Another Life (14 page)

Once Bob had introduced me to Borchardt, I managed to buy a slim, elegant novella by a Spanish nobleman about the Spanish Civil War that had been published in Paris to acclaim. Like most French fiction, it failed over here, but in the meantime I had edited and published a novel of my own, and with that I was content. Success in terms of sales would hopefully come in its own sweet time. In the meantime, I felt myself to be an
editor
in the full meaning of the word.

I also succeeded in buying a more conventional book, for one of my old friends from Oxford, Colin M. Turnbull, had turned up in New York having spent a couple of years in the Ituri Forest of Rwanda-Burundi, living with the Pygmies. Colin, a tall, handsome, and engaging young man who reminded many people of T. E. Lawrence, had already created something of a stir in anthropological circles as the first white man to have lived with these small, secretive people. He had emerged from his stay with them convinced that they had a richer culture than the surrounding tribespeople who had always despised them and passed these attitudes on to the white colonialists. On the basis of a few articles Colin had written for
Natural History
, I persuaded S&S to give him a book contract for $5,000 and started to work with him on an account of his experiences that we eventually called
The Forest People
and which is still in print as of this writing, nearly forty years later.

The atomic bomb, Governor Alfred E. Smith, French fiction, and Pygmies—it did not occur to me at the time, but I was beginning to set a pattern for my future as an editor, which was to have no pattern.

CHAPTER 7

E
diting is a skilled profession, but it is not one that publishers have ever particularly respected or well rewarded. Ultimately, the big money goes to those who bring in big books. Even if they can’t edit
worth a damn, somebody can always be found to do the editorial donkeywork needed to make the book publishable. In extreme cases, a freelance editor can be brought in to get the manuscript in shape, and it is not an accident that most of them are thin, pale, and wear thick spectacles, since the only jobs in the publishing industry that require more education, absorb more hours of painstaking drudgery, and pay less well are copyediting and indexing.

To buy books it is necessary to cultivate agents, but that is easier said than done. Relationships with agents are treasured and closely guarded by senior editors, particularly when it comes to the agents with major clients and a track record of commercial success. It is not that agents themselves are inaccessible—for the most part they are willing to be taken to lunch by just about anyone—it’s just that no sensible junior editor wants to step on his superior’s toes by poaching. Editor/agent relationships have often been forged by years of friendship and mutually shared success, so it’s hard for a young and ambitious editor to get to the major agents without giving deep offense to the very people who decide on his or her raise.

This was even more true in the 1950s, when book publishing was a tighter, more “clubby” business, a small world in which everybody knew each other and in which personal relationships counted for everything. It was well known and understood that certain big-time agents such as Harold Matson, Sterling Lord, and Scott Meredith submitted their books to Peter Schwed, while others, such as Harold Ober and Paul Reynolds, sent their submissions to Henry Simon. Agents who specialized in more “literary” fiction, such as Candida Donadio and Phyllis Jackson, as well as the more showbiz-oriented agents such as Robert Lantz, Helen Strauss, and Irving Lazar, worked with Bob Gottlieb. Indeed, Donadio was so close to Gottlieb that some people thought they were the same person. One simply could not pick up the phone and call one of these people to say, “Hi, I’m new at S&S, but I’m looking for some good books, so why don’t you send me a manuscript?”

The
Literary Market Place
(
LMP
), the book industry’s bible, lists innumerable agents, but a great many of them are only one or two steps removed from the slush pile. I sent off fulsome letters to any number of them and got back a small avalanche of manuscripts, most of them so dog-eared that they had obviously made the rounds of every publisher in New York, not a few of them even containing previous rejection letters. Clearly, it was going to take more than this.

In the end, my first connection to an agent came about through an old Oxford friend, Bob Livingston, who called to say that a friend of
his
on the West Coast had had some dealings with a literary agent in New York who was complaining that he no longer knew anybody at Simon and Schuster. That sounded fishy to me, but Livingston brushed my doubts to one side. “This guy is no
schlepper
,” he said. “He’s Somerset Maugham’s agent.”

