Lee Keedick
In the early summer of 1923 John Cowper came back to Patchin Place from California. According to Autobiography, Arnold Shaw, very ill and depressed, could not look after 'the old Shaw-Powys Circus' anymore and therefore decided to hand his 'ageing acrobat' to the 'well-known' Lee Keedick Bureau. With Lee Keedick, 'the most formidable of all managers', 'a smooth-shaved gentlemanly Banker kind of person with a big formidable chin, but who drove hard bargains' we enter the realm of 'business'. Still according to Powys's version in Autobiography, Shaw also had a high regard for Keedick's experienced subordinate, Mr. Glass:
Mr. Glass certainly was in the old tradition of lecture-management in America. He had travelled from coast to coast with Stanley, the explorer; he had arranged lectures for the dialect-poet Whitcomb Riley; he told humorous stories about Jerome K. Jerome. He was a Scotsman; and he had a look as if he might have been Seneschal of Glamis Castle. He was a very big man. He was the only man I have ever known who wore boots of 'size twelve'... And his attitude to me was exactly what suited me best. He treated me as if I had been a sea-lion or a pet elephant.But in fact reality proved slightly different if we are to believe what Powys reveals to his brother Llewelyn: pressed by financial problems, he himself took the decision to leave Arnold Shaw, whose lecturing carreer was declining, and find himself another agent. He hesitated between two: Emmerich/Truman and Lee Keedick, and tried to decide by comparing both offices.
Keedick's offices were large and leisurely and hung with portraits of Sir Oliver Lodge and Conan Doyle, etc etc, more as if they were in offices in London than in New York. I only say one stenographer at all, a solid elderly house-keeper-looking lady — where Emmerich's offices were full of rather sad over-worked typists. Perhaps Keedick keeps his slaves on the roof — or down the corridor somewhere, away from his stately reception rooms! (Letters to His Brother Llewelyn, 9 Oct. 1924)He finally signed for a five-year contract with Keedick, but also somewhat foolishly, agreed to give him 10 per cent on all his writings. A decision he came to regret. Luckily for him, later Schuster, his publisher, took the matter in hand:
He (Keedick) has yielded on the point of the 10 per cent on my writings. He saw I was really like a mad bull on that point — and that will subside at the end of this year — I mean at the end of next autumn when he has had 10 per cent of all my Royalties on these books! ( Letters to His Brother Llewelyn, Autumn 1929)
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