2Born in Hartford, Connecticut to a patrician family and educated at Columbia University, William Bradley, an editor, translator, poet, and homme de lettres, crossed the Atlantic as a First World War Lieutenant and settled permanently in Paris in 1919. He married Jenny Serruys, a Belgian-French translator and anglophile whose family had ties with the Parisian literary and political elite through their amicable connections with, among others, writer Anatole France and statesman Georges Clemenceau.

4The Bradley agency—a bridge between France and the United States—is a fascinating albeit neglected object of study. The exploration of the agency’s archival papers and correspondence helps trace a commercial, as well as intellectual route when it comes to literary and cultural exchanges. It also connects local spaces (the salons of the Left Bank or soirées on the Île Saint-Louis) to global dynamics (the Atlantic crossings of people, books, and ideas). Moreover, the archives shed light on these two key scouts, negotiators, fiscal advisors, translators, and on the many tasks taken on by William and Jenny Bradley, two cultural intermediaries who have remained hidden behind the scenes in the decades they acted as literary agents. The agency’s papers, including professional and personal correspondence, as well as contracts, located at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, offer privileged access to an array of negotiations and translations that illustrate the role assumed by the Bradleys as cultural passeurs between France and the United States, in the interwar period and post-World War Two era.

5This article first introduces the careers and achievements of the literary agents William and Jenny Bradley with the aim of (re)inserting these intermediaries into the complex communications circuit that unfolds from writer to editor and on to reader, at a time when the circuit became more international. The perspective then shifts from editorial to social function and from the publishing arena to a more intellectual space. The Bradley correspondence crossed with other archival and biographical sources unveils the sociability rooted in the agents’ participation in the local world of Parisian salons that harbored transatlantic relationships. Finally, through this combined interest for a literary agency’s intermediation and for a scaled-up approach of cultural dynamics, literary agents like the Bradleys may be viewed as the makers of varied transnational cultural routes for books and authors. In sum, this article hopes to help redefine the time range and spatial trajectories of transatlantic literary exchanges by shedding light on the significance of William and Jenny Bradley, as Atlantic passeurs.

Intermediaries in the communications circuit

6William Faulkner is one of the American authors who contributed to a form of revolution in reading, writing and literary criticism in interwar French literary circles (Hamel). Jean-Paul Sartre is often credited with introducing Faulkner to a French audience. But other instigators and facilitators contributed as well; among them, Maurice Edgar Coindreau, a professor of French literature at Princeton University who served as a scout for Gaston Gallimard and convinced the latter to publish Faulkner’s novels (Pothier; Sapiro; Spill). French editions indeed appeared in the 1930s, with Coindreau translating As I Lay Dying as Tandis que j’agonise and with writers André Malraux and Valéry Larbaud respectively authoring prefaces for Sanctuary (Sanctuaire) in 1933 and Tandis que j’agonise in 1934. Literary agent William Bradley remained in the shadows of these celebrated enablers, although, importantly, he negotiated the contracts. While Coindreau first introduced Faulkner to Gallimard in a March 4, 1931 letter, Bradley is referred to as the intermediary as early as August 12, 1931 (Histoire d’un livre). Other letters show the dissatisfaction of Faulkner’s American publishers, Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, with the terms initially offered by Gallimard for Sanctuary (Sanctuaire, 1933). In his patient correspondence, Bradley successfully renegotiated the terms for the French translations of Light in August and The Sound and the Fury in 1935 and 1938. The continued collaboration with Gallimard, made possible by the work and support of Bradley, undoubtedly laid the ground for the reputation of Faulkner in France in later decades.

9Bradley’s intermediation served to consolidate the financial base of relatively young firms like Grasset, while simultaneously contributing to the business of American publishing houses. This took place in the context of the rise of recently established houses, founded at the beginning of the new century, such as Grasset (1907) and Gallimard (1911), that ushered in the era of best sellers—or in the words of Grasset “the era of the hundred thousand” copies (Mollier 2021). While Grasset’s access to recognition is remembered as being associated with his publishing of the scandalous French adultery narrated in Le Diable au corps by Raymond Radiguet (1923), the young publisher had, shortly before, engineered a publicity stunt with the publication of the French Canadian narrative of Maria Chapdelaine : récit du Canada français by Louis Hémon (1921), a posthumous novel and unexpected best-seller for Grasset (Mollier, 2015 309). Hémon is one of the French authors William Bradley brought to his business partner, Macmillan, who published an English translation of Maria Chapdelaine the same year. In 1924, Macmillan subsequently published The Journal of Louis Hémon, negotiated and translated by William Bradley himself. In other words, the Bradley agency pioneered the institutionalization of a new intermediary in the author-publisher relation during the interwar period, at a time when the book industry was undergoing significant changes pertaining to the increased circulation of books in the French market.

