriously. I have no idea whether hesold or found anything, but he became friends with Schlotterer at Hanser [notthe brightest fellow I don’t think who would later become puzzled by thedisjuncture of the co-publishers of Urizen Books].
Schulz was nothing if notindustrious. But whatever sources I imagined to stand behind the look he gaveme I assumed [!] derived from the little social documentaries he was making forvarious West German TV stations. That the source of his monies was the dubbingof US pornographic films in partnership with a perfectly kindly-seemingbumbling Mafioso Soldati Victor Bertini I did not find out for a year and ahalf after Urizen’s founding, and from Susan Sontag. And whatever source ofunease it became to me, especially to see a progressively more and moredistraught rather nice burly Victor… looking back [for a while both he andSchulz were driving Bentleys!]: there I go about five years later, and so didor do quite a few others even now, but I at least know why I became sodistraught, who knows perhaps Victor figured out Schulz three card Monte tricksand money being sluiced through to establish equity. [Schulz had made a documentary on the makingof U.S. pornographic films, it had been shown on West German TV.; Schulz got acall from someone who knew how to distribute the stuff; Schulz became a dubberand in need of an entity to sluice his share of these monies back into theU.S.]
In Spring 75, I wrote Schulzregarding the look in his eyes being serious and we decided to go ahead.Simultaneously I was meant to write a new book of Brecht’s Three Penny Opera for Carl Weber which an Austrian immigrant andwould be impresario, Leo Feldsberg, by way of a fruit packing fortune in Columbia,proposed to produce. Nothing came of that courtesy of Stefan Brecht who optedfor a different producer and the same old book and kept the option money, butLeo, with a penthouse pad, on Central Park South, was interested in joining thetwo kids who were starting a publishing firm. Leo and Schulz, hombres de negocacion to their hearts,seemed to hit it off at once, Leo’s instrument Oberon N.V [i.e. an NetherlandAntilles off-shore corporation] taught Schulz how to set up Princeton N.V., hisinstrument to bring in his monies. Leo was the son of a Viennese wine merchantwho had had fled to London in 1938 and been interned as an enemy alien by theBrits who didn’t distinguish between Jews and German or Austrian nationals atfirst, to whatever degree the enthusiastically welcomed Anschluss had sunk in, and was shipped to Australia – the old penalcolony! – but had managed to catch the last boat from Australia to Colombia,South America prior to Pear Harbor. There, in Bogota, so he said, he hadborrowed 25 K from the Danish consul and started Fructo, a fruit packing outfit which he sold, so he said, for 40million at around the time it appeared that the Fidelistas would come intopower in Colombia. He now planned to make good on the dream of his youth tobecome an impresario – he apparently had one of the world’s best collections ofrecorded operas at his compound on a hill outside Kali. I never visited him, Schulzdid at the time he produced the film Pretty Maggie Money Eyes in Cartagena, so this bit ofinformation is second hand. At the timeof the founding of Urizen Leo and Schulz had plans to produce a film of Midsummer Night’s Dream, and thegirlfriend got 5 thousand dollars to write a screenplay, and it all seemed verymuch en famille, but eventually Schulzwelched on his 50 K commitment to Leo… but again I am shooting ahead. Leo evenhad the idea that we ought to locate the firm on Central Park South and a high-endboard of directors, I failed to say that in that case he needed to invest amillion dollars – who knows, perhaps he might have if I had illustrated what ittook to put, say, a firm like Athenaeum on the map; I was friends with MichaelBessy, a gentleman. Leo Feldsberg’s idea of a board – in retrospect it makesbetter sense, I think I didn’t want it because I felt it would hem me in! I amunfit for any kind of institution, for very long, and know only too well whynow. However, my ways and instincts and preference was to be way downtown andout of the way of the standard publishing world. I had wanted to be waydowntown already a decade earlier.
Leo quickly became asource of profound embarrassment for me, one other reason for trucking in withus was his notion that some young guys might have some young girls for him,once when I took Handke to JFK on a flight back to Europe, I happened to noticeLeo among the waiting passengers and steered Handke as far as possible awayfrom him. Leo was also an embarrassment to the Wall Street firm that handledhis affairs. They mentioned how difficult they found him.
With Schulz’s and Leo’smoney we had a combined starting sum of $200,000, I myself introduced 50 Kafter the first year, thirty borrowed from friends whom I didn’t even have toask… people seemed to read my mind, everyone was certainly extremely well disposed,both Peter Handke and Enzensberger offered books of poetry of theirs, a firmowned by its employees [we quickly found out that if we gave everyone sharesafter a certain time they would have tax liabilities] and “sharing profits”[but not losses!!] with their authors… I think Urizen was in the black one maybetwo quarter during its six year existence. I paid myself a thousand dollars amonth, I could afford to do so because I had handsome royalties from my playtranslations and editing at Farrar, Straus. Future income from work atContinuum I sold for a few thousand dollars as then needed.
The Start-Up
In hindsight, Leo’s 100 K created no end ofproblems. Leo was someone who hated to lose a buck on a bet the way I mighthave a thousand dollars, an observation that confirmed my suspicions that thatwas the way to be to become a millionaire, certainly not as nonchalant as I.The extraction of each installment of his commitment became a major hassle, andat one time I actually blew up and said, listen if you don’t come through afterwe are in this deep I will make sure that you don’t produce anything in thistown. That actually did the trick! I might have thought of standing up likethat as time went on.
I had initiallyenvisioned six at most 12 books or fewer a year; working half time on that andon a book I had a contract for, the biography of Kurt Grosskurth, a 20thof July conspirator, on which I had not given up yet. But Leo then had made hiscommitment contingent, and quite sensibly, on my getting a good distributor;and once I did, I agreed far too readily to their, Dutton’s, Mr. Whitson’sterms, of an income to Dutton for all they did of 50 k a year, that is 25 % of remittances from bookshops in exchangefor repping and billing and collecting and shipping; to achieve that sum forDutton while bringing in the remaining 75% for Urizen meant that we had togenerate $ 200 K worth of sales.
Book publishing can bereduced to something as simple as this: You buy a pound of printing paper, sayfor .25 cents and you sell it for $ 10.00 once it has been inked and the pagesbound. After shipping costs and bookstore discounts, the publisher receives $5.00. From that is deducted 1.00 [10%] of royalty for the author; and theremaining four bucks go to defray the printing, typesetting, design,proofreading and editing cost and all the other fairly fixed overhead –salaries, rent, telephone, etc. - that a firm has. It is fairly obvious why theunit cost diminishes with best sellers. I am leaving out all ancillary rightsincome here.
I could have also had Dutton for 25 K I thinkif I had been more experienced and then I would not have had to put all ourmoney on the first two cards, the first list consisted I think of Sussman/Lee’s anthology Sex Differences;Krötz’s Farmyard and Other Plays; Sam Shepard’s Angel City and OtherPlays; Handke’s Nonsense &Happiness; Olaf Hansen’s edition of a Randolph Bourne Reader, TheRadical Will; Franz Innerhofer’s Beautiful Days; Peter Fuller’s TheChampions; Arato/Gebhardt’s The Frankfurt School Reader; IljaEhrenburg’s The Life of the Automobile; Suzanne de Brunhoff’s Marx onMoney; the two volumes of Marc Linder’s Anti-Samuelson; MichaelHamburger’s anthology of German poetry - if I have that right, and take on thedistribution of our British distributor, the fine Trotskyites of Pluto Press,Nina Kidron, lovely people - Mr. Whitson of Dutton was anything but delightedwhen I introduced not only the second Urizen Books list at our second salesconference but at least two more dozen Pluto Books, a couple of which – a JackLondon biography comes to mind – did surprisingly well. Whitson thought I hadpulled a fast one! I had simply not asked him, he was the one who insisted onthe nut. So sometimes good things can come from initial mistakes. Far toorarely of course. [For some years we fell behind in turning Pluto’s plus overto them, then they fell behind to us when Urizen books were selling briskly inthe U.K.] Dutton’s salesmen were stuck with what that nut generated. As it was,we barely survived, and had it not been for selling Patrick Lee & RobertSussman Stewart’s anthology Sex Differences to five different bookclubs...Urizen might have been a one year wonder. After about two years, onceHoward Linzer joined us, we got out from under Dutton, hooked up with the rightsalesman for the respective territory for our list and moved the stock to afulfillment center in New Jersey.
By then I certainly wasaware how under-capitalized we were, yet after about two years Urizen had madean impression. And Schulz became interested! As many complaints as I have aboutthe Handke reception in the US, which I recently took a close gander at:
http://www.handke-trivia.blogspot.com
I had nothing to complain about the way UrizenBooks was treated by the review media or the bookshops or printers ortypesetters or our own sales reps once we got out from under Dutton. During its6 year existence a single book shop welched on its debt; one type setter heldme personally it seemed up when he knew I needed a Pulitzer Prize winning playset quickly: he doubled the price for the final set of galleys! The samePulitzer Prize winner’s first 200 books [five cartons of 40 books each I think]were stolen off a loading dock and consigned to a book shop on lower Broadwaythat shall go unnamed here: i.e. the “mob” knew where there was value. Otherwise:hey, hideous business was clean! It was perspicuous. The example of my fatheras an unhappy but invariably successful pathos-ridden businessman had made meleery of anything along those lines. The upfront business, that is.
For the first month in Summer 1975, Urizen was at inwhat was then Schulz’s loft on the fourth floor of 65 West Broadway, there wasa lovely German Secretary Siegried Mueller, then I took a suite right acrossthe street at 66 West Broadway on the same floor but installed a South Americanrope bridge with attendant publicity only in my imagination. At one point, fora couple of years, when Urizen had 7 employees and things were going prettywell we occupied the length and extreme narrowness of 66 West Broadway, 6 roomslength-wise and a corridor, narrow but with a great front and cornice, exceptfor a sliver, the office of an accountant, James Glaviano. A cheap buy assomeone who looked at his work for us once called him. One big room with greatshelving, the front office with a huge old safe with a working combination. Beingthrifty minded I bought our desks and what not at some great and exotic bankruptcyauctions. Another prophecy perhaps. It all came out looking wonderfully funky,I had a marvelous ancient rolling cabinet with 12 lacquered drawers where them.s. in progress could be stored within hand’s reach. That I miss even though Ikeep my various m.s. now as Google docs who knows at what servers on Mars orVenus.
