<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a good chance Georges Borchardt was responsible for shepherding at least one of your favorite writers to publication. After immigrating to New York from war-torn France at age nineteen in 1947, Borchardt found work as an assistant at a literary agency. One of the first sales he completed on his own was a play by an Irishman titled<\/em> Waiting for Godot.<\/p>\n Over the next seven decades, Borchardt introduced American readers to works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Eugene Ionesco<\/a>, and found a home for Elie Wiesel<\/a>\u2019s oft-rejected<\/em> Night. He has represented John Gardner<\/a>, Mavis Gallant<\/a>, Stanley Elkin<\/a>, and John Ashbery<\/a>. Today his clients include Ian McEwan<\/a>, T.\u2009C. Boyle<\/a>, and Susan Minot as well as the nonfiction writers Tracy Kidder, Anne Applebaum, Adam Hochschild, and\u2014somehow\u2014me.<\/em><\/p>\n Wry and self-deprecating, Borchardt\u2019s French-accented answers are often punctuated with a laugh that sounds like a mixture of joy and disbelief. This isn\u2019t surprising when you consider the path his extraordinary life has taken\u2014from hiding in plain sight in Nazi-occupied France to representing five Nobel laureates and eight Pulitzer winners. For his contributions to literature, in 2010 he became the first literary agent to be awarded France\u2019s highest award, the Legion of Honour.<\/em><\/p>\n Borchardt and his wife, Anne, have run their own agency together since 1967. We spoke over sandwiches in his office on East Fifty-Seventh\u00a0Street and Lexington.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n When you began in 1947, were agents as entrenched in publishing as they are today?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n When I started working as an agent, I didn\u2019t even know what an agent was. I had never heard of the profession. And there was no such profession in France. The job I had, it didn\u2019t even say \u201cagent\u201d on the letterhead. It said \u201cAuthors and Publishers Representative.\u201d It took me at least six months to figure out what we were really doing. Agents were not held in great esteem. For a long time, publishers felt that agents were like parasites. When they were polite, they called them \u201cmiddlemen\u201d\u2014not realizing that they themselves were middlemen and that the only important ones were the authors and the readers.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n How did you get that first job?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n After I arrived in New York, I went to a number of employment agencies, and they always said, What\u2019s your American experience? Well, I had none. But then again, I didn\u2019t have any experience. I was nineteen. The son of a man who had worked for my father in Paris\u2014a high school kid\u2014helped me write a classified ad for the New York Times<\/em>. I put two ads in the Times<\/em>, and two letters came in response\u2013both from the same person, Marion Saunders. She owned an agency that specialized in foreign writers\u2014they had recently sold Albert Camus\u2019s\u00a0The Stranger<\/em> for $350 to Knopf.<\/p>\n In addition to getting coffee and bookkeeping, I was supposed to read French books. I thought that was amazing\u2014I could get paid to read, and I could get free books. I mean, during the war, there were no books in France. There was no paper, there was very little being printed, and all of my books and the family\u2019s books had disappeared. At the office in New York, I would see things that were interesting and think, I may not be able to sell this, but I may as well read it. It was a way to build my library. Did I know I was an agent? Of course not. I really didn\u2019t know what that was.<\/p>\n One thing the war had taught me was a dislike for owning things. Because everything I liked as a child had disappeared\u2014my stamp collection, my books. I mean, in those days, when you gave a book to a child, it was not an insult. If I didn\u2019t ask for a book for Christmas, I asked to have one of my favorite books bound. They came uncut, with paper covers. I would go to a place and select the end papers and the leather for the binding, and then I would have this beautiful object to take home. Well, all these things were gone.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n What did you read as a kid?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n In the lyc\u00e9e at the time, the world more or less stopped at the end of the nineteenth century. I wasn\u2019t taught Proust or Gide. You didn\u2019t learn anything about foreign literature. If you wanted to read Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky\u2014that\u2019s not what was being taught. But I was fond of translations\u2014Ivanhoe<\/em>,\u00a0James Fenimore Cooper. I collected a whole series of \u201ctales\u201d books\u2014Tales of the Aztecs<\/em>, Tales of the Greeks<\/em>, Tales of the Bible<\/em>, and so on. In school, I was always first in r\u00e9citation<\/em>, memorizing scenes by Racine or Moli\u00e8re. I always got the main roles. I thought I might become an actor.