12Literary agents seem to have undergone a parallel struggle to attract the recognition of their contemporaries and the attention of scholars. They often had to elbow their way into the publishing industry. Indeed, while their intermediation was welcome when it came to solving intricate copyright issues, or boosting a publisher’s list of authors, they were also often met with hostility and viewed as “parasites” who represented a threat to the publisher-writer relationship and cut the revenues with their fees. In research, literary agents are not unpopular of course, but little visible, perhaps an effect of the enduring “silence cloaking their profession” (McGrath 351). Difficult access to historical sources may be another reason why, although scholars of the contemporary period are now able to turn to interviews and digital data to redefine the contours of the agents’ mediation in the conglomerated publishing world (McGrath; Sinykin). Such opportunities are welcome because the intermediation agents engage(d) in is not solely of interest to book history. The William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records at the Harry Ransom Center and their 245 boxes spanning from 1923 to 1982 provide many research possibilities beyond the mediating role of the agents as professional intercessors in a publishing world that was opening to new Atlantic spaces (Cossu-Beaumont, 2020). Turning to new perimeters, the next section seeks to observe and discuss intermediation and sociability in cosmopolitan Paris society in the interwar decades and postwar years.

Literary agents in the “world of salons”

14This overview of the interconnections that articulated social life, personal friendships and publishing endeavors on the Left Bank bears testimony to the personal, professional and international networks within the modernist circles or within the Lost Generation. Social events and soirées at Stein’s and at the Bradleys’ formed, in the intimate perimeters of their homes, private spaces whose dynamics was actually transatlantic. This sheds new light on Paris as an international capital of letters and depicts the city as a place, not just of inspiration and prestige, but also where publishing undertakings and concrete channels of such achievements can be scrutinized (Casanova; Mollier, 2014).

15The Bradleys thus not only served as intercessors for publishers in the transatlantic business and as go-betweens for other literary agencies; they were also the architects of social and artistic connections. The Bradleys positioned themselves at the center of many different artistic, literary and publishing networks and yet their role has been overlooked and their presence is invisible in the history of American expatriates and of modernist Paris in the interwar period. As such a central figure, William Bradley can be viewed as an homme double, a figure identified by Christophe Charle for the nineteenth-century intermediaries in the literary, theatre or art world. Their occupation as writers, critics, contributors and founders of reviews, theater directors, editorial directors, Charle argues, was a needed interface between the artistic sphere and the public (Charle, 1992). More than just utilitarian professionals and negotiators within the industry, they served as mediators allowing the boundary between the art world and the rest of society to be crossed. In that sense, they can be regarded as figures central for cultural history as well as social agents in their time. It may be argued that, although literary agents in France became relevant only in the next century and without stepping into the light, they too can be regarded as holding a professional and a cultural/social double role. Indeed, the specific unfolding of Bradley’s career through Parisian sociability articulates a social function along with his more technical contributions to the editorial business. In addition, Bradley’s concrete achievements in the circulating of foreign books and the reaching of new readers for them is an invitation to view him as an intermediary between cultures. This increased circulation blurred the borders of a national publishing sector and of national literature. The dynamics of such an homme frontière, in-between cultures, a figure deemed dual in its professional and social roles and transnational in its scope, has been discussed by Laurent Jeanpierre for interwar literary Anglo-American modernism and, here, the concept can aptly be transferred to the observation of the literary agent (Jeanpierre).

I never felt so stupid and uncomfortable in my life. I knew who he [Bradley] was—or is—a very important person but honest to God! I had no more idea what he did than an octopus. However they were very nice to me and I guess I managed well enough because I’ve been invited again. (Hutchinson 386 n106)

17In addition, while living in France, Claude McKay and James Baldwin both benefited from the Bradleys’ financial support and from the agency’s decisive work on their behalf—this publishing history also needs to be told.