AtMcGraw-Hill I had met and made friends with a comfortable fellow from theSouth, Walton Rawls, who was now doing independent production work. Schulz onmeeting and liking him, mentioned that Walton seemed trustworthy, which caughtmy attention, because it meant that Schulz might not be. He and I had notworked together, so in that respect I was to find out a lot as time went on.Handke had said that the fellow was very dark, and then conceded “at least veryGerman,” as Handke turned out to be too, in both though very but not entirely differentrespects, albeit a genius who desperately sought peace even in geologicalformations. Schulz’s girlfriend Barbara had mentioned that he had screwed thefellow who was not yet identified as the actual dubber of the porn films out ofsome money. A murderer to be! A girlfriend who had worked as an actress atSchulz’s Handke play productions, mentioned a dictatorial manner. I filed thesematters away in a backroom of my mind.
Walton got a fellow by the name of HerbertMordana to handle the typesetting, and when I ran into an old friend from FrederickPraeger, Inc., Hannah Guenther, she mentioned that letting Mordana handle yourtype setting was bound to be a major problem - well, Walton hadn’t knowneither. Mordana created no end of delays and havoc, e.g. books designed forAntiqua coming type-set in Helvetica was the least of it… I was learning aboutproduction what I ought to have known all along even though I had spent a fairamount of time with printers and typesetters during my magazine days, and lovedprinting firms. However, via Walton/ Mordana the painter Michael Hafftkaentered my life – he and his wife were supporting themselves working forMordana, and I never asked Michael whether he and his spouse had beenresponsible for some of these egregious type-setting errors. {Let me know, willyou, fella!}
http://www.hafftka.com/
Eventually design was handled in house, there wasa printer who occupied the entire second floor, and he did the printing ofcatalogues. I had met Marty Moskoff at some point and he designed a fine paperbackline and wonderful covers. Who was/ is also an independent artist:
http://www.martinmoskof.com/gallery/index.php#/content/start/
His most famous project was the design of theSchwarzenegger body building book. He did very tasty work for us! Which bringsto mind the first set of Hyperion Stationary which I had an expert in thatfield design in a very modern manner, using a Futura face - which made Schulzthoroughly unhappy. Since not too much of my heart was invested in that design,I went along with his preference for distinguished looking paper and a type facethat suggested a firm at least a hundred years old. All Hyperion stationary wasthen used for scrap once the name change took effect. Eventually I found outthat Schulz had been raised by his grandfather and that he belonged to apostwar generation where grandfathers were more important models than dead orabsent fathers; including their facades; and about six years later, after thefact, I found out how unsavory his grandfather had been in business matters.
Another problem croppedup when two initiators of project that we had signed up, Eike Gebhardt, onepart of Arato/ Gebhardt’s The Frankfurt School Reader and Robert SussmanSteward of Lee/ Stewart’s Sex Differences were unable to write the‘head-notes’ for their individual selections! Also, it took us quite a while tofind the proper person in Christopher Lasch to write the introduction to the FrankfurtSchool Reader.
Sussman Steward thencouldn’t deliver on his other five bright ideas for which I had paid advances,but I went crazy and his agent, former colleague Candida Donadio got him to payback the advance.
Schulz I started tonotice took pity on truly pitiable people, and gave them small allowances,which he now sought to have Urizen defray. I objected and I think that stopped.
Schulz during hishalf-decade in the U.S. had become well versed in the permutations of Americanleftism, mostly university-based even then, I happened to like StanleyAronowitz for having real union origins, and introduced him to my friend FredJameson, and the hit it off, who however somehow never showed up at Urizen. Andthough I feel more and more like a Trotskyite, these inclinations are at warwith my anarchist tendencies, idle as these speculations are. But Schulz in hisforaging had come on an odd fellow who lived near Princeton, was married to amovie critic, and raising buffalo, Ralph Schönman, ex-secretary to BertrandRussel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Schönman
and who had a trove of left unpublishedliterature, but I am uncertain whether Marc Linder’s Anti-Samuelson cameto us via him or through the estimable Tom Ferguson for whose three volumeedition of Marx and Engels writing for the New York Daily Tribune we did notachieve the needed number of subscriptions, I forget whether it was 100 or 200,to break even on the up-front cost. Schulz and Olaf Hansen and I repaired toSchönman’s place at one point but I don’t think anything came of thatexpedition, we turned his trove down.
Duringthe course of the first year just about every unpublished poetry m.s. in theU.S. and Canada reached the start-up. I took a look at each of them, andgradually whittled down the pile. Subsequently I realized that lots of them hadat least one publishable poem; that would have made for an interestinganthology indeed.
Lots of delays and a very nervous Schulz, nervousabout everything, who communicated his nervousness to all those around him, harried,who however first went on a huge WPA filming trip with Olaf Hansen who was theexpert in that field… and never got paid, lucky to have his name on the fourfilms. But got two book publishing contracts from Urizen, the Bourne reader anda biography of James Agee which he never turned in.
Schulz and I had anagreement that we both needed to approve a book if it was to be published,which made for few disagreements compared with other matters that then startedto crop up especially as of 1979. Those that did, involved two books I wantedto get done of many others unlaid eggsthat I brought with me to the firm: Handke’s Der Hausierer which I hadinitially contracted for while at Farrar, Straus but substituted Goalie’sAnxiety of the Penalty Kick [Handke’s third novel, Die Hornissenbeing his first] when Handke revealed to me that Hausierer [The Peddleror The Panhandler, it exists in various Romance language translation] waschockfull of quotes from American black mask type detective novels and not onlythat, he had quoted them from German translations – it seemed too daunting atthe time, and since Handke was not only a genius but a rabbit, substituting Goaliewas easy. But now I had the opportunity to find the kind of translator whowould do the extra puzzle work, for a book that otherwise could not be simpler.But it appeared that Handke had said something unpleasant to Schulz at Schulz’sAmerican premiere of My Foot My Tutor and Self-Accusation atB.A.M. in 1971 and Schulz carried grudges, petty ones! Ditto for Adorno, whoresisted Schulz’s advances during his Frankfurt University days, whose AdornoReader had been initially contracted for by Farrar, Straus, then killedthere by my nemesis Michal DiCapua, and beats me why I didn’t do it atContinuum where I did other Adornos, and Adorno was still hot then. So wasHandke, commercial considerations didn’t come into play. I say, carry grudgesonly when the next time you see the fellow you want to shoot him, not for minormatters, as I feel about Schulz, who ever so fittingly lives in adisintegrating baroque mansion… three Tom Wolfe dots… Palermo! Schulz who Idiscovered to lack a sense of poetry but not of appreciation of scholarly workdidn’t want to do Brodsky either, but he wanted to do Marvin Cohen. I hadnothing against Marvin’s work, he had a variety of story collections out withNew Directions and other firms; but didn’t seem outstandingly original; so wemade a bargain, you do Marvin, I do Brodsky and let’s see… and then I becamereally good friends with Marvin and his long, broken down fraying at the edgescoats and loved running into him at parties, there he fed himself, and he hadnice girls he sent my way and I managed to get one of the tax shelters toinvest directly in his poverty! One missile head less I kept telling myself! Ialways knew the exact stage a book was in and everything else financially, youcan do that. Moira Hodgson who was an editor I forgot at what magazine thatalso did some fiction kept saying that she couldn’t wait to find that one storyof Marvin’s she could do. I finally pointed out to her that they were allquintessentially Marvin, he might not be as accessible as Woody Allen, she justlacked the guts.
Schulz became an overbearing pest when I objectedto a project of his, say Hansen’s Bourne reader: I had nothing against Bourneor Hansen, except that a lot of Bourne had been done not long ago and was inthe libraries. Or Peter Fuller’s The Champions, whose take on themotivation of super successful sports figures struck me as too simple-minded. Ieventually agreed to both proposals with a “you’ll see”, and oddly enoughSchulz some years later, seeing the results for these anything but importantbooks, agreed. For Hansen, however, his edition of Bourne, a loss leader forus, became his entry into U.S. Amerikanistik circles. He didn’t get much elsefrom being screwed by Schulz out of his WPA efforts.
Among the various losersthat Schulz found to work at Urizen there was one really happy exception,Howard Linzer, a scrappy little guy who then hooked Urizen up with its ownsales crew, and whose energy was welcome, and who quickly learned what abastard I had for a partner; and among my many grievous mistakes was to letHoward go, or not beg him to come back, when he walked out after I hadintervened in a verbal tiff he was having with someone who had joined us as anintern, I think from Bennington, one Debra Emin: I was hearing all thisshouting and cursing going on in the back-room with the shelves full of booksthat was Howard’s office, you little this you little that, they were bothlittle people and had the compensatory tendencies that go with that fate, butHoward had a sense of humor about his, a rarity that, as Debra then did not. Mystupid sense of fairness on automatic robot, and not delving into what wasactually going on. He left, she became deflated at not having anyone to fightwith; and a recent communication upon rediscovering her as “the publisher” ofSullivan Street Books, a single books, it is her own “Scrugs,”
http://www.deborahemin.com/index.html
drove home how much of a loss it was to allow Howardto leave. He had invested a lot of himself in a book called End Product,by the pseudonymous Sabbath + Hall, an aberration that we would not have donewithout his taking a shine to its possibilities, and he got Abby Rockefeller towrite a foreword, and it turned out to be a lot of fun all around; and Howardalso exhibited some fine editorial ideas when it came to the editing of WilfredBurchett’s Grasshopper’s and Elephants. He brought in The LongDistance Runner and knew how to promote and sell it. His loss was feltkeenly, the more so when he was replaced by a dead loss dead beat worn out has-beenburnt out with a stellar record Hyung Pak who showed me nothing on firstmeeting and nothing but being sweet and doing nothing during the one yearbefore I made Schulz fire him. After Hyung departed, aside myself and achanging caste of secretaries, Hilary White, Heather’s sister, then AnneHemenway, another Bennington grad who had studied under Bernard Malamud, only alovely sheepdog of a fellow by the name of Keith Goldsmith was left.
