The Book Rep

from

My Reading Life by Pat Conroy

A memoir

Pub Date: November 2010

Excerpt courtesy Nan A.Talese Books

In 1972, when The Water is Wide was published, the sales representative, Norm Berg, made a visit to my home in Beaufort to offer valuable advice about how I was to conduct myself as a young writer making my way into the labyrinths of a business I didn’t understand.

Until I met Norman Berg, I had not yet developed a philosophy of writing, nor figured out the strategies I would need to be a writer of consequence for many years to come. From the day he met me to the last day of his life, Norman took my writing career with high-stepping seriousness. He lacked any sense of frivolity or lightheartedness when the subject was either books or the writing life, and his dedication to the world of language was like a pure stream inside him. He was a hard man who dismissed fools without conscience or regret. His mouth was a thin line underscoring a disapproving face, and it lay closed beneath his brow and nose like a lesser blade in a Swiss army knife.

A meticulous man, he carried a love of order to extremes sometimes. His books were well-ordered and arranged with care. When a book he revered went out of print, he would re-publish the book under his own NSB imprint. His volumes were jacketless, but sturdy, and Norman displayed an almost religious affection for these books he rescued from oblivion.

Because of Norman S. Berg publishing house, I read The Education of Henry Adams, South Moon Under by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, John Muir’s The First Summer in the Sierra and Before the Colors Fade; A Portrait of a Soldier by George Patton.

Norman was a passionate reader and an unflinching loyalist to those books and writers who had struck him with their inner brilliance. His reputation proceeded him, as had warning from editors and other writers cautioning me about Norman’s pugnaciousness, his opinionated closemindedness, his caustic nature, and a negativity that he could spread at will like a black pollen that could harm the confidence of any young writer. I ignored the warnings and welcomed Norman into my life. Since he would be the man pushing my books to southern booksellers, it seemed reasonable that I make legitimate diplomatic enquiries into bringing the off-putting Mr. Berg into my camp. I found his seduction effortless.

Like most men of wintry, implacable reputations, I discovered Norman to be a solitary figure wounded by his own self-inflicted capacity to cut himself off from all opportunities of friendship. He had made a fetish out of solitude and a virtue of his impatience with small talk and his unwillingness to tolerate the company of the unread simpletons he encountered on his journeys throughout the south. The world of books was a sacred grove to him.

Because his personality was so off-putting and his manner so sharp-cornered, it took me years to write him into my life as a mentor and companion. Though he worshipped writers, he could not keep from trying to break their tender spirits and mold them into artists worthy of his dark imprimatur. His championing came with a price. From the very beginning Norman longed to turn me into a writer I was never born to be.

It was Norman’s deepest wish that I take a thousand pages of my over-caffeinated prose and cut it down to a hundred pages of glittering, hard-boiled writing that would shine in its elegant completeness. He wanted me to write a book using all the delicacy and craft of watchmakers hunched over springs and wheels as tiny as semicolons. My attraction to the colossal and the elephantine offended him. Like many editors before and after him, Norman became a head cheerleader for restraint and economy of style.

Since the English language in all its vertiginous, high-hurdling glory had passed down to me by a word-stung mother I had enjoyed getting my hands dirty anywhere the language would grant me a letter of transit. Norman would argue for the elegance of understatement. Countering, I made what I thought was a compelling case for overreaching, the wonders a writer could coax from his or her talents if they approached a blank page with their imagination afire and unbound.

“Don’t you want to matter?” Norman Berg asked me on our verandah on Hancock Street. “Don’t you want to be part of the literary discussion? Don’t you think about your place in literature?”

“No, I haven’t thought about any of that, Mr. Berg.” I said.

“Then what do you want?” he asked me. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because I want to be remembered.”

“You don’t write well enough to be remembered.”

