Q: How did Hemingway get published?

A: Scott Fitzgerald recommended him to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's. Scribner's published The Sun Also Rises, the book that put him on the map.

Boni & Liveright had published In Our Time. He had a contract with them for two books.

To get out of it, he sent them The Torrents of Spring, a parody of Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter.

Anthony Burgess called this pusillanimous. Anderson had befriended him.

Q: Anderson praised Gertrude Stein. She liked him. She felt double-crossed. I think this is when she started saying Hemingway was yellow.

A: It wasn't very classy. I'd call it chickenshit.

Q: Did Perkins know?

A: Yes. Publishing is a small business. A gentleman's club, back then.

Q: That's not very gentlemanly.

A: No, it's business.

Q: In the pamphlet They, or dem, you gave two presentations, one on publishing as a business and one on self-publishing as an alternative.

A: Yes. I said that self-publishing isn't really an alternative, and the better you are at it, the more it hurts you, with New York, but second, New York is such a business you haven't any choice: if you could have a career as a mainstream writer you wouldn't want one, it has become so debased.

Q: And you expect New York to publish that?

A: Yes. My books aren't non-commercial they are anti-commercial, and that's a prevailing theme in American letters, back to Thoreau and Melville. Whitman.

Q: Whitman had to publish himself.

A: So did Thoreau, and Melville went unpublished, after Moby-Dick.

Q: You are in the tradition.