\u00a0<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n What did your parents do?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n My parents were German Jews, and when they saw Hitler appearing in 1932 or 1933, they decided to move to Paris. My father was in the record business, as the head of Polydor, which produced Edith Piaf, among others. We lived in the bourgeois sixteenth arrondissement, near the Trocad\u00e9ro. The building<\/a> is still there, on the corner of rue Scheffer and rue Louis David. Because of my father\u2019s important position, there wasn\u2019t that much interaction between him and his children. We had a maid and a cook, and a barber that came to shave him. My mother was mainly in charge of making him comfortable. We weren\u2019t allowed in the living room alone. That was adult territory.<\/p>\n I have two memories of my father. One was going with him to the 1937 World\u2019s Fair. The other was when he took me to an American movie\u2014American films were considered immoral. We went to see Bringing Up Baby<\/em>.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n How did your life change when the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n My father had died of cancer just before. I remember the first time I had to wear the Jewish star. That I remember very vividly. We lived in this bourgeois quartier, and if we saw a black person, he was probably a very elegantly dressed ambassador. I remember the first time I walked to the lyc\u00e9e with this thing on. I was very nervous. There was a black man on the other side of the street, and he crossed over to me, and he shook my hand. I was thirteen or fourteen. I\u2019ll never forget that gesture.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n What do you remember about fleeing Paris?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n It was just before the Nazis rounded up people at the Vel\u2019 d\u2019hiv, in 1942, before deporting them to Auschwitz. My oldest sister had a friend whose boyfriend worked for the police, so we were told about it. My mother\u2019s Russian dressmaker\u2019s Spanish boyfriend came and got us and brought us to the apartment of some White Russian princess. Then, for some reason, we left that place, and we stayed with an abortionist. The police came for her, not because we were staying there, and somehow\u2014I have only vague recollections of this\u2014the Spaniard came at the same time and got us to go to the roof until the police left. Then it was arranged that we would go to Chalon-sur-Sa\u00f4ne, which was a small town southeast of Paris that was half in the occupied zone and half in the free zone. At night\u2014if you paid them\u2014people<\/a> would take you in a rowboat to the other side of the Sa\u00f4ne River.<\/p>\n So my mother, my two older sisters, and I somehow got down there, partly by train, partly by walking, because it was too obvious if you arrived at the train station. When we did arrive, my legs were all cramped up, and I could barely stand anymore. And my mother, who I think in her youth had studied to be a nurse, massaged my legs so I would be able to walk. That evening, we were told that the guy who ferried people across had been shot at and now he wasn\u2019t doing it anymore. Somehow, we got an identity card that allowed us to go back and forth across the bridge. The card was for a woman, and whoever sold it to us doctored it up each time, so my mother went over, and then each of my sisters went over. There was nothing for me, of course.<\/p>\n I was told to cross over with a group of schoolkids. I was given a little apron like they were wearing, over short pants\u2014I was rather small for my age. I still remember crossing the bridge\u2014there were guards and soldiers\u2014and feeling my legs turning to cotton. The guards may have been part of the French militia, which was even worse than the Germans. Once across, it was easy. We went to Nice, a large city with schools. I went to private school there. And then the next summer, we went to the beach. One day, I returned to the hotel, and I was told that my mother had been arrested by the French militia. And so I left immediately\u2014I knew the militia would come back. I met a boy from school who was older than I, and he put me in touch with a priest in Nice who took me in. He arranged for my sisters to go to some village up in the hills, a dead-end kind of place. I spent the rest of the summer with the priest. Then I went to the lyc\u00e9e in Aix-en-Provence. One of the professors there knew of my parents through his parents, and also knew the head of the lyc\u00e9e. He arranged for me to be in school without being officially on the books.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Was this common?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n No.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Did your peers know?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n No.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Did you use your real name?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n Yes, but we took the t<\/em> off Borchardt<\/em> because there was a pianist called Adolphe Borchard, without the t<\/em>, who was actively performing and composing film music during the occupation, and so that sounded like a good thing.