Keithhad come on his own, he was from the West Coast, Stanford I think, had studiedin England and already had some publishing experience, I had him meet the otheremployees, who all liked him, he had a job and our sending him to London on ascouting expedition helped him get a job with George Braziller, highlyrecommended. He missed the last gasps of Urizen. Take another look at Blake’sillustrations.
Another loser Schulzbrought in while I was at a Chicago A.B.A. was one Bernard Hassan, who had beenlet go at McMillans; at least he alerted us to the fact that McMillan had a readyto go translation of Rudolf Augstein’s Jesus, Son of Man and McMillanwere letting it go – if you wonder why that firm hit the skids contemplate thatbrilliant decision whoever’s it was. Hassan oversaw the proofreading of theAugstein, it came out with 500 typos, and within a year Hassan was gone. If wewanted another editor the overworked me who usually worked on weekends anduntil 10 at night I would not have minded at all, and I knew some fine ones Imight have asked. Schulz on his own, when he happened to be at Urizen was inhysterics half the time.
While Howard was with usI arranged for the first infusion of tax shelter money [see HIGH POINTS] twomajor investors I had found had taken one look at Schulz and passed; and Iimagine so would others. However, with Urizen being fairly hot and Schulzapparently waking up to what had been wrought, he then came up with his ownidea for a solid financial footing [see anon].
HIGH + LOW POINTS + Misses
1] After Michael Brodsky appeared at my office in1977 I think and left a maroon satchel with five manuscripts in it, looking atthe first page of each and hearing the kind of Eureka that you do when you seteyes on the next Beckett. Brodsky had come via Patricia Highsmith in Paris hehad met Handke and Handke had sent him to me and proved to be the kind ofwriter who communicated the pain his soul felt was due to my stomach’sproclivities no doubt, which is why I preferred editing journalists such asWilfred Burchett, or Jim Stratton, or Jonathan Steele or running around withMarvin Cohen. Detour, the first of the two of the five Brodsky’s we did,won the P.E.N. Hemingway Prize, the sort of thing that confirms to you that youare not hallucinating, at least when it comes to books. Schulz didn’t becomeinterested until friend Joerg Laederach made some scholarly observations aboutBrodky’s innovations in prose.
2] Sam Shepard’s Buried Child deservedlywon the Pulitzer, and Shepard, a playwright was a consistent bestseller for us,the five collection of his we put out, he had an amazing following amongreaders. Big surprise that. As an author first rate, as a person, all geniusesare weird, but some geniuses are weirder than others….I also had ample reports of his behavior on filmsets.
3] Schulz proved an impressive impresario when itcame to publishing Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process; a conference,etc. etc. He also initiated fine monthly event at his loft for the first coupleof years that centered on one or the other author or book. The girlfriend atthe time had a sister who had married Mr. Schlitz and we showed Norbert thecurrent state of civilization of a Park Avenue Penthouse – the occasional vacationfrom downtown squalor was not such a bad thing. Publishing Elias drove home asuspicion that the NYRB was really not much more than the “readers digest” for innellectuals – a long review there didabsolutely nothing for sales, say as compared to the New Yorker, which cateredto real readers, and not b.sers. Ditto really for the New Republic and TheNation, the latter of which never reviewed a single book of ours, which is theleast of the grievances I have about that soft-core outfit. Ms. Van den Heuvelappears to have bought Obama’s rhetoric! Oh boy. At least the Nation Institutesupports pal Tom Englehardt http://www.tomdispatch.com/
Absolutely invaluable to me during the past eightyears!
4] Rudolf Augstein’s Jesus, Son of Man notonly making a lot of Southern Christians unhappy [there were some but fewerthreats than anticipated] but being the only book we published that alsopleased the silent partner Leo Feldsberg, as he cackled at Christians ascendingthe hill opposite his [outside of Kali Columbia] on their knees on Easter,while he played an opera from his great opera collection with twosub-machine-gun-toting guards walking the periphery of his compound. What filmis that?
5] The night at Un Deux Trois that I faced down, taunted Robert Kalich [only withmy “team” backing me up!] as Kalich and his twin brother Dick [“The KalichOrganization”] wanted out from our contract for his The Handicapperbecause we had only managed to get advance orders of about 3500 copies – hugefor little Urizen, which was trying to maneuver this book into our one and onlyauction at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the Kalich Organization then paid us afurther 20 K to get the rights back! I had made 40 K for the firm by editingwhat had been brought to me at my office in what seemed like a huge Kotexcarton full of manuscript pages, and had whinnied the stable down in six finemonths spent on his penthouse terrace, had met the crème de la crème of theJewish mob and we did not have to publish the beast, had the KalichOrganization out of our lives, and made more money just editing than we everdid on anything publishing! Schulz played good cop to my bad cop that day whilebeing engaged with them on some casino deal! The Handicapper then waspublished by Crown Books and it became a Book of the Month Club alternate, moreI expect than we could have achieved, and was sold to mass paperback. It sohappened that in 1980 I flew to the Frankfurt Book Fair not via Icelandic butin a 747 [I think because the U.S.I.A. had taken care of all travel expenses onmy way to Bulgaria for them] and I was seated next to an attractive andintelligent woman about my age who it turned out was the editor at Crown whohad had to deal with the “K-Organisation” – at one time, Crown, too, had feltlike good riddance of the ridiculous twins whereupon she was threatened, buther lawyer husband had their brethren checked out: no one would kill or beat upanyone for them! One delight of the whole Handicapper “Caper” was thatthe K-Organisation had its featured mobsters subscribe to the book in the formof the degree to which each was featured: the star sent us a check for 10 k, 1k came in a brown paper in the form of cash from a Jeweler at around Canal andthe Bowery. Ah the adventures of publishing! Better or at least as good as anynovel written is to live a novel!
I also once made 10 K for the firm editing the notbad memoir of the very upper class totally foot-bound wife of a banker turnedpsychoanalyst. $ 100 an hour I charged, just as her husband did for his work.
However, the Kaliches then stayed in my life, andBob’s A Twin Life, if only he had got the opening right… it had someamazing stretches - Bob progressively, but not quickly enough for his talent tocome to full bloom, gained some control; the so very different Dick’s books [TheNihilsthete, and especially Charlie P.] are pretty interesting in avery different fashion from the realist Bob:
http://www.dickkalich.com/
6] Taking a trip on the Long Island R.R. beyond thecity limits, as seemed to be legally required, with a lawyer boy scout troopleader, and back and signing signing signing no end of Tax Shelter Contractsand forms and coming back to the office with a bunch of checks amounting tomore than a hundred thousand dollars! Easy money – I loved it after all thosehard earned bucks; an hour’s trip on the L.I. railroad! One or two fewermissile heads! Mostly dentists did these deals, they committed between 10 and20 K to an investment, the lawyers who created these investments made most ofthe money of course, and they managed to avoid taxes on 100 k worth of income.No wonder the new set of chompers I need is coming in so dear! One firm washoused in a modernistic all-mirrors glass building in Long Island City, I thinkit was also round and about 15 stories high. The perfect building for theperversity of capitalism, you looked at it and your own face looked back atyou. Schulz and I hauled out there once and complained that one book that wehad sold to mass paperback had been sold too cheaply, another 5 k for Urizen,the lawyers wanted to keep everyone happy.
7] Jim Stratton, the fellow who did theelectricity for my first loft, turning out to be the writer of UrbanPioneering, a dirty looking book as it was printed in Baltimore, they askedus if they ought to do it over, the bad inking, but it was just right that way.That of course helped destroy Tribeca by attracting a lot of the moneyed whoended up with designer lofts. Horrors what Tribeca has become and Carl the lastof the three owners of Puffy’s sold it to a multi-millionaire as I just foundout via the web!
New Owner Vows Puffy's Won't Change
http://www.tribecatrib.com/newsfeb05/puffy.htm
8] The effect that the publication of Bataille’s Storyof the Eye had on sexual practices in the immediate neighborhood,laundries.
9] The publication of Wilfred Burchett’s Grasshoppersand Elephants and the attendant drama that it involved. The book had cometo me via Pluto Press, Trotskyites who did not want to do an old time UnitedFront man’s book, no matter that he was famous and prolific. I well recallwalking into the sundry store at the North East corner of Chamber and WestBroadway at the hour I needed a Mars bar in the late afternoon as a pick me upand seeing a big picture of a pudgy face on the cover of the NY Post with theheadline “Torturer of G.I.’s in the U.S.” and on taking a closer look my goingto myself “No Wifred, please, please no,” buying the Post and the candy bar andheading back to my office and calling I happened to have the number of thepress officer at the White House, was it Thomas Hoving’s [?], and with greatrelief hearing that that was just bad Australian blood between the Aussie leftand Rupert Murdoch. Wilfred had been Ho Chi Min’s go-between to Johnson at theWhite House. No problema! But to really appreciate my “no no no” you must knowmy personal psychology and especially that of my family during World War II inEurope.
