Hardwick's novel is mediocre and forgettable, as most autofictive-inflected stuff is, but I enjoy her criticism and essays. I've got a couple of the NYR books and they're good. The biography of her is not very good, and was lacerated by Christian Lorentzen.
Writers in NY in the 20th century were able to live those lives due to a combination of low rent and better rates. Freelance rates, NOT adjusted for inflation, are worse than they were 50-60 years ago. And if you had the knack for magazine pieces, like Mailer, a few of those could float you all year. There's a great part of Podhoretz's 'Making It' where he fumes at Baldwin for spurning Commentary for the New Yorker and reveals Baldwin got something like $10,000 for his piece. If you were a fairly hard worker and could cobble together a few $1 a word pieces per month (there were magazines that paid even better) or every other month, you were easily paying your rent in NYC. In the 60s and 70s, it wasn't hard to rent apartments for a few hundred bucks a month.
$10,000 in the '60s? Okay, I do mourn the loss of that world. I knew rates were higher but not that much higher. Agreed on Hardwick as essayist—I like her little Penguin Lives Melville bio too.
I'm gonna go back and consult my copy of 'Making It' tonight. My sense was Baldwin's rate was very high, but also something that could happen. Much more common was doing a magazine piece for $1 or $2 or even $3 a word. And if it's a feature, several thousand words, you get the idea. Couple that with low rent.
If you *really* care about the economics of midcentry novelists, read the Blake Bailey Philip Roth bio. You get the sense of the numbers Roth did. In '68 from Portnoy he made something like $800,000, between the advance and movie rights and everything else. And the beauty of Portnoy was that Roth could write poor-selling novels throughout the 70s that alienated critics but command huge advances each time, on the strength of Portnoy.
Interesting! And if he hadn't floundered around like that in the '70s, I doubt the streak in the '80s/'90s would have been possible.
I adjusted $800,000 for inflation (about 7 million) and did a cursory search to see if any literary novelists were making anywhere near that today in advances etc. Apparently a million-dollar advance was still possible as of 2018:
Emma Cline got $2 million or so for The Girls in 2014 (it was a multibook deal) and The Other Black Girl, which is not a very good novel, I think broke seven figures
That passage from the Lowell review is money, it's something I think people are sometimes afraid to acknowledge because it's not really like the precarity of being IE; black or queer has been totally abolished (which is not to say that it hasn't been diminished over time) with the embourgeoisement of those aesthetic signifiers. Tardigrade's thought about American writers is spot on-I'd even amend his Pynchon asterisk with the idea that some of his late work arrives at a conclusion I believe you've expressed some sympathy with before-that it's not really in any of our interests Down Here to get too involved in trying to read the tea leaves of elite games in which we can only be expendable foot soldiers-so he too may belong at the end of the day. I've never read Foucault’s Pendulum, although I see used copies of it everywhere.
Right, and many conflicting things can be true: the embourgeoisement helps in the long run to combat that precarity, it produces in the short run an inevitable reactionary backlash, it's aesthetically lamentable, etc. It's complicated. I think early Pynchon can be read that way too, as with the counterforce in Gravity's Rainbow being cultural bohemians. Foucault's Pendulum is fun if you like that sort of thing—the occult and conspiracy theory—but I wouldn't call it required reading.
I searched your webpage for a review, but see you haven't reviewed A Confederacy of Dunces. I suspect you've read it and would be interested in your take.
loved reading this! I similarly loved Renata Adler’s Speedboat and was left unmoved by Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights (Speedboat had a slowly accelerating feverish quality to it that felt very absorbing; Sleepless Nights felt very laborious to read and the prose almost overworked…like Ross Barkan though, I really do like Hardwick’s criticism!)
and thank you for introducing me to Henry James’s beautiful phrase of the “present palpable intimate” in fiction—such a gorgeous description that really captures what great contemporary writing feels like
Thank you! Yes, Speedboat had velocity, whereas Sleepless Nights doesn't, or enough of an organizing principle. (Her original title, as reported by Pinckney, might have helped with the latter: The Cost of Living.)
Hardwick's novel is mediocre and forgettable, as most autofictive-inflected stuff is, but I enjoy her criticism and essays. I've got a couple of the NYR books and they're good. The biography of her is not very good, and was lacerated by Christian Lorentzen.
