MAXIM LIEBER

AUTHORS' REPRESENTATIVE

Murray Hill 2-3135-3136

CABLE: FERENC • NEW YORK

545 FIFTH AVENUE

NEW YORK CITY

August 25, 1937

Miss Josephine Herbst
Yaddo
Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Dear Jo:

That The Nation check was miserably small is not open to discussion but then Jo, you know as well as I do that the liberal weeklies do not carry the national advertising that The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's do and so cannot compete in rates with these mass magazines. If you will write the kind of stuff that is acceptable to low paying magazines, you must be content with that. On the other hand, that you should be astonished to receive the check through me is indeed surprising since the Nation matter of factly accepted me as your agent and did the quite normal thing in passing the check on to me. Here are some authors who enjoy the personal contact with editors; they enjoy having long talks with them; that need not however, necessarily disturb the author-agent relationship. You only lay yourself open to browbeating and mistreatment by discussing things with editors, when it would be so much more reasonable and would conserve your energies for more important things, if you left negotiating and argument to an agent who would be more unyielding, more persistent and thereby earn his commission.

What shocked me was to have you say, "The whole Spanish business has been a bad egg". I cannot imagine you, somehow, wanting to capitalize on the bloody conflagration going on in that unfortunate country. All along I had thought that your desire to go to Spain was motivated by some lofty ideals and intentions

MAXIM LIEBER

AUTHORS' REPRESENTATIVE

Murray Hill 2-3135-3136

CABLE: FERENC • NEW YORK

-2-

545 FIFTH AVENUE

NEW YORK CITY

of getting at the actual truth and shouting it from the roof tops, such roof tops being The Nation, The New Republic and NANA. If because of a concatenation of circumstances, these media did not welcome your material, you should neither blame me or Spain.

On the one hand you say, "It would be all right if I could be relieved of all details in placing stuff!" On the other, you maintain that you can't be relieved because you feel that placing the material requires a good deal of manipulating on your part...and that you will forgive me for saying is largely a matter of your own choice. You are a very dynamic person, extremely restive and you feel that you must have a finger in every pie. Obviously you will not believe me if I assure you that matters would go along satisfactorily if you delegated them to myself or anyone else for that matter...for mind you, I do not write this as a personal plea, nor would I wish you to construe it as such. I merely feel that your letter calls for an answer, for you make several unsavory statements, even though only by implication, as for example when you say that it has occurred to you that you should stop being a "prize sucker", or when you express suspicion that you might have got more money for your title from the picture company.

I'd always assumed that our relationship was based on a sympathetic understanding, a friendship and a concomitant mutual trust. Your present letter shows how absurd I was to entertain such notions. Indeed Jo, your letter is terribly revealing and a terrible blow to me, for the surface statements would lead anyone unfamiliar with the facts, to believe that you were being terribly abused, that I had failed to help you properly, whereas the known facts would definitely contradict that, for I helped you even to the point of making slight loans to John and yourself at various times. Indeed Jo, you are not the sucker, for it appears quite plainly that I am.

ML:GM