Wilfred it turned out hadbeen one of the chief sources for no end of U.S. newsmen in Vietnam and Iorganized a dinner for them and Wilfred at Elaines,and a fine evening it was until it was pretty much destroyed by the appearanceof Murdoch’s NY Post henchman Brian Donleavy [of “Son of Sam Sleeps” fame] andmy making the mistake of taking Elaine Kaufmann’s advice to leave with Wilfredand his darling Bulgarian wife through the adjoining kitchen [Donleavy’sphotographer was laying for us outside the restaurant] and Donleavy andphotographer barging into the kitchen door, Donleavy pushing me out of the way…and the cops coming and my taking Donleavy to court and reading his Burchettprovided tales of gouging of eyes and biting off of ears into the court record –Leonard Street Part I, we were the first case called that morning out ofhundreds - and Donleavy as he and his lawyer and I left saying to me, “aren’tyou glad that all I did was push you,” and the realization that that hoodlumrugby player who could have torn 150 pound me to shreds in a minute had a senseof humor about being Murdoch’s henchman and my getting his past on the record,undisputed, salved whatever wound I had, but not Wilfred’s who must haveexperienced worse during his days on the Ho Chi Min trail where the US Army hadparachuted some battalions just to find him [if they found Wilfred they figuredthey had found the forever moveable Vietcong H.Q.!]. Donleavy had ruined a fineevening! We published one further bookof Wilfred’s, Southern Africa Stands Up, but it was not as good as Mosquitoesand Elephants, since Wilfred had not really been in the tunnels with themosquitoes there. Times Books, then, did his autobiography, one of thelast century’s great war correspondents; many wars 100 great correspondents. Ithen used to visit him in Paris, where he lived in Clamart, one barrio overfrom where Handke lived then, Meudon.
10] High or low: Urizen’s first appearance at theFrankfurt Book Fair, fall of 1976, I had taken my usual Icelandic airlines via Reykjavik,for the price of the tickets, and the delightful dottirs and the duty free store, to Luxembourg, rented a car anddriven to Frankfurt, put up at one of those communal houses I knew, and Schulzwith his long beard and still semi-hippie clothes and I with my leather hat andjacket kept getting pounced on by apple-cheeked West German border guard: evenentering from Luxembourg and just showing the outside of my U.S. passport nolonger sufficed under the circumstances of the RAF having abducted and thenkilling someone who had run slave labor in Czechoslovakia during the Hitlerregime and was now the head of the German businessmen’s association. I wasthoroughly checked out each time they stopped us, it was the German Fall, so weput on suits… and rented a Mercedes… only the former, and it sufficed to let usknow what we had to do if we wanted to be terrorist abductors. But those kidsas border guards, none of them even shaved yet! On the drive back in theTaunus, near Trier/ Tréve at night I called Handke in Paris from a phone at aturn-out, all the captured RAF member had committed suicide simultaneously intheir various prison cells, I imagine I found this very disturbing.
11] I don’t know if the publication of Sabbath& Hall’s End Product was a highpoint, but it sure made for a lot ofexcitement in an out of house, and Howard Linzer worked his tail off for this oddity,so did Becky [Rebecca Johnson] the blueberry queen from Michigan by way of artschool and East Village film making who lived in her office, performed “playingBataille” there one morning for Seth, and never paid back Ruth Kalksten the $ 4K I had arranged for her to make her first film when Beck sold out toHollywooooood as so many then did.
Ditto for the Punk Book where friend BorisPearlman who lived in a tiny room I rented him at Urizen arranged for hisfriend Dike Blair to be the American editor of what had started out as aBritish book. I lived a bit of a punk music life at night and have no regretsfor those explorations. Boris, a fine reader, the fastest lip east of theMississippi, Boris Policeband with the bad ticker on SSI, a trainedclassical violist, my pool instructor wherever he is if he is alive.
12] At the Atlanta A.B.A. I think in 1978 Ispotted the then notorious but now ex-Black Panther Eldrige Cleaver, whose Soulon Ice had really registered with me many years ago, and I had oncewitnessed his fascist saluting at Manhattan Hall, now supposed Baptist at one of the Baptistsstands, who then happened to amble over to Urizen and noticed its leftist edge,came up to me, we shook hands, cold, clammy, and he whispered to me he was“just jiving” [no great surprise on my part], however I realized by looking athim, holding his hand that I was contiguous with what I felt was pure evil.Later an earth mother friend of mine mentioned that she had also slept amongthe thousands with Eldrige during her Ramparts days, and… “found him verysweet.” More earth mothers are needed I suppose. I myself was really a MartinLuther King follower.
Atlanta had a highpoint when a youngauthor of ours sought to find a place to go dancing on a Sunday night and thecab driver took us to the only place where that was feasible in Atlanta then ona Sunday night, the Afro-American Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter, a hugedance hall it seemed and we were the only two Honkies in the crowd and werequickly assigned a dancing instructor. I felt pretty much at ease since I had livedin African-American communities, sometimes it helps to have a European accent,and the young woman seemed to be at ease too. It came down to a dancecompetition between the city slickers and the country bumpkins, I forgot whowon the prize but it was a one of a kind experience.
13] During the course of Urizen’s existence,especially later in the 70s I became a member of the sounding board, many anight of one, of an old friend who ran a company being besieged by twofinancial behemoths, eventually the city took it over, that afforded me unheardof insight not only into the machinations of these two behemoths [there’s areason Jenny Pritzker had the good sense, I think, to take her name out of therunning for a position with the Obama administration] but also of the city andits workings. Was there a single commissioner or inspector who was not on thetake? Comptroller Goldin I think then ended up with jail time. There were somesuicides. But Ed Koch seemed to be as clean as the disinfected water in the marbleswimming pool at Jack LaLanne’s in the basement of the Woolworth Tower, wherehe dog-paddled with two guards, smiling, politicking even then. I was temptedto swim up to him, if the guards had so allowed, and whisper a few things intoHizhonor’s ear. Funny how tall a man with such a small head should turn out tobe, just like Jack Perdue, whose chicken fat from the chitlin circuit neverdisappeared from Hizhonor’s midriff, dashing across to City Hall as you couldsee him early in the morning. Meanwhile Tribeca was changing into what it hasbecome. Lots of people whose names were later in the limelight and then in jailstarted populating the avant garde, the restaurants. From the friendship withmy uptown fighter friend came acquaintance with the serious bankers who backedmy friend’s company, and the possibility of turning Urizen from a pipsqueakinto a serious company; one look at Schulz behaving arrogantly – he appeared attheir offices with Hyung while I was away – ended that. However, while providingsomething for my friend that helped us all get through those long nights I happened tomeet a fellow publisher, Jeffrey Steinberg, who had Stonehill Books, who becamethe source for the second infusion of tax shelter funds. The name of Jeffrey’sfirm, the “stone” in it, keeping Jeffrey’s charming company, made for a lot oflaffs but also entailed considerable danger, you never knew whether his Saabwould get through Central Park without his nodding out. Jeffrey was fortunatein having a real publishing moll for a girlfriend in Heather White who survivedthe fiery crash that ensued when his nodded out Saab was rear-ended by somedrunks on the L.I. Expressway. Most publishers I noticed were lone wolves orwolverines. An exception in Germany seemed to be Ledig Rowohlt and his darklady, and a friend of Jeffrey’s there, Antje and her boyfriend. My friend whowas fighting the behemoths with her husband having fled would have been thefighter I needed at my side instead of the pretty ones I became involved with,some of them real lead balls [but I sure can’t blame Schulz for my needing asqueeze in my life or for being some kind of honey pot for them at that time.] That is about all I want to say about all of thathere, otherwise I would write a very long chapter indeed. But it added yetanother unexpected dimension to the experience. I happen to have a longstanding interest in modern physics but never did anything in the field exceptedit the translation of a book on Quarks for Martin Kessler at Basic Books, ittook me some months to get back up to snuff on the subject; now there is stringtheory, I propose the worm hole theory, that is: at any moment you aresurrounded by near innumerable worm holes, through any one of which you canslip into a another world full of further worm holes, another fraught world ofexistence.
14] Without being apublisher I very much doubt that the U.S.I.A. would have asked me to representthe country culturally for a month’s visit in Bulgaria. I didn’t really want togo, but none of my Russian speaking friends in publishing did either, and Icouldn’t have been happier for the eye opener it was, also about the by thebook standard cold war reporting that Auntie did there. I don’t know, the NYTimes might was well close most of its foreign bureaus for what they produce.My vestigial Russian came alive in about three weeks in Sofia, I have writtenup this trip, and the subsequent most revelatory visit I paid Handke who wasthen living with the “big animals” on the Mönschberg in Salzburg, that can befound at:
http://www.handke-trivia.blogspot.com
The visit to Handke is memorialized at:
http://www.van.at/see/mike/index.htm
LOW POINTS
Besides those already mentioned in the account:the complete flop of three wonderful books: I know it happens, but it ought nothave to Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s delightful and instructive Mausoleumballads of scientific progress, nor to Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama of he 19th Century, and not in acountry that allegedly like a Benjaminesque materialist approach to history; it needed more work less than hope onour part; or to Gavino Ledda’s Padre Padrone, a wonderful account ofOedipal relations among Sardinian goat herders; the film had been a hit, we hada goodly section pre-published in a brief-lived but big magazine forItalian-Americans. Nada.
