10 Buried Alive
2PEOPLE FAMILIAR WITH the number of years Bucky and I had been working together—friends, cousins, creditors, in-laws—would often ask me…What does Macmillan think of your book? They envision publishers, unlike banks or utilities, in highly personal terms. They presume publishers to be rich and cozy, half Dutch Uncle, half Mother Earth. I found it difficult to explain that, though I had a lot of good friends at our publishers, to ask how Macmillan feels about Synergetics was rather like asking A &P how they feel about lamb chops.
3 I have an imaginary picture of a publishing house as a loose association of people, many of whom have just come from, or are planning to depart for, other publishing houses. The editors are committed chiefly to their overlapping responsibilities for books in progress. The business people are on the top floor, and they make all the decisions about book after book and writer after writer: whether to publish, size of advance, price, promotion, when to let a title go out of print—everything. Most business decisions are made on projections of numbers, and since books cannot be easily quantified (except as accessories after the fact), publishing is inherently a very speculative business. Thus the businessmen become dependent on the persuasion, track record, and artfulness of the people they employ as editors.
4 Editors are artistic and sensitive like writers, but they understand business—which writers don’t. The editors are employees only in the sense that they can be fired. (Whom did Brecht have in mind when he asked: Why murder a man when you can employ him?) I have the impression that editors function as free-lancers in a bullpen—like people on the trading floor of Lloyds of London or the New York Stock Exchange—making book, with their own market sense but with their boss’ money. Wrapping up a package.
5 Editors seem to have to cope with as much in-house chaos as out-house chaos. At least this picture explains my experience that those in a publishing house best able to understand a writer’s problems are those usually least able to do anything about them. (A situation of that kind could hardly be accidental.) And when you do get into your editor’s office, you find there are never any tables and there is no place to put any of your papers down. You have to work out of your lap, which is even worse because the chairs are so low.
6 Just before publication of our book, the situation was as awkward and precarious for Macmillan as it was for Fuller—though we all seemed oblivious—at that point of no return after fulfillment of the contract and the exchange of the bride price. It was too late for any thoughts of incompatibility or antipathy. For Bucky and me, Macmillan was the ultimate nexus, the only possible link where his design-scientist’s thoughts could reach print in the industrialized capitalism of a mass society; there was no other kind of patron available. Only in retrospect is it clear that there was no way the gears could be expected to mesh smoothly. How could a committee on tenure generously receive a Pythagoras? What use could a Boeing technical task force make of a Copernicus? How does Buckminster Fuller shape up on the fall list? For both parties the shock ahead was mutual, inevitable, and totally unexpected.
7 Once the galleys were locked up and the book was sent off to the printers, it would have been nice to think that most of our troubles were over Synergetics. was just the kind of work that is almost impossible to appraise from the manuscript: the span of attention demanded by its endless intellectual labyrinths, the complex relationship of text and illustration, the exotic scope and terminology, the sheer bulk, all made it very difficult for the publisher to assay his property. The book opens with an exhortation to the reader to dare to be naive…but it is quite another matter to expect a publisher to observe the same injunction. At this period of the book’s production one of their officers assured me that they knew Synergetics was an important book because they had paid so much for it: top floor and bottom line were crossing fingers in the increasing absence of communication with editorial reality.
8 So it must have been solely on the basis of Buckminster Fuller’s reputation and the knowledge that this was his most ambitious work that the corporate genie decreed that in the spring of 1974 Macmillan would herald Synergetics as the chief feature of their fall list, committing the entire front cover and a full page of copy…and this to a book that virtually no one but Fuller, me, and the copy editors had ever read! (And how could they? …a book of which most reviewers confess that they have read only a fraction.)
9 The price had gone up from a scheduled $12.50 to $15.00. Thirty-two pages of color were promised. Publication would be in October. The successful launching of the book seemed assured. Fuller’s total rewriting at white heat had occasioned only a moderate delay in production, and by April the first bound galleys were finally available.
