Another Life (28 page)

“Cheer up,” I said. “Tomorrow may be better.”

He looked pensive. “Do you think anybody would miss us if we left?” he asked.

I didn’t think so, but it seemed like deserting one’s post under fire. On the other hand, anything seemed better than staying. What if somebody at S&S found out that we hadn’t stayed? I wondered. What would happen to us?

Dick shrugged. “Nobody will care. Anybody asks, we’ll tell them it was a great learning experience.” He spoke, as he always would over the coming decades, with absolute confidence.

Quietly, as if stealth was called for, we sneaked downstairs, checked out, and got back into our rented Rambler. Dick’s spirits rose as we hit the highway and put some distance between ourselves and the librarians. Through the mist, we could see the glow from the lights of New York. “Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?” he asked solemnly. “What’s your ambition?”

I was silent for a few moments. I didn’t have a clue about where I wanted to be
next
year, let alone in ten years’ time. The truth was that I didn’t really have a specific ambition. Fatherhood or not, my mind was still full of unrealistic or mutually contradictory ideas about the future, a well-stuffed cloud-cuckoo-land: I dreamed vaguely of going back to England, or taking up photography, or even of going into the movie business, the very thing I had run away from in the first place. To have a lot of different ambitions, I realized, was to have no ambition at all.

At S&S, where ambition might have made some sense and even done me some good, I really had none. Above me there were layers of people more senior than myself, who showed every sign of staying there for the rest of their lives (or mine)—starting with Bob Gottlieb, Henry Simon, and Peter Schwed—although it did occasionally occur to me that I might be able to leapfrog over one or two of the lesser ones without great difficulty and perhaps had already done so. With the appropriate modesty, I suggested to Dick that my ambition was to go on doing pretty much what I’d been doing but at a higher rate of pay.

“Bullshit,” he said firmly. He lit a cigarette. “You’re as ambitious as I am.”

I denied it. “You’re full of shit,” he went on in a cordial tone, his deep voice rumbling. He sounded sincere and well intentioned rather than argumentative.

He pointed his cigarette at me in the dark. “Look at the facts,” he said. “You joined the company as Henry’s goddamn assistant. Then what happens? You look around, you see that Henry’s not going anywhere, so you start editing manuscripts for Bob, who
is
going somewhere. As if that isn’t enough, you jump ship from working for Henry to Peter—who, by the way, is going to eat Henry
alive
. You even get to work with Max and go to editorial board meetings.” He chuckled knowingly. “Somebody looking at your career at S&S so far just
might
think you were pretty ambitious for a goddamn Oxford man, that’s all I’m saying.”

Seen from Dick’s point of view, perhaps Schwed had been right to see me as Machiavellian after all. I laughed. “It’s nothing I planned. It all just
happened
.”

Dick snorted. “Nothing
just happens
, my friend.” He puffed on his cigarette contentedly. “Listen, if all this comes naturally to you, you’re way ahead. The best way to get ahead is not to be obvious about it, believe me.” He was silent for a moment. Dick’s ambition, it must be said, was unconcealed—far from being bashful on the subject, he was proud of it. This was one of his more appealing traits. You could call him a lot of things, but Machiavellian wasn’t one of them, then or later.

“What’s your ambition?” I asked, as much to get him off the subject of me as out of curiosity.

