http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2014/05/rogerstrausjonathangalassifarrarstraus.html
Dear
Dana,
- Since you transmit my royalties perhaps
you also keeps track of incoming from foreign publishers - if not, you
certainly know who does.
- At either event I wanted to make you and
all of Suhrkamp aware that Farrar, Straus has arbitrarily halved the royalties
- of one percent! - on some of the few (the six) titles on which they
actually render them, that is on the at least one-eighth of the ones to
which I am contractually entitled (as detailed below).
- I asked Victor Wernicki, (note cc and
copy of letter below) who renders statements for Farrar, Straus/ Macmillan
USA/ Holzbrinck for an explanation but have not received it, for how long
this might have been going on, for it takes a magnifying glass to make the
discovery in the fine print of their readouts.
- In 1966 I signed a contract with Farrar,
Straus & Giroux as Scout and editor for books in German. The contract
called for participation on my part once a book had sold in excess of
5,000 copies and in the event of mass paperback and book club sales of 2
%.
Things
went well initially. Two of the first three authors were Nobel Prize winners.
Nelly Sachs, whose OH THE CHIMEYS selection of poetry and one play and
introduction by Hans Magnus Enzensberger I put together translating 65 poems myself;
and a ten book contract for Hermann Hesse where three of the translations, done
for the deceased Harper & Row editor Roger Klein, were ready to be
published: Ursule Molinaro's of NARCISS & GOLDMUND, and mine of PETER
CAMENZIND & BENEATH THE WHEEL. All first ten titles were sold to Bantam
Books for handsome advances, NARCISS for $ 500,000. CAMENZIND and BENEATH THE
WHEEL for 250,000 however I received accounting and the agreed royalties only
on the first five of the first ten book contract I just discovered. I recall
buying a Napoleon style raincoat in Paris and turning it over to author Peter
Handke in 1971 when he was in need and was indeed already an early and
future conqueror and how we (his wife and buddy Kolleritch of Short Letter
Long Farewell fame, and I) were amused how well the coat
suited him and how excellently he struck the emblematic pose!.
- At the same time that I made the so
surprising discovery of the halving of the percentage this spring and then
realized that Farrar, Straus had not paid me the royalties due under my
1966 agreement on the second
five titles of the first ten book Hesse contract, all published in the
first half of the 1970s and all sold to Bantam mass paperback for very
large advances in which I was meant to participate, I had been bugging
them, for quite some time, since 1994 to be precise, pay up under the second
ten book contract.
-
- Here
the five titles of the first Hesse contract on which FSG has not paid me
- Pictor's Metamorphoses: And Other
Fantasies
Hours in the Garden and Other Poems: A Bilingual Edition (English and German Edition) - Knulp: Three Tales from the Life of
Knulp
- Strange News from Another Star and Other
Tales by Hermann Hesse.
- If the War Goes on:
Reflections on War and Politics by Hermann Hesse (Jun 1971)
-
- The fact that I made this discovery - (while
attempting off and on for the past twenty years to get Farrar Straus to
live up to our agreement with respect to the second ten book Hesse
contract which I negotiated in 1969 while still in their employ, and which
ten titles I selected) as well as a number of other titles (*) - that kind
of unawareness on my part shows, on the one hand, a certain
indifference or nonchalance as long as my income suffices for someone who
about 30 years ago chose to work exclusively as a writer and scholar and
occasional translator. I had seen and experienced quite enough during my
twenty-five years in New York. That is, it manifests a peculiarity
of editors who regard themselves as servants of their betters, the authors,
and who far too often think too little of themselves. Genuegsam is the German word and although the word has a
certain social acceptability it does not really signify a happy state of
being, or how anyone ought to be. For one thing, these servants become far
too easy to exploit. Since I did a pretty thorough analysis I know the two
chief trauma whence this once characterstic quality derives, and also the
first time I had a hint of it: in high school when I was extraordinarily
impressed by young Bruckner’s gratitude at someone performing his work. - Meanwhile some of
the fighting spirit - once engaged exclusively for author - now comes into
play, if belatedly for myself who for the longest time had wanted to be
nothing but an editor and translator, and to stay out of the thick of
things: a modus that - however wanting to get some things done – that is,
lay some fine eggs in the right nest - inevitably involves you in the thickets,
and it appears that Mignons then can turn feral. It was the
circumstance of not finding or being with the right publisher into whose
nest this cuckoo could lay his accumulation of eggs that then made for the
ill-fated Urizen Book adventure!
