Less Than Noble Nobel Considerations

Earlier this year, the Guardian reported on disclosures from the Swedish Academy about the discussion behind the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. They show how many considerations there were besides literary quality.

For example, Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) might well have had the inside track as a Scandinavian—but then she died, and the prize can’t be awarded posthumously. (A person can die between the announcement and the awards ceremony.)

The academy was evidently waiting for Ezra Pound to die as well. Its members considered him the greatest poet then working in English, but also politically unacceptable. That meant they wouldn’t give him the prize, but equally they wouldn’t give it to another English-language poet until he died—and that scotched the chances of Robert Graves (shown here).

So eventually the academy awarded that year’s prize to…John Steinbeck. Even at the time, he was considered not up to the standard of other literature laureates. But Steinbeck’s stature has obviously been raised by the Nobel. I wonder whether, if those other considerations hadn’t intervened, he would have had been such a presence on my junior-high reading list?

The Link Between The Grapes of Wrath and My Father’s Dragon

As long as I’m talking about John Steinbeck and Penguin, I might as well retell the story of how he became a successful literary author. He didn’t start out that way, as this biography from the Educational Paperback Association explains:

Throughout his early years, Steinbeck's tenure with publishing companies tended to be short. Each of his first three books was issued by a different press, and after To a God Unknown failed to sell Steinbeck was in danger of having no publisher at all.

Then Steinbeck had the luck to attract the attention of Pascal Covici, a Romanian immigrant who headed a small publishing house named Covici-Friede. It had published The Front Page and The Well of Loneliness, and Covici decided to take a chance in 1935 on Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat.

In fact, Covici decided to gamble bigger than a small literary press could usually afford to do. He decided to commission illustrations for Steinbeck’s book. And not just from any artist--he hired Ruth Chrisman Gannett.

Gannett would go on to illustrate her stepdaughter’s My Father’s Dragon books and to earn a Caldecott Honor for My Mother Is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. But in 1935 I don't think she'd started working on children’s books yet. In fact, her career might not have gotten any further than Steinbeck’s.

But Gannett’s husband Lewis happened to be book critic for the New York Herald Tribune. Covici was undoubtedly hoping that by slipping the manuscript into the Gannett household he could get his new California author some extra attention--if not necessarily a good review, but at least more than the same consideration as all that year's other novels from little-known authors.

And it worked. Lewis Gannett wrote in the 19 May 1935 Herald Tribune:

I like Tortilla Flat, and I do not think that I am prejudiced in its favor merely because I lived with Danny [the hero] for two months before I read the book, while Ruth Gannett was drawing pictures to illustrate it. John Steinbeck is a born writing man, and Tortilla Flat a book to cherish.

And that review made other critics notice Steinbeck, too.

Covici-Friede published three more Steinbeck novels in the next two years: In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, and The Red Pony. Then it went out of business. Covici went to work for Viking, taking Steinbeck along; they continued to work together for the rest of their careers. (Friede went to work for Zeppo Marx.) Eventually Viking became part of Penguin, which is why the current copyrights lawsuit involves Penguin and some Steinbeck heirs.

“Appropriate Reward for Artistic Gifts”

This month brought an important ruling in the ongoing copyright suit between Penguin and heirs of John Steinbeck's second wife, though it will probably have little impact on other authors' copyrights. The judges seem to be ruling on matters specific to the Steinbeck literary estate, such as when his third wife negotiated new contracts. (And don't think there aren't family tensions involved, too.)

However, I'm glad that the latest judicial decision overturned an unusual, and highly impractical, dictum within a 2006 decision. As Publishers Weekly just reported:

In the 2006 decision, a judge ruled that the author's heirs should be able to renegotiate the original publishing contract Steinbeck signed in 1938, since no one could have predicted how popular his works would go on to become. As reported elsewhere, the judge who made that 2006 ruling, Richard Owen, said the copyright law allows for renegotiation and "appropriate reward for artistic gifts to our culture."

According to the same logic, publishers should be able to renegotiate contracts with authors whom they've overpaid on the basis of accumulated royalties. Obviously, those works have turned out to be worth much less to the culture than author and publisher originally anticipated.

As in, "I'm sorry, Mr. Segal, but when we read your book twenty years after our predecessors signed it up, we realized it was a load of crap. And since sales are way down, it's clear that the rest of the country thinks so, too. Therefore, we want to drop your royalty rates and ask you to repay us half of the original advance."

Or perhaps we consumers could apply this idea, and ask publishers to pay us back for all those books we bought because we thought they were important, but have never read. Right now our best option is to truck them out to the local library's used-book sale, and how many copies of A Man in Full can one community ingest?

Or perhaps--and this is where I get serious--we should realize that publishing contracts, like many other business deals, are crap shoots, and neither party knows the long-term value of a book at the time they make the deal. Both author and publisher go into negotiations assessing their risks and probabilities, hopes and realities. The contract terms reflect those considerations and the two parties' relative power (usually the publisher has more, of course). Sometimes one side ends up luckier than the other.

In the case of John Steinbeck, the books covered by this lawsuit includes some of his most popular, and therefore most lucrative: Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, and The Grapes of Wrath. After their publication he negotiated more favorable contracts with the same firm for new novels. East of Eden and Cannery Row are well regarded, but most critics don't consider The Moon Is Down, The Wayward Bus, or The Winter of Our Discontent to be great artistic gifts to our culture. Would a judge order those contracts to be renegotiated in Penguin's favor?