MOBY DICK IN MANHATTAN

Can an acclaimed writer devote himself purely to his work and still make money?
James Wilcox tried, and he's paying a high price for the literary life.

BY JAMES B. STEWART  (New Yorker magazine, July 4, 1994 issue)

When James Wilcox is working at the St. Francis Xavier Welcome Table,
as the church's Sixteenth Street soup kitchen is called, on the first
and second Sunday of every month, it's hard to tell he's an acclaimed
novelist. It took some of his fellow-volunteers years to figure it
out.

None of them had read "Modern Baptists," his first novel, published in
1983, which was hailed in a Times Book Revievu frontpage piece by Anne
Tyler as "startlingly alive, exuberantly overcrowded." Nor were they
familiar with its five siblings, three of them set in the fictional
Tula Springs, Louisiana, which has been compared by more than one
critic to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.

Wilcox himself was much too shy to tell them about any of this. He
looks younger than his age, which is forty-five, and has a slightly
ruddy complexion,medium build, and sandy hair. Though he's
nice-looking, he agonizes over his author photographs and didn't want
one on his last book. Yale-educated, he speaks with no trace of a
regional accent. His Southern roots are evident only in the elaborate
courtesy with which he waits on the soup kitchen's "guests," as he
unfailingly calls them when he is dispensing juice and coffee. He
betrays little reaction even when something really grabs his
attention, like the saga of a woman who was plagued by the stench from
a neighbor who kept twentytwo cats in her Murray Hill onebedroom
apartment.

"For years, I never knew what Jim did," I was told by George
Deshensky, a lawyer who is one of the directors of the soup kitchen.
"Then, one day, someone said, 'He's a published author.' So we'd
introduce him that way. We didn't know what he published or where."
Deshensky began relying on Wilcox as a "calming influence" when
altercations threatened to break out in the line--something that
happened with some regularity. Since then, during the eight years that
Wilcox has been working at the soup kitchen, he and Deshensky have
become close friends and Deshensky has read his books. Still,
Deshensky was surprised when, after he complimented Wilcox on the
empathy he shows for the soup kitchen's impoverished patrons, Wilcox
replied, "I'm only a check or two from being in the line myself."
There have always been struggling novelists, of course, as well as a
handful of best-selling, highly publicized multimillionaires. But in
the past twelve years James Wilcox has published six novels to rave
reviews. While his books are classified as "literary fiction" by the
publishing industry, they aren't inaccessible or highbrow. He has been
described as a "comic genius" (Vogue), "a master" (Kirkus Reviews), "a
natural.... One of the most promising fiction writers on the national
scene" (Los Angeles Times), "among the classic American humorists"
(Newsday), and "Dickensian in [his] wealth of eccentric characters"
(New York Times).  He has a high-powered agent, Amanda (Binky) Urban,
of International Creative Management, who has consistently got him
advances that were larger than could be justified strictly on the
basis of the number of his books sold. In other words, among novelists
Wilcox counts himself one of the lucky ones. Even so, the current
state of publishing has consigned him to a life of nearpoverty.

At my insistence, Wilcox, who is single and lives alone, showed me his
tax returns for the past ten years. His best year was 1988, when he
had a gross income of $48,600 before agent commissions (of ten per
cent) and expenses. He now remembers that year as an aberration--a
time when he could eat out occasionally, and even take a cab. And
since that time, as the market for tradepaperback fiction has shrunk
and authors' advances have declined, his income has dropped
accordingly. In 1992, he earned twenty-five thousand dollars. Last
year, it was fourteen thousand dollars. The advance for his current
novel was ten thousand dollars; in a concession, his publisher gave
him two-thirds up front, rather than the customary half. When I
visited him recently, he had just finished the last of three meals
he'd extracted from eighteen pieces of chicken he bought at Key Food
for three dollars and forty cents.

	Nor is Wilcox's plight confined to making ends meet.
HarperCollins, which published his last five books, didn't exercise
its option for his current project. Only Hyperion, the Disney
publishing subsidiary, showed any interest in the manuscript, and then
mostly because Rick Kot, the editor who championed Wilcox at Harper,
had recently moved to Hyperion. Hyperion is a smaller house, less able
than HarperCollins to indulge a distinguished but unprofitable author.
In Wilcox, commerce and art are now at a standoff, with Wilcox's
future as a novelist at stake. At a time when some unpublished first
novelists are igniting bidding wars and hauling down advances of half
a million dollars, "we were lucky to get ten thousand dollars," Urban
says of Wilcox's current contract. "This book is absolutely critical.
Something has to happen."

LIKE Deshensky, I'm a friend of Jim's, who, before I began this story,
had no idea of his dire financial plight. I met him a little more than
a year ago, at a dinner party given by Urban to celebrate his latest
novel, "Guest of a Sinner." Urban is my agent, too, but I hadn't
realized that she represented Jim until I spotted a copy of"Sort of
Rich," his fourth book, one day on her bookshelf and, because I was
already a Wilcox fan, asked her to introduce me.

"Sort of Rich" is one of my favorite books. I bought it after reading
a Times review, found something to think about on almost every page
("The twenty-four chicks Mrs. Dambar had purchased last week had
dwindled to three as a result of an unpleasant disease and six or so
getting lost on a walk she had taken them on to strengthen their leg
muscles"), and returned to the bookstore a week later to buy another
copy, as a gift. It was no longer in stock and wasn't being
reordered--a situation that may help explain why it ultimately sold
just forty-seven hundred copies in hardcover.  Jim himself, I must
confess, made less of an impression on me at Urban's dinner. Besides
being overshadowed that night by last year's playoff between the
Knicks and the Bulls, he was char acteristically shy. We barely spoke.
Af terward, though, he phoned and re minded me that we had actually
met at a party five years before. He even remembered what we had
discussed--piano playing.