It was not the last time Norman Berg would hurt my feelings, but I thought his early criticism would offer a firewall when I made my timorous way in the world of New York publishing. From the earliest days of our friendship, he brought me books that he believed I should read before daring to impose my own puny visions on an unsuspecting American public. Norman brought me the books of new writers who had impressed him with their debut novels. Because of Norman Berg, I had read Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, Don De Lillo’s Americano and Paul Theroux’s Waldo before I was even published by their publisher. I felt then and I feel now a deep affinity with those writers who appeared in that first fall list with me.

Each time he would visit from Atlanta, Norm Berg would bring me dozens of books and I could gauge his pleasure as he quizzed me about each author and I would present ample evidence that I had read every book he brought into my house. When he quizzed me about the contents of a book, there was always a competitive sting to the queries. Books seemed to bruise rather than edify him. Because they were true to life they could seem harmful to Norman as though he were picking up live jellyfish from a tidal pool. There could be no mastery or understanding without pain. Whenever we sat down to discuss literature, I knew he would tolerate no lightheartedness or introduction of frivolity into the conversation. Books were a matter of life and death in the world of Norman Berg. He was an easy man to dismiss and a hard one to love. In the end, his great solitude tamed me.

In the spring of 1972, Norman picked me up in Beaufort and took me on a sales trip through the Carolinas. He wanted me to understand the world of bookselling from the top down and he insisted that I accompany him on a trip where he would sell my book The Water is Wide to stores around the South. He instructed me to study the fall list and to hunt for clues that would let an owner know how important the publisher considered my book to be in the grand scheme of the fall season. According to his reckoning, my book was the tenth most important book that would be published in the next sales cycle.

“Your books not a big ticket item for Houghton Mifflin,” Norman said. “I can guarantee you that much. How many copies are in the first printing?”

“I don’t know.” I said.

“You make it your business to know. Your agent should’ve told you. The first printings’ only five thousand copies. It won’t even sell that many.”

“How do you know?”

“Experience,” he said. “You want to know about books. I deal in cold facts. “

He drove me to Charleston where he let me sit in as he sold his fall list to the Book Basement and the two elegant men who ran the store in the shadows of the College of Charleston. Since I had gotten to know the men slightly as a cadet and had become a regular customer since my graduation, I was relieved when they ordered five copies of The Water is Wide and irritated when Norman tried to talk them into reducing their order to three books.

“You can always re-order,” Norman said.

“Mr. Conroy’s firing was covered well in the press.” The first man said.

“We’re comfortable with that order.”

Next, we drove over to King Street and I entered Hugeley’s book Store, a much larger venue that the Book Basement. Hugeley’s bristled with Citadel connections and Hugeley’s had never ordered a single copy of The Boo, my self-published book that rankled the rare sensibilities of the Citadel power structure by my championing a commandant they had fired for his corrosive effect on discipline within the Corps of cadets. Mr. Hugeley was detached rather than personable when he met me that day, but he ordered two copies of the book which I felt like a victory of the smallest sort.

“You made enemies at the Citadel”, Norman said as we walked back to his car.

“It wasn’t hard to do.” I said.

“Why would they get mad over The Boo?” He said. “It’s unreadable. A piece of shit is the best this you could say for it.”

“It’s mine.” I said. “That is the best I can say for it.”

“No.” he said, “It’s yours and it’s the worst thing you can say for it.”

At night we camped in his Airstream trailer and he always tried to choose campgrounds where he could hear the sound of flowing water. He also loved the sound of an agitated surf or the struggle of an incoming tide as it surged against the wind – hardened shoulders of a Carolina sea island. He cooked quail and rice and gravy on a propane stove. At night, he talked about the books that had changed his life. He had ordered a case of wine, a Chianti, and he insisted that we drink from fine stemware and eat our meals on good china. Always, Norman pulled guard duty for the importance of civilization as a cure all for the encroachments of chaos into the human condition. Before he cut out the lights, he would play Mozart’s piano concertos as we read from books he collected in the small, but well-chosen library he had gathered for our sales trip into the American South.

It was somewhere outside of Spartanburg that Norman discovered that I had never read the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and he launched into an aggrieved monologue about my lack of preparation to embark on my life as a writer without a working knowledge of Tolkien’s great descent into the dense mythologies of his own imagination. Armed with a hard-earned ignorance that I tried to camouflage with bravado, I foolishly argued that Tolkien wrote books for children and a cult of frothy adults who never took the time to grow up.

