52
PARTISAN REVIEW
months to bring out
Orwell.
During that time, I had
to
respond to sug–
gestions of the ed itor and copy editor, check and revise the index, cor–
rect the proofs and revised proofs, and clear the permissions for the
photographs and quoted words, which is very laborious and very
expensive.
If
you are getting a contract for a biography, make sure you
get money from the publisher to pay permissions, otherwise it's going to
come right out of your pocket. You have
to
obtain the photos, you have
to write the captions, you have to compose the copy for the dust jacket.
That's important because you'll see those words reappearing in reviews
by people who didn't have time to read the whole book. I once had a
whole review based on just Chapter
I
of my big life of Hemingway,
which is the longest book I ever wrote. You have
to
fill out a long pub–
licity form, you have to contact friends who might provide blurbs, you
have to suggest how the book should be promoted, and you have to go
on a book tour. Even though I took full responsibility for all these mat–
ters, and to do otherwise would be to invite disaster, there were bitter
quarrels about the design of the dust jacket, which I won, and now is a
thousand times better than the hideous thing they tried to force on me
in the first place. But we also had a big fight about the photos, which I
lost, because I had two on each page, and the two were joined in a kind
of thematic unity, and sort of told the story in a way that structured the
whole book. They just destroyed that by changing the order and putting
four on each page instead of two, and putting it on matte paper instead
of glossy. Having won the first battle, I didn't have anything left to win
the second one. All this is going on, of course, while I'm working on my
next book. So the amazing thing about writing is that you start alone,
with a head full of ideas and a blank page, and when the book is com–
pleted, it involves editors, printers, binders, designers, publicists, sales–
men, distributors, bookstore clerks, reviewers, interviewers, and if you
are Iucky, readers.
Jeffrey Mehlman:
I teach here, and had to miss the last hour's proceed–
ings because I was teaching Mallarme, who was proud not to have had
a life. I want
to
remind Andre Aciman that there is no deeper Hebraic
or Biblical tradition than the murmurings of the Hebrews about what
an awfu l mistake it was to have left the fleshpots of Egypt, though it
doesn't get much play in the Haggaddah. My question is for Jeffrey
Meyers, and it's inspired by Edith Kurzweil's statement that there is not
a person in the room who doesn't have a pleasant association with the
city of Paris. I would lik e
to
ask about what is surely an unpleasant
association. I recall that when Milan Kundera decided he was a French