	Since then, we've met from time to time to play piano duets.
Jim could have been a professional musician, and almost was, on both
the cello and the piano. In our duets, he generally plays the more
difficult "primo" parts, and, although he always maintains that he
doesn't want to perform, we've given three small recitals this year.
We've even joked about taking our act to the American Booksellers
Association annual meeting: anything to ingratiate ourselves
with--or, at least, make an impression on-- booksellers. In the
course of our practice sessions, I began to suspect thatJim wasn't
exactly flush. He mentioned that he couldn't afford to have his piano
tuned, and that, in any event, it was on loan to a friend, since he
couldn't fit it into his studio apartment. Otherwise, I didn't think
much about his finances; and, given Jim's nature, they are not a topic
he'd ever mention. We'd sometimes eat out after our sessions, usually
in modest restaurants, but once at a place that must have run forty
dollars a person. Only now do I realize how that must have shattered
his budget, or that he would often walk the sixty-six blocks between
his apartment and mine to save the fare.

Wilcox's first break as a writer came at Yale, when he submitted a
short story to Robert Penn Warren, then on the Yale faculty, and was
one of twelve students admitted to his fiction seminar. Like Warren,
Wilcox hails from the South. He grew up in Hammond, Louisiana, a town
of fifteen thousand, not far from Baton Rouge, where his father, James
H. Wilcox, plays the French horn and headed the Music Department of
Southeastern Louisiana University before he retired. At Yale, Wilcox
had dabbled in theatre, at one point dancing in the aisle clad only in
a fur loincloth, in an avant-garde production of Ionesco's
"Rhinoceros." But Warren's book "Understanding Fiction" has been an
enduring influence on Wilcox's work. He wrote several short stories
for Warren's seminar and a novel as a senior thesis. Though he was
awarded honors for his effort, he was disappointed that Warren showed
none of his work to his agent. But Warren did recommend Wilcox to
Albert Erskine, a legendary editor at Random House, who was looking
for a new assistant.

Wilcox arrived for his job interview neatly dressed and well
groomed--an anomaly in 1971, when shoulder-length hair and T-shirts
were the norm at Yale. Erskine, a Southerner, who had also lived in
Baton Rouge, later told Wilcox he had got the job because he was the
only applicant with the manners to remain standing until he was
invited to sit. Erskine had worked with William Faulkner and John
O'Hara. He was credited with discovering Malcolm Lowry and Eudora
Welty. He edited James Michener. "It made me tremble that he'd known
Faulkner," Wilcox says. He was hired, at a yearly salary of
seventyfive hundred dollars.

Wilcox was plunged into the world of high-end trade publishing,
writing flap copy and doing line editing, and he was gradually allowed
to offer more substantive criticism. James Michener, after receiving
editorial comments from Wilcox on the manuscript of his best-selling
novel "Centennial," sent Wilcox a letter telling him to call his
travel agent. He invited Wilcox to go anywhere in Europe at Michener's
expense; Wilcox chose Paris, and spent ten days there in 1974. At the
other end of the publishing-income scale, Wilcox worked on novels by
Cormac McCarthy, which sold only modestly. Even Erskine, Wilcox
learned, could be taken to task for literary fiction that didn't sell.
But Erskine stubbornly backed writers he believed in, and his stature
enabled him to get away with it.

The job gave Wilcox plenty of insight into what worked and what
didn't, in both the literary and the commercial sense. Much of his
effort, like his editing of "The Save Your Life Diet," which became a
best-seller, was hardly destined for literary seminars. He advanced
from editorial assistant to associate editor at Random House, and in
1977 he moved to Doubleday as an associate editor. That meant being
caught up in the swirl of agent lunches, book parties, and dealmaking,
and also meant rising at fivethirty to read manuscripts. "It was
incredibly demanding. I had no time to write," he says. His life was
at least superficially glamorous. Through Random House, he had become
friends with the dashing photographer, author, and Africa enthusiast
Peter Beard and was invited for a pair of weekends at Beard's house in
Montauk, where he and Beard discussed Conrad and Faulkner, and he
found himself mingling with celebrities. He met Catherine Deneuve,
Terry Southern, Margaux Hemingway; he had dinner at Mick Jagger's, he
came to know Andy Warhol, and Warhol's agent, Roz Cole, agreed to
represent Wilcox.

In 1978, at the age of twentynine, Wilcox felt that time was running
out. At Random House, Toni Morrison had had the office across the
hall. She'd already written two novels, and she'd encouraged Wilcox to
write. At Doubleday, he was further bolstered by Jacqueline Kennedy
Onassis, who also encouraged him to try writing. Though he was now
making eighteen thousand dollars a year, he had no savings. He had
published none of his own writing. But he knew he had to devote
himself to writing full time; his efforts during nights and weekends
had been both draining and unsuccessful. It took him a year to muster
the courage to leave Doubleday. The first time he approached the
office of the editorinchief, he was too nervous to go in. He circled
in the hallway, mustered his courage one more time, and came back. "I
couldn't go through life wondering if I could write something," he
says.

In the disciplined and methodical way that is characteristic of him,
Wilcox addressed himself to reducing his living expenses. He had found
a twelve-bytwenty-foot studio apartment on East Twenty-fourth Street
for a hundred and ninety dollars a month. It was a fourthfloor walkup
and was lighted only with a bare fluorescent fixture, but the building
was clean and comparatively quiet. Just then, too, he was lucky enough
to sell a treatment for a screenplay he'd collaborated on with a
friend from Yale. That brought in ten thousand dollars, less
commissions, when it was optioned by Columbia Pictures. (It was never
produced.) The money sustained him for a year.

Wilcox wrote one short story after another. He sent his manuscripts to
The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Redbook, and they were
rejected everywhere. He began submitting them to smaller, less
well-known outlets. "All I got was rejections," he says. When one
story had made the rounds and come back, he sent off another. His
money was running out. In 1980, he started typing address labels for a
lawyer. He'd spread them out on his apartment floor, then organize
them by Zip Code. He could tell that that upset his mother--the
thought of her Yale-educated son on hands and knees fiddling with
address labels.