Having paid homage to Maugham myself at the Villa Mauresque with my Uncle Alex and Alexa, I could hardly fail to be impressed. Maugham was the butt of many stories—most of them, unfortunately, true—but he remained, even in extreme old age, one of the most successful English writers of the twentieth century, as well as one of the century’s wittiest and most acerbic misanthropes. Maugham was to grow bitter in his old age and finally lapsed into precarious senility, but in 1959 his was a name still to be reckoned with, so I hastened to call Jacques Chambrun as soon as Livingston had hung up.

The voice that greeted me was low, rich, obviously French in origin, and full of grave courtesy. He said he would be delighted to meet me, all the more so since my family was one he respected deeply as a European and a man of culture. “We Europeans must stick together,
n’est-ce pas?
” he said with a sigh, and we chatted briefly in French, in which he was even more impressive.

I suggested lunch, but after consulting his calendar, lunch proved to be impossible for some time—his engagements were, I must understand, unfortunately unbreakable, since they were with many of the most important people in publishing and the cinema. I suggested that we meet for drinks, but Chambrun, it appeared, did not approve of the American cocktail hour.

I mumbled my agreement. Dinner seemed like a rather big deal to suggest to an agent as important as Chambrun, particularly since I must be small fry from his point of view. What about tea? he asked.

We agreed to meet at the Alhambra Room in a midtown hotel the next afternoon. I had happy visions of good china, polished silver, and many plates of gingersnaps, Bath biscuits, and seedcake, so I was surprised when the hotel turned out to look like what the French call
un hôtel de passe
—that is, one in which rooms are rented by the hour and in which the lobby is full of furtive gentlemen and heavily made-up
filles de joie
.

The Alhambra Room was off the lobby, past a stygian bar, and its name seemed to have influenced the rest of the hotel’s decor, which was
a combination of early Beverly Hills Spanish and Moorish Gothic. At the entrance I asked the maître d’hôtel—an ancient and poorly shaved European of some kind, dressed in tails so old as to have a shiny green phosphorescence to them—for Mr. Chambrun’s table. He lowered the huge red flocked-velvet menu with faded gold tassels that he had been holding in front of him like a shield, as if I was about to attack him with one of the spears from the wall, and bowed, with a faint air of disapproval. “Monsieur le comte vous attend,” he said in what was clearly not his native tongue.

Nobody had mentioned to me that Chambrun was a count. I seemed to recall that a Comte de Chambrun had been an eminent diplomat in France at the time of World War One, probably this one’s father, I decided.

My mind was therefore not on my surroundings as my Bela Lugosi look-alike led me through the gloom to a tiny table set for two. My host was not in sight, so I sat down and looked around. Only now did I notice that there was an orchestra on a platform decorated with immense ferns. On a small dance floor, a number of elderly citizens were, in fact, dancing a spirited tango. Around me, the people taking their tea were older still. Some of the men actually wore spats, and not a few of the ladies rested their heavily beringed and arthritic hands on silver-handled canes.

The music stopped and one of the dancers, a short, rotund gentleman in a well-cut double-breasted suit, made for my table. He had a bald head and the well-fleshed features of a gourmand. It was an ugly face, pendulous and lumpy, as if molded from plaster that had sagged before drying, but the ugliness had a certain charm and elegance to it. Like many fat men, Chambrun moved gracefully on small feet. His shoes were unusual: narrow, expensive, and well polished, with high-buttoned tops to them in some kind of black stretch material, the sort of thing that Proust might have worn. Everything about him gave off an aura of prosperity and good-natured joie de vivre.

I rose, and we shook hands. I apologized for not having used his title. He waved the matter aside with one hand. The heat of his exertions on the dance floor had sharpened the odor of his eau de cologne and brought a slight beading of perspiration to his brow. He dabbed at it with a silk handkerchief. “We are here in America,” he said pleasantly, with an air of noblesse oblige. “One does not bother about such things. I am perfectly happy to be
Monsieur
Chambrun, plain and simple.” (I
was eventually to discover that he was not even remotely related to the French noble family and as much entitled to be called “Count” as I am.)