- http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2011/04/short-unhappy-life-of-urizen-books.html
- http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2013/08/wieland-schulz-keil-hunting-socieity.html
-
- About
1980 I realized that I wanted to withdraw again but it took a half dozen
years to extricate myself from the so distracting sybaritic New York. After
a year and a half in Billie the Kid country I closed down my NY loft, and
nearly got sucked back in, but then moved into an idyll in the St. Monicas
near Los Angeles, to complete a psychoanalysis and my writing projects - I
was living off a small legacy and my royalties, barely enough but I needed
not to take on any outside work except the rare translation of a book that
enticed me, such as Erich Wolfgang Skwara’s The Plague of Sieana.
-
- But in 1994, with large section of my
DARLINGS & MONSTERS SPIRAL (think of it along the lines of Carlo
Emilio Gadda’s The Big Mess on the Via Merulana of mid-century N.Y.)
and an initially unanticipated Handke project underway (initiated
subsequent to the experiential event of reading his The Repetition
in 1987)
- http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2010/06/handke-magazine-is-over-arching-site.html
- and a completed an analysis (in the
sense that something of the kind is completeable once set in motion),
- the small
legacy, which had allowed me to do the analysis, and on which I had lived
and worked went poof, while I was living under what I regarded a near
idyllic simplest rural circumstances and I had to return to the U.S. and
had little choice but to interrupt my projects for a decade and resume
translating, life as a
visiting scholar, and the only good thing that ever came from being
truly needy – and it turned out to be priceless - was the experience here
in Seattle that made for WRITE SOME NUMB'S, BITCH! Here a hint of it http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2013/07/precis-of-write-some-numbs-bitch.html
-
- About
1994, Kurt
Bernheim, my successor as Suhrkamp agent in New York, informed me that the
famous second ten book contract ran over him. My various letters to Roger
Straus to remind him that I had withdrawn because he asked me not to
double-dip went unanswered. If I am not paid I cannot pay, that
cascade is very simple indeed.
- Here the background on the FSG matter.
- In 1969 Roger Straus
and I negotiated a second 10 book contract with Suhrkamp, the selection
being mine, especially keen I was on Hesse letters many of which
advised those who had approached him to find someone but not him as a
leader preferably to become inner-directed (I made a selection which FSG
eventually published with Ted Ziolkowski as outside editor). Since I knew
of F.S.G.'s reluctance to commit huge amounts to advances I managed to get
both parties to come together at the sum of $ 5,000 per title on signing,
that is, a total of $ 50,000; and this was the one time I had lunch at the Four Seasons - the Suhrkamp New York agent,
whom I had no idea I might replace on her resigning the account, was the
Berliner Joan Daves, whom I much liked for her 30s stylishness, and whose
husband Ashton I would later use as translator for Adorno as senior editor
at Continuum Books, and I can’t say I ever paid attention or noticed that
Roger was a chintzy tipper. I myself, having had barista-type jobs make
sure to tip even when broke.
-
- The first Hesse
contract ran through Joan, and the second, then, was meant to run through
Lantz-Donadio, but never did – and the reason it was so delayed had to do
with Dr. Unseld renegotiating the terms for mass paperback sales and
running into objections, of course, on the part of Roger Straus – (ah the
sacredness of a contract!) And
so it instead ran through Kurt Bernheim after the agency Lantz-Donado and
I had resigned the account in 1971, in part for Dr. Unseld’s violation of
his contractual agreements with Farrar, Straus of which he did not consult
with his agents – the most experienced and sophisticated Robert Lantz
would certainly have advised against doing so, especially in Unseld’s
bull-in-the-china-shop manner.
- Roger Straus, on the
Bull holding him up (the bone of
contention was the mass paperback income split) of course came crying to
me, and didn’t seem to believe that neither I nor Robbie (as Lantz was
known) had the faintest. And it was I who had been instrumental in the
introductions back in 1966, when, as Suhrkamp scout I had stopped by
Farrar, Straus to express my interest in their list for Suhrkamp and Roger
Cherry picker Straus had subsequently offered me a job at a firm that I
thought far too august to approach. At this point I am tempted to give a
brief account to what extent I was and was not experienced after six years
in publishing in New York, but I will desist.