He sent seven stories to The New Yorker, and all of them were
rejected, but he was heartened by correspondence with one of its
editors. His first letter from the editor, which accompanied the first
rejection, was "an encouraging rejection," Wilcox says. "It was a
thrill to get a real, typewritten letter from The New Yorker." In
response to the second story, the editor wrote at greater length,
offering criticism of the work. He also commented on each of the five
ensuing submissions. Finally, after a year, the editor called Wilcox
to say he was accepting a story, and the magazine would pay twentytwo
hundred dollars. It seemed a fortune to Wilcox.

"Mr. Ray" appeared in the January 26, 1981, issue. "The old woman had
worked hard on the 'No Smoking' sign, embellishing the stark black
letters with ivy and birds and a dog she forgot to put the tail on,"
it began. Being published in The New Yorker was a milestone for
Wilcox--an affirmation, of sorts-- and he happily sent a copy of the
magazine home to his parents. [ But the piece didn't exactly cause a
stir in Hammond, Louisiana. "Jimmy sure has good punctuation" was one
neighbor's only comment. Another, pointing to an unrelated cartoon on
one page, asked, "Where did Jimmy learn to draw like that?"  "Mr. Ray"
is set in the fictional town of Tula Springs, Louisiana, and that
aspect of the story had drawn approving comment from the editor. After
the story was accepted, but before it was published, Wilcox began a
novel set in Tula Springs. He wrote the first half in six months,
while living on the money from "Mr. Ray." Since Cole was no longer
representing him, he offered the unfinished manuscript to another
agent; after reading it, the agent said he couldn't sell it. Wilcox
was discouraged, but a little later a friend read it and said it was
funny. Wilcox persevered for another year, and in June of 1982 he
finished the book, which he had entitled "Modern Baptists." He offered
it to two more agents, and both rejected it as unsalable. Then Harriet
Wasserman, an independent agent, agreed to handle it. Knopf, Simon &
Schuster, and Viking all turned it down.

Rick Kot, then a young editor at the Dial Press, heard about "Modern
Baptists" from another editor, who said he had read it and had hated
to turn it down, but it was a comic first novel--a tough sell. Kot
called Wasserman and asked for the manuscript. Though he liked it, he
was cautious about publishing it. "It's always a gamble publishing a
first novel," Kot says. "With a comic novel, it's an even bigger
gamble. It's a marketing truism that the sense of humor is very
subjective. Comedy is a very tough category. 'Modern Baptists' fitted
the convention of Southern humor, but it was more serious, more
ambitious." The New Yorker story offered confirmation that Wilcox had
talent Though Kot had concentrated on nonfiction, he offered
sixty-five hundred dollars for the book, and, not surprisingly, since
that was the only offer, it was accepted.

The main characters in "Modern Baptists" are Bobby Pickens (always
known as Mr. Pickens), a forty-oneyear-old bachelor who works at the
Sonny Boy Bargain Store, and F.X., his improbably handsome half
brother, who has just been released from Angola State Penitentiary
after serving time for dealing cocaine at a nearby
dinnertheatrein-the-round. At one point, Mr. Pickens, who has fallen
in love with a young employee at the Bargain Store named Toinette
Quaid, aspires to the cloth:

    Mr. Pickens knew that once he got his preaching diploma, he would open
    a church for modern Baptists, Baptists who were sick to death of hell
    and sin being stuffed down their gullets everv Sunday. There wasn't
    going to be any of that oldfashioned ranting and raving in Mr.
    Pickens's church. His Baptist church would be guided by reason and
    logic. Everyone cou d drink In moderation. veryone could dance and pet
    as long as they were fifteen-- well, maybe sixteen or seventeen. At
    thirty if you still weren't married, you could sleep with someone and
    it wouldn't be a sin-- that is, as long as you loved that person. If
    you hit forty and were still single, you'd be eligible for adultery
    not beinJ a sm. as long as no children's feelings got curt and it was
    kept very discreet. But you still had to love and respect the person;
    you couldn't just do it for sex.

However, upon being spurned by Toinette Mr. Pickens finds himself
alone with Toinette's chunky friend Burma LaSteele:

      He stood before her in his new orange bikini briefs and his matching
    orange undershirt. His belly button was plainJy visible; the underwear
    was two sizes too small.
      "Why pretend?" Mr. Pickens said, pulling the T-shirt over his head.
    His white hairless chest swelled out into a sizable belly, from which
    Burma averted her eyes....
      "Mr. Pickens," Burma said, turning away. "Please, get dressed. You're drunk."
      "This is your chance, Burma. Why blow it? You're getting
    old--there's gray in your hair, gray m mine. We're going to die, all
    of us, we re going to die miserable, unloved. I can't stand it
    anymore. At least one of us can be happy. You, Burma. You be happy.
    You deserve it more than any of us. You're good, Burma. You're a good,
    good woman. I can see your heart. It's pure and unselfish and good."
    Tears ran down his cheeks and his nose began to run. "Take it. Grab
    life before it passes vou bv." He stepped out of the briefs, and she
    beheld him stark naked except for his left sock, the one with the hole
    in it, which he had forgotten to take off.

Kot says that "Modern Baptists" needed little editing--given Wilcox's
own editing background, his manuscripts are meticulously written--but
he insisted that Wilcox rewrite the ending. "He had Mr. Pickens die in
a train wreck, which violates every convention of comedy," he
explains. So Mr. Pickens' car runs out of gas as he tries to commit
suicide by crashing into a telephone pole.

