Continuing my discussion of Debbie Nathan's book....
As I wrote in yesterday's entry, the book chronicles the lives and interaction of three women -- a patient, a psychiatrist, and a journalist -- together responsible for the Sybil phenomenon and the resulting wave of interest in multiple personalities.
I'll write today mostly about the journalist, Flora Schreiber.
Her first publishing niche
She had a freelancing niche in the late 1950s and early 1960s writing for women's magazines about the women in the lives of politically powerful men. In June 1960, for example, Good Housekeeping published an article of her's titled, "Richard Nixon: A Mother's Story." The mother of course was Hannah Nixon, and Schreiber had gotten permission from the people around the Vice President, and from Hannah, to follow Hannah around, taking notes on her day and copying down the pearls of wisdom that fell from her mouth. Such as her boy's favorite dessert -- cherry pie.
This is not to suggest that Schreiber was a partisan Republican hack. She was an entrepreneur filling a market demand, and she could do that with the women in the lives of Democratic politicians too. After that election, she got another assignment from Good Housekeeping, to write "What Jackie Kennedy Has Learned From Her Mother."
(SPOILER ALERT. Jackie -- pictured above, for you youngsters -- learned about show horses and good manners from her Mom.)
Search for a new niche
Schreiber appears to have made decent money in that publishing niche. Unfortunately, the market was getting tighter in the 1960s. The women to whom G.H. and kindred magazines appealed were spending more of their time looking at the glowing screen in their living rooms, less of it reading glossies. so the glossies were cutting back, doing more of their writing in-house, etc. Schreiber responded to changing market conditions by broadening her product line.
She decided to start pitching articles popularizing new developments in psychology. Her first article in that vein was "I Committed My Daughter," written from the first person POV of "Claudia," the mother who had committed her schizophrenic daughter "Norma" to the care of a private hospital in Florida. This ran in Cosmopolitan in 1962.
That was a big hit, and it was her interest in following up this newer niche that led Schreiber to contact Dr. Cornelia Wilbur. As I mentioned in yesterday's entry, Wilbur in the 1960s co-authored a book on the psychoanalytic understanding of (male) homosexuality, and that book took a rather strict old-time-religiony sort of view of gay men (the Freudian religion), a view that sees such a sexuality as disease and sees gay men's presumedly domineering mothers as the carriers of that disease.
Under the tutelage of Wilbur, but using the first-person voice of one such mother (a "composite" i.e. a fiction), Schreiber wrote "I Was Raising a Homosexual Child," published -- again by Cosmo -- in January 1963.
A Meeting and a Coincidence
Wilbur was very happy with Schreiber's use of her work, and decided to give her another plum -- the MPD case she's been working on, the exclusive scoop on Shirley. The three women met in 1962, but the writer cautioned the patient and psychiatrist at this meeting that she couldn't sell the story to a book publisher until it had a happy ended -- a cure. The multiples had to become a happy integrated one, then it would be bookable, in at least two senses of that word.
There was another caution. Schreiber said she'd be very busy, because she had just gotten a new teaching job that would supplement her freelancing income, and she needed time to settle into it. So, she couldn't commit herself to starting work on a book until 1965.
Conveniently, Connie declared Shirley cured in ... 1965.
The work of writing and the work of looking for a publisher went on together, and both took a long time. It wasn't until 1969 that a small publishing company named Cowles agreed to a contract (and gave Schreiber a then-considerable advance of $12,000.) The working title of the book at this point was Sylvia.
Schreiber doesn't seem to have worked very hard to protect Shirley's anonymity. She changed names, but not very much. The use of Sylvia and later Sybil as a pseudonym doesn't show much effort. Likewise, Shirley's mother Mattie in real life, became Hattie in the book. There are other examples of the slightness of name changes, but the overall point is that anyone who had been in the Mason family's social circles during Shirley's childhood and who read the book when it did come out could make a fairly confident guess about who the book was about, and it seems at least a few did so.
Buckley's Publisher
Publication was delayed somewhat by the failure of the would-be publisher, Cowles. Its remnants including the contract with Schreiber were purchased by Regnery, which had been known as an ideologically conservative publishing company. [Regnery was best known as the publisher of William F. Buckley's book expressing his dissatisfaction with the liberal tone at his alma mater, Yale University.] But by the time Regnery took over Cowles, it was eager to get into less obviously political fields, and publish some money makers.
Sybil was for sale as a bound book as of May 22, 1973.
No Nobel???
Its success, and the subsequent royalties, turned Schreiber's head. Nathan portrays her "doing behind-the-scenes paperwork to nominate herself and Sybil for a Nobel Prize in literature," although she immediately assures us that that was unsuccessful.
THAT is surprising. First, the Nobel Pize for Literature is awarded to an author on the basis of a body of work. Often a considerable body of work. It isn't the Pulitzer, it isn't awarded on an article-by-article or book-by-book basis. For example, in the year of Sybil, 1973, the award went to Patrick White. The citation didn't name any specific book of his but congratulated him on his "epic and psychological narrative art."
Patrick White was the author of The Living and the Dead (1941), The Aunt's Story (1948), The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957) and so forth.
Schreiber on the other hand was the author, as we've noted, of puff pieces on the women in the lives of powerful men, who turned to pop psychology and hit a zeitgeist-determined jackpot.
Nobel ... no.
