Memories of Juris Jurjevics (1943-2018) by Jerry Gold

It’s been a little over a year since my friend Juris Jurjevics died unexpectedly. I met him for the first time on March 26, 1997. It was a wet Wednesday morning and he and Dan Simon and I sat at a small table at the Jon Vie, a cheerful bakery on Sixth Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets. I had come to New York to interview him and others in independent—that is, noncorporate—publishing for a book I was compiling. Juris was the publisher and one of the founders of Soho Press.

When I called him from Seattle to ask for an interview, he was suspicious, and I think he remained that way in the time between my call and the interview and for much of the interview itself, listening when I had hoped he would talk without prodding. He was suspicious and even reluctant to agree to talk with me because he had been interviewed by another Seattle publisher and then quoted in print as having said something in one context that he had said in another. He softened somewhat only when I promised to send a transcript of our talk for his corrections before I published it.

He asked then if I would mind if he brought Dan Simon, the publisher of Seven Stories Press, with him. I had intended to ask Dan for an interview anyway, so I did not mind at all. On a number of occasions, I had interviewed two (or more) people at the same time and I had almost always enjoyed the verbal interaction between them as they jumped in to finish each other’s sentences, or challenged each other’s memory or interrupted with a different point of view altogether.

I was sitting over coffee in the bakery, reading Stanley Unwin’s The Truth About Publishing, when Juris and Dan came in. I was surprised at how large Juris was. Almost everyone in publishing I had met in New York so far was small and slender, and Juris was tall and robust. He crooked his neck to look at the book in front of me. “That’s that British book, isn’t it?”

I said it was.

“It’s old,” he said. He was either dismissing the book or dismissing me or perhaps only wondering why I was reading it, I wasn’t sure which.

I was interested in how independent publishers came to publishing, either as a career or as an avocation. Unlike most people in publishing, Juris did not graduate from college but went to work in a Barnes and Noble and stayed there until he was drafted into the army. This was during the war in Viet Nam and he was sent there, assigned to a signal company that was attached to MACV, the American Military Advisory Command, in II Corps. I was surprised to hear him say he had been a soldier in Viet Nam. Of all those I interviewed for the two volumes I published on independent publishing, seventy-one people, only seven had seen military service and only two had gone to Viet Nam.

I said I had also been in Viet Nam, and in II Corps, but had left the year before Juris arrived. I had been in Special Forces. Juris said he had known a number of men in Special Forces. Both of us had been enlisted men, both of us had left the army as sergeants. (Of the seven who had served in the military, six had been enlisted personnel. The exception, Barney Rosset, had been in World War II.) It was at this point in the interview, I think, that his suspicion of me began to lift.

After his return from Viet Nam, Juris went to work for Harper and Row. I asked him how he, who had not finished college, who had been a soldier, and worse, an enlisted man, “a proletarian,” had gotten a job at Harper and Row which was “very blue-blood. Very exclusive,” as Juris described it.¹

He had started at the bottom, “in the dungeons,” copyright and contract registrations, where his earnings did not even ensure that he would eat regularly.²

Aside: A few years prior to this interview and twenty-plus years after Juris started at Harper Row, a well-known and well-regarded editor from one of the major New York houses came out to Seattle to speak at a conference. When asked by someone in the audience what the starting salary was for an editorial assistant, she replied, “Well, my dear, it’s assumed that your family will support you.”³

With others, Juris said, he had gotten involved at Harper with trying to expand the influence of the small, in-house union. Ultimately, he came to feel that it would be best for him to leave the company because his organizing activities had drawn some negative attention from management.

Listening to him, I began to detect something of the antiauthoritarian. I had been instrumental in establishing a union local for Head Start teachers when I lived in Missoula, and I recognized at least some of the aspects of antiauthoritarianism that accompany organizing or agitating, because I shared them.

As Juris told it, the success of his career in corporate publishing owed to a personal connection and luck. He got a job at Avon through a friend and began editing books there. From Avon he went to Dutton and then to Dial where eventually he became editor-in-chief, thanks to Nicholas Meyer’s (The Seven Percent Solution) mother who intervened on Juris’ behalf, apparently unknown to him at the time, when Dial was looking at someone else to fill the position.