Shortly after Kot finished the editing, early in 1983, he was
fired--not for signing up books like "Modern Baptists" but as part of
a sweeping cost-cutting campaign that accompanied the consolidation of
Dial into its owner, Doubleday. Fortunately, a surviving editor at
Dial, Allen Peacock, liked "Modern Baptists" and kept it alive. The
publicist for Dial was also enthusiastic about the book, and she had a
good track record with reviewers. Positive blurbs were rounded up from
prominent writers, including Robert Penn Warren and Brendan Gill. The
book soon developed the momentum of a modest hit. In its Forecasts
section, Publishers Weekly, the trade bible, gave "Modern Baptists" a
"boxed" review--one that not only was favorable but put booksellers on
notice that "Modern Baptists" could be a hit. The book was published
in June, 1983. Then, in mid July, rumor had it that Anne Tyler, a
"hot" novelist on the heels of the huge success of "Dinner at the
Homesick Restaurant," was reviewing the book for the Times. Many books
are review-proof, and their publishers can afford to be indifferent to
the Times, but literary fiction like Wilcox's lives or dies on the
strength of its Sunday Times review.

On July 31st, on the Book Review's front page--the most coveted
position in the book industry, one that Kot says many writers would
"give their right arm for"--Tyler wrote, "Every reviewer, no doubt,
has methods for marking choice passages in a book. Mine is a system of
colored paper clips; yellow means funny. 'Modern Baptists' should be
thick with yellow paper clips on every page, but it does even better
than that. While I was reading it, I laughed so hard I kept forgetting
my paper clips. Mr. Wilcox has real comic genius. He is a writer to
make us all feel hopeful."

The review was a godsend, triggering a wave of favorable reviews, from
nearly every major paper. Wilcox had a brush with celebrity when a
producer for Barbara Feldon (Agent 99 of"Get Smart") called to say
that Ms. Feldon might be interested in having Wilcox as a guest on her
cable-TV talk show. Hollywood was said to be interested in the screen
rights. It was, of course, dizzying to be the subject of so much
acclaim so soon--especially for someone as modest as Wilcox. "He was
thrilled, or what passes for thrilled with Jim," Kot says. "He said
something like 'Oh, gosh.'" Wilcox never inquired about the size of
the first printing ("I didn't want to know; I assume it was low," he
says), which was five thousand copies. The book went back to press
four times, and ultimately sold eleven thousand copies in hardcover.
The Literary Guild optioned it. Penguin bought the paperback rights,
for ten thousand dollars. It was published in the United Kingdom. For
his next novel, Wasserman was able to negotiate an advance of $27,500.
Dial bid on it, but Harper & Row, which had meanwhile hired Kot as an
editor, outbid Dial. Wilcox dared to believe that his future as a
novelist was secure. He stopped writing short stories.

Having read the first hundred pages of the new manuscript, Kot had
high hopes for it. "It was a coup to get him," he says. "I saw a
writer with a promising career, someone we wanted to develop. I loved
his work and liked him personally. Harper wanted to do more literary
fiction." As it happened, literary fiction was driving what was then
the hottest category in publishing--trade paperbacks. The runaway
success of Jay McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City," which was
originally published in trade paperback rather than hardback, had
publishers scrambling to develop their own lists of hot novels in that
large-type, softcover format, which typically sold at about half the
hardcover price, rather than the one-fifth to one-fourth charged for
mass-market paperbacks. In the past, trade publishers had typically
auctioned reprint rights to paperback publishers and split the ensuing
royalties with the author; that was what had been done with "Modern
Baptists." But because costs for trade paperbacks were only slightly
higher than those for mass-market paperbacks, they could be profitable
with even relatively modest sales. The Harper deal for Wilcox's new
book included both hardcover and softcover royalties, a so-called
hard-soft deal, which has now become commonplace.

Wilcox's second novel, "North Gladiola," was published in 1985. Its
heroine, Ethyl Mae Coco, is the prime suspect in the murder of TeeTee,
a Chihuahua belonging to the Tula Springs beauty college--and Mrs.
Coco had, in fact, once thrown a pan of lukewarm bacon grease on
Tee-Tee. Kot's main concern was to build on Wilcox's audience for
"Modern Baptists" and avoid the notorious "sophomore slump" that has
felled numerous promising first novelists. He was quickly reassured.
The novelist Bobbie Ann Mason hailed "North Gladiola" as "a scream."
Reviews were again enthusiastic, though the Times Book Review didn't
again give it the front page. There were no author tours, however, and
no bookstore readings. Not every review was positive. After Harper's
publicity department sent Wilcox a copy of a negative review, he asked
that only positive reviews be sent him. Harper complied, but one
negative review slipped through, leaving Wilcox much upset.

Ominously, sales of"North Gladiola" fell well below those for "Modern
Baptists." It never came close to "earning out" the advance, as the
publishers' phrase has it. Wilcox could barely bring himself to look
at the royalty statement. "I'd open it and sort of squint at it," he
says. "All I saw was a minus. Then I filed it away." He was concerned.
"The momentum of 'Modern Baptists' was being rapidly lost," he says.
Like many authors, he began to wonder if his agent-- Wasserman--was
the best agent for him. "A movie deal fizzled out, even though there
seemed to be a lot of interest," he says. "I like and respect Harriet,
but I wanted more to happen." Though it was painful, Wilcox severed
his ties to Wasserman. Then he called Urban, who had been recommended
by colleagues, and who had had great success with literary fiction,
representing, among others, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. Urban
loved "Modern Baptists" and "North Gladiola," and agreed to represent
him.

Despite the weak sales of "North Gladiola," Urban negotiated Wilcox's
best deal yet--a two-book contract for seventy thousand dollars. That
advance largely accounts for Wilcox's peak earnings of $48,600 in
1988. In 1987, when the first of the two manuscripts came in, "Miss
Undine's Living Room," in which Olive Mackie runs for superintendent
of Tula Springs' Department of Streets, Parks, and Garbage, Kot had
the first serious problems he'd encountered in Wilcox's work. An
ensemble of characters, none of them particularly sympathetic, flew in
the face of literary convention. Kot invited Wilcox to dinner to
discuss possible solutions.

