The Imprint of Alan Swallow: Quality Publishing in the West

8 Vardis

123 8 Vardis alan Swallow rejected the first manuscript Vardis Fisher offered him, without even seeing it. Meeting Fisher for the first time at a University of Denver writers’ conference, he told him he could accept no prose books of any length as long as he was limited to doing his own printing.1 Fisher was to become Alan’s best friend among all his authors. They disagreed over matters large and small, but were bound together in part by childhoods spent in barren patches of western land and by struggles to overcome resulting shyness and perhaps well-concealed feelings of inferiority. “You have been a wonderful haven to me, dear friend and brother,” Vardis once told Alan.2 “As Fisher says, we are brothers,” Swallow said.3 According to one account, vigorously disputed by Fisher’s wife, Opal, transactions between the two were often informal and not put in writing.4 Vardis Fisher was a cantankerous, petulant, and prejudiced individual who wrote off liquor as a business expense and often talked of ending his life as a suicide bomber who would kill only himself.5 He was a heretical writer who said that such Christian doctrines as original sin “are a hospital, and the only people there are sick people who 124 | The Impr int of A lan Swallow don’t want to get well.”6 A Northern Idaho librarian told him “that if she kept on reading my books she would go straight to hell.” Another librarian publicly burned some of his volumes.7 During the Depression, Fisher battled bureaucracy and political censorship to produce almost single-handedly an Idaho Guide that was acclaimed as one of the outstanding accomplishments of the WPA Writers Project.8 In personal appearance, he struck one young writer as “rather the romanticist’s ideal of what a novelist should look like 27. NovelistVardis Fisher was probably Alan Swallow ’s best friend among his writers.“We are brothers ,” he once told Fisher. In later years Fisher was a sharp critic of some aspects of Swallow’s career. Grant Fisher and Special Collections Department, Boise State University Library. Vardis | 125 and be: rugged appearance, long head, prominent forehead under thinning hair, alert brown eyes, and prominent nose and chin,—this above wrestler’s shoulders and arms, long tapering fingers and big feet.”9 When Fisher’s works made their first appearance, he was compared with such literary lights as Thomas Hardy, Theodore Dreiser, and Thomas Wolfe. In his depiction of the Snake River country where he grew up, calling it the Antelope Hills, he was said to have equaled Hardy’s Wessex or William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.10 As time went on, his reputation so faded that he estimated Swallow was selling forty or fewer copies of any of his titles in a year and if he withdrew them, “I don’t think any publisher would want me.”11 After the author’s twelve-volume Testament of Man series was completed, Swallow told him, “I think this series must surely be counted one of the major literary projects of our time, perhaps of all time.” When the interview was reprinted seven years later, the hyperbolic statement was dropped.12 Alan seems to have been alternately enthusiastic and wary about the mammoth project. He told Fisher that the reception of the series was “going to get tough,” particularly as it approached “the precious Christian era.” Nevertheless, he said, “perhaps I ought to see what I could do about it.”13 Fisher’s agent thought Harcourt Brace would make an offer, and the author was torn between the advantages of a big publisher and his loyalty to Swallow. In the end, Harcourt said no, and Alan told him, “We’re in this together.” Swallow would be the publisher of the Testament series, and Alan believed it would do well.14 Like other eastern 126 | The Impr int of A lan Swallow publishers, Harcourt had balked at, among other things, the elaborate notes that Fisher appended. Alan agreed to them after Vardis argued that the notes were necessary to show that the works were based on scholarship.15 Fisher and his wife, Opal, talked Swallow’s offer over while getting “pleasantly stinking,” and decided, “It will be a pleasure for you and for us. We like the idea.”16 When Swallow proposed to send out advertising under a special 1½-cent rate, Fisher replied...