With considerable skill, Norman eviscerated every argument I threw at his windshield as I tried to break the stranglehold of a writer I’d never read. He trounced me soundly as he introduced me to the many pleasures of middle earth and the immeasurable courage of hobbits. As he dragged me through the perils of Frodo’s quest, he spoke of the dark and brutal authority of the ring of power, and the gathering of the ceaseless evil of Mordor. I didn’t know a single thing Norman was telling me about and my embarrassment over being caught in such a boldfaced, unnecessary lie stung me deeply.

But I let Norman’s passion for Tolkien steady me. In an endangered land of dwarves and elves and wizards, I listened to the story of creation and the unseen world told once more by a writer with supernatural, unsurpassable gifts. I let the story possess me, take me prisoner, feed me with the endless abundance of its honeycombed depths. It is a story that rules me. In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of primacy of story. I’d rather warm my hands on a sun-lit ice-flow than trying to coax fire from the books they calve from glaciers.

Writers of the world, if you’ve got a story, I want to hear it. I promise it will follow me to my last breath. My soul will dance with pleasure, and it’ll change the quality of all my waking hours. You will hearten me and brace me up for the hard days as they enter my life on the prowl. I reach for story to save my own life. Always. It clears the way for me and makes me resistant to all the false promises signified by the ring of power. In every great story, I encounter a head-on collision with self and imagination.

Though Norman Berg was not a good storyteller, he carried the day with his ringing, high-strung defense of Tolkien’s works. Outside the hills surrounding Ashville, Norman told me that a good novelist wrote about the whole, known world each time a word was written on a blank page.

“You claim to be writing your first novel.” Norm said in a nice voice that let me know he didn’t believe me.

“I have,” I said, having written the first pages to the book that would become The Great Santini.

“Does it tell me everything I need to know about leading a good life.” He said, “And I mean everything.”

“No.”

“Then throw it away. It’s not worth writing.”

“I’m twenty-five years old, Norman.” I said, “I don’t know everything in the world yet.”

“That is good.” he said softening. “At least you know that much. Keep writing. If you’re lucky you’ll have one or two important things to say before you die.”

“Here is one of them.” I said. “Fuck you, Norman.”

His laughter took us all the way to the campsite outside of Ashville. I discovered early that he liked it when I fought back wherever his distemper turned surly or mean-spirited. He found my resistance to his manifesto on literature stimulating when he talked about books. Self-doubt was a country of origin to me, but Norman entertained no such uncertainties about himself. He believed that good writing contained the irrefutable answer to every question that could plague mankind’s toilsome journey beneath the stars. Before we went to sleep at night, he would walk me out to show me a full moon, its silver captured in the tossed slipstream of a mountain river. “Always know which phase the moon is,” he would say. “Keep up with the transit of planets. Know everything. Feel everything. That’s your job as a writer.”

“What’s your job, Norman?”

“To suffer. To feel everything in the world. But it dies inside me. I have no gift. I can’t write. That’s why I’m driving you crazy.”

Somewhere on that trip, Norman cut a deal with a bookseller somewhere in the mountains, maybe Virginia, maybe Tennessee. I was struck blind by impetuous desires of my own ego in those days, and the wonderfulness of my own self. Norman walked me into a small store on a hilly street and introduced me to an elderly man who seemed less than dazzled at the prospect of meeting me. In fact he was brusque, discourteous and I took an instant dislike to him. I could tell he wasn’t about to write to his mother about his good fortune in meeting me. Then Norman Berg tossed a surprise in my lap that still amuses me almost forty years after it happened. Now, I see its amusement, then I felt bushwhacked and sold down the river. Norman had sat down in the backroom of the bookstore to sell the fall list, when he tossed his notes and paperwork and catalogues toward me.

“You’ve seen me do this, Pat.” Norm said. “You sell the list. Let’s see if you’ve got what it takes to be a book rep. We know you can write a book, now let’s see if you can sell one.”