"With 'Miss Undine,' Rick was very clear," Wilcox says. "After I turn
in a manuscript, Rick takes me out to a nice dinner. We've been to
Union Square Cafe, Bouley. It's a shame, really--the only time I get
to go to these places, I'm too nervous to eat. He didn't like any of
the 'Miss Undine' characters. He said there was no center."

Wilcox considered Kot's criticism. But his mild demeanor conceals a
strong will. "Maybe I've read too many positive novels with wonderful
characters," Wilcox says. "I've read genre fiction. I read Judith
Krantz when I was at Doubleday. The main characters are always rugged
and handsome if they're men and gorgeous and buxom if they're women.
They have a drive to succeed, and they do succeed. They forge ahead in
life. Why can't I write about more heroic characters?" He answers his
own question. "I'm not a positive thinker. Southerners tend not to be.
Faulkner, Welty, O'Connor they're in the tradition of Hawthorne or
Melville. There is depravity. We're not good people unless we really
try. Popular fiction is Emersonian. He transcends the dark side of
human nature. Selfreliance. We can become better people. I don't
subscribe to this. The sense of reconciliation readers want is not
that easily won. Unearned idealism usually does more harm than good. I
absorbed this from Robert Penn Warren. He wrote a poem about a night
flight to New York in which he thought about Emerson at thirty-eight
thousand feet, the point being that at that distance from life you can
indulge in Emerson's view of human perfectibility. I don't see Olive
as positive or negative. We're all pretty mixed bags. Our faults are
very much tied in to our virtues. Most of our lives are not weddings,
funerals, and crises. We're not in a plane that's about to crash, and
we're not about to launch a new line of high-fashion clothing. We
mostly have routine days. We can't see where we're going. I've heard
the most interesting things standing in the checkout line at
Wal-Mart." Wilcox declined to make any significant changes in "Miss
Undine."

Wilcox's world view may have been reinforced one evening soon after he
put the finishing touches on that book. At a dinner party he attended,
he bit into a piece of chicken and broke off a crown from a tooth. As
he was walking home, castigating himself for having gone to a cut-rate
dental clinic (his "dentist," actually a student, had received a
failing grade for the crown installation), an attractive couple,
walking arm in arm, approached him. They told him they had a weapon,
then mugged him. In addition to his cash and credit cards, they stole
his crown, which he'd carefully kept in his pocket. The new crown set
him back eight hundred dollars.

Then he received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service announcing
that he was being audited for his 1985 income, of $11,800. In addition
to examining all of Wilcox's banking records, the auditor, obviously
suspecting that Wilcox was hiding income, insisted on visiting his
apartment. Wilcox deducted a third of his annual rent, because he had
divided his small studio space into three areas--a sleeping area, a
sitting area, and a work space. The auditor examined the table where
Wilcox worked--which, given the size of the apartment, was close to
the refrigerator--and accused Wilcox of eating there. Wilcox said he
didn't ("It's much too depressing to eat next to the typewriter"), but
the auditor argued that he could eat there, so the area wouldn't count
as an offfice. It also lacked a solid wall, which would have cut off
his view of both windows. The auditor found no undeclared income, but
did disallow Wilcox's home-offfice deduction, which came to four
hundred dollars. "He seemed very respectful," Wilcox says of the
auditor, who had admitted that this audit was his first assignment for
the I.R.S. "He didn't make me feel creepy, like a tax cheat, which I
guess he could have."

"Miss Undine" was published three weeks later. (A dental college
figures prominently in the plot.) Some readers and reviewers have said
it's their favorite among his works. The reviews were almost uniformly
positive. But the influential Michiko Kakutani, in the daily Times,
sided with Kot, noting the lack of positive characters. Sales slipped
to five thousand copies.

"Sort of Rich," Wilcox's next novel, which came out in 1989, brought a
New Yorker, the newly married Gretchen Dambar, to Tula Springs, which
somehow reminded her of both Baroness Blixen's African farm and
Parsippany, New Jersey. Kot thought it Wilcox's best work--"a close to
perfect novel." In an effort to boost sales, Wilcox attended the
American Booksellers Association annual meeting, in Washington, D.C.,
and he was featured at a Harper luncheon for literary novelists. He
was also sent to bookstores for readings and did a brief tour of the
South. He got a television booking on a 6 A.M. show in New Orleans. A
painfully small crowd showed up for autographs in Jackson,
Mississippi. The reviews were very positive. But sales slipped again.

By now, Wilcox couldn't bring himself even to open his royalty
statements. "They're very depressing," he says. None of the advances
had earned out since "Modern Baptists." "I'd really been hoping to
earn out with 'Sort of Rich,' " he says. "I knew that the publishers
were paying out more than they were making. I was doing the best I
could. This isn't a good situation. I'd love them to see some benefit
from all they'd done for me. This was hard on me. I felt they were all
hoping something would happen."

Kot and Urban talked, and agreed that something had to change in order
for Wilcox to ''break out" from sales of fewer than five thousand
hardcover copies. On the strength of the manuscript for "Sort of
Rich," Urban had negotiated a new, forty-five - thousand-dollar, one
book deal. But Wilcox had now done four novels set in Tula Springs. No
momentum was building. No one told Wilcox this in so many words, but
when he himself suggested a change of pace from Tula Springs both Kot
and Urban were enthusiastic. He decided to bring some of his
characters to New York.

"I hate to be so marketing driven," Kot says. "But we had to get a
handle for Jim. The big-selling novelists, like McInerney, were
tapping very specific markets. Young. Urban. David Leavitt had the
first gay short story in The New Yorker. They were generating
extrabook publicity. What could we put Jim forward as?"

