Jean Echenoz’s Jérôme Lindon offers sixty lean, affectionate, and sometimes slyly sharp pages that map the two-decade bond between its author and a publisher who has become a pillar of the French literary world. The book begins in 1979 with an unexpected summons to Lindon’s office and a contract for a debut novel that almost everyone else declined; it closes with the news of Lindon’s cancer death in 2001. Between these bookends, Echenoz offers a vivid, intimate portrait of the ties and the small psychologies that can flourish—or fray—when two people collaborate in close quarters, bound by a shared love of language and the craft of writing.
Five years after Echenoz’s fateful first visit to Editions de Minuit, and barely a year before I myself would meet Jean, I climbed the same narrow staircase at 7 Rue Bernard-Palissy to see Jérôme Lindon. I don’t remember a “friendly-sounding” woman waiting on the second floor, though perhaps it was she who ushered me upward, as she had done for Jean. What remains clearest is the sense of awe—an intimidation deftly and amusingly captured by Echenoz when he recalls their first encounter; the formidable, acerbic Lindon perched behind his desk, while I sat in a chair that felt miles away from the legendary figure before me.
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 happened to be on my honeymoon with my first wife, and in the spirit of eager young professionals we were both using our trip to chase work: she to interview a writer for the Paris Review, I to visit publishers. Lindon agreed to see me not because of any standing I had in publishing—at the time I was a novice editor at Random House—so much as because an influential literary agent had kindly arranged an introduction through connections held by friends 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. There was abundant courtesy—first in being received at all, then in being treated as someone worth meeting. Above all, there was Lindon’s generous endorsement, urging that I acquire English-language rights to Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant, which had just appeared and was already causing a stir. I don’t recall whether he handed me a copy or if I bought one—the volume I own bears a price mark on the first page (49 francs, about $5 at the time), plus a discreet stamp indicating it wasn’t shoplifted.
I carried the novel back to New York and set out to secure the rights, but Random House’s decision-makers deemed Duras a specialty item, suitable for a Grove Press–style audience and not a wise investment of their enormous budget. The book went to Pantheon, their sister house known for welcoming such challenging titles. The Lover climbed to number 9 on the New York Times bestseller list, cementing Duras’s reputation in the English-speaking world and leaving me with a notable regret on my résumé. So it goes.
Not long after, another Minuit title, Cherokee by a certain Jean Echenoz, landed on my desk for reading courtesy of Jonathan Galassi, then Random House’s editor for poetry and translations. I devoured the novel in one sitting, conveyed my enthusiasm to Galassi, and the two of us carried the work to Jason Epstein, then the imprint’s editor-in-chief. I can still picture Jason rifling through the French edition, muttering about authors with “unpronounceable” names (Jean later recounted a comic echo of a related worry in one of his early talks with Lindon), and tossing the manuscript back down the hallway toward us.
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.”
Fortunate for me, this tale had a happier ending than the Duras episode: learning that the rights to Echenoz’s overlooked novel had been acquired by David R. Godine, I wrote to Godine proposing myself as translator. Godine took a chance, and Cherokee appeared in 1987—the genesis of a long friendship with David and his publishing house (where I would later serve as editorial director for seven years), and, most of all, with Jean himself, ten of whose books I would come to translate by now, including Jérôme Lindon.
I should probably say “eleven titles,” since this count omits the co-authored venture Semaines de Suzanne (English: S: A Novel), a collaboration among Jean, Harry Mathews, Patrick Deville, Florence Delay, and three others, including me, who also translated some of the French pieces. The project arose when Jean received a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, in 1990. I joined his team, and we were charged with drafting a short work of fiction during the three weeks of the residency, balancing beach afternoons, evenings at the local bar (The Breakers), field trips to nearby sights (including a shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral), and time spent refining our own projects. We sketched a central character, Suzanne, outlined the main plot threads, divided the chapters, and carried notebooks in our pockets.
After three weeks we produced a rough manuscript, which Jean happily brought back to Jérôme Lindon for publication. The reception, to put it mildly, was discouraging: “One hour later, Jérôme Lindon calls: Irène, tell me you were wondering about this. Let me tell you what he’s really saying: I think this thing is worthless; it’s very bad for you; I’m publishing it just so no other publisher gets his hands on it.” And so Semaines de Suzanne appeared from Minuit in April 1991 with as little fanfare as possible (though it was translated into Japanese and, I believe, German). It drew little attention and sold barely a copy.
That hardly mattered to me: this was my first published book, bearing the Minuit imprint. As Echenoz notes about his own debut, sales were “beside the point: I have a publisher and it’s Jérôme Lindon. The rest is unimportant.” I have been fortunate enough to grasp 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.
