Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux by Boris Kachka (review)

The title of Boris Kachka’s history of the book-publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux may be misleading and disappoint readers who aren’t reflexively turned on by the minutiae of warehousing decisions, Union Square culinary fads, transatlantic media mergers, and such soap opera staples as liaisons between charismatic bosses and indispensable secretaries. Despite Kachka’s title, FSG probably achieved its legendary status thanks more to its unflagging six-decade commitment to “traditional values” rather than for its glamour, hipness, or “hotness.” Whatever it was that inspired FSG founder, Roger Straus, Jr., the protagonist—arguably the hero—of Hothouse to enlist FSG as an agent of Cold War propaganda (177-78) reflects what a fundamentally conservative operation he ran.

Readers looking for the most provocative outré publishing house of the FSG era would do better to study its younger, lower Manhattan neighbor, Grove Press/Evergreen. Its equally storied founder, Barney Rosset, turned his company into the bastion of “vulgar modernism” depicted in Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde, Loren Glass’s recent chronicle of Grove’s rise and fall. The motto Kachka ascribes to FSG, “Quality is commercial” (339), would have struck the Grove/Evergreen crowd as more Madison Avenue than St. Marks Place. And however much we honor such FSG greats as Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Robert Lowell not even their most fervent partisans would call their writing hot. These writers’ allegiance to FSG rested on their relationship to Robert Giroux, Straus’ junior partner, whom Kachka shows to have exerted a stabilizing influence on the company as the editorial linchpin and intellectual conscience of FSG during its heyday. Kachka illustrates the reach and impact of Giroux’s gentlemanly bookishness, recalling how T.S Eliot, then at the height of influence as the Anglophone world’s most renowned poet, sought out the much younger Giroux’s counsel (85) and how the equally bookish but legendarily ungentlemanly poet John Berryman, came to depend on Giroux for emotional sustenance (142).

Notwithstanding this conservatism, FSG--like Evergreen--contributed immeasurably to the intellectual ferment of its era, to the Beat movement, the ethnicization of American writing, the sixties counterculture, and the growing familiarity among American readers with writers from abroad, including Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Seamus Heaney, and Alberto Moravia. Kachka provides an informative and often illuminating account of this intellectual climate, which readers of this journal will recognize as the milieu in which Philip Roth came of age as a writer. At its epicenter raged the midcentury Manhattan cultural turbulence that Roth evokes in Sabbath’s Theater (1995) and The Human Stain (2000), which Roth himself in turn helped roil while becoming one of the stars of America’s literary firmament during the 1960s and 1970s. In Straus’ Manhattan the importance of any new book depended on whether its publisher could get the eminence grise of New York letters, Edmund Wilson, to mention the title at a cocktail party (313).

By the end of the FSG saga after its absorption into the global “publishing group” Holtzbrinck, Edmund Wilson had come to be eclipsed by Oprah Winfrey. Kachka illuminates how Winfrey’s book-club endorsement became the gold standard among American publishers by devoting the penultimate chapter of Hothouse to the 2001 contretemps between Winfrey and FSG novelist Jonathan Franzen. Their feud, which lasted a decade, began when Winfrey chose Franzen’s novel The Corrections (2001) as a book-club pick and invited him to appear on her TV show. When Franzen disparaged Winfrey’s literary sensibility as “schmaltzy” and “one-dimensional,” she immediately rescinded this invitation.

Kachka’s story begins much earlier, in Edith Wharton’s New York, in a world of Guggenheims and Strauses, hochgeboren scions of earlier arriving German-American Jews whom Stephen Birmingham immortalized...