Letter to Andre Deutsch (4 November 1963)
Reassuring Deutsch after the publisher's anxious letter about Scott Meredith's strong-arm methods and Mailer's silence: all final decisions still rest with Mailer and Cy Rembar. The letter names the new novel — An American Dream — and asks how to settle the advances already paid on the long novel.
Responding to the anxiety Deutsch had conveyed in a 24 October letter — about agent Scott Meredith‘s “strong-arm” methods and Mailer’s two weeks of silence — Mailer reassures his British publisher that “all final decisions on everything are still being made by Cy Rembar and me,” recalling his old bad conscience over Barbary Shore. He asks how Deutsch wishes to handle advances already paid on the long novel, pitches a friend’s Moroccan cookbook for Deutsch’s list, and — in one of the first such references in a letter — names the Esquire book “(now titled An American Dream).” He also mentions that his ward Jeanne is now Mrs. Paul Krassner.