Most books acquire some dross, the waya ship’s hull does small crustaceans on their way to publication, rarely doeseverything go smoothly, or a first rate book falls dead on publication aftereverything has gone smoothly. I can think of only very few books thatencountered no problems whatsoever, where the editors were in agreement, whichencountered no production and design problems, where the endorsements fell intoplace as well as the reception and sales were commensurate with the book’squality, and I don’t think my memory is failing me: Christa Wolf’s Thinkingabout Christa T. , Christopher Middleton, translator, which I did atFarrar, Straus; Gertrud Kolmar’s DarkSoliloquy, translated by Henry A. Smith, which arrived over the transom atmy desk at Continuum Books [a unique event starting with the form of its unsolicitedarrival, I forgot whether Professor Smith knew of my publication of NellySach’s Oh the Chimneys, but that may have been the reason why he soughtme out]; Robert Bresson’s Cinematography at Urizen – it is not toosurprising that each of these books is a translation: each came with a historyof success and acceptance to the United States, which limited a number ofup-front problems, but created the possibility of translation problems. Alongthe opposite of these rare events comes:
A] Dr. Mikhail Stern’s The USSR vs.Dr. Mikhail Stern, which produced one of the oddest debacles. Schulz cameon the book, was it at the book fair, or in Paris {?}, it was published underthe auspices of Gallimard, which lent it a certain imprimatur. I looked at it,it seemed too clean, the good Dottoreadmitted to taking only one goose and one duck in exchange for the gonadaltreatments he offered the farmers in the Ukraine. Howard Linzer was excited atthe prospect of doing a human rights book with a publicity campaign, and as sooften, I then said, o.k. We bought the book from Gallimard, and right now I amforgetting whether we had a British co-publisher or whether we distributed itthere via Pluto Press. Marco Carynnik’s translation, from the original Russian,presented no problems: the author did – he wanted to have mention of that oneduck and goose eliminated, thus the rat fetus I had smelled early on was borninto full fledged neutria, a rat that kept on growing, that was voracious.
During thecourse of pre-publication I came to know a variety of human rights hyenas inN.Y. publishing, nice people all it seemed, Mr. Bernstein of Random Housesticks in the memory. At publication time, Dr. Stern and sons arrived in theU.S., we organized a reading tour for him, and then one of his sons called andwanted to have lunch with me. I took him to my standby, one of the last of thewonderful old mercantile restaurants in the changing neighborhood, at Churchand Barclay. It devolved that the son wanted to be paid a second time for thebook’s publication in the U.S. I pointed out that we had bought the rights fromGallimard, who had world rights, no? And said: “Nice try, fellow.” It helped tohave a tad of peasant background not to fall for such an obviousness. Soonenough, Dr. Mikhail Stern was marching in the Ukrainian day parade and sayingthat Ukrainian blood had been flowing in his veins for eons, something I wouldnever dispute. Further, it devolved that on crossing the border from Hungary toAustria, the CIA had provided Dr. Stern with his second manuscript, on sex lifein the USSR, I forgot who did this in the U.S. Was it Putnam’s? At any event,Dr. Stern and sons then went on to Israel and opened a sex clinic, and Iimagine he knew how to administer testosterone shots.
B] I could go on at some length aboutJoachim Neugröschel: but let me put it briefly: have nothing to do with peopleat whose sight Peter Handke has nausea attacks. After providing no end of helpto his career, long prior to Urizen, and using him for the translation of atleast four books, and his pretending to know Russian when he translated IljaEhrenburg’s The Life of the Automobile from the German, he felt he wasentitled to half of the income from our mass paperback sale, our one and only,of Bataille’s Story of the Eye. [10 per cent was due by contract andusually translators do not share in that at all]. Subsequently he becamepersona non grata, as he might have long before: don’t deal with people even ifthey are talented who repay your good deeds by bad mouthing you behind yourback. If he happened to be walking by outside on the sidewalk now… Ditto forBarbara Rose who also elicited a nausea attack on Handke’s part, borrow a nauseadetector from Handke if yours is not working. The physically ugly…
except for those who are beautifulugly. I have met a few of those too, and they often are the most beautiful. Bediscerning as I have become, or at least more so.
Urizen made few mistakes in passing upin what was submitted to us, but I ought to mention two that we did miss. DavidMamet and Wally Shawn. Mamet’s “American Buffalo” arrived when he had not beenproduced and I felt so so about it, so did Schulz, “good old Americannaturalism”, it never ends. Had it been “Glengary Glennross” where the naturalisticpitter patter leeched some poetry out of the dross might have been different. Basically,Mamet is a one trick pony. Wally Shawn I had had years ago a delightful dinnerwith and a mutual friend, but I felt maybe he ought to go and join theSandinistas. That his work would play and be successful? If I had known thatwould either I or Schulz have felt less luke warm? Commerce was really neverthe decisive factor it seems, except we might and would have published HeinerMueller whom we all knew and admired if we’d seen that he might catch on. Sothat is an omission out of a sense of commercial pessimism. I then worked withCarl Weber on a lot of the translations he did after Urizen had ended.
Weirdnesses:
There really are too many, perhaps thewhole idea was mad. But two stick in my mind. Reading an interview with Schulzin the NY Times in the late 70s where he represents himself as the solepublisher and founder of Urizen Books; that is along the same lie as on hispersonal web site, where it says that “Urizen Books” which he founded was“sold.” Indeed.
At one time I asked my father whohappened to be in town to have a meal with Schulz. They came out of it with astrong dislike of each other; I may have had a long term unhappy relationshipwith my very Lauis of a father, but I respected the judgment of someone who hadmiraculously survived his involvement in the 20th of July and histime in Gestapo prison; he had judgment about people, I had been brought up ina prison of my own but had come out of it as an overly friendly dog, for fartoo long.
END IS NEAR
In 1978 Schulz got married to someone we referredto as “Crazy Helene”, a Lacan nut case who supposedly [according to OlafHansen] had been o.k. during her student days in Frankfurt; and as so often, gettingmarried can get a fellow going. I think it was during the 1979 or 80 FrankfurtBook Fair, Hyung Pak, too, was along, Schulz conferenced, cutting me out, withhis ex-school mate Michael Klett, who had inherited the formidable firmKlett-Cotta
http://www.klett-cotta.de/verlag_klett_cotta.html
At any event, I returned from a tripsubsequent to the Book Fair and there was a note on my desk – this was meant asa shock tactic I suppose - saying that Leo had agreed to a proposal where Klettwould invest in the company to the tune of 500 K, and Schulz being itspresident. And he then told me that he was utterly determined we even haddinner. I was fairly delighted at the prospect of being able to step back andSchulz possibly actually doing some work for his salary. With Klett buying in,but this became known as “the triple play that went awry” : I might havechecked with Leo whether he really wanted that, since Schulz had screwed himout of 50 k, but didn’t bother at the time, which might have alerted Schulz ifhe’d been less voracious. The new arrangement – some kind complicated buy backscheme - required an adjustment of the partnership and share structure. Whilegoing over the investments Hyung alerted me that Schulz appeared to have put inthe - to both of our amazement - amount of 180,000 thousand dollars. Schulzappeared in my room, he seemed more than unusually nervous and I asked himwhether he had really invested that sum – Hyung’s telling me told me thatUrizen was being used to sluice monies – and he said he had. Well, there weretransfers from Princeton N.V. and there were 80,000 dollars plus a lot ofmonies for work that he had not performed during his long absences going out tohim personally or to WSK Productions. I decided to test the fellow: “Well, ifyou really put in 180 K then you should get the commensurate amount in stockoptions,” and when he accepted that proposition, he was really surprised a myseemingly believing him, whatever doubts I might have had that I was dealingwith a major crook vanished; and that was the moment to find the right lawyer,because at that point I had already counter-signed for half the debt to ourchief printer, the Banta Company, to keep us going. And if I had been utterly responsible as Ishould have been I would have done so, and alerted Klett, dealings with whomSchulz had me cut out of to a degree that I was uncertain about the game thatKlett might be playing in this take-over. However, I then did not do anything -let Klett put in half a million, let WS have a high stock position, he had evenmore incentive to persuade Klett, it would mean a lot of books gettingpublished, let him be the lead dog in an enterprises that made me more nervousby the month. In the end Klett only put in 50 K and did not get anything forthe loan except I imagine a write-off whatever that was worth to them inStuttgart. I met Michael Klett once, at my office, he seemed to be havingstomach problems and was anything but an impressive fellow. When Schulz came byto say that Klett had declined, I had yet another tax shelter trough ready, andwent to it once more, five few missile heads or whatever for Uncle Sam’simperialist enterprise! What might have happened to Klett’s 500 K if they hadreally invested them with Schulz having management over them? I imagine a lotof it would have been blown on WSK Production’s films.
After about a year of Hyung Pak Irealized that a dead Buddha had replaced the energetic Howard Linzer. Hyung hadshown me nothing on first encounter and he showed me nothing in a year. Imentioned it to Schulz during a phone call from the airport, I think I was onmy way to Paris, and Schulz actually admitted that I was right, he himself hadof course been mainly involved in films, and Hyung was let go: “Whoever hiresfires,” was the way I put it to Schulz who didn’t really want to do the painfuldeed. $ 18,000 down the drain a not a penny to show for it, that was a KoreanBuddha, the quiet eye in the doldrums of the back room.