Without such publicity, the once promising market for literary fiction
was faltering. Nan A. Talese, who publishes literary fiction as the
president of her own imprint at Doubleday, says, "There are four
thousand serious book buyers in this country that you can count on for
literary fiction. That's your basic number, including libraries, if
there isn't a bell or a whistle, like having a very beautiful author
do a tour across the country without any clothes on. That's how we're
selling books these days." At the same time, the trade-paperback
fiction market had become saturated. Even as hardcover sales were
fading, so was the Wilcox backlist. As computers proliferated in
bookstores, the Harper sales force was growing more discouraged about
Wilcox's prospects. 'They'd look on their computers and see that his
last book only sold three, so they'd say, We'll only take two this
time,"' Kot says. "The sales force was grumbling mildly, saying it was
getting harder and harder to get his books out in stores."

Kot was enthusiastic about the new book. It had a great title,
something much more contemporary--"Polite Sex." F.X., the handsome
miscreant from "Modern Baptists," made a reappearance. Kot pitched the
book to the sales force as "Wilcox comes to New York." For the book,
he hoped for a bigger urban sale. He commissioned distinctive new
cover art, which won an award for graphic design. Harper managed to
get seventyfive hundred copies into stores. Time asked for a
photograph of Wilcox in anticipation of a major review.

But publication day came and went, and no major review appeared. The
"news" that Wilcox had moved his setting to New York made no waves.
Not only did "Polite Sex" fail to attract the urban readers Kot and
Urban had hoped for but it seemed to alienate his core group of
Southerners. Despite consistently favorable reviews, Wilcox's fifth
book sold worse than any of the previous ones.

Kot called Urban. "I said, 'Binky, we only sold three thousand. I
can't afford to pay any more. We have to be realistic." He reminded
her that Harper (now HarperCollins, as a result of a merger) had kept
all Wilcox's books in print, even buying backlist rights to "Modern
Baptists." Kot offered twenty thousand dollars for Wilcox's next
book--half his prior advance. Urban knew she couldn't sell Wilcox on
the open market after the numbers on "Polite Sex," and, besides, she
was not thrilled with the new book, which Wilcox was already writing.
She worried--even as she remained convinced that Wilcox had the
potential to produce a huge success--that his writing was becoming too
serious, too inward, increasingly esoteric. Wilcox took the twenty
thousand dollars, happy to be able to keep writing.

There was a quiet sense of dread about Wilcox's sixth novel, "Guest of
a Sinner," which was published last year. Inspired in part by the
woman with twenty-two cats he'd heard about at the soup kitchen, it is
darker, more complex, than the earlier books. "After his father had
swerved into a tree to avoid hitting a squirrel," one passage goes,
"Eric had never once, in the fifteen years since, questioned if the
squirrel's life was worth his mother's. Not out loud, at least. Mrs.
Thorsen had been killed, while Lamar, properly buckled up, had
survived without a scratch. Eric's mother always refused on principle
to wear a seat belt, mainly because she thought it was the liberals
who made its use a law, but also because it wrinkled her clothes." Kot
was concerned because Eric, the main character, is less likable at the
end of the story than at the beginning. And, though nothing seems
forced or didactic, the book does have weighty themes of religion and
faith. Worse, it proved impossible to describe the plot to the sales
force, let alone give the book a marketing "handle."

"Guest" sold four thousand copies. For his latest book, Kot has
offered Wilcox ten thousand dollars. "What was I going to do?" Kot
asks. "I'd given it our best shot. We had to get a lower advance."

The economics of literary fiction are stark. Consider the cost to
HarperCollins of publishing "Guest." While specific numbers are
closely guarded, several people with access to HarperCollins' results
provided this summary. Every book has a fixed "plant cost," which
covers copy editing, setting type, proofs and proofreading-- about ten
thousand dollars for "Guest." Added to that is the "PPB" (printing,
paper, and binding), a variable cost, depending on the number printed;
a press run of six thousand for "Guest" added about nine thousand
dollars.  Marketing expenses, which in the case of "guest" included
advertising (a one-fifth-page ad in the Times Book Review cost five
thousand dollars), author touring, and posters, came to just over ten
thousand dollars. The advance added twenty thousand dollars. And
before any of these costs are covered, twenty-five per cent of gross
sales goes to general overhead. Six thousand copies of"Guest,"
retailing at twenty dollars, would yield $57,600 in gross sales to
HarperCollins (retailers and middlemen keep just over half the cover
price), so a charge for general overhead would be $14,400. Thus, total
costs were approximately $63,000.  "Guest" yielded no
subsidiary-rights revenues. (In a hard-soft deal, the paperback
edition is accounted for separately.) At four thousand hardcover
copies sold, "Guest" produced about $38,000 in revenue to
HarperCollins, leaving a deficit of $25,000. HarperCollins aims for a
fifteen-per-cent return on investment, which means that "Guest" would
have had to sell more than seven thousand copies to generate the
roughly $73,000 necessary to meet that standard.

Given the way that the publishing industry allocates
costs--particularly the practice of assigning an arbitrary percentage
of gross sales to cover general overhead--it's easy to see the appeal
of the blockbuster. A novel that sells a hundred thousand copies may
never pay back its advance yet can be solidly profitable. Those are
the books that generate the large revenues for general overhead, which
includes, among other things, the editors' salaries.

But what about the speculative first novels that, with no author track
record whatsoever, can command astronomi cal advances? Lately, people
in the publishing industry have been buzzing about "The Day After
Tomorrow," a first novel by Allan Folsom published this spring by
Little, Brown, which brought a two-million-dollar advance.  That money
could more than sustain Wilcox for the rest of his natural life.  Nan
Talese explains, "The first novel that is sexy or promotable, or has
just been sold to the movies, can get a huge advance, because it's
something new," and she points out that "The Day After Tomorrow," the
work of a Hollywood scriptwriter, had been pre-sold to the movies.
"You know how Americans are about 'new.' There's no track record for
the bookstores to pull up and say, 'That author only sold five
thousand copies.'  They see that the publisher has a lot at stake and
is really going to get behind this, touring the writer, making spe
cial galleys, and so on. That's the plan."  This strategy has been
fuelled by the success of novels like "Damage," by Josephine Hart, and
"The Secret His tory," by Donna Tartt, both sexy first novels with
attractive authors which were enormously profitable despite large
advances. "It's a very odd atmo sphere," Talese says. "Publishers are
willing to gamble lots of money on something that might hit big, but
more hesitant to invest smaller sums and stay with an author as he or
she builds an audience.  

