Another Life (35 page)

This was a controversial opinion at the time and remains so for many people, who tend to simplify this into a battle between crass commercialism and serious literature, as if there was not some common gray area into which the two merged—and have merged, more or less, since the beginning of the written word. In any case, it was Bob’s stroke of genius to understand this, right from the beginning, and to approach the manuscripts he read with a far more open mind than the vast majority of his colleagues—and with higher standards, too.

Beyond this, Bob was a gifted
reader
. It might seem strange to suggest that reading is a talent, since most people assume that almost everybody can and does read every day, but Bob read as a great music critic might listen, with attention, pleasure, a high degree of discrimination, and a sense of perfect pitch. A sentence off balance, a few lines that could be cut, a wrong note, caught his attention, but he did not read, as so many editors do—as poor Henry Simon had, for instance—for the sole purpose of finding flaws. He read for and with pleasure, yet at the same time he could imagine, in his mind’s eye, as he was reading, how the book might be reconstructed, how intricate changes might bring out the best in it, how cuts might get the reader to where he or she wanted to go faster.

It is conventional in publishing to divide good line editors, who can blue-pencil a manuscript in detail, from editors who are more concerned with the big picture, but Bob was good at both, and watching him work one soon learned that it is no good doing the one if you don’t do the other, that sometimes the big fix was needed, sometimes every line had to be corrected, and on occasion both. You did what you had to, and that was that.

But no editor, no matter how good, can turn a bad book into a good one, so an editor ought to work only on those books he or she loves, for whatever reason. Loving the book makes the work worthwhile and makes it at least possible that something useful will be accomplished by working on it. Working on a book you hate, dislike, or are indifferent to accomplishes nothing at all.

Beyond all his other abilities, Bob was a great teacher, the kind who teaches without being aware of it, and for a period of about four years, during which he reigned as S&S’s editorial star, he turned the editorial department into a kind of school, almost rabbinical in its method of instruction
and entirely dominated by his firm but gentle insistence on getting everything right. Perhaps Bob’s only weakness was that while he himself was a remarkably shrewd businessman and seldom overpaid for a book he wanted, he was determined to prevent the business people from intruding into the decisions that mattered to him: which books to publish and how to publish them. These were precisely the decisions, however, that the business people were determined to control, or at any rate to subject to some process of decision making more quantifiable and objective than, say, Bob’s instinctive feel that this or that book was worth publishing and called for a printing of twenty thousand copies. This eventually became a serious problem for him in later positions at Knopf and as the editor of
The New Yorker
. At S&S, however, these problems did not arise. Fortunately for Bob and his authors, Shimkin’s attention was fixed on getting Max out, while Max’s attention was fixated on staying put.

For a time, no doubt, it might have passed unnoticed by Schuster and Shimkin that S&S was in the process of becoming something it had never been before: a “hot” literary house, putting out a remarkable list of new writers, one after another. The discovery and launching of Heller was followed by innumerable launches of new stars, whether from the United Kingdom, like Edna O’Brien, Len Deighton, and Doris Lessing, or from the United States and Canada, like Bruce Jay Friedman, Mordecai Richler, James Leo Herlihy, and Charles Portis. Unexpectedly, improbably, Bob had transformed S&S, with its reputation for nonfiction and self-help best-sellers, into the hottest fiction house in New York. The smart, irreverent, wisecracking Jewish black-comic novel, exemplified by books such as
Stern
and
A Mother’s Kisses
, was virtually his invention and led to many anxious discussions with Max. Max was of the generation that did not think there was anything particularly funny about being Jewish—rather the contrary—and was made nervous by the fact that this new school of fiction tended to portray Jews as whining, complaining, neurotic, sex obsessed, and burdened with hellishly dominating mothers and weak fathers. In
A Mother’s Kisses
, the hero’s monster-mother begs and threatens a counterman, “I want you to cross your heart and swear to Christ that my son’s patties aren’t greasy,” and most of these books prefigured the “self-hating” Jews of Philip Roth’s later fiction (
Portnoy’s Complaint
and after), caricaturing the urban Jewish family in ways that Julius Streicher himself might have envied.