As an alternative to Klett and with otheroptions having declined at one look at Schulz’s arrogance, I checked in withthen friend Jerry Leiber whose 100 Song Lyrics as Poetry was announcedforever in the catalogue but the selection itself was never firmed up, perhapsif I had put my foot down. Not my style, but that is one way of wasting a lotof time, shilly-shallying with Leiber; not the first time, nor the last.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Leiber_and_Mike_Stoller
I have some comments at
http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com
on the occasion of Josh Alan Friedmann’s bookabout rock musicians, about Leiber about whom I wrotea little book, “Love Letter to Jerry Leiber” about 15 years ago when he welchedon another project and I was someone who now did put his feet down, sometimesboth at the same time: “A basket case who never wrote another lyric after1975.” After about a year of saying yes and no and yes, it was a final no,around 1980. By that time I had also raised the funds for his then wife BarbaraRose’s line of book, Aquilla [Eagle]Editions; Ms. Rose had about a dozen interesting m.s., both Schulz and I agreedon that, but she then failed to pay my agent’s commission to me, I did it inpart because Urizen would be the distributor. That was about a 100 K, and sheowed and still owes me the 10%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Rose
Usually I worked until 10 at nightoften until 10 with a snooze around 5 or six, mostly on the green Naugahydecouch, or sometimes I worked out and swam in the evening not at 7 a.m with EdKoch. But for many years I went one or two nites to meet with an old friendwhose company was besieged by two behemoths of capitalism, and I became one ofher sounding boards as she and I and sometimes one of her banker friends madethe connections between city and state corruption and what was happening to hercompany, her husband had already fled back to France, and out of the connectionto her bankers came a first rate investment proposition for Urizen.Unfortunately those principles then met Schulz when I was away on business, andHyung and the principles later told me of Schulz’s arrogant behavior. That wasthe second time that meeting Schulz just once sufficed to ruin a possibleinvestment. I imagine the same might have happened if I had said, “You areperfectly welcome to invest a million,” to the head of the Schlesinger Fund -my Elaine’s friend Johnny Ryan, who recently passed away, had introduced me -when he had said that they never invested less than that after I had said thathalf a million was what the firm needed to be properly financed to go forward.And did I want to run and have the firm just by myself – not really either thenit appears. And my killer instinct, the Hamlet in me was hamleting around likecrazy, it had enough fight in me up front, but liked backing up, not being cutup from behind. But it would be a while longer before I went to a lawyer. I hadnever drunk to excess in my life except beer as kid counselor at camp when wewere quarantined, five cans is what it took, I disliked drunkenness, with astepfather as an example whose experience in Korea had gotten to him. Around1979 I was drinking a half bottle at a time through every brandy in the worldand dancing it off late at night, sober in the morning with a good swim andwork out. Only once was I so inebriated that two lovelies, Gena and Lisa walkedme home, who thought all this was incredibly funnee. Something was getting tome, and it was the relationship with Schulz, the psychological abuse I wastaking, a photographer took some photos in the landfill and we were bothsurprised at how angry I came out looking, not only that I was getting intofights in the local bar, and was the one who was throwing the first punch, atvery little provocation, but the sore hand seemed to hit someone who was aboutto be tossed anyhow. I had for a physician someone with a great collection ofart that the downtown artists had given him for getting them through this orthe other scrape, Marc was a lovely Romanian doctor, and he prescribed for whatI later realized had been the psychosomatic symptom engendered by internalizedanger, a pain in the gut, proverbially called a pain in the ass. If I had knownthat one of the components of Donnotal was a sedative, the other, bella donna,a calming agent, I would have never taken it. As it was, Donnatol not only tookcare of the ague in the gut but released a lot of energy. I became so relaxedat the same time! I felt wonderful, while gradually turning into a junkie onthe stuff. Schulz happened to come into my office and as he sat on the couch Idecided to do something crazy and lay down on my Persian rug, and noticed thathe thought I was crazy, and then decided to play really crazy at the same timethat I was becoming crazy; that nicely confused him and kept him off balance.That is what I meant, initially, when I said that when I look at how VictorBertini was behaving during the first two years later on I saw myself.Distraught, like Blake’s images of Urizen.
That I seemed to need a main squeeze inmy life did not make life any easier, I didn’t have to look far, women’sliberation was being taken to an unheard of extent, one employee I had takenwith me to Frankfurt, I always stayed at Olaf Hansen’s there, crawled into mybed one night, I must say I never tossed a pretty one, the next day thegirlfriend at the time showed up from Paris, and the employee must have feltlonely no doubt, the days of downtown threesomes were still to come, but when Iwouldn’t continue to sleep with the employee back in N.Y. she quit working forus, a fine intelligent employee in every other respect; ah well. After Hyunghad left Schulz wanted a friend of his wife, Linda Coverdale to work for us, Iforget as exactly what, and I recall my saying, and I was not entirely joking,well as long as she doesn’t want to sleep with me. Schulz assured me that shewouldn’t, once I got to know her I actually would not have minded. She was adelight to have around, again I can’t recall a damn thing that she did, but sheeventually became a first rate translator from the French.
One idea that derived from thatexperience and general observation of the downtown scene was a book entitled“The Well Laid Woman”, that was about all that was missing in that zone ofliberation, but I didn’t find the right writer for it at the time! I knew I’dhave a best seller with halfway the right writer who would write the finalchapter of the liberationist desires as they were being lived out downtown. Isuppose all this eventuated in “Sex and the City”… lots of matters originatedin our downtown stew during those days. Another project I kept on the backburner was a great bartender’s guide that our provender ex-bartender waswriting, but not fast enough. I was not planning to publish it through Urizen,but merely merchandising it. I then performed a favor for my provender thatwould land me in some hot water, fortunately it was just a favor that involvedno monies. Still it was another wake-up call.
At one point towards the very end, withinterest rates being 21 %, no further tax shelters in the offing, my taxshelter agent dead, as was to expected, nodded out on the side of the L.I.express way, it looked as though yet I might be able to borrow against a smallinheritance. Schulz came to me to ask if once I had the firm, he was willing tosell “his share” [he had gotten back about his entire investment of $ 180 K andput in very little work] for 25 K, whether his wife, “Crazy Helene” as she wasknown, would be able to buy her books through Urizen at the discount – 40% offlist – that exists as a courtesy between publishers. I was astounded at suchforesight! But said yes and kept my astonishment to myself. Leo got wind of thepossibility of my buying out Schulz and called to ask why I didn’t buy him out,too – I suppose I might have if I had actually managed to borrow the sums thatwere needed. However, more was needed than just buying the firm – at one pointI was so certain, everything seemed set, I moved most everything across thestreet even, it had all to be moved back over across the street – still noSouth American rope bridge. It was Jimmy Carter’s 21 % interest rate thatkilled the possibility. If I had not been suspicious of the lawyer for myfather’s estate, he could have arranged the loan: there was alot of value in the company, about 125,000 books that was generating about $ 10 k in sales per month, royalties andforeign rights income; $ 250 K in debt; $ 180,00 of that debt was to our chiefprinter and I had secured half of it with a counter signature a few years back;Banta continued to print for us, but we now paid up front and were not payingdown the debt.
Now that Schulz as of Fall 1979 hadcontrol of the firm and Hyung was no longer there the checkbook and any way toascertain the financial condition of the firm had moved with Schulz to his digsthe little mews on Carmine Street. The imminence of a merger with Klett had involveda change in banks, on looking at the old account I discovered that Schulz hadcleaned it out, for himself and WSK Productions. After that I never saw thecheckbook for the new bank account, I kept asking for it, or had Anne Hemenwayask for it. I did it for form’s sake, just to let him know that I knew. Ididn’t’ get to see it until the bankruptcy and was not in the least surprisedby the extraordinary self-dealing. The one piece of art that had come Urizen’sway, in the form for the cover of Bataille’s Blue of Noon, thetranslator Harry Mathew’s friend, was it David Hockney [?], had mysteriouslydisappeared…. But was then retrieved from you guessed it… the mews on CarmineStreet. I will never forget the moment Schulz told me that he knew about rugs.
What eliminated all equivocation on mypart about finally taking on Schulz was the following.
Via Jorge deHerralde Grau, the publisher of the Barcelona publisher Anagrama [Urizen waspart of a small group of small publisher, Marion Boyars, with whom I hadalready done books at Continuum, Klaus Wagenbach in Germany, 10/18 ChristianBourgois in France who passed away in 2007] I met his brother, the film makerGonzalo de Herralde Grau who had a script that he wanted to make in New York.After making all these little social documentaries Schulz was branching outinto low budget feature films, also he had closed down Vicland Productions, theporno dubbing firm – which meant “Fuckland” [if you lent Vicland the German wayof pronouncing it] and he had made, disastrously, Pretty Maggie Money Eyes, inthe fabulous and enviable Colombian City Cartagena, and then made Gonzalo’sfinancially equally disastrous Jetlag:
http://www.citwf.com/film371574.htm
out of the Urizen offices, and authorMarvin Cohen had a small part in this rather Antonionesque film which I liked alot. I will always recall the message that came in on the tele-ticker thatSchulz had installed at Urizen: “Figaro [the Spanish Production firm behindGonzalo and co-producer with WSK Productions] accepts your accounting.” It tookme quite a while to stop laughing that early in the morning!
Gonzalo’s heart project was to make afilm of Malcolm Lowery’s Under the Volcano, and he was well along theplanning stages, even knew of a good screenplay, which is how Schulz got windof John Huston’s decades-old interest in making the same film:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088322/
I well recall the moment in my officewhen Schulz said that Gonzalo was unfit for the project. Schulz then went to Hustonwho was filming Annie in New Jersey:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_%28film%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Huston
Huston appears to have seen at once whatit took me some many years to face and fathom, and gave Schulz a bit part as abreak-in thief in Annie, and in Guernavaca sent him to Mexico City toget some real whores. Schulz could not have been prouder. My hat goes off toJohn Huston for knowing his useful idiots and treating them like that withoutthe least compunctions! And for his lack of compunctions in that respect.
However, the prospect of Schulz gettinghis hands on the script made for the death knell for Urizen.
With my being unable to borrow againstthe small legacy and unable to find a way to factor our receivable with acousin who worked for Dresdner, two extraordinary harpoons landed on the dyingwhale. As the worms in the meat, something on the order of final fundamentaldisgust, finally sets off the revolt of the sailors in the Battleship Potemkin,farce then came to the rescue in the form of a death knell. The nice old manwho ran the fulfillment center in New Jersey retired and handed the reins tohis hotshot son. At one point, Schulz did not pay the fulfillment center’s billfor several months, beats me why you would do that unless WSK Productions wasso hard pressed. But the fulfillment center not only stopped fulfilling theorders as they came to them but also stopped turning over our checks to us, sothat Urizen was unable to pay the fulfillment center. The hotshot kid did notseem to comprehend that he was shooting himself in the foot with his action; ittakes two to tango and two to throw the harpoon, self-destructively in bothcases. No astrologer could come up with such a conjunction.
At this point I was sick of it, andwanted to hang the albatross where it deserved to be hung. No more rabbits outof the hat. My magic had been abused. Not being paid, I went on un-employmentand occasionally saw Schulz tearing his hair out across the street. AnneHemenway, Urizen’s last employee, reported that he’d come in in the morningtear open the mail to see if it might contain a check.