Who knows whether "The Day Af ter Tomorrow" will change that thinking.
A Times critic dismissed it, noting that "the author has a great deal
to learn."  The book's jacket copy claims that it "reinvents the
thriller." It does not say what I the book is actually about: an
international conspiracy to clone Hitler from his frozen head.
Although ads have touted it as a "No. 1 National Best-Seller," the
book recently dropped off the Times best-seller list after eight
weeks, never having reached the top spot.

Brand-name fiction writers remain the safest commercial bets, even
though they, too, can command huge advances. Bill Shinker, who until
recently was the publisher of HarperCollins, says, "You know that on a
Sidney Sheldon or a Barbara Taylor Bradford there's no way in hell the
advance will ever pay out. You can still make money. Those authors
will sell at such a predictably high level that it will cover a lot of
overhead. Wilcox is a labor of love. He's never going to pay your
overhead."

But even a labor of love--and Shinker says he loves Wilcox's fiction--
can't go on indefinitely. "After one or two books, we saw a pattern
emerging. He wasn't alone in this. Trade paperbacks that once sold in
multiples of what the book sold in hardcover were now selling half the
hardcover sales. A very sad development, but we were up against it."

Even though Kot moved to Hyperion in 1993, HarperCollins did make a
bid under its contract option for Wilcox's next work. It was low--
seventy-five hundred dollars. 'We felt we'd got into a rut with Jim,"
Shinker says. "I had no explanation for why the books weren't
performing. He had fabulous reviews but never the sales to live up to
them. The kind of fiction he was writing, there might have been a time
in the sixties or seventies when he would have sold in massmarket
paperback. But taste has changed. Today, multicultural, black,
Hispanic, Japanese--that's the trend. The books that Jim did, as good
as they are, fell through the cracks."

Shinker felt that HarperCollins had to make a bid that stood a chance
of earning out. "God bless him if he goes someplace else" is what
Shinker says he felt. "Maybe they'll bring a fresh eye and can do
something. It's frustrating when you like somebody's work and you
can't make it happen for them."

Wilcox has struggled with his current novel, in part because of the
mounting pressure he feels from his publisher and his agent. After
"Guest," Urban took him to lunch for a serious talk. (He can't bring
himself to discuss money with Kot.) She said he had to consider his
audience. "A problem with selling his books is who will buy them," she
says. "That's what a bookseller asks. Literary fiction is not selling
well. You need a target market. Women buy books, but his aren't
women's books. It's pathetic. Why can't you just write good books? But
there's too much competition for people's attention. I told him, We
have to have something.' "

Urban's message got through. Wilcox is a great fan of the English
novelist Barbara Pym, a brilliant writer of smallscale social comedy,
and he is haunted by the knowledge that Pym wrote six published novels
and the seventh was turned down. She spent the next sixteen years
writing unpublished novels, and was rediscovered only at the end of
her life, when the London Times Literary Supplement hailed her as one
of the most underappreciated novelists of the twentieth century.
Wilcox's first instinct was to go back to "Modern Baptists"; after
all, it had sold reasonably well. He thought he might do a more comic,
slapstick story of a New Yorker who returns to his Southern roots. He
tried a short story in that vein, written in the first person, and
sent it to The Nets Yorker. It was rejected. He tried about sixty
pages of a novel, and sent them to Urban and Kot. He could tell they
were cool. Urban told him it seemed forced; it wasn't funny. "I've
never worked so hard starting a book," he says. "My advance was going
down. It was a difficult time for me. I was very aware of the need for
an audience. I don't want to be like Barbara Pym--I want to sell this
to someone."

Then something new came to him. In "Guest of a Sinner," a minor
character had come to terms with being gay and had begun having an
affair with a garbageman. Wilcox found himself pondering the
possibility of a relationship between a gay man and a straight
man--not a sexual affair but a coming together on common ground of two
people who didn't share the same sexuality. He mentioned this idea to
Kot, who remembers Wilcox describing it as "a comic 'Death in
Venice."'

Kot was excited. "I could play this, run with this," he says. "It
sounded like fun." A comic "Death in Venice" might not exactly fly
offshelves, but the phrase was something--it was a "handle" for the
sales force. Mann's classic novella had a beautiful young male
character that might appeal to a gay audience, yet the novella as a
whole appealed to mainstream readers and it inspired both a movie and
an opera. With the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Thousand Acres," the
novelist Jane Smiley had just scored with a "King Lear" in Iowa. Was a
comic "Death in Venice" any less probable? Hyperion's publicity people
loved it. Urban, too, liked the idea. Kot could sell his new
publisher, Hyperion, a fresh approach to Wilcox. It gave him the
ammunition to outbid HarperCollins and continue editing Wilcox. Even
without a finished manuscript or an outline, Hyperion committed itself
to publishing it, albeit with a small advance and little money at
risk. The initial contract explicitly referred to the work as "a comic
updating of'Death in Venice.'" The marketing idea was to graft a gay
audience onto Wilcox's existing readers.

No one knows how large the gay book-buying audience is. Kot says that
a successful nonfiction book on a gay theme can sell twenty-five
thousand copies; Randy Shilts sold many more. "It's well defined,"
Urban says. "Publishers can market, sell, advertise to this audience.
This is an audience that could support Jim's books. It has developed
in the last few years. It's strong. We have to have something."