10 For some reason the publishing industry finds it cheaper to send the galleys to Barnstable on Cape Cod to be cut and glued into ‘‘perfect’’ bindings than to try to do the same thing at the compositors or in Manhattan. Not until some dozens of these bound galleys had come down from Cape Cod did Macmillan have a realistic opportunity to inspect the merchandise, to see what kind of a product they had on their hands. And the bound galleys were particularly vulnerable as they contained no suggestion of the book’s essential artwork—not even the black-and-white line drawings.
11 As these galleys were routed in-house throughout Macmillan—sales, editorial, legal, promotion—they had to emerge as an accident looking for someplace to happen. Fuller’s confrontation with the unbound galleys had provoked a crisis of composition and crisis of production, but the confrontation of the bound galleys with the real world of management and marketing resulted in catastrophe. A secretary in the publicity department opened the pages to a particularly abstruse passage and complained to her boss that she could understand none of it. The book was instantly judged as totally incomprehensible. Who could possibly understand this kind of talk Synergetics? was manifestly a disaster, quite unsuitable for distribution as a trade book in retail stores.
12 The feeling of shock was not unreasonable, and it took little time for warning lights to flash throughout the house that they had a costly dud on their hands. How could the hard-nosed professionals of Third Avenue have been so taken in by the blandishments of Fuller, strumming his enigmatic refrains as the wandering minstrel of quantum mechanics? …As our book took on wings, I had seen my role as that of a stable boy to Pegasus, perhaps, but not as Epios carving the wooden horse of Troy.
13 All of this happened at a time when Macmillan had quite enough other problems on their hands. They were in the throes of a drastic reorganization of management and were being harassed with frontpage publicity stemming from deep embroilment in a labor dispute caused by militant union attempts to organize the employees. It was a period when no one’s head was on too securely and no one wanted to lose his in championing a book as crazy as Synergetics. The officer who had signed our renewed contract was the first to waver from the cause. Following the panic in publicity, the people newly in charge at the trade department disclaimed responsibility and urged dropping the book altogether.
14 In the summer of 1974 Synergetics, was taken out of production. The book was removed from the fall list (but it was too late to change the cover). The paper allotment was canceled. The printing schedule was scrapped. It was not even tentatively scheduled for the spring list. The computer read-outs of titles in production had relegated it to a literary limbo. And the only way we sensed all this was because no one would answer the telephone. For Bucky and me it was like being buried alive.
15 Our editor, Bruce Carrick, tried vainly—and charitably—to conceal from us the extent of the disaster. He later confessed to being guided by his own dictum that depressed editors are bad enough but depressed authors are worse. In May, we had gotten our first warning signal that all was not serene at the 866 Third Avenue headquarters when Carrick confided that his superiors were inclined to defer publication in order to ‘‘give the reviewers more time.’’ A month later they said they were considering reprocessing the book as a college textbook. Not until Carrick left Macmillan, in October, did we realize the full extent of the damage. He had kept up a bold front until the last because he felt the arguments against the book had become emotional and that the economics of the situation would argue for eventual publication—if only to cut losses. He was an almost incurable optimist and felt that the company had too much of a financial stake in the project to abandon publication when the chips were down. He had an enthusiastic sense of the market for Fuller’s many books, but he was unsuccessful in translating this into in-house support for the project.
16 During this difficult period of labor disputes and internal administrative turmoil, people were being fired—and rehired—right and left, and it was not hard to get a fairly good picture of the fate of our book from the growing pool of disaffected employees. At times, during that awful summer, it seemed that our only recourse might be litigation over performance on the contract; but none of us wanted to go to court and if we had done that, the book might never have come out.