Shooting ahead a bit now:
Since I knew Frankie Fitzgerald fromthe P.E.N. executive committee I had a line to Michael Fitzgerald who was theexecutive producer of Volcano as he had been on Wise Blood andperhaps on other Huston films. It was to be expected that Schulz would pull hisold tricks of double invoicing and the like as one of the producers. Sureenough, but this time he was caught up front, and had to spend his producer’sshare paying a lawyer. I said nothing when he divulged these developmentssorrowfully a few years later at the second “duces tecum” hearing at RichardKilsheimer’s office – however, Kilsheimer, the Banta lawyer had let me know inadvance that he would not prosecute for perjury!~ He might as well have toldSchulz to his face the way the lies were flying at the hearings. Good God, whyeven have a hearing in that case – so that he could bill his client, the GeorgeBanta Company? Here I have jumped ahead a bit ad a ways of some interestingdevelopments.
At some point Schulz wrote me a letter that we hadn’t talked in awhile. No baby, no mas. He had alsoscrewed another friend of mine, Patrice Marden who with a Ralph Cotta [norelation to the Cotta of Klett] had a a small film and t.v. production company.We all concluded at some point that one should not even talk to the cleverfellow who was unbeatable with his various verbal tactics. Of course, Schulz had already screwed her outof money, a measly sum $ 500. He also screwed someone else he met through mypublishing world
Inge Feltrinelli out of her investementin Under the Volcano – trust in him via trust in me was being used andabused.
The final blow:
To have the money to get hold of thescreenplay – a makeable screenplay was the key to a film that no end of filmmakers had wanted to make ever since Volcano was published in 1949 Ithink - the very broke Schulz, WSK Production was nearly bankrupt too, thensold the heart of Urizen, its 12 most important titles, to Werner Linz atCrossroad/ Continuum, who might have checked - he the kind of fellow who willbuy the Brooklyn Bridge on the cheap where he might have bought all of Urizenand come out way ahead - whether this was doable [it was not in the case of theSam Sheppard collections]. Urizen may have had 250 K worth of debt but assetsworth one million that was generating 120 K a year minimum, I might haveexplained that to Werner, but it never came to that. Schulz then kept this money for himself and WSK Productionsafter a bit more sluicing and pretend invoicing, as I wouldn’t find out againafter Urizen had declared bankruptcy; and was even too stupid to pay thefulfillment center which held tens of thousands of dollars in uncashed checks!And then claimed in bankruptcy court that the bankruptcy laws had not allowedthat – and this went unchallenged by the sheep that were lawyers who all theyneeded to see the lie was look at a time-line of what went down. Prior todeclaring bankruptcy, Schulz stopped a $ 100 check I had made out to our lastemployee, Anne Hemenway, her x-mas bonus! That is the kind of act that itselfdeserves a thousand lashes. In bankruptcy court, at the third session, Schulzwas caught at having diverted funds to WSK productions, and thereupon nevershowed up at another hearing!
But he must have been hard pressedindeed even after
he got the 25 K from Linz/ Seabury. Fortotally delinquent author Andrew Arato later told me that Schulz had tried toborrow $ 300 from him – and that Arato had not lent it to him because he “hadheard that Schulz did not pay back.” First of all that was incorrect sinceSchulz and I had both treated Arato royally, and Schulz could be quite generouswhen he was in the money. Arato was projecting, the righteous constitutionalistwith a taste for whores is the one who does not pay back advances forundelivered books, two in the instance of Urizen Books. And as such he will beremembered.
At the first bankruptcy hearing it tooka single simple question, by the lawyer for our printer, the George BantaCompany, Richard Kilsheimer: “Were any monies transferred from Urizen Books toWSK Productions”… and when I got backhome there was Schulz’s terrified voice on my answering machine. He heardright: the boom was about to come down. And it did in the form of my suitagainst him for illegal conveyances and the like.
Since I had counter-signed for half ofUrizen’s then debt of $ 1800 K to ourchief printer, the fine George E. Banta Company - that could have pulled theplug for several years now - I got myself a lawyer, had Egbert Romaine our fineTrinidad-Tobagian elevator man serve Schulz [who according to Egbert went bluein the face and ran]. Schulz never appeared in court to defend himself, and Iwon the suit per se before the Constance Baker Motley, who was the chiefjudge of the Southern District Federal Court. You can, too, if your opponentdoesn’t show up! It’s easy, or was easy before the cost of filing became $ 10k. The judgment then was transferred to Banta - who had the job of gettingSchulz to show up at a “duces tecum” hearing - their lawyer, Kilsheimer [I once had a dreamwhere Kilsheimer did my killing for me, this lovely man, who however refused toprosecute for perjury]. It was not until the U.S. Marshall affixed a notice atSchulz’s Carmine Street Mews for an auction of his possessions that Schulzfinally got himself a lawyer, aside the Urizen bankruptcy one. Actually, asecond service was required for that, Schulz was very much holed up at thatpoint, and I had a French woman I knew pretend that she had a script for himfrom our French 10/18 publishing friend Christian Bourgois - Schulz even heldthe coat hanger out for the girl as he she served him! Politeness alwaysimpresses girls, no matter from whom. Hitler, too, was known as eminentlycharming in Munich society. See this fine abstract on the evil that derivesfrom narcissistic injuries:
http://www.zeit.de/2009/44/A-Das-Boese
Once Schulz appeared in Kilsheimer’soffice for the duces tecum hearing:
http://www.lectlaw.com/def/d202.htm
- in this case to ascertain whatproperties he had to satisfy the judgment which was now Banta’s - and the twolawyers had stepped outside to confer, he and I were briefly alone together forthe first time in a long time, and he congratulated me for having caught him: Iwas reminded of someone who had shot me in the temple with a bee-bee gun out onthe beach at Rockaway one night and then said: here shoot me! I had beenterrorized by a coward, a masochist! How very very weird.
The illegal conveyance of the Shepardcontracts to Linz [not too surprisingly he was the kind of fellow who would buythe Brooklyn Bridge] at Seabury produced another interesting suit anddeposition. Sam had fairly decent lawyers who, as I recall, had offices in ornearby the Woolworth Building, which housed my friend Hermann Dilloff. From theKalich days? I am not sure. Herman Diloff, that rarity in WW II, a JewishMarine colonel. He also knew about theater and he had a son who wanted to get abook published. What does a Jewish Colonel’s son do to become even moreAmerican – he gets himself a wagon and ahorse and troupes through Montana and Wyoming and writes stories about hisadventures; a mass paperback house then did it. Terrific dad terrific son, wespent some time talking about his project at Puffys. Diloff Esq. then commiseratedwith me about the demise of the firm. He was someone I might have looked upsome years before and it would not have happened. Otherwise the only lawyer Iencountered during these days whom I would recommend as anything but a nicefellow was Schulz’s Howard Pariser. He was sharp and tough and realized in notime that I was gunning for his client, he treated me very gingerly when Iwould show up at his offices not too far from my loft; quickly hide the paperson his desk; it was a two fella operation, how did Schulz come by someone thattough [?] – who however began to sour on Schulz when he was not being paid foras good services a as he could provide under most unpleasant circumstances.Challenges upon challenges upon challenges were thrown our way. Ah RobinWablonsky why didn’t you ask me to marry you – you were infinitely funnee, werenever boring, warbled with the best of the birds, had great tresses and greatlegs and became a the most tenacious of lawyers who never lost a case!
The Shepard suit walked in tandem withthe bankruptcy hearing and finally I got to see the Urizen checkbook again:Schulz was even stealing from the debtor in possession account. Asked about theconsiderable payment to the parking violations bureau for non-vehicular Urizen,the bankruptcy lawyer chimed in “He’s not a bad guy”… After another minuteSchulz piped up with “I can explain”… I am sure some lie occurred to someonelike him in a jiffy… but it never popped out, and he didn’t show at the nextbankruptcy hearing, which was then the last. Meanwhile the bankruptcy lawyer Ithink liberated the checkbook. After all, Urizen Books had the income from thefulfillment service, close to 10 K a month, that had come in very handy for abasically bankrupt WSK Productions!
I had had few if any dealings withlawyers until then. In retrospect, a rube like me ought to get himself a lawyerthe first contract he signs when he gets to the Big Apple, or any majorAmerican city. There’s a good reason there are so many of them, one good reasonis that a really good lawyer is as hard to find as a great writer or shrink. However,disputatious lawyers and their paper wars are preferable to the general mayhemthat would ensue without them. Urizen had a lovely fellow by the name of JerryTritz for a lawyer, I forgot whether he was on a retainer and what if anything heever did, but I asked him to parties and he was a sweet guy. However, I thengot lucky once Schulz was out of my life. The severely and unjustifiablyneglected live-in girl friend of the time, neglected over the mayhem in my life,moving out was replaced in that huge space by an exceedingly bright fellow, hethought he would be a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania down the line, who clerkedfor one of the Federal Judges, but not of the Chief Judge before whom I arguedmy case, in the Southern District, and Jim then gave me a crash course in theFederal Civil Procedures. Another of those worm holes, a worm hole to a zillionother worm holes.
Shortly before Schulz departed theseshores, he rented the mews to the German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus; andshortly before that happened I heard that Crazy Helene and he were fightinglike cat and dog. No surprise. Meanwhile Schulz has the occasional affair – tohear that came as a pleasant surprise to.I even got wind of a mad woman who thought of him as “the love of her life”,albeit briefly, but then she had had no end of madnesses of that kind, too.
The wonderful things that didn’t getpublished inevitably in such an event.