His experience in corporate publishing proved invaluable to him for the connections he made and maintained, and for the lessons he absorbed, and for me because he passed on some of those lessons to me. In conversation and in writing, I’ve often cited this passage from the interview I did with him:

In any industry uniformity of product is a big goal. You can have it in six colors, but it needs to be the same thing. And business is very uncomfortable when the product is not that, when it’s very individualistic. And so there’s a real drive to get into the genres that are obviously lucrative, and they stay there until they develop the authors in those genres. And the genres that weren’t so lucrative, they want to stay away from. A lot of the people from the business side…didn’t really get a full grasp of it, and their idea of uniformity obviously doesn’t work. Really, the way they talk, you’d think they were sending out to a delicatessen for ‘six more of those.’ And it doesn’t quite work that way. You aren’t offered the menu, whether you like it or not. And the business side wasn’t that comfortable with it. They like it down-market and controllable.⁴

That quote comes from my book, Obscure in the Shade of the Giants. I like it because it explains much of what befell American literary fiction. Juris was talking about the 1980s when publishing came under the influence of MBAs, intelligent people driven by the desire to make as much money as possible with the least amount of risk. As Juris expounded, I recalled that it was in the 1980s that I found myself drifting away from American fiction and toward foreign novels. (For a while, I read science fiction, but then that also began to pall. Today I read hardly any American fiction, and when I do read an American novel I am almost always disappointed. To be sure, some very good fiction is written by Americans, but very little of it is published.) It was also during this period that people in publishing began referring to it as an “industry” and books as “product,” as though a book were interchangeable with any other from the same assembly line,⁵ although it wasn’t until the ‘90s that I heard booksellers in the Pacific Northwest call books product.

A few months after Obscure was published, I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair where I found myself eavesdropping on a conversation between five or six editors from as many European countries. They were at an aisle junction in what was then known as the American hall, Hall 8, waiting for the representative of one of the largest American houses to arrive. They were complaining about the “menu” of novels, to use Juris’ term, the Americans were offering. The books were dull, one much like another, and the Americans had been offering novels just like these for the last several years. The editors would have liked to establish relationships with new trading partners, but nobody else had the commercial clout of the Americans. Finally the American rep showed up and the conversation was dropped in an instant and replaced with glad-handing and how-have-you-beens.

The year before Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature—surely a slap in the face of American publishing, Dylan’s talent notwithstanding—I was asked by a couple of European agents in Frankfurt how American fiction had gotten “this way.” That something was wrong with American fiction went without saying; the agents’ interest now was in trying to figure out why it had deteriorated.

While I was trying to think of a way to respond, one of the agents answered his own question. “The writing programs,” he said.

I agreed that, by and large, the MFA programs had not served American literature well, but I wouldn’t place them at the top of the list of things that have combined to bring it down. I did allude to a couple of American MFA students who had complained to me about the “McWriting” they were being taught in their program, and a graduate of another MFA program who told me that the programs took their cues from publishers; that is, if students want to be published, they must give publishing houses what they want; they must not try to sell them writing that is innovative. Without knowing it, they were validating Juris’ observation about publishers wanting “six more of those.”

I included in my list of causes for the decline of American fiction the removal of the arts and humanities from public school education; teachers’ ignorance of the best of world literature, as well as the ignorance of the professors who taught them, and that of the agents and editors who are the gatekeepers for the major publishing houses; and the lack of visibility, even availability, of great books in physical bookstores where people can browse.

But the agents disagreed. They insisted the writing programs were to blame. I understood that they were afraid of the writing programs because they had begun to appear in Europe. They were afraid that if the programs proliferated, readers eventually would not be able to distinguish the literature of one country from that of another. The American penchant for conformity, which had debased American writing, at least the writing that was published by the large American houses, was a threat to European writing, and the European literary establishments were pushing back; they were buying very little American fiction, except when it came to best-selling crime fiction whose potential for profit-making could not be ignored.

These were some of the things—continuations, really, of the topics that came up in the 1997 interview—Juris and I talked about in the years following. We talked about publishing and we talked about the Vietnam War and its aftermath, and occasionally a book one of the other of us had read that had nothing to do with either. He did not think like a critic or an academician, but judged books by their publishing viability or the value they otherwise provided the world, and the pleasure they gave him.

Unlike many editors, he did not blame the book or its author if it did not sell well. He tended to see the problem as one of Marketing or Promotion (big M, big P) for misunderstanding the book or for simply not putting out the effort to push it effectively. Sometimes he simply chalked a book’s sales performance up to the mood of the reading public. He was the kind of publisher other American publishers used to be—Bennett Cerf, for example, before Random House went public—using the profit from popular books to finance better books that he knew would not sell as well. I admired him immensely.

