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By Root 789 0

at the center of the book), but that firm chin made it clear that she took her writing in earnest and was not going to be a pushover when it came to changes. It was apparent, too, that she was a serious student of literature and something of a moralist, as well as a student of philosophy and religion. She seemed uneasy about writing popular fiction and needed to be reassured that it was worthwhile. Good as she clearly was at it, her heart did not seem to be in it. At the end of lunch—we became instant friends and have remained so ever since—I felt emboldened to ask a question about the plot. Although the book was set in nineteenth-century Cornwall, there was something very familiar about the story, I said. Was there not a certain uncanny resemblance to the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II? Susan Howatch blushed prettily. Yes, she admitted, she had in fact borrowed the plot directly from history, but after all, Shakespeare had borrowed most of his plots from somebody else. Did I think anybody would notice?

I wasn’t sure, but I decided there was nothing to be gained by worrying her. After all, the book was written—she could hardly change or obscure the plot at this point. Time passed, and everything good that could happen to a book happened. The S&S sales reps loved the book, Dick decided to go for broke with a big printing, Barbara Bannon not only loved it but adored the author, once she had met her, and the buyers at the major stores predicted huge sales.

They were right, too. Penmarric launched Susan Howatch on a career as a major worldwide-best-selling novelist. At intervals of two years, one big novel followed another, each of them hugely successful—Cashelmara, The Rich Are Different, Sins of the Fathers, The Wheel of Fortune—each of them based on either the plot of a Shakespeare tragedy (The Rich Are Different, for example, though set in America in the 1920s, follows the story of Antony and Cleopatra) or the life of a major historical figure. The parallels were absolutely clear-cut, and yet never from 1971 to 1984 did any reviewer ever notice! Some readers did, though they were not disturbed by the fact.

With each success, Susan seemed to become more uneasy about what she was doing. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy the fruits of success up to a point, it was as if the kind of popular fiction she was writing simply didn’t satisfy her own intellectual and moral needs. Indeed, with every new book we fought a well-mannered tug-of-war over the packaging and the flap copy, with Susan pulling for seriousness and me, needless to say, pulling for commercial appeal. “Tell her she’s not Dostoyevsky, for chrissake!” Snyder instructed me when I reported to him Susan’s concerns and misgivings, but even if I could have told her that it wouldn’t have helped. She knew she wasn’t Dostoyevsky, but she yearned to be, or rather an English, Anglican equivalent of him, dealing with serious moral issues as opposed to simply entertaining people. This resulted in an unfortunate paradox: The more copies we sold of her books, the more unhappy she was with us. We were treating her as a big commercial best-seller, not a “serious” writer, she complained, perhaps unable to recover from The New York Times’s curt dismissal of Penmarric as “a leaden lump of a novel,” written in “early Prince Valiant style.” There is no angst like that of a best-selling novelist who yearns for good reviews and doesn’t get them, and nothing more sure than that she (or he) will blame the publisher.

Eventually, Susan’s serious side simply won out over the side of her that was very ably writing entertaining romantic family sagas, and she moved on to religious novels, in a spirit of expiation for the frivolity of her previous works. She thus became the only best-selling novelist in my experience to walk away from her own success or to leave her publisher because he had sold too many copies of her books.

CHAPTER 22

By 1971, three years after Bob’s departure, Dick had made good the loss and then some. He had proven we could publish big commercial novels