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n What happened to your mother?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n My mother was sent to Auschwitz. Nobody knew how bad the camps were and that people weren\u2019t going to come back. For years, actually, after the war \u2026 Sometimes you\u2019re on the street \u2026 You know how you see somebody and it reminds you of somebody, and you\u2019re not sure\u2014Is it Joe? I would think maybe this was my mother. That lasted for quite a while, coming to terms with her death.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n After the war, did you and your sisters return to your home in Paris?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n First, I went with my oldest sister to try and repossess the apartment. I was there for moral support. Various people had camped there\u2014Germans, collaborators. We got it back, and it was weird. We camped in this rather large, empty apartment. I slept in what had been my sister\u2019s room, and we tried to rent out the rest, since we needed money.<\/p>\n In Aix, I had passed the baccalaur\u00e9at<\/em> exam, with a name without a t<\/em>\u00a0on the end. That allowed me at the time to go to any graduate school or law school. Most people who didn\u2019t know what they wanted to do went to law school, so I went, and I hated it. I was only seventeen. Then I worked for probably nine months at my late father\u2019s old firm, Polydor. My sisters had worked for an American field hospital in Aix-en-Provence, and they wanted to immigrate to America. We sold the lease to our apartment and came over in May 1947.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Have you gone back to the apartment since?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n I\u2019ve gone by there to show Anne where I lived. I didn\u2019t want to connect with the past, but one year we went there, to rue Scheffer. The building had five or six apartments, one apartment per floor. We had lived on the third floor, and in the window, there was a sign that said FOR SALE<\/small>. I said maybe we can ask the concierge to see inside, but there wasn\u2019t one anymore. There was just a code pad to enter.<\/p>\n But here\u2019s a strange thing. We represent Patrick Modiano, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014. After he won, I started looking through his as-yet-untranslated books to see if there were any short stories we could sell in translation. And I actually found two pieces that I thought could stand alone, and we placed them with Harper\u2019s<\/em><\/a> and The Paris Review<\/em><\/a>. In one, there is a character who goes to visit somebody, and it\u2019s in an empty apartment on rue Scheffer.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Of all the streets in Paris, he chose that one.<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n Right [laughs]. But now Modiano has written a new novel, which Yale University Press will publish in translation this fall, and it\u2019s essentially\u2014I mean, all of his novels are essentially a little bit the same. They\u2019re about memory. This one is about six women the narrator has known. And one, the younger one, is working for the Polydor recording studio\u2014where, of course, my father and I worked.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Of all the businesses in Paris \u2026<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n I wrote him and told him this and that I lived on rue Scheffer. Modiano keeps all these old phone books in his apartment because he checks addresses. He wrote back and said, \u201cYes, I see your phone number was PASSY<\/small> 66 12.\u201d The letters represented neighborhoods, just as in New York you had PLAZA<\/small>, today\u2019s 753.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Now I have chills. This reminds me of the exiled Nabokov in Speak, Memory<\/em>, wondering who would pick up the phone if he dialed his childhood home in St. Petersburg.<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n And the funny thing is I have trouble remembering my own phone number now, but for some reason that number\u2014PASSY<\/small> 66 12\u2014is still engraved in my memory.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n What were your impressions of America when you arrived at age nineteen?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n New York City was a disappointment. I had six years of English in school, and yet I couldn\u2019t communicate with people. I could translate a poem about daffodils, but there is a difference between sitting behind a desk and being out with people. It\u2019s embarrassing, and you sound stupid. Then you realize that people think you\u2019re stupid. You speak funny because of your accent, and what you say is so simplistic. And by the time you have something interesting to say, the conversation is already miles away. You become the quiet one. And you feel a bit hostile toward these people, who are having a great time while you sit there moping.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n You got the job assisting at the agency, but then you were drafted into the U.S. Army. How is that possible?