Over a pot of tea—brewed with tea bags—and a plate of rather dry-looking petits fours, Chambrun told me of the many sales he had made for Maugham over the years, of his passion for new and exciting novelists, and of his close connections with the leading magazines. Certainly working with a great writer like Maugham was an honor—and a profitable one—but the real pleasure lay in discovering new young talent. He kissed his fingertips. He was discriminating, as he could see that I must be—after all, were we not both Europeans? The kind of books he liked were often
special
, I must understand, not for everyone. He himself was a passionate reader of fiction, in love with the written word. Even so, only if a work of real quality caught his eye did he send it on to a few favored editors who shared his tastes.

That sounded good to me. I did not aspire to be Maugham’s publisher yet, after all. New young talent was exactly what I was looking for. Would I like to dance with any of the ladies? Chambrun asked. I declined. Chambrun clearly wanted to get on with his dancing—his feet were tapping in time to the music—so I made my
adieux
, and he promised to send me the work of a few of his very best writers. We should do business together, he hoped, very soon.

Shortly afterward, a steady stream of manuscripts began to arrive from Jacques Chambrun. Strangely enough, they did not seem very different from the ones in the slush pile; some of them, in fact, I even
recognized
from the slush pile. Most of them showed signs of having been mailed out many, many times, despite being accompanied in every case by a letter assuring me that I was the first editor to have the pleasure of reading the book. I had, in fact, the ungenerous impression that he might simply be passing along manuscripts without reading them at all.

There is hardly anything more depressing for a young editor than turning a book down when it has been sent to him by an agent. Chambrun took no offense at all at my sending his books back with long, apologetic letters explaining exactly what was wrong with them. In fact, he even called and invited me to lunch with him at the bar of the Sherry Netherland Hotel, where, apparently, he ate every day. I happened to mention where I was going to Henry Simon, and he raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Chambrun?” he asked, with an unpleasant chuckle. “The so-called Count? Is that charlatan still in business?”

He was not only in business, I said with some heat, but he was sending
me manuscripts. Besides, he was Somerset Maugham’s agent, which surely counted for something. Henry shook his head gravely, like a doctor confronting a terminal illness. “He
was
Maugham’s agent for a while—God knows how. Maugham fired him eventually. It turned out that Chambrun was selling magazine rights to Maugham’s stories all over the world without telling Maugham and kept the proceeds for himself. And that’s not all …”

“Not all” involved a long discussion of agents who actually
charged
writers for reading a manuscript. This custom had been invented by Scott Meredith, who eventually had a stable of poorly paid readers working for him, busily sending back form letters that purported to tell the writer what to do to make his or her book salable to a publisher, for a fee. This practice was anathema to conventional agents, who felt that it was roughly tantamount to stealing pencils from a blind man’s cup. Many publishing houses simply refused to do business with Chambrun, Henry said.

I took all this with a grain of salt. Most of the really interesting people one meets in life are rogues, and it did not shock me that Chambrun might be one of them—indeed, it was part of his charm. At the Sherry Netherland bar, where Chambrun was ensconced in a corner banquette, I chose not to bring up the unflattering portrait that Henry had drawn of him. After all, the man was sending me manuscripts, even if they were unpublishable. Other agents might have a better reputation for honesty, but I wasn’t getting anything from them.

Whatever else might be phony about him, Chambrun was at least genuinely French. A fastidious eater who did not believe in the American ideal of the light lunch, he ordered elaborate dishes, sent them back to the kitchen when he wasn’t happy with them, and took his time over dessert. He did not stint himself on the petits fours that were served with coffee and even wrapped the remaining ones frugally in a paper cocktail napkin to take home. When the check came, we both stared at it for a while, then Chambrun pushed it toward me firmly and without apology and popped a digestive mint into his mouth. He had taught me a basic rule of book publishing, never since forgotten: When an editor has lunch with an agent, the editor always picks up the check.