He didn’t answer for a very long time. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him slouched against the door, one arm slung over the seat back. He was gazing ahead, at what? I was reminded of Gatsby’s green,
orgiastic light at the end of Daisy’s dock, but in this case there were only the twinkling lights of the oil refineries and chemical plants on either side of the highway, blinking mysteriously in the dark. There was something of Gatsby in Dick, I thought, as there is in every American who wants to rise above his father’s station and dreams of gaining wealth, class, or both. Dick had already begun that process long ago, I guessed. His eagerness to learn was voracious, passionate, sometimes a little frightening. He was not just a fast learner but an
instant
one, soaking up what he wanted to know deftly. Already, in the few months since he had made his first appearance on the twenty-eighth floor, he had changed. The thick-soled shoes with blunt toes had given way to elegant English wing tips, his suits already showed signs of hand tailoring, the button-down shirts had been replaced by English ones with elegant, hand-sewn collars and showing just the right amount of cuff. Some time later, he admired one of my shirts and asked where it came from. I told him I had bought it at Pierce, Hilditch, and Key in London. A couple of weeks later, I noticed that he was wearing a similar shirt, having had his secretary call the London shirtmakers and give them his measurements. It was not just clothes—like Gatsby, he absorbed what he wanted to, adapted it effortlessly to himself, and soon knew more about it than you did. Even his Harvard accent had become more pronounced, now that he had one elegantly shod foot in the hardcover-book world, for it was clear that his immediate ambition was to become a hardcover publisher (
Peter Schwed, watch out!
I thought) though equally clear that his ambitions went beyond that, into some stratosphere that only he could see or imagine.

“I want it all,” he said.

“
All?
Money? Fame? Power? A limo? Beautiful women? That kind of thing?”

He laughed, but I could tell that he was being serious. “Something like that,” he said.

“Do you think book publishing is the right profession? It sounds to me as if the movie business might be a better choice.”

Dick shook his head emphatically. “Nah,” he said. “This is the one I’m in. Books have class. And look at the people who are running the goddamn book industry! Most of them don’t know what they’re doing. I mean, look at S&S. You and I could run it a hundred times better than it’s being run now. A
thousand
times better! We’d make a good team, too.”

If Dick wanted to team up with an editor, why hadn’t he picked Bob, who was already successful? I wondered. But then I realized Bob already
had
a partner of sorts in Tony Schulte. Also, Bob would always want to be the star, and Schulte was willing enough to let him have the limelight. Dick would never be comfortable in
anybody’s
shadow. He was picking a dark horse in me, certainly, but at the time he didn’t have much of a choice.

“You know what I’ve left out?” he asked. Answering the question himself before I could, he said: “We’re going to have a lot of fun, whatever happens.”

We shook hands on that.

*
This is a loaded subject, even today—the work of some English writers travels perfectly well, while that of others, for no very discernible reason, doesn’t at all. Some English best-sellers—Dr. Herriot’s
All Creatures Great and Small
, for example, or the novels of John le Carré—go on to become huge best-sellers in the United States, while others sink without a trace into the Atlantic. Much English literary fiction, and almost all French and European fiction, doesn’t travel at all, like certain kinds of cheese, but every once in a while there will be a startling exception, like Salman Rushdie or Martin Amis. The situation is complicated by the immense hunger for American books of all kinds in England, and, for that matter, in the rest of the world. Like Big Macs and blue jeans, American writing is by and large welcome everywhere, which tends to make the transatlantic traffic more or less one way. Thus, the novels of Mary Higgins Clark invariably top the French best-seller lists, whereas it is hard to remember the last time that
any
French novel, literary or otherwise, even appeared at the bottom of
The New York Times
’s best-seller list. The French complain bitterly about American cultural hegemony, while the British, who experience it much more severely, don’t seem to care.

*
He was playing the role of an African chieftain in my Uncle Zoli’s film
Sanders of the River
at the time, and that remains for me the stump puller of all voices.

*
Years later, on our first trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair, before Snyder had graduated to chauffeur-driven limousines, I remember our renting a car at Frankfurt airport and driving in circles through the pouring rain and early morning rush-hour traffic of a strange city. Snyder read the map in a state of growing dismay as I got into the wrong lane or missed a crucial exit. We could actually
see
our hotel as we sped past it in the wrong direction again and again, apparently unable to approach it. “You are
never
going to do the fucking driving again,” he growled in a deep voice, and I never did.

