Call My Agent
Michael Gorra on the profession where taste is everything—or almost everything
Call My Agent
Michael Gorra
The translucent marble of Yale’s Beinecke Library both holds and hides many curious things, among them a sheaf of almost illegible letters from Henry James to J.B. Pinker, an Englishman who in 1898 had begun acting as his literary agent. It was a new profession, if that’s the right word, and its first member is commonly held to be Pinker’s competitor A.P. Watt, who opened up shop in 1875. Watt had Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, Pinker not only James but also Joseph Conrad. Many of James’s letters to Pinker are still unpublished, including the one he wrote on June 25, 1906—a letter that says a great deal about the way agents worked then, and in many ways now.
The novelist begins with a progress report. He had been busy all spring on what he called the New York Edition of his life’s work, and there’s a package in the mail with three hundred heavily revised pages of The Portrait of a Lady, first published in 1881; the rest will follow. The greater interest of the letter, however, lies in James’s reply to Pinker’s request for a favor. “I will,” he writes,
with pleasure send you an introduction to Mrs. Wharton (I in fact enclose one herein;) & I will also write to her telling her more in the same sense. But I’m sorry the question didn’t come up when she was in England (very briefly) a month ago—it could easily have led, no doubt, to your seeing her then (though I inferred the Macmillans were “after” her.) Also she isn’t an abundant or rapid producer (having £20,000 a year of her own!!) But herein is the letter.
Pinker wants to build what everyone in the trade calls his “list,” his stable of clients, and the surest way to do that is to get a reference. Personal contact matters, always has and always will. He needs James to vouch for him, to let Edith Wharton know that she won’t be sorry to put her business in his hands, even after he’s taken the then-customary 10 percent. But the long-established house of Macmillan was “after” her. The House of Mirth had been a great best seller the year before, and the firm wanted to sign her up, to cut out the interference of people like Pinker and Watt. Most publishers of the day saw agents as by definition disreputable, and in Middlemen the Temple University professor Laura McGrath quotes the self-interested 1897 judgment of William Heinemann, who had brought out several of James’s books. To him the literary agent was a “parasite,” indeed nothing more than “a canker...eating itself into the very heart” of what ought to be the “mutual interests” of two gentlemen, the one who wrote and the one who brought that writing into the world.
James had been stiffed by publishers often enough to know better; Wharton was both luckier and tougher. Macmillan did get her, as Scribner’s had in the United States, yet she negotiated fiercely on her own behalf and even busied herself with the advertising of her books. And of course James was wrong about her. She was already in her forties, but her career was just starting, and despite that enviable private fortune she proved almost as “abundant and rapid” a producer as he was. She published twelve books in the 1920s alone, earning enormous sums from both magazine serials and hardback sales, and spent every penny of it. She would have made Pinker much more than James ever did, and meanwhile the agent’s other star, Conrad, was thousands of pounds in debt to him.
Few agents today would act as their clients’ private bankers, but Pinker’s investment in Conrad did eventually pay off. In his last decade the former sea captain found an unexpected commercial success, and the agent was rewarded for having kept faith with his own sense of literary worth, his own taste in a profession where “taste is everything.” Or almost everything. There’s also what McGrath calls “market savvy,” and a blend of the two is what makes “books, careers, canons.” Pinker had that as well; it’s why he asked James for that introduction. He thought Wharton would make money, and that’s still what agents want, good books that make money, though now the introductions usually go the other way, with young and sometimes desperate writers begging their friends and teachers for a reference. Who is your agent, and can I use your name in writing to her?
These days the middleman is almost always female, as McGrath writes in her ironically titled first book, though that’s not the only irony here. No contemporary publisher would refuse to deal with an agent, and yet in general parlance middlemen still don’t have a good reputation. They may not be cankers, but they remain people one speaks of wanting to cut out, proverbially sharp and cynical dealers who bollix up the food chains of commerce and culture alike and get in the way of any direct relation between producer and consumer. McGrath sees it very differently: this particular kind of middleman is necessary, and there are a lot of great books we wouldn’t have without them. “No figure,” she writes, “has been more significant, and yet more invisible” in the “ecosystem” of contemporary American fiction, and her shrewd, scholarly, and generous work shows why.