20Jenny Bradley embraced the same work ethic and dedication to the agency’s business, working alongside her husband in a room of her own in the family apartment and office on the Île Saint-Louis. Her signature appears more and more often in the interwar correspondence when she developed a privileged relationship with American publisher Blanche Knopf. Their letters offer a unique mix of business considerations and more intimate issues, such as the death of the Bradleys’ daughter, Blanche’s frustration at being sidelined in the Knopf firm, and finally the death of William Bradley in 1939, after a long illness. After the Second World War, Jenny Bradley took over the agency and resumed her occupation as a major French-American liaison in the literary world, with Blanche Knopf still a privileged partner. Their correspondence, yet another form of sociability, cultivates an original space for their friendship and professional rise, and reflects their contribution to the building of a realm for literary exchanges between France and the United States. For instance, the Jenny Bradley-Blanche Knopf collaboration opened a path for the publication in the United States of Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus, under the exclusive contract Jenny Bradley had obtained from Gallimard for Sartre and Camus in December 1944 and thanks to the enthusiasm of her American publisher friend. After reviewing the development of the agent profession and presenting their distinctive sociability, a combination of professional and intimate interactions, this article will turn to the specific itineraries of cultural exchanges across the Atlantic.

The routes and directions of cultural circulation

21Standing by Albert Camus every step of his path to international recognition and to the Nobel Prize in Literature (1957) was Blanche Knopf. She had pursued her interest in Albert Camus through her friend and business partner Jenny Bradley who had originally pushed her to read L’Étranger (Claridge 234). The publisher who had left Europe on the brink of war in the summer of 1939 was so eager to resume her yearly professional and personal shopping sprees that she obtained an official mission with the War Department to be allowed back into Europe as early as June 1945 (Claridge 233). On this particular 1945 trip, she was introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre whom she signed for Knopf through Jenny Bradley. Just a few months earlier, Knopf had also made good on her friend’s reading advice: “Buy Camus” reads her March 15, 1945 telegram to the Île Saint-Louis agency (Henderson and Oliphant). Knopf then fought for Camus’s publication and relentlessly circumvented negative reviewers and her own board’s lukewarm reception (Claridge 243). The Stranger finally came out under the Knopf imprint (1946) and Blanche Knopf had the French author come to New York for a promotion trip (Henderson and Oram). The Plague followed in 1947. Camus’s itinerary from France to the United States paralleled the previous trajectories of US authors eastward, across the Atlantic, such as Faulkner’s in the early 1930s, which the Bradleys contributed to circulating. It has been suggested that Faulkner, among others, greatly influenced Camus’s generation in its approach to literature, style, and engagement (Pothier 372). In the 1940s, a new French literature was now celebrated in the United States and internationally, and the mediation of such enablers as Bradley or Knopf appears as both enduring and transformed. Camus’s route to world consecration was indeed traced by his American publisher who lobbied the Nobel academy on behalf of the French writer and, in December 1957, personally accompanied Camus to Stockholm by way of Paris.

22The reading of Camus’s trajectory, and the exploration of the Bradley and Knopf papers, both housed at the Harry Ransom Center, are probably facilitated by the transnational turn in history and its call to “juggle with the variables of time and space” (Bender 9). In that frame, the French-American circulation can be understood beyond the one-way trip of a single milestone novel or prominent author in the interwar period or in the post-war era. It can be inscribed in the longue durée and in a wider perspective, mapping a complex web of ongoing reciprocal exchanges and pointing to outcomes more durable than just the sales fostered and revenues secured for writers, publishers and agents. The long-established collaboration between the indefatigable Blanche Knopf and a more discrete but shrewd Jenny Bradley reminds us that the literary agency was also in the business of building actual routes across cultures, as this section intends to further illustrate.

23More multidirectional transactions and translations are observable through the agency’s industrious work and may be inscribed within the dynamics of cultural mobility (Clifford). Scaling up of national spaces points back to the experience of African American artists and intellectuals in Paris, many of whom encountered the Bradleys. True, Langston Hughes has left rather bitter accounts of his travails through hunger and poverty in 1920s Paris and nuanced the tales of a liberating and inspiring Parisian space for African Americans (Rampersad; Hughes, 1945). In Paris, Hughes met the American philosopher Alain Locke, patron of the Harlem Renaissance and editor of The New Negro, and René Maran, the French Caribbean author who had received the Prix Goncourt in 1921 for his novel Batouala (Locke; Maran). The two men were themselves close and these encounters speak for the transnational dialogue between the New Negro and the francophone movement of Négritude (Fabre, 1975). In addition, the Knopf-Bradley papers unveil an unknown side of this interaction. Langston Hughes was a Knopf author and Blanche Knopf tried to use such bonds to circulate her “important young” author beyond the American shores, notably the connection through René Maran by way of the Bradley agency:

Do you know whether the negro newspaper Les Continents, edited by René Maran, is still in existence? If it is can you tell me where they are as we are publishing a very entertaining book of verse by an important young Negro, Langston Hughes, and I should like to get in touch with Maran about it. (Letter from Blanche Knopf to William Bradley, 2 December 1925, Bradley)

24Jenny Bradley later conceded that the endeavor to reach out to Maran failed. Gallimard turned down Hughes’s collection of short stories The Ways of White Folks in 1934, which the Bradley agency managed to push through Éditions Rieder (Hughes, 1934). The Knopf-Bradley duo did not yield and ultimately had Hughes translated after the Second World War and published by Éditions de Minuit and Seghers.