It was not only Max who was sensitive to this kind of thing. Even Peter Schwed, who hardly admitted to being Jewish at all, expressed his doubts about Bob’s new wave of young Jewish writers (the old wave included writers such as Meyer Levin, who wrote about being Jewish with glum seriousness). Shimkin also occasionally chimed in with complaints from rabbis in Larchmont or Westchester, none of whom, of course, had read the book in question but were merely passing on the unease of their congregations in the face of these new assaults on their faith. Jews poking fun at Jews—worse yet, at the fact of being Jewish—was still a controversial phenomenon in the 1960s, and to those whose minds were still on the Holocaust (which had not yet acquired that name) it was deeply shocking. It was one thing for Gentiles to hate and ridicule Jews—there was nothing new in
that
—but quite another for Jews to hate and ridicule themselves and, most sinister of all, for other Jews (Jewish publishers, for instance) to make money out of it.

It is to Max’s credit that whatever his own doubts (and whatever pressures may have been put on him by Shimkin and many of his own friends), he did not prevent Bob from taking the S&S fiction list in a direction that cannot have pleased him. Of course, it helped that Bob was successful and increasingly famous—the Schusters might not necessarily
like
the books he was publishing, but they knew success when they saw it. Besides, Ray, though she was not much of a reader of new fiction, had a wicked sense of humor and was, in this area at least, comparatively unshockable. “So
nu
, what’s so terrible about all these books?” she once whispered to me at the yearly office outing, which took place at the Schusters’ Sands Point house. “Jews can’t be funny?”

This was the occasion when Ray first announced (to her neighbor W. Averell Harriman) that Bob was “my Max’s new young genius,” a role for which Bob would have been well suited, with his Napoleonic lock of hair and his disheveled clothes, had it not been that he took none of this seriously; indeed, Bob at the Schusters’ looked as if he were slumming far more than former governor Harriman, and in a way he was: Harriman, for all his wealth, was just a politician, whereas Bob was an intellectual.

For a brief time, Bob made S&S, by the sheer force of his personality, intellectually chic, a house very much in his own image, at least on the surface, for S&S was not nor could ever be a Farrar, Straus and Giroux or a Knopf—it was simply too big. Like its chief rival, Random House, it might, for a time, acquire a conspicuous frosting of avant-garde
literature, but the cake itself remained made of self-help books, “inspirational” books, business books, big-time popular fiction, and middlebrow nonfiction, as well as such tried-and-true publishing staples as mysteries, puzzle books, income-tax guides, and books on gardening, cooking, bridge, poker, stock-market investment, and almost every known human interest. However much attention Bob’s books might get in the New York literary world, the financial stability of S&S rested on its backlist and on its continued publication of relatively humdrum titles. Stability and profit in book publishing are more likely to come from
What to Name the Baby
or income-tax guides than from the latest new novel, however critically acclaimed.

A publishing house can only be so big if it is to represent the taste and vision of one person, even of one person’s clique; above that size, if it is to survive, it must be more of a supermarket than a boutique. That is not to say that a publishing house doesn’t need a trendy or famous editor who follows his or her distinctive taste; a house without such a person rapidly becomes dull and sooner or later begins to lose authors. For a good many years during the fifties, sixties, and seventies, Doubleday, then the largest American trade house, was financially successful while producing a seemingly endless flood of solid, safe, middlebrow books without any strong editorial figure. By the early eighties, however, Doubleday went into a sharp decline, and authors no longer wanted to be published there. A sensible publisher knows that any major house needs books that will be talked about, books that will create a sensation, books that represent a certain literary style or view of the world, not because these are necessarily profitable but because the attention they receive lends a certain cachet both to the rest of the list and to the reputation of the company itself. In much the same way, in the world of fashion the profit is no longer in the dazzling creations of famous couturiers, whose work is reported on in breathless prose by the media, but in the huge merchandising empires to which the couturiers have lent (or, rather, sold) their names. The dazzle surrounding this or that latest collection makes sense only when you take into account that it is being used to sell perfume, handbags, sunglasses, pens, watches, luggage, and jeans all over the world at outrageous prices. An editor who becomes a celebrity might or might not be profitable—the best are, of course—but lends glamour to what might otherwise be a fairly ordinary list. How much this is worth is hard to estimate, but it’s worth
something
, and Max knew it. In Bob’s case, most of his books were either modestly or
outstandingly profitable, so the literary glamour he provided was not, in fact, costing S&S anything, but it is never easy when a young editor becomes better known than the owner of the company. It is to Max’s credit that he managed to give up the limelight with a certain degree of grace and good humor.