Though I protested such a slick betrayal, I was caught up in the imaginativeness of the set up and the boldness of the jest. Mimicking all that I had seen Norman do for a week, I launched into a sales spiel for the most important books on the list, the books the publisher had the most invested in and whose success the future of the company depended on for its financial health and survival. I made the case for the non-fiction books by Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger and wrote down my first two orders which were modest though respectable. Turning to the novels on the list, I delivered brief thumbnail sketches of the pleasures each book provided although I’ve a slender memory of not having read a single work of fiction that I was attempting to sell to the crusty man who cleared his throat in annoyance with every presentation I made.

Finally, I came to the existential moment when I was offering my own book The Water is Wide for this unpleasant man’s impartial judgment. I described a young man going to teach on a Carolina Sea Island back in 1969. It was the first year of teacher integration in South Carolina and this young man was the first white teacher who ever taught black children in that part of the world. The kids were in terrible trouble, but the man thought he could teach them and make a difference in their lives.

Even I could decipher the amateur quality of my presentation, but I got surprised in the middle of my delivery when the main said, “Who gives a damn?”

“Excuse me.” I said.

“I don’t care. What should my readers care what happened to a bunch of black kids on an island no one’s ever heard of?”

“The book is kind of well written.” I said.

“Kind of. It’s kind of well written. That’ll stir the soul of my readers. It sounds like a total bore. Pass.”

“Pass?” I said.

“Yeh. Pass. I don’t want to order a single copy of that book. It’s not for me. I can’t think of a soul who’d buy this book. “

“But there’s a publicity campaign that’s pretty good.”

“Pretty good. Not good enough. I pass. Let’s go on to the next book. “

I finished selling the list in a barely controlled rage and gave a shameful performance in presenting the backlist, which I always found impressive. By the time I left that bookstore, I was ready to whack the living daylights out of that smug hostile son of a bitch who had taken such grotesque pleasure in my humiliation.

“You set me up, Norman,” I said, over dinner that night.

He laughed and said, “I sure did. I thought you were too smart to fall for that little trick. I was wrong.”

“You knew he was going to pass on my book.”

“Yep, I set it all up. He didn’t own that store. He’s a retired rep. Did it as a favor to me.”

“What’s the point?”

“You’re the only writer in America I know of whose ever sold a list for his publishing company.” Norman said. “It makes you rare. Time will tell if it makes you exceptional.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Now you know how hard it is.” He said. “Reps are going into bookstores all over the country trying to sell your books. No one knows who you are. No one gives a shit. Your book depends on the reps falling in love with your book. They’ve got to fall in love with your language, your story – they’re selling the spirit that lives in your book. If it has a spirit.

“Why didn’t you get him to order at least one copy of my book?”

“Because then it wouldn’t have hurt so much,” Norman Berg said. “Hurt is a great teacher. Maybe the greatest of all.”

When Norman dropped me off at my house in Beaufort, he handed me a package roughly wrapped in butcher’s paper. I did not unwrap the gift until I sat at my writing desk the next morning. Inside, there was a boxed set of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. Norman had included a brief handwritten note that told me he treasured our time on the road together, that he thought I was on a quest to be a writer that mattered and that I must read and remember everything. He believed that the writers of the world were ring bearers who bore the weight of the world on their shoulders, but would only understand his meaning when the ring of power disturbed my art and rose up to trouble my quest.

Norman then revealed to me, he did not consider any writer educated until they had absorbed the radiant wisdom of The Lord of the Rings. For the next month, I joined the fellowship of souls who joined the Hobbit, Frodo, on his perilous journey into the dark lands of Mordor. I mark the time I spent reading those splendid books among the richest days of my life. The great books are like the elevation of the host to me, their presence transformed, their effect indelible and everlasting. Their job is to change you and everything about you. What is the loss of a job, the death of a friend or a bad review when you’ve followed Gandolf the Grey through the mines of Moria and the march of the Tree-folk on Isengard.