In this instance that included [1] 100Song Lyrics as Poetry by Jerry Leiber; [2] Marx & Engels contributionsto the New York Daily Tribune, in three volumes, that Tom Ferguson had puttogether, those amazing pair’s 19th Century journalism, they werethe clearing house for world wide news in London at the time, and we needed Ithink 100 subscriptions to be able to put it out; most of those we had camefrom USSR libraries; e.g for an example
http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/marx/works/1857/06/05.htm
[3] more Brodksy, but 4 Walls + TwoWindows took over where we left of; [4] Bresson’s screenplays in severalvolumes, don’t know if anyone has done them in the meanwhile; [5] a book of ourauthor Pierre Clastres [Society against the State] that Paul Auster translated
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Clastres
That Urizen, with a power mad Schulz,should then become the first publisher of Clastres is bitterly
ironic. [6] A wonderful project that myfriend Robert Phelps had proposed centering around Colette. One regret: thatduring the hurly-burly I forgot all about my uptown Trotskyite novelist friend DannyGordon who had run the Columbia Pictures reading office and who I think hadonly one of his novels published, by Pantheon.
One book we lucked out of was Cathy Acker’s Blood and Guts, not due toour doing but through Cathy’s. I saw Urizen also as a publishing house rootedin its bohemian neighborhood, and via I forgot right now who – it probably wasBecky Johnson I had dinner at the house of one of Cathy’s backers and then them.s. came to me. It certainly was something very different, and I wanted to doit, really more out of my localist ideology than anything else, andsurprisingly Schulz agreed even though he said he hated it! I think Acker got asmall advance but then found some excuse to back out, nothing I was going tostop her from doing, she went to fellow publishing pal and tax shelter agentJeffrey Steinberg, pulled the same deal and ended up with Fred Jordan at Grove,a good friend and the man with the highest quotient of Viennese perversity perounce in N.Y. publishing [that I was aware of] and Grove did well with her, andI continue to breathe sighs of relief at the good riddance of her and the trailof other masochistic grandiosities. There was and always was a lumpen side to Bohemia and it invaded mylife in the form of my taking in for one month a talented Australian actor, talentedwhen on heroin it turned out, but it taking me years to get him back out of myloft. I don’t know if someone can be found to do a history of the lumpen just going back to thetime of Marx’s formulation, but it has been a fertile garbage pile for eons now.Maybe Schivelbusch will do it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat
In The Eighteenth Brumaire ofLouis Napoleon (1852), Marx refers to the lumpen proletariat as the'refuse of all classes,' including 'swindlers, confidencetricksters, brothel-keepers,rag-and-bonemerchants, beggars,and other flotsam of society, 'as a 'class fraction' that constituted thepolitical power base for Louis Bonaparte of France in 1848. In thissense, Marx argued that Bonaparte was able to place himself above the two mainclasses, the proletariat and bourgeoisie,by resorting to the 'lumpen proletariat' as an apparently independent base ofpower, while in fact advancing the material interests of the bourgeoisie.
AFTERMATH
Once it was all over I decided to visitLeo Feldsberg once more at his penthouse on C.P.S. Our last contact had been whenit appeared that I might be able to buyout Schulz and have the funds to set the firm aright: he had called and askedwhy I didn’t buy him out too; he, too, was willing to take 25 cents on thedollar, but as compared to Schulz who had actually already got his entireinvestment of $ 180,000 out, Leo took a complete loss. Affordable certainly ifyou are worth 40 million dollars, but still it must have hurt someone who hatedto lose a single dollar on a bet. To my amazement, he told me that since I hadwanted Schulz to run the firm a few years back when Schulz was trying his greattriple play with Klett, there was nothing he could do under those circumstancesto prevent that from happening. I had clear forgotten to call him at the timeand check whether what Schulz said was the case, or maybe object to it; I hadclear forgotten that Leo agreeing to anything of the kind was most unlikelysince Schulz had welched on his 50 K commitment on their film deal. Well,Schulz had created his own noose in several fashions by the great triple playthat never came off. Leo said that he, too, has thought of suing, but thendecided not to, collecting would be too difficult if there was anything tocollect.
“LaLutta Continua” was a slogan long in use among the Italian left, the Brigante Rosso. In my instance itapplied to my pursuit [Chris Sievernich would say “ah the hunter” whenever we chatted] atSchulz’s appearance on the West Coast to produce his second Huston film, ofJoyce’s The Dead, in association with Chris who had been fairly apprisedof Schulz’s methods and even so barely managed to avert a take-over. Quigleywas the exec producer as he is on Schulz current project which has inveigledyet another German lamb:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092843/
I, finding NY York too distracting and myselftoo deeply embedded in a sybaritic life-style was living idyllically, afterabout a year in a true wilderness in New Mexico’s Sacramentoes, in thenorthernmost part of the St. Monica Mts. just shy of the preserve and BonyRidge. I got in touch with Banta and they connected me with their lawyer inL.A. who assigned an ex-process server from Pennsylvania fresh out of some lawschool in L.A. to serve Schulz and collect and attach. Her brilliant idea wasto strip search him upon apprehension and take every penny that he had on him.I did not mention to her that I thought this might not be the way to proceed.However, Schulz, too, had got news of my whereabouts, and one day I saw one ofthose really tough Mexicans [“When a Mexican is tough he’s like a toro” I thinkis the saying.] and that is exactly what he looked like in his beater of anOldsmobile, at the bottom of Deer Creek Canyon, one of two ways up to mymountain lair, right where Deer Creek meets the Pacific. Our eyes met, this wasa fellow who had recognized who he was looking for. I decided to take the otherway, Yerba Buena, on the way back, an even more circuitous and dangerous road,sure enough if the fellow didn’t try to run me off the road in my tuff car, a74 Malibu that I had converted into a vehicle that could get me through thewashes in New Mexico, best car of my life. At this point, I had stoppedequivocating: I served Schulz with a restraining order – easy again if youropponent fails to show; and a personal suit in Federal Court in L.A. Easy onceagain. Collecting is the problem. You begin to see the uses that the SpanishCrown had for what is now called “cosa nostre” and migrated to Italy… andarrived from Italy in the United States and developed all kinds of ethnicprogeny.
During the course of the bankruptcy Ihad come to know the president of Banta, a firm through whose good gracesUrizen had continued to exist several more years than it ought to have, and Mr.Bergstrom I think was his name, anyhow a fine Nordic name of that kind, waspretty upset about Schulz; to a degree that I think his board would have becomeupset with what he said I could do when I happened on an retired CIA enforcerand chauffeur when I moved to the Baja for several years in the early 90s. Hisname was Eggleston, a perfect CIA name and he was the angriest little fella Iever did meet, he lived in a compound, as did only one other person in Mulege,and that was Senor Fernandez who ran the Federales del Camino in Baja Sur, atRio Mulege’s estuary to the Sea of Cortez, in Loma Azul, with a Germanbiologist suffering from a severe case of malaria acquired during her work inSouth American jungles, and she was his governess, she was “mother” and forbadehim any further adventures, and Bill became angrier and angrier as time wenton. I took an amazing trip up north with him right after a tormento tropical had devastated Mex I, as happens once everycouple of years, he was a most extraordinary driver, in just a VW bus through adestroyed landscape, as soon as we crossed the border, via Tecate, and reachedthe City of Industry south of San Diego he found one of the Terminator films toget his jollies off, or maybe it was even a twin bill. I drove back south in mysecond car, a big station wagon full of stuff.
Paul Sylbert, author and life-longfriend, who’d met Schulz and noted the rapacious mouth, then said, accurately:“He wants to be caught and then he wants to do it again!” To truth of whichsageness you too might subscribe if you read the “wanted poster” as literature of sorts that the “Schulz-KeilHunting Society” devised.
http://www.schulz-keil.faithweb.com/
It is a comet-like streak ofdestruction, of being caught, of acquiring judgment upon judgment. That societyitself was formed around the year 2000 when I got wind that Schulz had done itonce again, to one of his benefactors, a Herr Kaiser, a very important man inGerman film biz, and in L.A.; and so we all got together and exchangedinformation; and I am being updated periodically. Domage that one dimension Inever found in New York whose depths and heights I came to know soincidentally, were members of the Sicilian Mob, who I imagine could do mine andeveryone else’s collecting for us in Palermo, if there was anything to collect,as there appears not to be with Schulz having had to sell his digs in Berlin[he lived on the Wieland Strasse, of course!] but as the saying goes, never saynever, yet what we would collect would be ill gotten gains. What is amazing isthat someone like that is still alive. What makes Sammy run? Budd Schulberganswered that query very nicely, thousands upon thousands of Sammies startedcoming out of the woodwork after Vietnam and also invaded Tribeca, ruining itas far as I and a lot of the former urban pioneers are concerned, who didn’tknow then for whose sake we were the avantgarde, they would show up at parties before the parties began and devoureverything, the hungriest of little birds.But what makes WSK run? Sheer rapaciousness, upward mobility with veneer toand self-stylization, the forever inferiority complex of the demos would notseem to be it. At about the time that Schulz got married and then really gotgoing in his endeavor - and he certainly is neither incompetent, nor stupid, orineffective, however lacking in artistic sensibility he is - he seemed to bethe slave to being loved by “Crazy Helene” as she was known. Yes, Schulz reallywants to be loved! My guess is by his crooked rapacious grandfather more thanby anyone else, being caught and punished I imagine is the ultimate form oflove for someone who totally conceals his visage.Fortunately, with all the unfortunate qualities I leeched of my grandfather was that even after beingfreed from his fourth concentration camp, mine was laughing again within twoweeks. He would, however, never show his back either to his wife or my mother.I have no such difficulty, obviously. I once told the story of the life anddeath of Your-Reason-Horizon to a friend on the west coast and asked what hethought of a film called “Is that any way to run a business?”. Having a greatsense of humor, he laughed and laffed and laffed and said: “Get yourself anagent.” A subject worthy of a novel. Here is Schulz in his latest incarnation,greeting as he would greet you from his disintegrating little baroque Palace inPalermo!
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