- http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html
- Within the year of representing Suhrkamp,
as of 1969, I had a call from Roger Straus saying I ought not to
double-dip the second Hesse contract, and after consulting with Candida
Donadio (who agreed with Straus if only to please a publisher he sought to
remain on the best of possible terms with for the mother hen’s authors), I
did so, it seemed to be an ethical matter, even though I realized that
Roger was also saving himself his minute royalties to me who found himself
supporting his job representing Suhrkamp - fulltime it turned out instead
of the anticipated half-time - with handsome royalty income from the first
five titles of the first ten book Hesse contract! Hesse, all around manna
it appears wherever he manifests himself! And then elicits greed! And I,
not entirely naïve to the articulateness of money, desisted the temptation
to go to Bantam Books and sell the second ten book contract for a million
or more and not only fund my unwanted agentship but perhaps edit them
myself at a great salaire – no, I liked Farrar, Straus too much for that,
and the idea did not seem to have occurred to the needy Suhrkamp or the
greedy Hesse heirs who were prodding Unseld.
However,
the 2nd 10 book Hesse contract was not yet signed and then never ran through
Lantz-Donadio, and so I did not even manage to dip once. When I called Roger
Straus' attention to that state of affairs once back from Mexico in mid-90s he
refused to answer, as has his successor Jonathan Galassi or Holzbrinck the new
owner, nor John Sargent the head of Macmillan U.S.A.
Imagine
that! I bring a total of what is now fifty books to Farrar, Straus, they make
millions, Roger Straus sells the firm for $ 30 million – and one thirtieth of
that is certainly the VAT I added, and they cannot respond! Perhaps Jonathan
Galassi, so heavily promoted by Roger Straus, over his own son, is just as
clever and crooked as his mentor.
- Check out
the link here and my annotations to Jonathan Gallasi’s review of Boris
Kachka’s recent book about Farrar Straus
- http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2013/07/roger-straus-robert-giroux-jonathan.html
At
the same time that Roger wanted me not to “double-dip” (in 1970) Roger wanted
to take a kind of snapshot of where we were at in midstream with a lot of
titles still in the pipeline, and so we did. It mentioned all the books on
which I was then earning my participation (but the Nelly Sachs on which I
actually deserved greater participation than any other considering the
amount of work involved in putting OH THE CHIMNEYS together, translating 65 of
the poems myself. However, Roger at one point said "we don't pay on poetry
translation", typical as we now know of a fundamental not just chintzy-
but crookedness), yet there seemed no need to specify the various other titles
in the pipeline,
such as the second set of five Hesse
titles from the first ten book contract, the second volume of Handke plays
(RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE AND OTHER PLAYS) all but They Are Dying out
I had already translated (the first was the near best-selling then Kaspar
& Other Plays), or published titles such as H. E. Nossack’s The
Impossible Proof or Christa Wolf’s Thinking about Christa T. which I
had acquired and whose translations I had edited but which had not earned out
for me yet, or so I was told. Leaving
FSG in 1969 with so many titles that I had been instrumental in acquiring still
to be publishes indeed meant leaving as it were mid-pipeline. One question that was never addressed was that
of authors who subsequently published numerous books through that firm, of
which there was one, Peter Handke, was especially productive and remunerative.
- It now looks to me, with FSG failing to
account to me over these many years, as though this "snapshot"
was a trick of Roger's (typical it turns out) to make the then status a
permanent one and try to get out of the commitments of the original
agreement. Roger Straus, it then turned out, was a man who while he
deceived and distracted you up front, was tricky enough to filch the
wallet out of your back pocket. There are other, grosser, analogies.
- I must say that at that time I could not
have conceived of someone who was making millions off treasures I had
brought him screwing you in that fashion; meanwhile, more experienced, it
turns out not to be not that an unusual event. Roger screwed Bob Giroux
who brought him not only great authors but also the kind of window
dressing, the kind of suit, Roger had needed since the beginning when he
affixed the name of a first rate editor, John Farrar, who was down and out,
to the firm's name, first. Cudahy, it ctd. like that. There I sat at editorial
meeting and Robert Giroux, like a banker in his suit, was suffering, it
turns out, to the extent that the thought of Roger made him desist from
writing a history of the firm. And where could he go with his great
authors after having left the other half at Harcourt, Brace?