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n I worked for three years at the agency and was drafted in 1950. The French consul told me I could choose between the French or American armies, and that the Americans had better food. I was lucky\u2014I was sent to Iceland instead of Korea, where most of my basic training class went. And the reason was because I had made a mistake [laughs]. Mike Bessie, the senior editor at the Harper publishing house, had sort of taken me under his wing. \u201cYou should be in intelligence,\u201d he told me. He had done this in World War II. One day, they asked for volunteers for intelligence, and I raised my hand. What I didn\u2019t realize is that there were different forms of intelligence. So I was trained to crawl under barbed wires to go behind enemy lines. And while I was being trained, most of my buddies were sent to Korea as infantry. I was left behind and went with the next group to Iceland. My ignorance, or stupidity, really saved my life.<\/p>\n We were sent there to protect the Keflav\u00edk airfield from a Communist takeover [laughs]. I was there for a year and a half, until 1952. I got two thirty-day leaves to go to France, where I met the publishers whose books I had been reading in New York. One was a member of the Communist Party, and because I was wearing an American uniform, he was terrified someone would see us. It was not by choice. I just didn\u2019t have any other clothes. When I got out of the army, Paul Flamand, the head of Editions du Seuil, wrote me. \u201cIf you decide to start your own agency,\u201d he said, \u201cI\u2019d like you to represent us in the U.S.\u201d That\u2019s how it started.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n When you returned to New York, did your career begin in earnest?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n No. I attended New York University at night on the G.I. Bill and earned a B.A. in English. Then I taught French-language courses there, which is where I met Anne. I earned a master\u2019s and agented on the side for six years.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Was there just no money in agenting? Advances were much smaller then.<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n It was hard for writers to earn much money. If someone said, I\u2019m a writer, the next question was, And what do you do for a living? It was not\u2014and still isn\u2019t\u2014considered a serious profession like being a lawyer or a doctor or even an elevator man. The real money for fiction and nonfiction was the magazines. I remember in the late forties and early fifties, an editor for Ladies\u2019 Home Journal<\/em> or T<\/em>he<\/em> Saturday Evening Post<\/em> would make the rounds of agents and see what stories had come in. Weeklies paid very well, and writers made a living from that. All but maybe two of Mavis Gallant\u2019s one hundred stories appeared in T<\/em>he<\/em> New Yorker<\/em>. That\u2019s what she lived on.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n After you sold Waiting for Godot<\/em>, did it feel like a breakthrough?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n Grove paid a thousand dollars, but it was for the play and two novels, Molloy<\/em> and Malone Dies<\/em>. I was very happy to finally find a publisher for Beckett, and the French publisher was happy. But then you have to go on. I had just sold three books by a fairly hopeless writer who was already old. I think he was forty-nine, and from an American point of view, he was over the hill and clearly didn\u2019t hold much promise. The novels would come out eventually, but first he had to rewrite them in English, so it was quite a ways off.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Beckett insisted on rewriting them?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n For the first novel, he did the translation with someone else, and he realized it didn\u2019t make any sense, so he rewrote it. He rewrote Waiting for Godot<\/em>\u00a0as well. In the original French, Vladimir asks Estragon, \u201cHave you ever been to the Vaucluse?\u201d Estragon replies, \u201cI\u2019ve never been to the Vaucluse. I have always lived in Merdecluse.\u201d You can\u2019t translate that joke. In English, it becomes \u201cI\u2019ve never been to M\u00e2con, I\u2019ve only lived in Cackon County,\u201d switching merde<\/em>\u00a0with caca<\/em>. Both seem ludicrous\u2014you don\u2019t expect these people to have been anywhere.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n If not for you, would Beckett have found an audience?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n Of course he would have.\u00a0 His books were being published in France thanks to his small French publisher, Les \u00c9ditions de Minuit.\u00a0 Godot <\/em>was produced in Paris. All the people who claimed to have \u201cdiscovered\u201d Beckett\u2014I mean, that\u2019s nonsense. In a sense, we all discovered him, but it wasn\u2019t a unique experience. That\u2019s true of all of the French books that I\u2019ve placed here, over two thousand of them.