Jérôme Lindon, Jérôme Lindon: On the Relationship Between Jean Echenoz and His Publisher

Jean Echenoz’s Jérôme Lindon recounts, in sixty spare, affectionate, sometimes lightly barbed pages, the twenty-year relationship that its author enjoyed with his publisher, a legend of the French literary establishment. The story begins in 1979 with an unexpected summons to Lindon’s office, and a contract for a first novel that virtually everyone else had turned down; it ends with the news of Lindon’s death from cancer in 2001. Between those two poles, Echenoz sketches a lively and personal view of the bonds and minor psychoses that can occur when two people work in tandem, and sometimes in conflict, grounded in a shared love of language and of the writer’s art.

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Five years after Echenoz paid his fateful first visit to Editions de Minuit, and barely a year before I met Jean himself, I climbed the same narrow staircase at 7 Rue Bernard-Palissy to see Jérôme Lindon. I don’t recall a “friendly-sounding” woman on the second floor, though I suppose it was she who ushered me up, as she had Jean. What I do recall is the feeling of awestruck intimidation, so skillfully and amusingly evoked in Echenoz’s description of his own first meeting; the impressiveness of tall, acerbic Jérôme Lindon seated behind his desk, while I perched on a not terribly comfortable chair that seemed to be placed miles away from the great man.

Echenoz sketches a lively and personal view of the bonds and minor psychoses that can occur when two people work in tandem, and sometimes in conflict.

It was September 1984. I was on my honeymoon with my first wife and, like the young go-getters we were, we’d combined our wedding voyage with a business trip, she to interview a writer for the Paris Review, me to visit fellow publishers. The fact that Jérôme Lindon received me at all had less to do with my personal standing in the publishing industry—a fledgling editor at Random House, I had none—than with the fact that I’d been graciously provided an introduction by a formidable literary agent, a friend of a friend of the family.

“Of that first meeting, I’ve retained a memory at once vague and precise,” Echenoz writes, and I could say the same. I know there was great courtesy, first in seeing me at all, then in treating me as if I were someone worth seeing. I think there was some general advice involved, from the veteran to the tyro. Most of all, there was Lindon’s hearty recommendation, quite generous toward an untried young editor, that I acquire English-language rights to Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant, which had just been published and was already creating a stir. I don’t remember whether he gave me a copy or whether I bought one—the copy I still own has a price scribbled on the first page (49 francs, around $5 at the time), alongside a discreet stamp to prove that it wasn’t being shoplifted.

I dutifully took the novel home to New York and endeavored to acquire the rights, but the powers-that-were at Random House deemed Duras a specialty item, fit for a Grove Press-type audience, and not a good investment of their mega-dollars. They let the book go to their sister house Pantheon, which had a reputation for welcoming such losing propositions. The Lover went to number 9 on the New York Times bestseller list, cementing Duras’s reputation in the Anglophone world and leaving me with a prestigious regret for my CV. So it goes.

It was around the same time that another Minuit title, Cherokee by a certain Jean Echenoz, was handed to me to read by Jonathan Galassi, who back then was Random House’s editor of such unsalable genres as poetry and translations, and poetry in translation. I devoured the novel in one go, communicated my enthusiasm to Galassi, and the two of us went to pitch it to Jason Epstein, at the time the imprint’s editor in chief. I can still see Jason riffling through the French edition, making some remark about authors with “unpronounceable” names (Jean relates a comic echo of a similar concern in one of his first conversations with Lindon), and tossing it over our heads and into the hallway.

As Echenoz says in his memoir, regarding the poor performance of his own first book, sales were “beside the point: I have a publisher and it’s Jérôme Lindon. The rest is unimportant.”

Fortunately for me, this story had a happier ending than the Duras episode: learning that the rights to Echenoz’s spurned novel had been acquired by David R. Godine, I wrote to Godine to propose myself as translator. David bravely took me on, and Cherokee was published by him in 1987—the start of a long association and friendship with David, with his publishing house (where I ended up working for seven years as editorial director), and most of all with Jean himself, ten of whose books I’ve now had the pleasure of translating—including Jérôme Lindon.

I suppose I should say “eleven books,” as this doesn’t count the collaborative novel Semaines de Suzanne (published in English as S: A Novel), co-written by Jean, Harry Mathews, Patrick Deville, Florence Delay, and three others, including yours truly, who also translated some of the French contributions. The project came about when Jean was awarded a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, in 1990. Having been invited to join his team, we were tasked with writing a piece of fiction over the residency’s three-week duration, between afternoons on the beach, nights at the local bar (The Breakers), outings to nearby sights (including a shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral), and work on our own projects. We duly invented a main character, Suzanne, sketched out the basic plot lines, divvied up the chapters, and took out our notebooks.

After three weeks, we had a rough manuscript, which Jean happily brought back to Jérôme Lindon to publish. As he recounts, the reception was less than stellar: “One hour later, Jérôme Lindon calls: Irène tells me you were wondering about this. So let me tell you, I think this thing is worthless, he says in essence, it’s very bad, it’s very bad for you, I’m publishing it just so no other publisher gets his hands on it.” And indeed, Semaines de Suzanne was published by Minuit in April 1991, with as little fanfare as possible (though it was also translated into Japanese and, I believe, German). It attracted scant attention and sold barely a copy.

None of that mattered to me: this was my first published book, and it bore the Minuit imprint. As Echenoz says in his memoir, regarding the poor performance of his own first book, sales were “beside the point: I have a publisher and it’s Jérôme Lindon. The rest is unimportant.” I’ve been fortunate enough to know exactly what he means.

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Jérôme Lindon by Jean Echenoz, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti, is available from Archipelago Books.