The first American literary agent was Paul Revere Reynolds, a descendant of the silversmith. In McGrath’s words Reynolds “inaugurated a grand tradition: he became an agent accidentally,” stumbling into the field because “he wanted to be around books.” He began as a publisher’s representative in the 1890s, selling the American rights to British books, and then slid over into hawking a few writers on his own, “placing their work in the mass circulation magazines for a small fee.” His most important clients were probably Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but he earned the bulk of his living from the stories and serials by other writers that he sold to those magazines, and Middlemen’s first chapter begins by quoting a 1927 letter to George Lorimer, the editor of The Saturday Evening Post. Here it is in its entirety:
I am enclosing a novel by Henry Kitchell Webster entitled The Man With the Scarred Hand. I will sell you the serial rights for $30,000.
That’s it. Author, title, price. But then Reynolds knew the market and the market knew him. His word was trusted, and while Webster is now entirely forgotten, he was a recognized figure of the day, even if the Post does not, in this case, appear to have bitten. McGrath begins here because Reynolds’s letter stands as the most naked form of what, in the title to that first chapter, she calls “The Pitch”; her later chapters all use a similar form—“The Debut,” “The Export,” and of course “The Lunch.” The price wouldn’t be stated today, not at first; still, those essentials remain at the heart of any transaction between agent and publisher, and so does that market knowledge in the form of individual editors’ tastes and preferences. What the rest of “The Pitch” shows, however, is just how much the agent’s work has changed.
For one thing, agents now edit. Reynolds probably never touched a line of Cather’s, and not because she was a great writer already; it simply wasn’t his job. Today a lucky young novelist may secure representation on the basis of a draft or a few stories in a quarterly. But even after that agreement is struck the writer typically needs to do one version after another of a novel before the agent feels ready to send it out. The middle sags, this character’s motivation is unclear, and have you thought about the first person? That can happen at any stage of a career, but many debut novels in particular undergo a process of development akin to that of a play or a TV show, and the bulk of that work happens not in the offices of Knopf or Doubleday but in a series of drafts produced for the agent’s eyes alone. Reports of the death of in-house editing have been greatly exaggerated, but as one unnamed agent told McGrath, there’s now an expectation that anything a publisher sees “will be closer to finished than not.”
In part that comes from the peculiar pressures the publishing industry puts on first novels. The “debut” is a particular category that McGrath traces back to the agent Sterling Lord, who along with the editor Malcolm Cowley so successfully talked up Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) that they created what we now call “buzz,” a sense of excitement that started years before the novel’s actual sale. Debuts are bright shiny objects, they introduce the writer to literary society, and editors chase them because, well, you never know. That book set in brownstone Brooklyn could be this year’s The Secret History. So they overpay for them, which makes respectable sales seem flat, and in consequence, McGrath writes, 60 percent of first-time novelists never publish a second. That says as much about American publishing in general as it does about the work of agents in particular, and Middlemen provides a superb introduction to the industry. But for the agent the chance of a big initial payment seems to warrant all that pre-submission work.
A second way that the agent’s work has changed is the kind of letter she writes once a book seems ready to go. McGrath quotes from one, a redacted eight-paragraph email—name, title, and plot summary removed—whose length and detail would have baffled Reynolds, and then she performs a skilled close reading of what this particular and anonymous agent has said without saying. The letter convinces. It avoids superlatives while conveying the agent’s sense of the book’s potential, detailing the author’s previous record in order to suggest that this one could be both a best seller and a prizewinner. It was a letter written by “this agent” for this book, and it turned out to be right. Her taste synced with her market savvy, and though the novel was bought at auction for a “modest sum,” it then sold over a million copies, won awards, and was translated into over thirty languages. McGrath knows its name but isn’t saying; readers will want to guess, as I did.
Middlemen is studded with such moments. Some are bits of fact: the first book auction was run by Scott Meredith in 1952, though not even he could later remember just what book he sold that way. Others take the form of narrative, a series of interviews or scenes: the Frankfurt Book Fair, tea in a Harlem brownstone, or a Zoom meeting at which McGrath listened to the agents at a firm she calls “Opus” discuss what they’ve found in the slush pile, winnowing over nine hundred unsolicited submissions down to half a handful of new clients. Those are enormous odds, but McGrath is impressed by the seriousness with which the Opus agents have done their job, by the confidence of their judgments, and by their continued passion for literature itself. This, she admits, surprised her, for she began her project
steeped in the tired academic generalization—that those who work in publishing are the English majors who couldn’t hack it in academia or those who cared more about money.... These stereotypes could not have been farther from the truth.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