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Did selling his work help your career?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n Did it ever bring me a single author? I doubt it. If anything, I think a novelist would say, I\u2019m not Beckett, and pass me by. The only person I think who may have been influenced by this was Robert Coover, because he was very close to Beckett\u2019s style. But in fact, when Coover came to us, he had already had at least one, maybe two agents before. He had an editor he really liked, and he decided he didn\u2019t need an agent. The editor said to him, \u201cYou have to get an agent, otherwise I have to screw you,\u201d and he gave him my name. It\u2019s possible that because we had Beckett, he thought, Here\u2019s somebody who reads things a little bit differently. Maybe.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Why was Elie Wiesel\u2019s Night <\/em>such a hard sell?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n In my cover letter I wrote that it was \u201ca book that I feel more strongly about than any other I ever sent you.\u201d But nobody wanted to hear about the Holocaust. Scribner\u2019s said it was a horrifying, moving document, but that there was no market for \u201cwhat remains a document.\u201d Kurt Wolff, the head of Pantheon, said the house \u201calways refrained from doing books of this kind.\u201d Simon & Schuster passed. Dutton. Ballantine. Blanche Knopf rejected it, saying \u201cI imagine you will have someone in your office who may want to deal with it abroad in England, or wherever.\u201d Wherever!<\/p>\n In 1959, after fifteen houses passed, Hill & Wang finally paid a $250 advance for the book, payable in two installments, on the condition that I find a British partner to share the translation cost.<\/p>\n Their first print run of 3,000 copies took three years to sell; sixty years later, the book sells at least that number each week. Worldwide, it sells 400,000-500,000 copies each year.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n You also represent the estates of many writers, including Tennessee Williams, Aldous Huxley, Hannah Arendt, Patrick O\u2019Brian, and Muriel Spark. How are handling estates different than handling authors?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n Generally it\u2019s fairly easy. I think for Aldous Huxley we negotiated over one hundred and fifty foreign rights contracts since we took over, and one of the biggest e-book contracts ever. Huxley\u2019s heirs seem happy.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n How did you come to represent John Ashbery?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n I had read some of his poetry. I met him in New York, and what made him interesting to me is that he was a brilliant translator from the French. \u00a0Rimbaud\u2019s \u201cIlluminations\u201d are probably some of the hardest poems to translate, because these forms are very difficult even in French. John\u2019s translation was superb.<\/p>\n He would always get his poems published in quarterlies or magazines by himself. We only did the books, and we\u2019ve also sold the foreign rights, which is more difficult in a sense. You can\u2019t just convince an editor to buy a book of poetry, because unless there\u2019s a local poet who can reinterpret these poems, you know you can\u2019t just translate them literally. You really need to have a Swedish, or French, or Italian poet who has fallen in love with Ashbery. There\u2019s really much less one can do for a poet than for any other writer.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Do you have any interest in writing a memoir?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n No.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Was there ever a moment when you thought you might?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n I might have done it had I been forced to sell the agency and had nothing else to do. The fact that our daughter Valerie joined the agency gave me a second wind. I can continue doing what I want without feeling irresponsible because everything works. It\u2019s nearly a miracle.<\/p>\n Valerie, being an only child, has heard most of my stories. As a child she didn\u2019t find them particularly interesting [laughs]. Actually she would say, \u201cIt\u2019s ridiculous, you work all day, then you come home and read manuscripts, and then from time to time you go out with an author who does nothing but talk about herself.\u201d That\u2019s true [laughs]. But that\u2019s what agents do.<\/p>\n It is a ridiculous profession, but so is writing. Your son will look at you working and think, \u201cWhat do you do? You sit in front of a computer, alone, writing thousands of words. What\u2019s the sense of this? We could be outside on the swing.\u201d<\/p>\n If you analyze what we do in the context of the whole world of course you\u2019re just, you know, this tiny little ant, and it doesn\u2019t make any difference if the ant moves one way or another.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n I don\u2019t believe that. The ants move things in a necessary way, even if we don\u2019t recognize it.