So we talked about publishing and about war and about particular books we loved. I was particularly taken with Farnoosh Moshiri’s At the Wall of the Almighty and, when I mentioned it, learned that he was too, even though neither of us had published it. He had tried repeatedly to persuade the New York Times to review it, but the Times didn’t review anything then that had not been published in hardback, and refused to bend. This effort for a book he had not published!

I published two or three books that Soho had rejected. I never asked why they were rejected and Juris never told me. The author of a book Soho turned down—not one I later published—told me that when Juris sent it back to her, she found it was accompanied by a lengthy critique he had written and suggestions on how to make it a better book. He had not invited her to resubmit it, but after following his suggestions in rewriting parts of the book, she was able to place it with one of the large houses.

During our interview we talked about people we had known in Viet Nam and what life in the United States was like after we returned from the war. I said I was fucked up and he said he was fucked up too.⁶ I think his anger was more focused than mine; at least he seemed better able to suppress it or channel it into something that worked for him, whereas mine sometimes worked against me. But both of us were able to tolerate, if not accept, points of view antithetical to our own.

I told Juris I would send him a copy of The Negligence of Death, the novel I had written, based on my war experience and which I had published with Black Heron Press. I mailed it within a week or so of returning to Seattle. I regarded it as a gesture of gratitude for his participation in the interview. A month later he called me. “I’m angry with you,” he said. “This is Juris.”

He was angry with me because he had taken my book to bed with him, thinking it would put him to sleep, but had spent half the night reading it. Worse, he was going to have to do the same thing tonight in order to finish it. He asked me some questions and I gave him background on the book, who some of the characters were in real life, or at least whom they were built on, and what had become of them, some of them, later in life.

A few weeks after that conversation, I called him to ask if he would be interested in reissuing Negligence. I had intended to do it myself through Black Heron Press, but my publishing schedule was filled for the next three years and I wanted the book out, reformatted and with a new cover, sooner than that. Juris decided on the spot. He would be delighted to, he said.

Like me, he had no tolerance for someone who lied to him or intentionally misled him. He had been talking up The Negligence of Death, now retitled Sergeant Dickinson, and someone told him that the Special Forces team in a set-piece battle I had depicted in the book had twelve members, not nine, as I said it had. Juris called me and spoke directly to the issue. I could feel the suspicion under the apparent calm.

Special Forces operational, or “A” teams were authorized twelve men in the army’s Table of Organization and Equipment, but my team was short three. One was in the hospital, anemic from a multiplicity of leech bites; one who had just been assigned had been killed on his way into the battle; and we were simply short one man; his slot had never been filled. That left nine of us. I gave Juris the names of the men who were both assigned to the team and were actually there. Before I got to the end of the list, Juris had backed off. “Never mind,” he said. I thought he was embarrassed.

I got the last name out and then I said, “But I can see where the person you talked to may have made a mistake.” Both Time and Newsweek, who had had correspondents at the battle, had reported a twelve-man team, probably having gotten their information from one of our headquarters that was ignorant of our situation on the ground. I was giving Juris and his friend who had possibly tried to one-up him a way to save face, but I was angry too.

We chatted a little about nothing I can recall now, both of us trying to smooth things over. We did, but we had learned something important: we both revered truthfulness.

I think he hoped that I would join his stable of writers of crime fiction. We met for lunch once at the Frankfurt Book Fair. He had sent me a couple of Magdalen Nabb’s novels, she being an American writer who lived in Florence (Italy) and set her novels there. I had enjoyed them and told him so.

“Yes!” he said, with that closed-fist arm pump that people use to signify accomplishment. I had not realized until then that he had a purpose in sending me those books. But I was captive then to trying to make sense of my own life experience, and I did not have the inclination to write crime fiction, although I did become a true fan of Magdalen Nabb’s books.

He called once to ask if I would be interested in doing a book on life after Viet Nam for Special Forces veterans of the war. I asked for time to think about it and eventually called him back, having decided not to do it. I had already written about the war and some of its aftermath and I wasn’t eager to write about it again. Juris, meanwhile, had decided not to pursue the project. Today I look at his proposal and my considering it as a flirtation with an attempt to put to rest the remains of our discomfort—if that’s the right word—concerning the war. We both gave up on it, I think, because we did not want to get distracted from the other aspects of our lives.

Juris could remain your friend while disagreeing with you. Nine or ten years ago, he told me that he had recently had dinner with Dan and some French publishers Dan knew. Except for Juris, everyone at the table was agreed that capital punishment was an evil that should be abolished. “What about Hitler?” Juris asked. “If we had captured him, wouldn’t it have been best to execute him like the other war criminals we executed?”