Writers in NY in the 20th century were able to live those lives due to a combination of low rent and better rates. Freelance rates, NOT adjusted for inflation, are worse than they were 50-60 years ago. And if you had the knack for magazine pieces, like Mailer, a few of those could float you all year. There's a great part of Podhoretz's 'Making It' where he fumes at Baldwin for spurning Commentary for the New Yorker and reveals Baldwin got something like $10,000 for his piece. If you were a fairly hard worker and could cobble together a few $1 a word pieces per month (there were magazines that paid even better) or every other month, you were easily paying your rent in NYC. In the 60s and 70s, it wasn't hard to rent apartments for a few hundred bucks a month.
$10,000 in the '60s? Okay, I do mourn the loss of that world. I knew rates were higher but not that much higher. Agreed on Hardwick as essayist—I like her little Penguin Lives Melville bio too.
I'm gonna go back and consult my copy of 'Making It' tonight. My sense was Baldwin's rate was very high, but also something that could happen. Much more common was doing a magazine piece for $1 or $2 or even $3 a word. And if it's a feature, several thousand words, you get the idea. Couple that with low rent.
If you *really* care about the economics of midcentry novelists, read the Blake Bailey Philip Roth bio. You get the sense of the numbers Roth did. In '68 from Portnoy he made something like $800,000, between the advance and movie rights and everything else. And the beauty of Portnoy was that Roth could write poor-selling novels throughout the 70s that alienated critics but command huge advances each time, on the strength of Portnoy.
Interesting! And if he hadn't floundered around like that in the '70s, I doubt the streak in the '80s/'90s would have been possible.
I adjusted $800,000 for inflation (about 7 million) and did a cursory search to see if any literary novelists were making anywhere near that today in advances etc. Apparently a million-dollar advance was still possible as of 2018:
https://lithub.com/a-brief-history-of-seven-figure-book-advances/
And here's one from last year, though adjacent to the genre-fiction space where things may work differently:
https://brittlepaper.com/2023/07/nigerian-american-author-nnedi-okorafor-signs-million-dollar-book-deal-for-new-novel-titled-the-africanfuturist/
Emma Cline got $2 million or so for The Girls in 2014 (it was a multibook deal) and The Other Black Girl, which is not a very good novel, I think broke seven figures
That passage from the Lowell review is money, it's something I think people are sometimes afraid to acknowledge because it's not really like the precarity of being IE; black or queer has been totally abolished (which is not to say that it hasn't been diminished over time) with the embourgeoisement of those aesthetic signifiers. Tardigrade's thought about American writers is spot on-I'd even amend his Pynchon asterisk with the idea that some of his late work arrives at a conclusion I believe you've expressed some sympathy with before-that it's not really in any of our interests Down Here to get too involved in trying to read the tea leaves of elite games in which we can only be expendable foot soldiers-so he too may belong at the end of the day. I've never read Foucault’s Pendulum, although I see used copies of it everywhere.
Right, and many conflicting things can be true: the embourgeoisement helps in the long run to combat that precarity, it produces in the short run an inevitable reactionary backlash, it's aesthetically lamentable, etc. It's complicated. I think early Pynchon can be read that way too, as with the counterforce in Gravity's Rainbow being cultural bohemians. Foucault's Pendulum is fun if you like that sort of thing—the occult and conspiracy theory—but I wouldn't call it required reading.
I read this today: https://www.acton.org/religion-liberty/volume-34-number-2/sin-wit
I searched your webpage for a review, but see you haven't reviewed A Confederacy of Dunces. I suspect you've read it and would be interested in your take.
Actually I've never read it...will put it on the list!
loved reading this! I similarly loved Renata Adler’s Speedboat and was left unmoved by Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights (Speedboat had a slowly accelerating feverish quality to it that felt very absorbing; Sleepless Nights felt very laborious to read and the prose almost overworked…like Ross Barkan though, I really do like Hardwick’s criticism!)
and thank you for introducing me to Henry James’s beautiful phrase of the “present palpable intimate” in fiction—such a gorgeous description that really captures what great contemporary writing feels like
Thank you! Yes, Speedboat had velocity, whereas Sleepless Nights doesn't, or enough of an organizing principle. (Her original title, as reported by Pinckney, might have helped with the latter: The Cost of Living.)