<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n Maybe. I really feel in many cases that I\u2019ve made it possible for a book to succeed and also made it possible for a writer to go on writing. And not all of them necessarily would recognize this. A few of them express gratitude. Some of them are not aware of it, and some of them don\u2019t even like it. Because there\u2019s this sort of red carpet syndrome\u2014when you\u2019ve known somebody, say, before they became \u201cMondrian,\u201d or \u201cPicasso,\u201d they prefer the people who come later, and look up at them.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n How do you know you want to represent a writer?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n I don\u2019t ask writers to pass some kind of test. There\u2019s no way of measuring, it\u2019s really all instinct. You can sometimes see it on the page or in the person.<\/p>\n If it\u2019s on the page, it\u2019s the actual writing. The way things are expressed differently. To most people there\u2019s only one way of saying something: \u201cThe vase is over there.\u201d So what can you add? But in fact there are millions of ways of saying it, sometimes without even mentioning the vase. You know, anybody can go to China, most people can learn Chinese, but they don\u2019t necessarily see what you\u2019ve seen, even though it\u2019s right there. Not everyone who goes to China can write about China and be interesting.<\/p>\n And as an agent I have to be nearly as arrogant as the writer. You see, the writer is arrogant because he or she thinks that he or she can say something that has never been said before or say it better or differently. The agent is essentially doing the same thing, claiming that he or she can recognize this in somebody. If you don\u2019t really believe you can do this, then you should do something else.<\/p>\n There are two things I find in my work. One is the act and the pleasure of reading. And the other one is what I call playing Monopoly<\/em>, which is the act of negotiating with the publisher. It\u2019s more important than just playing, but it follows the same techniques. It\u2019s important. The publishers are still trying to keep authors in a sort of stranglehold by not giving them enough money.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Why?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n Out of sheer greed. And shortness of vision. They don\u2019t want to recognize that without the author, they would not exist. Their ideal would really be to replace the authors with some sort of computer program, which would also of course get rid of the agents as well. It would be a double riddance and a double victory.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Is this because of how long it takes to write a book, or for a writer to develop?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n Authors aren\u2019t reliable. They don\u2019t always come up with a great idea, or they keep writing what seems to be the same book again and again and again. One of my favorite New Yorker<\/em> cartoons is a woman coming up to a painter sitting in front of an easel by a pond and saying, \u201cClaude, not water lilies again.\u201d I\u2019m sure someone once said that to him.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Writers are often misfits. After seven decades at this job, why do you still put up with them?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n This is what I love and have always found fascinating: Writers know they\u2019re writers. It takes something inside you to continue doing your work, despite the fact that no one wants you.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n You\u2019re a genial person, but when you negotiate with publishers you have a reputation for ferocity. Where does that come from? Are you the same way with your dry cleaner?<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n I don\u2019t enjoy antagonism. I don\u2019t even enjoy confrontation. And I would do very poorly with my dry cleaner. Negotiating for oneself is nearly impossible, It\u2019s very difficult to say, \u201cI\u2019m just as good as so-and-so, and you paid that writer so much.\u201d It\u2019s hard to go to Random House and say, \u201cI\u2019m as good as the Obamas, so give me $65 million.\u201d If you\u2019re dealing on behalf of someone else, it\u2019s different. Once I was arguing with Random House when it was owned by S.I. Newhouse, over a few thousand dollars, and I referenced a Jasper Johns painting Sy had just bought for $17 million. I said, \u201cAll I\u2019m asking you for is a fraction of a square inch.\u201d<\/p>\n That I enjoy doing\u2014it\u2019s the pleasure of trying to catch the other person a bit by surprise. They don\u2019t expect Jasper Johns to be part of the negotiating.<\/p>\n As I think Donald Trump may find out one day, there is no such thing as the art of negotiating that applies to every negotiation. Each one is new, each one needs flexibility and an understanding of the circumstances and the value of what you are trying to sell. It\u2019s very, very complicated, to put a value on a manuscript. I mean, you have this manuscript, and it\u2019s typed on 300 pieces of paper. The paper was bought, let\u2019s say, for $6. But now that you\u2019ve put marks on it, it\u2019s no longer worth $6, it\u2019s worth zero. And now I am supposed to get thousands and thousands of dollars for it [laughs]. How do I know what it is worth?