He did not tell me how the others responded, but there was no indication he harbored any animosity toward them. Some readers may wonder why I have bothered to make this point, but I have known people to end friendships over disagreements on abortion or gun rights or political party affiliation or any of a variety of other issues. And, of course, currently many people have become estranged from one another owing to disagreements over other matters of public policy. Even before Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Americans found issues that would allow them to close their minds to other people.

In late May of 2005, my wife, Jeanne, and I visited New York. I hadn’t been to Book Expo America, the national book trade show and conference, in several years and I wanted to get an idea as to whether I should start exhibiting Black Heron Press books there again. I intended to talk to old friends from the days when the trade show was a more vibrant, welcoming place for smaller presses, as well as to simply observe the interactions between publishers and booksellers. (I found the small independents situated against a wall behind an opaque curtain. When I went to the show’s management to object, one person said they would be sure to remove the curtain for next year’s show, and another said I had not seen what I had seen, that there was no curtain. Neither spoke to the issue of placing the smaller presses out of the way of foot traffic, as though they were an afterthought, or perhaps an embarrassment that the BEA had found space for in spite of its distaste for small presses.)

Jeanne and I met Juris in the evening following the second day of the show. He suggested dinner at a restaurant we hadn’t been to, but I’m certain New Yorkers would know it, at least by name. (Unfortunately, I can’t remember it.) I do not remember what we ate, but our selections were wonderful, the contentment and sense of aesthetic satiation from the food remaining in my memory even today.

I thanked Juris for making the hotel arrangements for us. He had even seen that a bouquet of yellow roses awaited us on the dresser. He asked now, at dinner, if we liked our room. He said he had never been to that hotel, but had heard good things about it. We assured him that we found it charming.

We talked about writing and writers, commercial mostly, but also Edwidge Danticat. He had been her first publisher, but she had ultimately left Soho for a larger house. And, of course, we talked about publishing. The market for trade paperbacks had tanked a couple of years earlier and had not revived. Selling reprint rights had been a major source of Soho’s income.

From dinner, Juris took us on a walking tour of particular neighborhoods, especially Little Italy where Juris had gone to live when he was eighteen.⁷ He showed us the building where he had had a vermin-infested flat, and another building where, more recently, there had been a jazz club. He had taken a European publishing colleague there one evening and the man had been shocked that the drummer had a handgun in a holster strapped to his ankle. Juris had tried to explain to him about New York clubs, at least in those days, but his friend could not comprehend the possibility of such danger in a jazz venue.

But now, Jeanne and I were with Juris and we had just eaten a wonderful meal and gone on a short tour of Little Italy and Juris had taken us to the atrium across from Ground Zero and described to us what the scene had been there when the Twin Towers were struck, with parts of airplane wreckage flying through the building and going through or stopping at which wall. He must have read this or been told of it, because he was not there. He was on his bicycle on his way to work when the first plane went into the first tower. He had, for reasons I have forgotten, taken a detour, which may have saved his life, because his regular route took him close to the World Trade Center.⁸

He was still angry with Rudy Giuliani, New York’s mayor then. The trial of two men accused of terrorism was scheduled to begin soon in the city and that was why Al Quaeda struck when they did, and where. The trial was originally to be held in Arizona, but Giuliani had insisted on having the two men extradited to New York to stand trial there. He was responsible for the attack, Juris believed, but since then he had been passing himself off as a hero for keeping the city functioning afterward.

I could have said that if Al Quaeda had hit Phoenix, it still would have been a catastrophe for Americans. I could have said that, given the complexity of the operation, Al Quaeda had to have been planning it for months, even years. It wasn’t the kind of operation where they could say, Let’s go after Phoenix, and if they move the trial to another city, we’ll just switch to wherever the trial will be. But I didn’t say these things because I was struck by Juris’ grief and his anger and the passion he had for the city, and I didn’t want to say anything to suggest that anger was misdirected or in error. It was the only time I heard Juris speak out of something approaching irrationality.

I asked him once why he stayed in New York, given its high cost of living and the frustrations that accompany high population density.

Because New York is where everything is, he said.

Everything?

Media. New York is where all the most important media are, at least as regards publishing.

I couldn’t disagree with that. But I thought pragmatism was second to something else, something that couldn’t be measured except by his intensity of feeling. On another occasion, he told me he was getting ready to take a road trip to New England because his daughter felt he needed to take a vacation out of the city. His tone indicated that he was forcing himself to go.
He asked me once why I continued to run Black Heron Press when I could be using the time spent with the press to write instead. Because occasionally I discover a manuscript that makes me want to howl, I said. He nodded; he understood exactly what I meant.