-
- Yes, do check
out the link here to Jonathan Galassi’s review of Boris Kachka’s recent
book about Farrar Straus
- http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2013/07/roger-straus-robert-giroux-jonathan.html
Jonathan with the word "chintzy" has hit
the nailhead! Tigers rarely change their stripes, no end of people had the same
problem with Roger.
- Over the lifetime of a well-selling
title that one percent or two can sure add up! Roger was looking ahead,
saving small tips for the decades.
- I lost hundreds of thousand by agreeing
to be agreeable, obliging, and not pointing out the above-mentioned truth.
It took analysis to make me aware of that quality.
- Had I been warned about
Straus in any way, aside that I realized the guy was a brute who did not
belong in literary publishing yet meanwhile had a great list and Bob Giroux's
authors, great window dressing ever since he took poor beat-up John Farrar's
name and added it to his in 1947? Had I had any warning that something
might be seriously amiss aside the arbitrary decision regarding the Nelly
Sachs volume? Actually I had. I'd gotten to know Cecil Hemley the
founder of Noonday Press which paperback line Cecil sold to Roger Straus,
about the time I went to work for F.S.G., but independently of Roger.
Perhaps via Bryn Mawr classmate Paula Diamond who worked for Farrar, Straus
around that time??
- I did not ask Cecil how he had been
screwed, and his son did not know, a fine writer whom I contacted to find
out whether Cecil, who died in 1966 while his son was eight years old,
might have made his unhappiness with Roger part of family lore. It's hard
to know why Straus was so chintzy and foresightful of minute royalty
payments, what with an estate in Purchase, a yellow convertible Mercedes,
and his $ 1,200 suits that he never wanted to get any egg on while alive -
he may have just been putting up a good front if we are to believe what
his wife Dorothea says about the firm’s finances, walking at the edge of
bankruptcy all those years, and in that respect like a lot of the
publishers who lived from one list to the next until the great majority of
them were absorbed by one or the other conglomerate – owned by the shark
of sharks.
-
- Perhaps someone knows what termites came
out of the woodworks that Holzbrinck bought for $ 30 million from Roger
Straus?!
- I traveled to the Book Fair a few times
with Roger I can say that as to "sexual sewer" that wife
Dorothea mentions about Union Square, Roger was heterosexually what is
called "rough trade", and I think literature would have been
better off if he'd stayed in galoshes. Amazing in retrospect that the New
York Times, via reporter Henry Raimund, kept treating Roger as a kind of
oracle of New York publishing! That Roger Straus is bruited to have been a
great publisher is only possible in the U.S. He never made anything of
Noonday paperback line, he kept absorbing small independents like Cudahy +
Hill & Wang but they failed to flourish. He ruined the flourishing
publication history of Handke in this country which I recount not only in
the above link but also here;
- He
permitted my nemesis, Michael DiCapua (who appears to have resented that
my first two authors were Nobel Prize winners and that I was some kind of
interloper golden boy) to kill some of my best projects, e.g. an Adorno
reader that it took a year to fashion with Adorno prior to his death in 1969
and for which Susan Sontag was going to write the introduction – what a
real difference in intellectual life such an event would have made at that
time! Killed by an utter twerp who was even editor in chief at the time I
did what Handke then felt was the best translation he had seen to date, of
his Walk About the Villages. A twerp and ass-licking stiletto man
as the now city tomcat thinks of him!
-
- Handke once commented how unlucky I
seemed to be, you can’t be but half lucky at best if you end up in
business with the likes of Roger Straus, a dofus like Harold McGraw, Werner
Linz and my Urizen Books partners. Not that I did not work for fine people
in publishing, Sam Lawrence, Bill Koshland, George Braziller, or nearly
but then not as we had planned, as Arthur Rosenthal. About the only really
good thing that Straus then did was promote Jonathan Galassi where the
firm strikes me as far superior to what it had been; although it surprises
the hell out of me that Galassi - fellow poet, translator, scholar - fails
to respond to me in this matter, but goes into the no-response shell that
I suppose the legal Beagles prescribe in situations of this kind. It is so
easy to repair some of this damage, and as indicated above I am nonchalant
in the matter as long as I get by, which I am not at age 78 on a yearly
income of approximately 8 thousand dollars, and if it weren’t for a friend
who puts me up I’d be out on the street.
- Of course, it is also a matter of
principle, and that the principle meanwhile seems not to impress Jonathan
Galassi or the other powers at Holzbrinck, speaks not well for them – I
don’t know Jonathan Galassi, perhaps he turns out to be a chip of the
Straus block and that is why Roger promoted him as he did.