<\/p>\n Now, because everybody has the figures of what an author has sold before, people look at those and say, \u201cI see this earned $22,000, and it\u2019s risky and so on, but I\u2019m going to be very generous and offer $25,000.\u201d But you say, \u201cThis is a totally different book. This is not water lilies.\u201d<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Writers like to complain \u2013 about their publisher, or its marketing, or their agent. Sometimes writers have the disconcerting feeling that they work for their agent, not the other way around, since agents in essence elect to take us on as clients.<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n I work for the author. If authors present me with something that I think isn\u2019t very saleable, I tell them. But if they want me to try to sell it, I\u2019ll try to get the best possible deal. And I\u2019ve been both right and wrong. Take Tracy Kidder\u2019s House<\/em> \u2013 it was after Soul of a New Machine<\/em> won the Pulitzer, and I thought the obvious commercial follow-up would be another business book. I was wrong, and then I saw he was right. The idea is that you have to be right more often than wrong in order to succeed.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n I think you\u2019re unusual for an agent in that you line-edit manuscripts. You\u2019re an attentive first reader.<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t do that much of that before. The publishers are doing less and less, agents are doing more and more, and I think most agents do this. I like to edit before the writer gets suggestions from their editor, because that way if I say, \u201cTake out this chapter because it\u2019s boring,\u201d and the editor also says that later, then maybe you will believe him or her.<\/p>\n In a way, what we are trying to do, essentially, is show the author what she would probably see for herself if she set the manuscript aside and read it six months later.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Morgan Entrekin, the head of Grove\/Atlantic, once told me<\/a> that writers are under a new kind of pressure, with expectations of huge advances and sales to match, even for their first book. The media reports those rare successes, and not the long path taken by writers such as Richard Ford, John Irving, Anne Tyler and Toni Morrison.<\/p>\n BORCHARDT<\/p>\n The people who work for Random House and the other big houses, their mission is to make as much money as possible for the firm and its shareholders\u2014mainly the shareholders, and that\u2019s really what rules things. And that is what is less good now. Before, individuals, not corporations, owned firms.<\/p>\n If I go to a firm and say: \u201cThis book isn\u2019t going to sell that well in the next two or three years, but it has backlist sales written all over it. Twenty years from now: clear sailing\u2014all you have to do is push a button and print 5,000.\u201d The reply is: \u201cWhat good does that do us? The CEO\u2019s contract is up in three years. He needs to renegotiate his terms. He needs us to bring in things that sell between now and three years from now. He doesn\u2019t care what is happening in 10 or 12 years. It\u2019s not his firm.\u201d<\/p>\n The first two Ian McEwan collections, First Love, Last Rites<\/em>; In Between the Sheets<\/em>, and Tom Boyle\u2019s first collection, Descent of Man<\/em>, probably sold fewer than two thousand copies each. But they\u2019re still selling today. With Night,<\/em> I wrote to publishers that this was very important, and they needed to publish it. I didn\u2019t say it would sell [laughs].<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Michael Meyer<\/a> is the author of <\/em>The Road to Sleeping Dragon: Learning China from the Ground Up<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>In Manchuria,<\/em>\u00a0and <\/em>The Last Days of Old Beijing. He teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s a good chance Georges Borchardt was responsible for shepherding at least one of your favorite writers to publication. After immigrating to New York from war-torn France at age nineteen in 1947, Borchardt found work as an assistant at a literary agency. One of the first sales he completed on his own was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1501,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[34195,34194,10619,5400,34190,3990,34191,9734,5234,14681,2475,3344,9729,4935,22285,34192,3645,34193,31127],"class_list":["post-125700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-adam-hochschild","tag-anne-applebaum","tag-elie-wiesel","tag-eugene-ionesco","tag-georges-borchardt","tag-ian-mcewan","tag-jacques-lacan","tag-jean-paul-sartre","tag-john-ashbery","tag-john-gardner","tag-marguerite-duras","tag-mavis-gallant","tag-michel-foucault","tag-roland-barthes","tag-stanley-elkin","tag-susan-minot","tag-t-c-boyle","tag-tracy-kidder","tag-waiting-for-godot"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n