Advance Guard

Publishing was once the last refuge of politesse. Take the matter of advances, for example--those cash payments against future royalties. Seldom was a tardy writer pressed to repay; the image of a company bearing down on a lonely writer was too distasteful for bookmen to contemplate.

But they are rapidly acquiring the taste. As publishing houses get consumed by conglomerates, as advances grow ever larger--Simon & Schuster has just guaranteed Joseph Heller as much as $1.7 million for his next novel--more and more authors are being forced to put up or pay up. The most spectacular example of this new punctiliousness is the case of Robert Massie, author of the 1967 bestseller Nicholas and Alexandra. In 1968 Massie received a $130,000 advance from Atheneum for his next book, a biography of Peter the Great. The manuscript was due in June 1971. By then Massie was only midway through the project. When Atheneum refused his request for another $370,000 advance, the author set aside Peter, and with his wife wrote Journey, a book about their hemophiliac son, for Knopf.

Atheneum's continual demands made Massie nervous, then resentful, then stymied. "When I sat down at my typewriter, the first thing I saw was Atheneum," he recalls. In 1975 Atheneum saw red. It refused to let Massie out of the contract and sued him for the advance--plus $575,000 in damages for "lost profits." The case went to arbitration, and last month the publisher was awarded return of the $130,000 advance, about $16,000 in interest, plus 25% of any money Massie makes from Peter--if it is ever completed. Massie's repayment will be deducted from Nicholas and Alexandra royalties. As he sees it, "Nobody won this thing, but I didn't lose."

Other authors may not be able to make that boast. Random House is suing A.E. Hotchner to recoup an $11,250 advance for a memoir that he completed but the publisher rejected as "unsatisfactory." Putnam has begun proceedings against Joseph Hayes (The Desperate Hours) to regain $33,750 for a book called Missing and Presumed Dead that Putnam refused to publish.

Such tactics are not always necessary. In 1973 conscience-stricken Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz sold his beloved country home to repay $17,500 owed Simon & Schuster for an unwritten tome on the 1960s. Nora Ephron (Crazy Salad) has paid the last of $14,000 she owed Viking for a never-written history of the liquor industry.

As for Robert Massie, he started work last week as a visiting professor of journalism at Princeton and plans to ignore his unfinished Peter manuscript until the spring. "I'm not saying I'll never finish it," he told TIME Reporter Sarah Bedell. "Peter the Great has been around 300 years." Da, tovarich, but litterateurs may recall the fate of Leo Tolstoy, who, following the success of War and Peace, plunged into a novel about the selfsame czar. Even he abandoned the project for something shorter and simpler: Anna Karenina.

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