By 1965, however, his health had begun to give way. He had always
seemed
like an old man, and a rather feeble one at that, but now he was clearly faltering. He saw fewer people, and those whom he saw could hardly fail to notice that his Parkinson’s symptoms were far more pronounced, that he tired easily, that even his sense of humor, however peculiar, was going, giving way to an uneasy sharpness, as is so often the case with men who know they are coming close to the end of their careers. He had seen the future, and it did not include him. It was not just a question of age or health, however; Ray and her son-in-law Ephraim London both knew that the tax laws favored the sale of Max’s share in the company while he was still alive, and they urged him to get out while the going was good. In these days, when even comparatively small companies are acquired and sold for immense amounts of money and when CEOs are commonly given huge stock options and golden parachutes, it seems ludicrous that Schuster’s half of S&S was valued at only two million dollars, but in the 1960s it was the equivalent perhaps of twenty million or more today—enough to give Ray a sense of security for her own future. Whatever Max may have felt—and it was clearly a long and painful decision—he was unable to resist the urgings of his wife, his son-in-law, and his partner. In 1966, it was announced that he had sold his half of the company to Shimkin.

Max’s departure was arranged with a remarkable absence of fanfare, perhaps because it was a humiliating surrender on his part, perhaps simply because he had no desire to put a good face on it. Like so many men—indeed, like Dick Simon, and, eventually, Shimkin—Max’s retirement from the company he had helped to found was a death sentence. He talked of writing a book, of continuing his labors on the Inner Sanctum Library of Basic Books, of traveling, but without conviction. To nobody’s surprise, least of all, I suspect, his own, he was dead within four years.

By one of those transactions understandable only to the business mind, Shimkin, having gained the 50 percent of S&S that he had coveted for years, merged the company with Pocket Books, of which he then owned 46 percent, and ended up owning more than 50 percent of
the new, merged corporation, thus not only revenging himself on Max and posthumously on Dick Simon but also right royally screwing his partners in Pocket Books out of their control of that company.

I
T WAS
hardly to be expected that Shimkin would look with favor on the increasing independence and fame of Bob Gottlieb. A more far-sighted and generous man might have seen how important it was to S&S to encourage and reward him, but Shimkin was of that school of management which is essentially hostile and prides itself on
not
giving people what they want or, in this case, have earned. The harder you pressed him for what you wanted, the more he retreated into a defensive posture and found reasons why it couldn’t be done. This was not a spirit that was likely to nurture talent nor to satisfy Bob, who, despite his disheveled appearance and an aura of unworldliness, was beginning to show recognizable signs of ambition.

At some deep level, Bob was beginning to know his own strength and to chafe at having to remain under the control of people he made no secret of despising. Yet seldom had I ever met anybody who found it so necessary to deny his own ambition. Bob believed—
had
to believe—that everything he wanted was in the best interests of the company, of his friends, of his authors. Promotion, more power, a bigger office, he maintained, had been thrust upon him. He had accepted them unwillingly, humbly, because he had the best interests of S&S at heart. Nobody had worked harder (which was true), nobody cared as much (which was almost true), nobody loved S&S more or was loved with such intensity by almost everybody who mattered at S&S.