17 In retrospect it is the comic, even ludicrous, elements of the picture that survive. A contest of Buckminster Fuller vs. any institution is usually at least an even match; his uncompromising strategy of the individual has a way of winning out and it is usually the institution that ends up in need of consolation and first aid. (Would anyone of sound mind really relish being an editor or literary agent introducing to the real world of New York the kind of uncompromising temperament and original genius that has been compared to Leonardo and Darwin?) But retrospection was in short supply that summer and room for introspection was ample. My moustache went from gray to white and I shaved it. I had to virtually forego any form of literary collaboration with Bucky for the better part of a year. We found we couldn’t work together on anything without getting into the geometry…and we couldn’t get into any new geometry without his insistence that it should be incorporated in the not-yet-printed book. I knew that whatever prospects the book had would not be enhanced by our trying to add yet more material at 59 minutes past the eleventh hour. So the suspended animation of production entailed a mindless moratorium on collaboration.
18 How did the book arouse such violent emotions before it was even in print? Feelings ran high; it was a difficult and vulnerable book: 876 pages; 150 illustrations; dozens of tables, charts, and diagrams; with a deliberately naive and thorny text combining a homemade psychology and a do-it-yourself crystallography. One did not have to be a cynic or a huckster to have reasonable doubts about the prospects of this kind of work in the marketplace. I had told Nancy Kahane in Macmillan publicity that the book was certain to provoke hostile reviews; I was—perhaps recklessly—trying to suggest that its controversial character might help it gain recognition. As it turned out, there were very few hostile notices, perhaps because reviewers sensibly preferred not to tangle with a text they could not master. Most of the first reviewers treated the book as a gorgeous intellectual toy. It was a book in which everything—faults and possible virtues—became larger than life. I speculated that perhaps we had made a mistake to try to bring it out as a trade book; maybe we would have been better off with a technical or specialty publisher—but there the requisite daring would have been even harder to find.
19 Just as Fuller is hard to describe Synergetics, is hard to describe. Just what kind of a book is it Synergetics? is a book without genre. The Library of Congress catalogs it succinctly under ‘‘1. System theory. 2. Thought and thinking. 3. Mathematics—Philosophy.’’ The dilemma of the book is that it attempts
2021RBF: It wasn’t an attempt. It was spontaneous.
22 to combine science and poetry and philosophy in a single work and in the very act of combining three such elements—normally considered so disparate in our culture—it is impossible to appeal to any one of the disciplines without risk of grave offense to the other two.
23 I know that the whole structure of Fuller’s cosmos is a poetic one of vast harmony and subtlety. If the book is nothing else, it is one of the most complex literary and pattern metaphors of the age. It is a rare and wonderful vision of a geometry of conceptuality: how to start from a new place—independent of Euclid, Descartes, and Leibniz, independent of size, independent of time. In this book, Fuller is highly dogmatic, but never mystical; it is a business of stark homage to the tetrahedron.
2425RBF: I am not in homage to anything; certainly not the tetrahedron as an object, merely as the minimum structural system in Universe.
26 The book expresses a kind of geometry and a method of epistemology that is probably original in our civilization; if that is so, its very format means that academic recognition will be hard to come by. What I am trying to say is that, while Macmillan did us wrong, they were not without provocation.
27 Recapitulating our succession of editors over more than a decade at Macmillan is like reciting begats from the Book of Numbers: Peter Ritner, Robert Market Samuel Stewart, Ray Roberts, Bruce Carrick, Bernard Hassan, and Michael Denneny. Synergetics became an occupational hazard as it gained momentum. Even Ken Shaw, our copy editor, lost his job along with Carrick in the termination that wiped out a third of their trade editors. Throughout the fall of 1974—after Carrick was sacked—we had no editor at all. No copy editor either. There was no continuity. Even the secretaries and receptionists were always new faces. (I just thought this was bad for me, not realizing it must have been worse for Macmillan.)