CHAPTER 14

H
aving fun has always been an integral part of the book-publishing business—indeed, one of its main attractions. Bennett Cerf, whose enjoyment of life was so well known that it actually became one of Random House’s main assets, boasted frequently about how much fun he was having. This caused a good deal of puzzlement and anxiety among Wall Street types, since most of them took a more conventional, Puritan view of business; they assumed that anybody who claimed to be having fun during office hours wasn’t working hard enough. Even in such relatively unconventional businesses as television and the movie industry, few people would admit to having fun. On the contrary, people such as Jim Aubrey, who ran the CBS television network, worked hard to be seen as deadly serious, and so did his competitors and the men who ran the major movie studios. Aubrey was, in fact, known as “the Smiling Cobra,” not because he had a sense of humor but because his thin, narrow-lipped smile always portended the dismissal of some major executive who had failed to please him. Motion-picture executives strove to present more serious appearances than bankers. It is hard to imagine any one of them being carried out of his office in his own chair, a broad grin on his face, as Cerf did the day Random House moved to its new building, or telling an audience of Wall Street analysts that publishing was the most fun you could have with your clothes on.

There was something about many of the new, predominantly Jewish
book publishers that made them want to combine business and pleasure and enabled them for the most part to eat their cake and have it too. Dick Simon and Max Schuster, too, had always stressed the importance of having fun—and for the most part, they
did
have fun, each in his own way, as did the Knopfs, with rather more dignity. Alfred Knopf, an enthusiastic amateur photographer, took the portraits of many of Knopf’s authors for the jackets of their books.

Although Dick Snyder came out of the Doubleday farm team—nobody at Doubleday had any fun except Nelson Doubleday, who had too much—and the circle around Leon Shimkin (who was no fun at all), he instinctively understood the relationship between personal pleasure and publishing that made it a different business from most. In no other area of the media is it possible to take a flier on something you like with as small a risk. Movies cost millions to make, television pilots are not only expensive but seldom lead anywhere, the content of most magazines is predetermined by editorial policy, but the investment in any one book, provided it’s not by a big, best-selling author, can be measured in thousands—very often the low thousands at that. Moreover, every once in a while one of these long shots pays off. Successful self-help books, for example, are very often self-published (and self-promoted) until they reach the mainstream.

People who work in publishing houses, and by no means only editors, are always throwing off ideas, some of which get turned into books. One S&S employee’s dance lessons led him to suggest Arthur Murray’s book on how to dance that became a staple best-seller, year after year, just as Shimkin’s knowledge of bookkeeping led him to the discovery of J. K. Lasser, whom he persuaded to write an annual income-tax guide that has been a best-seller for many decades. Cerf turned a taste for corny jokes into a succession of hugely successful joke books (some of them published by S&S), while Alfred Knopf’s passion for good wine and food led him to the creation of countless books on the subjects and Dick Simon’s fondness for cards led him to publish book after book on card games, including Charles Goren’s best-selling bridge guides. The line between self-indulgence and commerce is nowhere thinner than in publishing. Fun made money.

•  •  •

I
N THE
meantime, book publishers were missing the biggest change in American culture since the twenties. The age of rock and roll had begun, and the big party of the sixties was under way, with London as its swinging capital. Nobody, not even Bob Gottlieb, whose antennae for trendiness were reputed to be tuned so finely, seemed to notice what was going on across the Atlantic, nor, increasingly, even under our windows on Fifth Avenue. Teen culture was about to take over the world, while book publishers on both sides of the Atlantic continued to worry about “high culture” and to publish books aimed at the parents and grandparents of the people who were making news and having fun.

I was very slightly ahead of the game because I genuinely
liked
the music, which was anything but fashionable to admit in publishing circles in the early 1960s, where most people were busy circling the wagons to defend “traditional” culture (of which the book was thought to be a bulwark) against the onslaught of sex, drugs, and rock and roll led by crazed and presumably illiterate teenagers. The notion that they not only might be literate but might even buy books if we took the trouble to publish any that interested them had not yet occurred to anybody.