Hothouse
The Art of Survival and
the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
by Boris Kachka
Simon & Schuster
When author Jonathan Franzen was told to expect a call from The New York Times to discuss his new book, “The Corrections,” back in 2001, he was surprised when the caller was not a Times reporter, but Oprah Winfrey, telling him that his book had been selected for her prestigious — and massively sales-inducing — book club. The ruse was intended to ensure that he’d be sitting by the phone, waiting for her call, without having to prematurely reveal the news that Oprah wanted to share personally.
Rather than feel the thrill of learning that his book had just become a guaranteed bestseller, Franzen found the whole thing off-putting.
“Everything was bogus from the start,” he said. “My first encounter with Harpo Productions was being told a lie.”
“Hothouse” chronicles the history of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the publishing house that “arguably set the intellectual tone of postwar America,” and in particular its well-bred co-founder Roger Straus, a member of the Guggenheim family whose libido was as impressive as his breeding.
The book teems with tales of the past century’s literary lights, from editor Robert Giroux’s friendship with the hotheaded Jack Kerouac, to how Straus would negotiate with the likes of Philip Roth by telling them to “f – – – off,” to the offices of FSG becoming a high-minded Plato’s Retreat where “everybody was f – – – ing everybody.”
The behind-the-scenes details of the Franzen incident, in which the author lost the book-club designation after publicly demeaning the honor and its host, is recounted in detail, including Franzen’s many bruising thoughts on the iconic TV host.
Franzen believes the fracture between the two began almost immediately, when his response to her usually life-changing news was less than enthusiastic, with Franzen saying, “I think she was surprised that I wasn’t moaning with shock and pleasure.”
In fact, the author resented Oprah’s role as self-appointed savior.
“I’d been working nine years on the book, and FSG had spent a year trying to make a bestseller of it. It was our thing,” he said. “She was an interloper, coming late and with an expectation of slavish gratitude and devotion for the favor she was bestowing.”
Even his eventual letter of apology to her was botched, making amends as he did for offending someone “who’s a hero — not a hero of mine per se, but a hero in general.”
But if Franzen comes off as impolitic at best, bratty and clueless at worst, “Hothouse” shows that literary or publishing brilliance rarely staves off social or moral failings.
Kachka shares how Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer was “a serial blasphemer and adulterer” who, Straus would say in what Kachka calls a “dubious” story, once “[broke] a sink while performing cunnilingus.” Giroux visited famed poet and editor Ezra Pound in an asylum, where the man greeted him with an anti-Semitic rant, referring to Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as “Franklin Rosenfeld” and “Weinstein Kirschberg.”
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is portrayed as particularly prickly. After his 2005 book “The World is Flat” became one of the best-selling books in FSG history, he terrorized a company assistant when, after the company’s publisher was unable to take his phone call right away, he screamed, “Do you know who I am? I’m Tom f – – – ing Friedman, and I pay your f – – – ing salary!”
Friedman would drive editors crazy with his “redundancies and rhetorical excesses. No sooner would Friedman submit an argument than he’d think of three more examples that altered its course, deadlines be damned.”
“In later years, following a backlash against Friedman’s breezy swagger and easy conclusions, assistants would mockingly announce his approach, using a popular media nickname: ‘The Mustache of Understanding is coming!’ ” Kachka writes.
There are also tales here of the classics that got away. While FSG published work by the likes of Tom Wolfe, William Golding, Susan Sontag and many more, Straus rejected “Lolita,” believing that “nobody will dare touch this”; Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose,” which, after his close friend Sontag felt a different book would be better for FSG, went on to sell more than 50 million copies; and a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that, had they accepted it, would have also given them the rights to his next book, which turned out to be “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
There are also copious tales of the company’s many sexual shenanigans, such as when, by the early 1960s, the married Straus was sleeping with at least two, “probably three” of his female employees. Two of those women were close friends and “bought Roger matching bathrobes so that their boss would feel equally at home at either of their apartments.” (One of Straus’ employees said that “Roger would f – – – a snake if you held it down.”)
But while FSG, for all its successes and failures and perversions and scandals, has remained as true as it could to its early literary ideals, perhaps the most instructive summation of life in the modern publishing world remains the Franzen incident.
As the author prepared for a conciliatory “Oprah” appearance for his 2010 novel “Freedom,” his girlfriend expressed the view that he shouldn’t fake admiration and reconciliation with “someone he didn’t even like.” Franzen responded that “it wasn’t real life — it was promotion.”