But Wilcox's shrinking advance has, somewhat perversely, diminished
rather than heightened his commercial sensibility. "It's so little
money that I'm going to write this exactly the way I want," he says
now of his new book. "I feel a burden has been lifted. When I was
getting the pages together, I was worried. Can Binky sell this? Now I
know it's never going to be a big commercial book. In a way, I'm much
happier."

The first sign that Wilcox might not play along with the new "gay"
marketing scenario came when he crossed out the reference to "a comic
updating of 'Death in Venice"' before signing his new contract. "This
thing just got out of hand," he says. "I never said it was a comic
'Death in Venice.' I said it was a comic reversal of 'Death in
Venice,' and even that's inappropriate. All Hollywood wants is high
concept. That means you can describe it in one sentence. 'Twins' is
what you get. That whole mentality has become a part of publishing.
It's sold before you write it. Reviewers review the concept, not the
book. That's why first novelists are getting five hundred thousand
dollars. I worry about these marketing categories, trying to define
things. Can't people just be people? I don't want it marketed as a gay
novel. People hear 'gay' and they think 'sex.' If this were
commercial, there'd be Big Sex. Well, there's no sex. None. The gay
man is unattractive, a little overweight. He can't get a date. He's a
Catholic." Worse, from a commercial perspective, the beautiful young
man, the Tadzio of"Death in Venice," has vanished. The main characters
are now aged seventy and fortyane "Tell the sales force it's going to
be 'Moby Dick' in Manhattan," he says of his new novel. "Maybe they
can sell that."

Wilcox now adheres as strictly as he can to a hundred-dollar-aweek
budget. He almost never buys clothes. He owns one suit, which is five
years old. His blue denim shirt he bought on the sidewalk for
fiveninety nine. A blue chambray shirt was bought at a bargain store
on Third Avenue. ("It's amazing the bargains you can find in
Manhattan," he says.) For a while, he had a queen-sized bed, but he
tired of having to turn sideways to get into the bathroom. Now he
sleeps on a worn brown velour sofa bed, a friend's castoff. He has
just bought a used air conditioner. He does his own laundry (a
dollar-fifty a load) and ironing. He tries not to eat out, and he
never takes cabs.  When he's working on early drafts of his novels at
his electric typewriter, he uses non-self-correcting ribbons; he
switches to the more expensive self-correcting ribbons only for the
final draft. Despite all these efforts, though, he has lately had to
borrow money from his parents to pay his rent, now four hundred dol
lars a month--something he hates to do. He has lost all confidence
that his future as a novelist is secure.

The most recent advance has left Wilcox no choice but to supplement
his income. Last semester, he taught a fiction-writing seminar at the
Camden campus of Rutgers University. That brought in 55,700.
Unfortunately, the train fare to and from Philadelphia caused him to
run up fourteen hundred dollars in not yet reimbursed charges on his
Visa card, which contributed to a recent cash crisis. He appeared as
an extra in a Macy's television commercial for a hundred dollars. He
has just completed a piece for Allure on the diffsculties of being a
handsome man. He sees it as research for a character in his new novel,
and he's grateful for the assignment. The piece, if it runs, will
bring in four thousand dollars, nearly half his last book advance.

There is no bitterness in Wilcox, no sense that life or the publishing
industry has treated him unfairly. On the contrary, in many ways
Wilcox seems to be living the life he always wanted--that of the
artist. He grew up in a musical family, steeped in the lore of
Mozart, the archetype of the struggling genius. "He is essentially
romantic," the writer Gene Stone, a friend of Wilcox's, told me. "This
is how a serious novelist is supposed to live. He may be the last of
his kind in America." Yet nearly all his closest friends say they have
now detected in him a worrisome level of anxiety about his financial
plight. "There are days when he's frustrated and nearly in tears,"
Stone said, and Polly King, another friend, observed, "He lives in his
own private hell of worry."

Wilcox concedes as much, yet brushes aside such concerns. "Publishing
is filled with ups and downs," he says. "I know that. I feel, frankly,
very fortunate to be able to write, to have the time and the means.
It's almost beyond my wildest dreams. Writing a novel was the be-all
and end-all for me. When I thought I could live on advances, after the
Anne Tyler review, I was thrilled. Now it's going downhill, but I
still feel lucky to be under contract. I'll do whatever I have to do
to make money and keep writing."

Ultimately, he says, he's sustained by his readers, however small a
group they may be. "Comedy is very mysterious. I'm thankful some
people find what I'm doing amusing." He gets a small but steady stream
of fan mail, from such improbable places as Montana and Indiana. He
showed me one letter, from a reader in Canada, dated June 28, 1989:

    DEAR JAMES,
      It has been a day. And now I can't sleep. I am dying for a
    glass of lemonade but of course I have no lemons or fake stuff, even
    to make it with. Instead I have a cup of iced tea which is probably
    unhealthy to drink at this time of night....
      I was lying in bed trying to sleep--my husband's asleep, my
    coming little baby in my stomach (I m five months pregnant) is asleep,
    my three cats are asleep, my old daddy, who lives in the apartment
    upstairs since my mom died four years ago, had another heart attack
    tonight-- his second in two months, this one is worse, they say-- and
    so I'm worried and thirsty and tired.
      Which does bring me to why I'm telling you this.... I'm
    clutching to the things that I love. And I love your books. Tonight
    when I couldn't sleep I thought I would read a book--so I went to my
    bookshelves and started scanning titles--I came to your three books
    which~~I've read at least twice each (though I don't usually do that).
    Anyway--please write another novel fast because I can't sleep (and
    even if I could I wouldn't if I had one of your books to read afresh).
    Is that a lot to ask? I'd do the same for you. Is it very hot where
    you are? My air conditioner's coming Thursday.  Yours sincerely . . .

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Copyright 1994 The New Yorker