When Norman Berg came to Beaufort for the celebration of the publication of The Water is Wide, I walked him out of the second story verandah of the only house I’d ever written books in.

“Gandolf the Grey,” I said, raising a glass to him, “I finished the trilogy.”

“If you think I’m Gandolf the Grey, you got nothing out of the book.”

“You bought me the book.” I said. “You brought me news of the ring.”….

“What’ll you do with it?” he asked.

“Ask me on my deathbed.”

“I won’t be here.”

“I sure hope not.”

“I don’t think you’ll ever be a writer,” he said. “I don’t think you’ve got what it takes. “

“But I’ve made some great friends along the way.” I said. “Guys like you.”

He sniggered, but his laugh was as joyless as it was noiseless. His critical powers always overwhelmed his creative ones, and he writhed in his own awareness of this indisputable fact. As we rejoined the party downstairs, I watched as Norman erased himself as he entered into the company of friends and well-wishers. Later, I would learn that he never introduced himself to my wife or mother or my friends. Later, he claimed he loathed parties because it represented time stolen from his priest like engagement with the great literature of the world. In public, my impenitent good cheer can strike even my closet friends as a bit on the sunny side up spectrum of human behavior. Norman considered my affability as an incurable flaw of character that would prove fatal to my pretense of becoming an artist. Without saying goodbye, Norman Berg left town early the next morning.

A year later, I moved my family to Atlanta, Georgia as I continued to pursue a futile quest to discover a home place I could call my own. Since I was born in Atlanta, I thought I might stumble on some clues as to the mystery of my migratory origins. I rented a series of offices in the midtown area that failed to fire the imagination as I began to take a withering look at my brutalized childhood. The betrayal of my father was not an effortless production and I began a long quiet nervous breakdown as I described the beatings that provided the abysmal soundtrack of my life as a boy. At this critical juncture, Norman Berg invited me out to his farm that he called Sellanraa.

When I stepped out of the car that day, Norman and his wife, Julie, were working in their vegetable garden. A pack of birddogs bellowed from their unseen cages in the rear of the great, weathered barn. They lived on fifteen well-tended acres bordered by a forest of oaks and pines which gave them the illusion of having escaped the land rush that had consumed the Atlanta suburbs. Inside the house was a great room with a flagstone floor, a massive rock fireplace, and a library of five thousand books near the door to his own warren of offices. On this day, Norman removed a book from its shelf. Whenever he presented me a book, it had a ceremonious feel to it as though he was laying a sword on my shoulder inducting me into an ancient brotherhood.

The book was Growth of the Soil by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. The copy he gave me had once belonged to Norma M. Saylor who lived in Palmyra, New Jersey.

“It’s an essential book. A necessary one.” Norman Berg said in his throaty catechist voice. “It’s the most important book I’ve ever read. I named my farm Sellanna in honor of Isak, the man who builds his home and raises a family out of nothing.”

“I’ll read it.” I said.

“You don’t just read this book.” Norman said. “You must enter in. Live it. It contains the great truth.”

“Which is?”

“Everything of virtue springs from the soil. Civilization always comes along to ruin it. But you can always find the truth if it comes from the earth. “

“It sounds like the most boring book ever written.” I said.

“Read it. Then decide.” He walked me out of the house and led me across a broad greens wood that led to the original farmhouse—a simple, two bedroom house with books and paintings and a working kitchen. It had a fireplace and a cord of wood for burning. There was a writing desk with pans and ink and the yellow legal pads I liked to write on stacked in a neat pile.

“Julie and I would like to offer this as an office to complete your novel. We won’t get in your way.’

“You have to let me pay you some money.” I said, moved by the gesture.

“Complete your novel.” he said, “that will be payment enough.”