Noble ... also no.
As I wrote in yesterday's entry, the book chronicles the lives and interaction of three women -- a patient, a psychiatrist, and a journalist -- together responsible for the Sybil phenomenon and the resulting wave of interest in multiple personalities.
I'll write today mostly about the journalist, Flora Schreiber.
Her first publishing niche
She had a freelancing niche in the late 1950s and early 1960s writing for women's magazines about the women in the lives of politically powerful men. In June 1960, for example, Good Housekeeping published an article of her's titled, "Richard Nixon: A Mother's Story." The mother of course was Hannah Nixon, and Schreiber had gotten permission from the people around the Vice President, and from Hannah, to follow Hannah around, taking notes on her day and copying down the pearls of wisdom that fell from her mouth. Such as her boy's favorite dessert -- cherry pie.
This is not to suggest that Schreiber was a partisan Republican hack. She was an entrepreneur filling a market demand, and she could do that with the women in the lives of Democratic politicians too. After that election, she got another assignment from Good Housekeeping, to write "What Jackie Kennedy Has Learned From Her Mother."
(SPOILER ALERT. Jackie -- pictured above, for you youngsters -- learned about show horses and good manners from her Mom.)
Search for a new niche
Schreiber appears to have made decent money in that publishing niche. Unfortunately, the market was getting tighter in the 1960s. The women to whom G.H. and kindred magazines appealed were spending more of their time looking at the glowing screen in their living rooms, less of it reading glossies. so the glossies were cutting back, doing more of their writing in-house, etc. Schreiber responded to changing market conditions by broadening her product line.
She decided to start pitching articles popularizing new developments in psychology. Her first article in that vein was "I Committed My Daughter," written from the first person POV of "Claudia," the mother who had committed her schizophrenic daughter "Norma" to the care of a private hospital in Florida. This ran in Cosmopolitan in 1962.
That was a big hit, and it was her interest in following up this newer niche that led Schreiber to contact Dr. Cornelia Wilbur. As I mentioned in yesterday's entry, Wilbur in the 1960s co-authored a book on the psychoanalytic understanding of (male) homosexuality, and that book took a rather strict old-time-religiony sort of view of gay men (the Freudian religion), a view that sees such a sexuality as disease and sees gay men's presumedly domineering mothers as the carriers of that disease.
Under the tutelage of Wilbur, but using the first-person voice of one such mother (a "composite" i.e. a fiction), Schreiber wrote "I Was Raising a Homosexual Child," published -- again by Cosmo -- in January 1963.
A Meeting and a Coincidence
Wilbur was very happy with Schreiber's use of her work, and decided to give her another plum -- the MPD case she's been working on, the exclusive scoop on Shirley. The three women met in 1962, but the writer cautioned the patient and psychiatrist at this meeting that she couldn't sell the story to a book publisher until it had a happy ended -- a cure. The multiples had to become a happy integrated one, then it would be bookable, in at least two senses of that word.
There was another caution. Schreiber said she'd be very busy, because she had just gotten a new teaching job that would supplement her freelancing income, and she needed time to settle into it. So, she couldn't commit herself to starting work on a book until 1965.
Conveniently, Connie declared Shirley cured in ... 1965.
The work of writing and the work of looking for a publisher went on together, and both took a long time. It wasn't until 1969 that a small publishing company named Cowles agreed to a contract (and gave Schreiber a then-considerable advance of $12,000.) The working title of the book at this point was Sylvia.
Schreiber doesn't seem to have worked very hard to protect Shirley's anonymity. She changed names, but not very much. The use of Sylvia and later Sybil as a pseudonym doesn't show much effort. Likewise, Shirley's mother Mattie in real life, became Hattie in the book. There are other examples of the slightness of name changes, but the overall point is that anyone who had been in the Mason family's social circles during Shirley's childhood and who read the book when it did come out could make a fairly confident guess about who the book was about, and it seems at least a few did so.
Buckley's Publisher
Publication was delayed somewhat by the failure of the would-be publisher, Cowles. Its remnants including the contract with Schreiber were purchased by Regnery, which had been known as an ideologically conservative publishing company. [Regnery was best known as the publisher of William F. Buckley's book expressing his dissatisfaction with the liberal tone at his alma mater, Yale University.] But by the time Regnery took over Cowles, it was eager to get into less obviously political fields, and publish some money makers.
Sybil was for sale as a bound book as of May 22, 1973.
No Nobel???
Its success, and the subsequent royalties, turned Schreiber's head. Nathan portrays her "doing behind-the-scenes paperwork to nominate herself and Sybil for a Nobel Prize in literature," although she immediately assures us that that was unsuccessful.
THAT is surprising. First, the Nobel Pize for Literature is awarded to an author on the basis of a body of work. Often a considerable body of work. It isn't the Pulitzer, it isn't awarded on an article-by-article or book-by-book basis. For example, in the year of Sybil, 1973, the award went to Patrick White. The citation didn't name any specific book of his but congratulated him on his "epic and psychological narrative art."
Patrick White was the author of The Living and the Dead (1941), The Aunt's Story (1948), The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957) and so forth.
Schreiber on the other hand was the author, as we've noted, of puff pieces on the women in the lives of powerful men, who turned to pop psychology and hit a zeitgeist-determined jackpot.
Nobel ... no.
Noble ... also no.
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