- If I were in New York I would bring suit
myself; and would sue for appr. one million dollars. I won two suits in
Federal Court in New York and L.A. against a former partner in Urizen
Books. However, since he now
resides in Palermo but I have no friends in the Sicilian Mafia and he has
acquired a host of European judgments as well as has become even more
knowledgeable in creating veils all the judgments do is accumulate the
permitted 10 % per annum. - Those were the reasons that the Crown of Spain
created the Cosa Nostre! A collection agency! That has meanwhile gone independent!
- There are terms on which I would settle,
I imagine that that sum is to be found at the cost which FSG/ Holzbrinck
incurs by not paying up, although I expect the cost is simply that of
keeping one of their house beagles busy with this case as compared to
another. Consigliere tell me that this is an instance where one could
challenge the statute of limitations! However, all the monies in such a
protracted process would go, guess? Thus one thing I can do is make sure
that the world knows what Farrar, Straus and Jonathan Galassi are like.
- From here I have to pay $ 10 K just to
file the suit in Federal Court, a sum I have not had in my account for
more than ten years; although NY State court would be the way to go since
the contract was drawn and executed there.
- And
here a link to the list of venues and people who have stolen either my
name or @ money from me in the course of playwriting - strictly as
background material for a further insight into the Wild West.
- http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2013/08/mis-attribution-of-translation-credits.html
Very
truly yours,
Michael Roloff,,4616 = 25th Ave NE # 357 Seattle WA 98105,206-612-4576
======================================
- # 1]
- Dear Victor,
- Having occasion to take
a careful look at the recent royalty statements that
FSG/Macmillan/Holzbrinck rendered to me I notice that although the royalty
rate of 1% for my participation in NARCISSUS & GOLDMUND is correct,
elsewhere, as for BENEATH THE WHEEL, it has been reduced to 1/2 of 1 %.
Question is, how long has this been going on, and if I cannot trust the
extraordinarily fine print there, why should I trust the sales figures?
- I say so with special
emphasis since under my original agreement I just discovered I have never
been paid - in all these 40+ years - for the second five books of the
first 10 book Handke contact, all of which, also, were sold to Bantam
Books for mass publication at extremely handsome rates. $ 500,000 for
NARCISS and $ 250,000 for WHEEL, CAMENZIND and the others, in which I also
participated at 1%. These five books I have not been paid for are:
- *
- Pictor's Metamorphoses:
And Other Fantasies
Hours in the Garden and Other Poems: A Bilingual Edition (English and German Edition) - Knulp: Three Tales from
the Life of Knulp
- Strange News from
Another Star and Other Tales by Hermann Hesse.
- If the War Goes on:
Reflections on War and Politics by Hermann Hesse (Jun 1971)\
- Now we come to two
other matters that are absent from your royalty statements:
- 1) An accounting for
the titles on the 2nd 10 book Hesse contract with Suhrkamp &
- 2) An accounting for
the 18 Handke titles on which I ought to participate under the original
agreement if they have sold more than 5,000 copies.
- About the 2nd 10 book
contract there is this to be said.
- Incidentally or not, of
the total of 20 Hesse titles I brought to Farrar, Straus I am presently
receiving accounting on income generated by five of them, which are listed
as in print at the FSG/Macmillan site, as are eight (8) others, which
leaves 7 important titles unaccounted for - are they out of print or do
they generate income via their various once subsidiary licensings?
- Hoping all is well with
you in the city of thieves, or shall I be kinder as I watch my crows steal
from each other, and call it city of magpies?
- =====================================
- # 2]
- it is 1970 I've been at Lantz-Donado
repping Suhrkamp for about a year and realized soon enough that there was
much less there to sell than met the eye - and retrospectively might have
checked with my predecessor Joan Daves why she was giving up the
representation even with a very rich Hesse 2nd ten book contract in the
offing. The truth she would have told me as I would find out soon enough
was that Suhrkamp in the persons of Unseld/ but especially Helene
Ritzerfeld were such pains in the ass that for nearly no amount of money
would you want to have to deal with them for any length of time. And Joan,
a Berlin émigré, smart stylish, had done well enough for herself repping
lots of others meanwhile not to need that pain. Even now, all these years
later, I get a complaint from someone who sees Suhrkamp rep on my resume,
about
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