| American publishers might well have been forgiven for looking askance at a project like Woody Allen’s memoir. Not only is Allen one of the most compulsive self-narrating voices in our confessional celebrity culture; he also, of course, is a rather toxic public figure, thanks both to his daughter Dylan’s claim that Allen molested her as a child (a charge the famed director denies) and to his scandalous seduction of, and eventual marriage to, his former stepdaughter, Soon-Yi Previn. Is there really any added value in granting the reading public sustained exposure to this particular narrator’s inner life and thoughts? But as New Republic contributing editor Rumaan Alam notes, when publishers were presented with Allen’s memoir more than a year ago, they were more concerned with the question of how to go about publishing it than of whether the book was really worth publishing in the first place. In investigating the story of the book’s acquisition, Alam learned negotiations were kept very tightly under wraps. Two editors at houses in the running for the manuscript told him that Allen made the unusual move of forgoing an advance on the deal in exchange for full editorial control. This condition was perhaps in line with Allen’s profile as a Hollywood auteur, but given the explosive material that the words a memoir by Woody Allen inevitably conjure, the proposition was too high risk for at least some major publishers. What’s more, the prolonged public silence surrounding all these discussions seemed like a red flag unto itself. As another editor—speaking on background, like all of Alam’s publishing sources—observed, if you’re talking over a book deal in secrecy, it’s worth asking why. And sure enough, when the publishing house Hachette announced, on virtually no advance notice, that it was about to release Allen’s memoir, A Propos of Nothing, it had a mutiny on its hands. Three days later, editorial employees at Hachette organized a walkout en masse over the book’s acquisition; the following day, the house announced it was pulling the plug on the title. Hachette, as it happens, had also published Catch and Kill, the bestselling account of efforts to discredit and buy off #MeToo accusers written by Allen’s estranged son Ronan Farrow. “Even beyond the family strife playing out at the house, the irony was stark,” Alam writes. Farrow’s book “documents the legal and bureaucratic maneuvers corporate actors use to quiet claims of abuse”—and here was Farrow’s own father striking just the sort of self-protective, behind-the-scenes compact that his son had exposed in chilling detail under the imprimatur of the same publishing house. When the dust had settled at Hachette, another smaller house, Arcade, swooped in with a deal to publish A Propos of Nothing and has now published the title. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the furor over the book’s publication now seems to be the most noteworthy thing about it. Jeannette Seaver, the Arcade executive who acquired the Allen manuscript, cites the book’s publication as a victory for free expression: “I come from a long line of free speech protesting,” she told Alam. But he suggests that the whole episode illuminates a deeper conflict between the imperatives of commerce and culture that doesn’t fit neatly into the received culture-war templates that counterpose First Amendment freedoms to the alleged excesses of cancel culture: Corporations are guided by profit motive. It’s hard to reconcile Hachette’s choice to publish Allen with the imperative to retain Farrow, whose Catch and Kill has sold more than 160,000 copies in hardcover, a success by almost any metric. Presumably, its executives believed that this would demonstrate the editorial independence of its various imprints, but it has simply laid bare that the ethics of many of the people who make books are at odds with the corporate entities that pay them to do so. As for the book itself, Alam reports that there’s not much of a there there. Allen’s handling of the most salacious parts of his story—Dylan’s accusations and the Soon-Yi affair and subsequent divorce from Mia Farrow—are at once unadorned and supremely self-serving; neither candid nor revealing, and of course mostly in line with Allen’s prior public statements. And even as a celebrity exercise in self-marketing, it’s oddly evasive and inert, Alam reports: At this point—Allen turns 85 this year—the man may be more persona than person. The memoir promises intimacy but delivers, mostly, shtick: hackneyed references (“headhunting tribes in Borneo”), a sprinkling of Yiddish (the beautiful “fumfered”), old showbiz argot (a successful film is one that “played well”), jokey allusions to Thiruvananthapuram or Zanzibar that affirm his indifference to the world beyond Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He’s a comedian, and this is his memoir, so I suppose he can be forgiven a few jokes. Still, one wishes they’d been a bit funnier.
Allen’s act is well known enough that this memoir’s readers would always be a self-selecting bunch. Though I’ve loved many of Allen’s movies, I was mostly unmoved by his whiz-bang voice; though I’m a sucker for gossip, I was mostly uninterested in his prodigious name-dropping. Leave aside, if you can, the question of whether Woody Allen ought to be canceled and consider, instead, whether he’s simply gone stale. The title A Propos of Nothing, in other words, may not be as winsomely self-deprecating as Allen intends it to be. Perhaps publishers might have even reached the same conclusion on their own had Allen submitted the manuscript to standard editorial review—that, at any rate, seems to be the only speculative silver lining that might be teased out of this latest sordid Woody Allen affair. —Chris Lehmann, Editor |