28 By this time, only by my persistent nosiness, sneaking past the Pinkerton guards in the midst of the strike, could I get some vague notion of what was going on. By poking around at lunchtime one day in late November, I discovered that the Synergetics ‘‘blues,’’ which had lain idle since April, were gradually being reprocessed. I had no one to communicate with, but some obscure imperative seemed to be at work. Gerry Dickler wrote Macmillan a charming letter inquiring whether the book was to be left ‘‘to drift for itself.’’ I finally caught up with the harassed and hard-pressed chief copy editor and chief of production. From them I learned only that all decisions about Synergetics were being made on the invisible tenth floor where the top executives were. (Eventually, more than a year later, I was to hear that it was Macmillan’s board chairman who broke the impasse on the fifth floor and decreed that the publication of the book should proceed. Which, I suppose, just shows that editors don’t have all the fun.)
29 The book had been designed with 32 pages of beautiful color drawings—mostly in Fuller’s hand—with intricate color coding for explication of the text. I learned indirectly that they were considering running these illustrations in black and white to reduce costs, although there was no way that the significance of each illustration could be preserved without the specific color legend to explain it. The prospect of dropping the color was a particular torment for Bucky and prompted his urgent—but in the end futile—intervention with the top management. It had been calculated that preserving the color plates would add about 45 cents in production costs to each volume. The final decision was to guarantee the unit profit margin by dropping the color and raising the retail price to $25.1 I was asked to go through the ‘‘blues’’ and delete all of the many text references to the color section and substitute references to what had been lamely rechristened the ‘‘drawings section.’’ The request struck me as macabre, but there was no one else left in the company familiar enough with the book to make the changes. I could not bear to lull the reader into thinking the pictures were supposed to make sense in black and white, so I let a few color references survive to salve our conscience.
31 By February the bound books started coming in from Binghamton and Michael Denneny rushed the first copy to Fuller in Philadelphia. It was a Sunday afternoon, and Bucky was in his 31st-floor apartment in I. M. Pei’s Society Hill Towers with Isamu Noguchi and Shoji Sadao, when the doorman brought up the special delivery parcel wrapped in brown paper. Bucky had to stop the doorman then and there to tell him about that precious cargo, the book he had been working on all his life. For ten minutes he recapitulated for the astonished doorman how he had first gotten the idea for the book when he was in the Navy, how he had worked with students making the models at so many universities, and the significance of his discoveries for humanity. Then he tipped the doorman ten dollars.
32 Once Macmillan had remustered its mysterious resolve, they came through handsomely. Synergetics was published on 3 April 1975 with a first printing of 15,000 copies. The salesmen had long awaited this title and Denneny had the wit to tell them what the book was about in one word: he said it was a book about the universe.2
33 Macmillan ran generous advertisements in the major city newspapers. (No one having caught a cosmic fish should be expected to carry it home through an alley.) The president of Macmillan gave a formal press luncheon attended by Raymond Hagel, the Chairman of the Board, and several other corporate officers, for Anne and Bucky and Arthur Loeb and me. Bucky got along famously with their Eastern Division sales manager Frank McCormick, who threw a party for him in Chicago. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal featured the book in lengthy reviews with high praise. Macmillan did a great job of getting the book into large and small bookstores all over the country. By fall a second printing of 5,000 copies was ordered, and a retail value of half a million dollars was in print. It took some waiting, but it was quite a package when it finally got out.
45 The following year on 7 October 1976, Macmillan brought out And it came to pass--not to stay handsome edition of Fuller’s accumulated blank verse. As Fuller and I continue to collaborate on the amplification and refinement of his synergetic geometry, we have accumulated over 500 manuscript pages of difficult textual and graphic material comprising Synergetics 2—tentatively scheduled for publication as Synergetics Harvest. And in the editing of Cosmic fishing: an account of writing Synergetics with Buckminster Fuller, Macmillan has tolerated whatever comments I have wanted to make and granted me generous support and encouragement: their willingness to print my unvarnished remarks accords them the last word which is their due.