Bret Easton Ellis: Psycho Analysis

IT WAS MUCH LIVELIER than your ordinary literary blood bath.

The rumors started last spring, four months after Bret Easton Ellis submitted his final version of American Psycho to his publisher Simon and Schuster. A few women refused to work on the book, Ellis’s third novel, which describes in excruciating first-person detail the days and nights of a Wall Street-yuppie serial killer named Patrick Bateman. The book is so graphic in parts that the marketing division at S&S started questioning whether it should be published at all. Then George Corsillo, the artist who had designed the covers for Ellis’s first two books, refused to work on American Psycho.

Despite these early warnings, the book inched its way through the editorial corridors at S&S. It met with approval from the editorial board and the company’s lawyers, was typeset in galleys and distributed to a few reviewers. By the fall, photocopies of the galleys were making the rounds in New York and Los Angeles. Then the press swung into action.

On October 29th an excerpt from the most violent chapter — describing a woman’s being skinned alive — appeared in Time under the headline A REVOLTING DEVELOPMENT. In December, Spy ran a passage in which the narrator had oral sex with the decapitated head of one of his victims. Suddenly, the book had the attention of Richard E. Snyder, the chief executive officer of Simon and Schuster, and his boss, Martin Davis, the chairman of Paramount Communications, which owns S&S and produces all the Friday the 13th movies. Apparently unaware until then of the growing public-relations disaster on his hands, Snyder speed-read the 400 pages over a weekend. Early the next week — and less than a month before the scheduled shipping date — Snyder informed Ellis’s agent, Binky Urban, that he was rejecting American Psycho, thereby forfeiting the $300,000 advance that S&S had paid Ellis. On November 15th, Snyder made the formal announcement, explaining the decision was “a matter of taste.”

The cry went up immediately: Corporate censorship! Within forty-eight hours of Snyder’s announcement, however, Sonny Mehta of Alfred A. Knopf (a division of Random House) bought the book for his Vintage Contemporary paperback line. Mehta, who had published Ellis’s first two books in Great Britain under the Picador imprint, had tried to woo the young author away from Simon and Schuster when Mehta moved to Knopf in 1987. Mehta said he would give the book a light edit and polish and scheduled publication for March.

Enter the feminists, led by Tammy Bruce, the energetic president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Bruce, 28, started the drive for a national boycott of the book and initiated a local hot line on which callers could hear her read gruesome passages aloud. Originally, the NOW boycott included all Random House authors but was later narrowed to Knopf and Vintage titles. Bumper stickers that read, NO KNOPF in ’91, were printed for the boycott, which would last until December 31st or until the book was no longer being printed.

Now coast-to-coast Bret-bashing began in earnest. The New York Times Book Review ran a glib, smirking review by Life-magazine columnist Roger Rosenblatt titled “Snuff This Book!” An opaque Los Angeles Times editorial called “Worries About a Book” reached back and slammed Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero, which it said “sketchily — indeed, artlessly — described the lives of a nihilistic circle of college-age hedonists.” Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett and other leading feminists jumped on Bruce’s bandwagon and wrote to Random House owner S.I. Newhouse Jr. and other executives, supporting the NOW boycott and expressing their outrage at the book.

Even corporate America joined the fray. When American Express learned that Ellis’s narrator, a prodigious consumer, used his platinum card to pay for prostitutes and to lift cocaine to his nose, a phone call was placed to Vintage. And if a company was unaware of being mentioned in the book, Tammy Bruce and NOW informed it.

All along, the nagging question of literary merit kept muddying the issue of artistic freedom. The few people who actually read the book called it moronic and sophomoric. The author was called a “dangerously greedy brat.” But if such a disturbing book were a masterpiece, what then? Now the literary lions weighed in. In the March issue of Vanity Fair, Norman Mailer set out to take measure of the book. Is it art? he asked. Not enough, he concluded. “If the extracts of American Psycho are horrendous, therefore, when taken out of context, that is Ellis’s fault,” Mailer wrote. “They are … simply not written well enough.” Let it be published, Mailer concluded, but don’t ask me to defend it.

In the middle of all this, the soft-spoken Ellis, 27, has kept his own counsel. Until now.