25In that sense, the archived correspondence pivoting around agents gives access to intellectual and cultural routes established by artists and intellectuals in their travels and exchanges. They offer corroborating or fresh evidence to document the channels of cultural transfers, here in the case of the cross-fertilization in the Black Atlantic and of the wider opportunities for scholarship on Paris Noir viewed as a transnational space and not just a local haven (Gilroy; Charle, 2019). Michel Espagne further suggests that book circulation represents a fruitful opportunity to map possible cultural transfers in so far as their material production and concrete circulation may be traced, particularly when scholars have access to the intercession of the mediators who intervened along the way. Following Espagne’s declared interest in mediators, but possibly going further than the observation of the routes travelled by foreign books being circulated outside of their homeland and the analysis of their reception abroad once translated (Espagne, 2009 202), scholars may reflect on prior stages of the communications circuit and show the agency of international mediators, as early as the inception of a book and its initial publication, in a cross-border dynamics.

26Before the war, Claude McKay had been close to the Bradleys when he lived in France. Their editorial collaboration further testifies to the complex roots and routes of canonical African American pieces such as Banjo and to a mediation that took more than one form for the literary agent. In that instance, William Bradley was not just instrumental in bringing a book or series of books to a new audience and in organizing the contracts, translation and promotion for the author outside of his linguistic and national orbit. The itinerary of a celebrated Harlem Renaissance novel like Banjo started in Marseille, as its genesis and publishing history reveal. Indeed, Bradley was insistent that McKay should do away with his project of a collection of short stories to focus on a novel. McKay subsequently turned one of the early short stories he had drafted into a full novel, Banjo, upon the strategic recommendation of his literary agent who was primarily concerned with his client’s contract opportunities with Harper and deeply prejudiced against the profitability of a collection of short-stories. The professional exchanges that ensued throughout 1927 and 1928 are part of the cross-border and cross-cultural meaning of Banjo. Bradley travelled South on numerous occasions to meet McKay and offered feedback on early versions, while securing a generous deal with Eugene Saxton at Harper. The transnational dimension of Banjo’s narrative has been explored by literary scholars because of the encounters of African American and Caribbean characters on the shores of Marseille in the narrative. But the Bradley-McKay correspondence further situates McKay’s 1920s œuvre within a mediating process that contributed to building publication trajectories across borders and cultures. Banjo, a book that was published by a leading American publisher, a novel that has come to embody the Harlem Renaissance, was devised in the South of France, away from the roots of the movement, through the close cooperation of a self-doubting and destitute writer and a confident and business-minded literary agent. In that sense, the Harry Ransom archival papers and the individual agency of William Bradley bring a new dimension to the “cultures in motion” that book history can also contribute to mapping (Rodgers et al.).

27From these personal encounters and publishing trajectories, emerges the fresh and hitherto neglected angle of transnational editorial processes and negotiations that is needed to overcome the shortcomings of a comparative approach. The literary agency surfaces as the very contact zone sought by crossed history (l’histoire croisée) to observe the complex workings of the circulation of artists and intellectuals, of ideas and of goods, here through the prism of books (Werner and Zimmermann). In addition to the hybridization at stake in the literary Black Atlantic perceptible in the Bradleys’ work on behalf of Langston Hughes, in their support of Claude McKay, and later after the Second World War in their collaboration with Richard Wright and James Baldwin, viewing the literary agency as a locus for such reciprocal dynamics helps nuance or counter the vision of a unidirectional flow of culture from America to Europe.