I read the book Growth of the Soil before I began the final sprint of my own novel. An anonymous man appearing in the wilderness and building a life out of nothing except his own strength and ingenuity was a sacred myth of origin to Norman Berg. It described an unattainable life for Norman, a misplaced horizon that no longer existed without compromise or adulteration. The book was dense with power and a sense of mystery that literature slings like pollen when some writers turn toward art. Kurt Hamsen rose out of the dark forests of snow haunted Norway the way J.R.R. Tolkien in his malice haunted journeys in Middle earth. Norman liked books that permitted no commerce with the one we were living in at the present time. At Sellaraa, his solitude began to make sense to me. He was engaged in a long, obstructionist quarrel with the world. He found most of modern life unbearable and the rest indefensible. It did not take me long to realize that Norman was trying to recruit me in some rearguard action during the long retreat from a sense of invisible order.

In the first month of my residency at Sellaraa, I gained control over the themes which would carry The Great Santini to its conclusion. Writing would always seem like a form of coalmining to me with its descent into the black hearts of mountains and the long journey back to the light where fires could flourish in honor of your patient, hardscrabble labors. I wrote myself into a fever pitch as I approached mania, then meltdown.

As I came toward the end of the book, I stayed at the farmhouse for weeks at a time. Each night, Norman would walk down to ask me for dinner. Julie was reading Walker Percy’s book Lancelot and she spoke about the book with affection and some delight. Norman gave a reader’s report on the books he was reading for the upcoming sales conference, including a book by Paul Theroux and one by a new writer Henry Bromell.

After dinner Julie went to bed and Norman and I sat in two enormous chairs next to his enormous stone fireplace in the vast sitting room. The books stared down on us like regiments of cashiered soldiers. As we sipped on glasses of wine, Norman asked me to read something from the novel, and I read a section I’d been working on that week about a little league coach of mine named Dave Murphy. After showing me great kindness and patience during a memorable summer, Dave died the following year of a terrible cancer. As I read that night, I thought it was the best piece of writing I had ever done in my life. I read it and I read it well. Wordless as usual, Norman stared at the fire and it was several moments before he spoke.

“You’re never going to be a great writer. Not even a good one. You can aspire to mediocrity. Nothing else.” he said to the flames.

“You’ve been clear about that.”

“But you’re going to have moments. Like that one. That was a moment.” he said.

“You liked it?”

“I didn’t say that. But I know a lighting strike when I hear it. I can only read. Never write.”

“Ever tried?”

“Of course. But I was born blind and deaf. This is not Sellarraa I’m living in. It’s a tomb and an iron lung.”

“Oh, Mr. Uplift enters the room again.”

“No, the truth teller. The man with nothing. “

I came to the last chapter of The Great Santini and I wrote it in one marathon sitting that took a full twenty four hours time of rough labor. Because he knew I had come to the end, Norman would tap on the back door with great discretion and I would find a hot meal and a book on the doorstep. He left me The Pisan Cantos by Ezra Pound, Deliverance by James Dickey, and Two Years before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana. When I finished killing my fictional father, I staggered down to the main house at Selleraa for a celebratory meal. He took me to the forest on his land and loaded a shotgun for me to hunt squirrels for dinner. The shotgun was beautifully made and had intricate carvings on its stock of scenes from The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. By then, Norman had told me the sad, desultory tale of his distant love affair with Ms. Rawlings. He admitted to being tyrannical and heartless about her own writing and that he nearly drove her crazy with his disapproval of her last novel, Sojourner, He had become a nightmare in her life and he now believed she could’ve written several more books if she’d never met him. As he cleaned the squirrels I had shot, he confided in me that Marjorie had been the great love of his life.

After we ate that night, Norman took a picture of me sitting in a chair in the kitchen of Sellaraa. It became the author photograph on the back of the book jacket of The Great Santini. Norman refused to take the credit for the photo, but I treasure it for what it had come to represent to me. When he died I delivered his eulogy at his memorial service. I held a copy of The Growth of Soil as I delivered the final words to this loneliest of men who became dizzy with his devotion to literature and writers. Though he could not banish that juiceless critic whose judgments were cutting and ruthless, he never uttered the word “pass” when my books came into the conversation. As I write this, I own the shotgun that Norman had made for Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. I don’t know where he is buried, but I hope it is somewhere in Georgia.