A Charmed Life As A Writer

A friend emailed me to ask if it were true that my novelist cousin used the famous and powerful Binky Urban as her literary agent, and I had to say yes, and what is more she once represented me on a book deal.  Wow! was the reply.  It made me think my career over, and I have to say, I've led a charmed life.  Nowadays writers outside of the academic market, i.e., university presses, struggle to find an agent to represent them, mailing their manuscripts  over and over again endlessly, facing a million rejections until they, if lucky, get a fit.  Way back when I thought to write a commercial book about the Homeric epics. I had taught the poems several times in humanities courses to college versions of the great unwashed, as I contemptuously like to refer to "le peuple," those who are not tuned into the literary and cultural currents of our day, and who look at me stupidly when I make what I think is a sparkling remark on what I have just noticed in the TLS, the LRB, the NYReview--the list is endless.  So I wrote up a specimen chapter based on my lecture notes and innocently mailed it off to Doubleday.  Innocently or mindlessly?  I knew that the publishing house had started a new series called Anchor Books, paperbacks for the literati and intelligentsia, and had the presumption to believe that someone in the office would open the package with my manuscript and read it.  Unsolicited.  Stupid of me perhaps, but this was 1964 and that's exactly what happened, and in time I received a reply from a young editor who took me.  I wrote the book, they published it; it stayed in print through several printings.  Then I wrote another book at their request on ancient Greek literature in general which was contracted to a friend of mine who died in a motorcycle accident.  It did well, eventually, even translated into Italian where I established some connections while there on sabbatical, and then it was  reprinted after some serious editing by a university press here.  Then John Gardener the novelist and critic wanted a book on Apollonius Rhodius for his literary series, and someone mentioned me, and he read my stuff or some of it, and I got the contract.  No sooner did I finish that than my student and friend who had become the publisher of a very large new commercial press asked me to write an ironic pseudo biography of Odysseus which was lots of fun.  For this high powered enterprise my friend insisted that I find an agent to negotiate the contract and I, thinking of my cousin, suggested Binky Urban. I was that naive; it was like a novitiate suggesting the Pope officiate at his ordination.  But she accepted, and I am sure got me much more money than the publishing anticipated for this item.  There were various other books along the way all of them at the suggestion of the press involved, all culminating in the publication of a memoir which was picked up by the supremely elegant Farrar, Straus, and  Giroux because its editor and publisher had it brought to his attention twice in a decade at a cocktail party and at a dinner party.  The decade interval at which he first rejected it and then had second thoughts gave me the chance to rethink it and add another chapter of later events.  Everything turned out just hunky dory.  Amazing.