Aside: I had talked about this with other independent publishers and found that we all experienced something similar when we came across an especially pleasure-invoking or insightful manuscript. I remember Emilie Buchwald of Milkweed Editions saying that discovering such a manuscript made her sit up straight and take notice of the world, as though it were new.

Actually, I remembered inaccurately when I wrote that paragraph. What she said, much more elegantly, was: “I think most of us who are literary publishers swoon over outstanding writing. It gives a visceral response when you read something wonderful.”⁹

I think Juris must have been considering leaving Soho even then, years before he did leave. Where publishing was (usually) a part-time activity for me, it was Juris’ career. Writing was something he did as he could make time for it. For me, writing was the first thing I did almost every morning. Publishing and editing were what I did afterward.

He left Soho Press in order to write full time. But he had also become discontented with publishing. He was not interested in digitalization which was then being touted as the printed book’s replacement. A disadvantage of living in New York, I think, is that you come to believe you must pay attention to this year’s fad—after all, everybody’s talking about it. Living away from New York, I could concentrate on a more historical perspective and, for the most part, ignore the year’s fad and even the two-year trend. Juris turned down a university job that would have required him to learn about digital publishing in order to teach it. His interest was in books, not technology. Also, the teaching gig would have meant traveling out of town, spending more time away from New York than he was willing to do.

I continue to think about Juris, his generosity to writers—he gave me a larger advance than I asked for for Sergeant Dickinson, telling me my request wasn’t enough—his love for New York, his old-fashioned idealism combined with pragmatism, his love of gossip, his commitment to literary works even though his own writing was commercial.

Aside: Once, when I requested more copies of Sergeant Dickinson, he sent them to me, using other books Soho had published, but remaindered, as packing material. It was a way to get these books better known even at the end of their lives with Soho.

I take back the notion about his writing being commercial. I do not know the sales figures for Red Flags, but they could not have been especially high. With a couple of exceptions, Vietnam War fiction has not sold well in the United States. Yet he wrote that book, a war novel but also an exposé of the corruption that permeated South Vietnamese officialdom, including the military, at its higher levels throughout the war and he wrote it, I think, because he felt a personal urgency to.

I still think to myself that Juris would appreciate something about publishing or Viet Nam or life in general that it sometimes occurs to me to say. He would be a good audience even if no one else was. I recently discovered a book recounting the experience of a mutual friend when he was a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge. I would have loved to talk with Juris about that one. And I’m about to publish a book—a first novel by a passionate young writer—that I know Juris would have admired. I wish he were around so I could tell him about it.

Jerry Gold

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ENDNOTES
¹Jerome Gold, Obscure in the Shade of the Giants: Publishing Lives Volume II, Black Heron Press 2001: 192.
²Ibid.
³Toni Morrison, referring to her career as an editor at Random House, reported that her job “never paid a living wage.” See Gayle Feldman, “Remembering Toni Morrison, Editor” in Publishers Weekly, August 19, 2019: 104.
⁴Obscure in the Shade of the Giants: 197.
⁵It was during this period also that Toni Morrison said she became “less interested in being in publishing” because “the work I liked was less and less valued.” See “Remembering Toni Morrison, Editor”: 104.
⁶Parts of the interview I allude to here, such as this passage, were not published in Obscure in the Shade of the Giants.
⁷Jeanne Heifetz, Juris’ wife, wrote me after reading a draft of this essay that Juris could not have lived in Little Italy then because he was at college in Valparaiso, Indiana. I have a clear memory of his saying he was eighteen, but cannot explain the discrepancy in Jeanne’s and my memories. In any case, I defer to her version, as I do in the endnote below.
⁸Jeanne Heifetz wrote me that both she and Juris were still at home when the first plane hit, and decided to stay there “once we understood what was going on.” She said, however, that when he rode his bike to work, his route did take him through lower Manhattan. I think I must have conflated two or more anecdotes Juris told me to have come up with the description of events I used in the text. I have included both Jeanne’s and my versions even though I believe my own is flawed, for no other reason than my fascination with the workings of memory.
⁹Obscure in the Shade of the Giants: pp. 311, 314. Of the approximately 40,000 manuscripts—a conservative estimate—that have been submitted to Black Heron Press over the 35 years of its existence, fewer than 100, perhaps only 50, have made me swoon. Still, these are 50 or 100 manuscripts that, in my opinion, had the potential to change the culture, had they been published, especially by a publisher with influence with the mass media. I’m certain that very few were, if only because small literary presses publish comparatively few books. —Jerry Gold, February 4, 2020