came the following day and every day for the next fifty-odd years to read the newspaper. Leo not only read the newspaper, he read each edition of every newspaper. One of his early jobs in Vienna had been working at a daily, reading the competition to see whether there were any stories they had missed. Leo had loved this job and acted for the rest of his life as if he still had it. He even had an arrangement with the newspaper delivery trucks that came to the office building so that he didn’t need to wait until the paper arrived at the newsstand. The truck driver was instructed to hand the latest edition to Leo waiting for it in front of the building.
I loved Leo, who spent his days smoking relentlessly, refusing to use an ashtray, preferring instead to let the ash on his cigarette dangle perilously until it ultimately fell onto his chest, which he patted into his suit—and he’d been wearing the same suit for as long as I’d known him, which was my entire life. His indulgent style extended to me, for which I, the son of a cautious father who was sometimes hard to communicate with, was grateful. One of Leo’s and my favorite hobbies was throwing paper planes out the window of the thirtieth floor when the agency was located on 42nd Street. Watching our planes drift into the New York Public Library never got old with us.
Leo Frischauer at the literary agency
As Leo and my father continued their debate on Faragó’s merits beyond writing, I returned to my bookkeeping. I had already entered the precious few checks we had received that day, paid the office’s electric bill and a lawyer’s fee, and prepared statements for a few authors. It was rudimentary work that I could have done in my sleep. Numbers, to me, were simple; unlike my father’s clients, they either added up or they didn’t.
My father assigned value in ways that rarely made a profit. Indeed, his decisions usually translated into disaster for my ledger. It hadn’t started that way. His agency, which began in 1932, received a remarkable stroke of luck with the advent of World War II. While devastating for most of Europe, the war provided my father with an incredible opportunity. Because authors from the Axis powers couldn’t receive royalties from sales of their books in the United States, German, French, and Italian publishing houses needed someone to hold the money until the war ended.
Because of my father’s many European friends, he and a man named Marcel Aubry serendipitously found themselves approached by some of the continent’s biggest and most venerable publishers to hold their copyrights until their countries were no longer enemy territory and subject to the US alien property withholding regulations. Gallimard in France hired Aubry and my father to represent them in the United States, and almost overnight the greatest minds of the twentieth century, such as Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, were among my father’s first clients. He also represented the estates of Franz Kafka and Alfred Adler.
My father’s salon sensibility made him a perfect American counterpart to European publishers. After the war, he maintained his transatlantic affairs, not only continuing to represent their authors but also pioneering the editorial scouting business by advising European publishing houses on the best American writers to translate and publish for their markets. But if he had the right literary temperament, my father remained a poor businessman, constantly settling for too little compensation or loaning money to his authors, who were anything but good for it.
I had resolved to talk to my father about one issue in particular that could no longer be ignored—the agency’s longtime deal with Rowohlt Verlag. Faragó’s surprise visit temporarily delayed the discussion, but as soon as Leo agreed to disagree with my father, who returned to his office, I got up from my desk and walked the four steps it took me to arrive at his door. I had to act fast since I didn’t know who or what might distract my father next.
“Dad, can I talk to you for a second?”
“Come in. Sit, sit.”
He put the Saturday Evening Post he’d been reading back on top of a stack of other papers and magazines, including the New Yorker, New York Times, Herald Tribune, and Publishers Weekly. When he wasn’t chatting with Leo or any of the other characters that took up his day, his nose was always in the papers or magazines, not books. He preferred the excerpts in the Saturday Evening Post or the New Yorker to the whole works. Although he loved publishing and books, I never saw him reading one.
“I think Leo is being too hard on Lazi,” he said. “No one is saying he’s a saint. But any man who won’t give up chasing the Nazis is okay by me. Lazi continues to find new revelations about those bastards when everyone else says World War II is over. Over? Tell that to the victims. Saints are boring and so is their writing. Boredom is the root of all evil, as they say.”
I didn’t know where this was going, but with my father it could go on for quite a while, and I had business to discuss.
“Dad.” I cut him off. “Are you aware of how much Rowohlt is paying us a month?”
“Sure.”
“Three hundred a month.”
“Right, three hundred a month.”
“It’s a very, very small amount.”
“Well, it’s something, isn’t it? And it comes on time every month. That’s worth quite a lot in this business. We had a French publisher who was paying us $500, but the problem was that we never got paid. They never gave us the money they were supposed to. With Rowohlt, the paycheck is sure and steady.”
I felt my frustration level rising rapidly. Talking to Father was always complicated and roundabout. For him, choosing a morning pastry could inspire a lengthy monologue. He loved to reason things out to interesting arguments although not necessarily logical ones. I wasn’t in the mood right now to ride the endless merry-go-round.
“It might have been good during the war, but it’s not enough for the work we do—keeping track of all their foreign rights contracts here in the US and advising them on what American books to buy for their territory. We have to renegotiate our contract.”
“Oh, Francis, I don’t know . . .”
“Look, you can’t make money this way. Rowohlt is not a charity. But it’s turning us into one.”
My father leaned back in his worn leather chair and gave me a look that was not easily discernible: part confusion and part dismay, yes. But did I also detect an undercurrent of pride? People get into the book business for different reasons. For my father, it definitely wasn’t for money. Though it didn’t seem to be about books either. It was always more about people than anything else.
Wherever he went, my father created a club. Before he married my mother, quite a number of people had keys to his apartment and stayed there unannounced whenever they were in New York. In fact, for the first year or so of my mother and father’s relationship, people were constantly showing up who had the key but didn’t know that he was now married.
There were many iterations of this hospitality: Leo, unaffordable loans to friends, and forgiving almost any character flaw. Even my father’s fluency in three languages fed his social reach. I admired my father’s generosity with his friends.
Born to Hungarian immigrants living in Glens Falls, New York, he learned to speak his parents’ native language while spending his formative years in Hungary following what must go down as the most poorly timed holiday in history: When my father was ten years old, the family went on vacation to their native country. World