28While the tidal wave of American literature reaching Europe after the Second World War is undeniable, it may be inserted into a more complex environment where mediators selected, prepared and presented the authors and genres that were to represent an American culture that was, in a way, curated. Gallimard’s successful 1945 collection, La Série Noire, is a case in point. Literary scholars have shown that a genre of American crime fiction was veritably formed in France through the collection and its head Marcel Duhamel (Lhommeau and Cerisier). Yet the most archetypal romans noirs, enthusiastically embraced by French readers as the quintessence of America, were actually written by two British writers, Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase who authored the first novels issued by the Série Noire in 1945 and 1946. Marcel Duhamel’s selective choice and his translations of these early volumes thus successfully fabricated an American genre. Next came Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake (translated by Boris and Michèle Vian) and Farewell My Lovely (the translation was supervised by Duhamel), and later Dashiell Hammett and Chester Himes. In this unprecedented cultural transfer, along with Gallimard, Duhamel and translators, literary agents were also key mediators. The success of the Série Noire required a constant supply of authors and flow of novels which Parisian literary agents Michel Hoffman and Jenny Bradley readily provided in a context of fierce competition (Cottenet, 2017a). The Bradley agency acted on behalf of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett who were in the Knopf roster, but also worked for the Série Noire author James Hadley Chase. Literary agents handled the sizeable amount of legal and administrative tasks attached to such international contracts with multiple authors attached to various publishers and sometimes foreign co-agents and lifted the obstacles to royalty distribution and monetary circulation in the post-war era. The iconic American culture many French readers became familiar with, and supposedly connoisseurs of, did not simply come from cultural artifacts that landed en masse upon European soil. The pioneering works of Richard Pells and Rob Kroes have established the complexities of cultural transformations and appropriations, though they admittedly remain difficult to identify and locate. As they are not only the outcome of imaginings and representations, the concrete part played by literary agents as well as the processes their archives shed light on may provide opportunities for new approaches of such cultural transformations and appropriations viewed as reciprocal and multidimensional (Kroes; Pells).

Conclusion

29There is no such thing as “Agent Studies” within the larger scope of book history, perhaps because of the difficultly in accessing remote archives and in exploiting the untapped mine of their papers when they are available. Future scholarship on literary agents might bring a fresh perspective on how book history, in its very epistemology, attempts to seize books as objects representing “a cultural transaction, a literary text, and a material artefact.” Depending on the scholarly angle, agent studies might strike conversations with literary studies, translation studies, cultural history, studies of material culture, the sociology of professions, to name but a few (Howsam 4).

30Beyond their commercial undertakings and participation in the book market’s transformations, agents contributed to artistic and literary production as partners of writers. These intermediaries, such as the Bradleys, were also primary mediators in charge of facilitating the cross-border circulation of books, of fostering more translations of their clients abroad and of lifting legal, monetary and fiscal obstacles. The larger Atlantic space finds itself scaled down by the networks apparent in the Paris salons, also transnational spaces in their own right, as was the Bradley agency itself. On these varied scales and in these different lieux, many encounters, exchanges and transactions took place. They contributed to the building of complex routes for the circulation of culture with the agents serving as passeurs in all these instances.

31The Bradley archives may also encourage a revision of the usual time frame narrative. The relentless work of the literary agents in the interwar period serves as a prelude to the post-Second World War frenzy for American culture in Europe. The Libération is sometimes viewed as the starting point of American hegemony, whereas books already travelled well and in both directions in the interwar period, such flows defying the Great Depression and resuming after the war (Grazia). The war may have halted the circulation of people and the shipping of books, but transnational reading certainly continued, as evidenced by the royalties collected from Gallimard by the Bradley agency on behalf of Margaret Mitchell whose Autant en emporte le vent never ceased to sell in spite of the war censorship. Beyond commerce, the conversation lived on, not linear, sometimes unbalanced, but somewhat uninterrupted.

32The Bradley papers also testify to the sustained coexistence of highbrow and lowbrow literature in the French-American conversation: from the early years, the Bradleys’ clients include André Gide as well as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the books received from abroad include Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as well as Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. After the war, Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, Truman Capote, Joseph Kessel, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were equally promoted by the agency.

33The Bradleys’ lifework thus fascinatingly articulates cultures, French and American, high and low, in ways that defy the simplified vision of a unidirectional flux in what has been suggested to be an “American Century” of popular cultural dominance and of unilateral influence. Their archives allow a scholarship in cultural history that grasps literary and commercial endeavors and hopes to probe the intricate workings of transnational cultural circulation and conversation. Historian Raymond Williams reminds us of one of the challenges therein by reminiscing on his war experience in France where he participated in the D-Day operations and on the comment of a fellow soldier about the French: “The fact is, they just don’t speak the same language” (Williams 9). The literary agent and the transnational historian join forces in their attempt to overcome this linguistic and cultural challenge at the core of their respective missions.