Another Life (38 page)

I must have written tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of words, without ever once thinking that I might some day write a book. Writing books was something my authors did, not me. So long as I was merely writing for magazines, I did not have the feeling that I was competing with the people I edited or embarking on a new profession. I told myself that I wrote for magazines as a kind of hobby, except of course that I got paid for it; writing
books
would be a whole different story. Besides, if you’re used to writing five-thousand-word pieces, a book seems like a monumental task. There was nothing I admired more than the
Sitzfleisch
required to write a book of 100,000 words or more. I shared Bob Gottlieb’s combination of sympathy and awe for people who could do this. It seemed to require more courage than I had, so I put any desire to do it firmly out of my mind.

CHAPTER 18

A
s the sixties passed by, lost to most of us in hard work, S&S was increasingly divided by the question of succession, most of
which hung on the question of what exactly Bob Gottlieb wanted. Even those who thought of themselves as Bob’s friends, like myself, were in the dark. He continued to edit his books, extended his hold over much of the company, and seemed willing to accept the status quo, even though he wasn’t exactly happy about it. Essentially, S&S seemed to consist at the time of two separate entities: the old, traditional S&S, run by Schwed, and the new, more contemporary S&S, orchestrated, if not run, by Bob. Typically, I had a foot in both camps.

But this was an illusion. S&S was still owned by Shimkin, and in the final analysis, he was to decide what happened. In some ways, the situation pleased him. If he was good at anything, it was at setting one faction against the other and allowing each of them to believe that he favored their side. He feigned sympathy to Gottlieb and his followers (particularly Nina Bourne, the advertising director, and Tony Schulte, who dealt with marketing), and let it be known that they were the future of S&S; he was equally sympathetic toward Schwed, and let him know that he represented the solid, day-to-day financial reality of S&S, which was what really mattered in the long run. Both sides had his ear, and both sides might have thought, from time to time, that they had his backing, but in fact Shimkin merely hoped to buy time by keeping Bob at S&S for as long as possible without having to give up much, if anything, in exchange. He was a master of retreat by small, slow stages, the Marshal Kutuzov of book publishing. One came away from him with a tiny raise, possibly a new title, some small concession—anything that would keep one from asking for major changes or a big raise. He was always happy to give away what he didn’t mind losing in the interests of peace. His expression at such times was that of the Buddha, serene and benevolent, but it was deceptive. The truth was that Shimkin, having eliminated most of his partners, was for the first time in full control of both Pocket Books and S&S and not at all sure what he wanted to do with it all. He talked about taking the company public and dropped hints both to Seymour Turk, his chief financial officer, and to Dick Snyder that they were being groomed to succeed him. No Ottoman sultan ever divided his court with more subtlety or better ensured that his son and heir remained powerless.

Since all this was being played out against a background of trendy publishing successes and at a time when Wall Street’s interest in book publishing was raising even the most second-rate of publishing houses
to the level of interesting investments, Shimkin had good reason to be cheerful. All he had to do was make sure nobody rocked the boat.

The boat, however, was about to be rocked more severely than anybody could have guessed by Bob Gottlieb. As the sixties passed by, Bob’s reputation as a wunderkind had grown by leaps and bounds. He seemed capable of anything, from securing, via Tom Maschler, the U.S. rights to John Lennon’s book
A Spaniard in the Works
to publishing a whole string of “commercial” best-sellers. Then he announced the news that nobody—least of all me—had expected: He was leaving S&S to go to Knopf.

Pledged to secrecy during his negotiations, the news that he was leaving was a bombshell that rocked not only S&S but the industry. There were those who saw it as a crippling blow to S&S, particularly since he was taking Nina Bourne and Tony Schulte with him, and others who felt that it would spell the end of Knopf as a kind of icon of quality publishing. As it turned out, neither of these predictions was correct, but certainly for a moment it seemed as if S&S had been torpedoed and was fast sinking.

I felt, perhaps more sharply than most, a certain wistful sense of betrayal. Bob was my friend. We had been close, both at work and away from it, and although we were very different in many ways, we shared a great many things: We were both omnivorous readers (Bob was better read in literature, while I had read more history), we shared the same kind of sense of humor, and much the same view of the world. I was deeply apprehensive about what life at S&S would be like for me without Bob and also felt hurt that he had not asked me to join him at Knopf. This clouded our relationship during the transition period, since it seemed to me that I had been judged and found wanting. Bob, to be sure, broke the news to me with infinite tact and rightly pointed out that his departure offered me a great opportunity and that it was time for me to take on more responsibility and succeed on my own. I was quite incapable of taking this in, however, and for the longest time simply felt a numb resentment at having been left out.

Fortunately for me, the hysteria surrounding Bob’s departure soon swamped my regrets. It is hard to describe the furor that his move created. Until that point, editors tended to stay with the same publishing house for their whole career—Maxwell Perkins, who stayed at Scribner’s until he died, was fairly typical. What is more, frequent job changing
was discouraged—a lingering effect of the Depression in the minds of those who remembered it or whose parents had lived through it. Nothing was more precious than keeping the job you had, however green the pasture might look on the other side of the fence, and loyalty to the company that employed you was assumed to be both owed and rewarded. The notion that a job was simply a stepping stone to the next (and better) job, or that the company might regard its employees, even the key ones, as essentially dismissable and replaceable cogs in the machine had not yet penetrated to the publishing business. In the circumstances, the fact that Bob was transferring himself and his key collaborators to Knopf (and by extension, to the rival Random House camp) was as if a Cambridge don had defected to Oxford or the admiral commanding the Naval Academy at Annapolis had put on an army uniform and taken command of West Point.

Of course, the more praise was thrown at Bob, the more S&S seemed to be lost without him, and very soon it became apparent that unless we acted quickly and carefully those of us who were left behind might be stranded. It was a strange and rapid change of mood. At first, people were overcome by the sense of loss, and wished Bob well, but almost overnight the tears and lamentations gave way to outright fear, as agent after agent called to say that this author or that one wanted to go to Knopf with Bob. Worse, they threatened never to send S&S another book if we made a fuss about it.

The extent to which Bob himself stirred up this incipient exodus is hard to guess, and it is perhaps a measure of the strength of his personal relationships with his writers that so many of them wanted to jump ship. Still, the effect it had on S&S was dispiriting and alarming.

Nobody was more shaken by Bob’s departure than Peter Schwed, though his emotions on the subject seemed to me conflicted. Schwed was an intensely ambitious man, with a prickly pride, and it can hardly have escaped his attention that Bob and his followers were mildly dismissive of the kind of books he liked, and in general thought him better suited to run the rights department than to take on the role of publisher. So long as Bob was there, Schwed, whatever his title, was overshadowed by Bob’s mere presence and undercut by Bob’s feline wit. On the other hand, Schwed was a sentimental man, with generous impulses and strong, old-fashioned loyalties, and he felt a great debt to Bob, who had been at S&S almost as long as he had. Though Schwed was fiercely competitive on a personal level—indeed, it was the dominating characteristic
of his personality—he had a certain ancien régime attitude when it came to publishing, perhaps the legacy of a youth spent at Lawrenceville and Princeton, where competition was reserved for the playing fields and gentlemanly behavior was encouraged off them. For whatever reason, Schwed was determined to behave like a gentleman at this first major test of his authority, as if what he sought from authors and agents—and perhaps from Bob—was some kind of recognition that he acted like the Princeton man he was. Fond of Kipling, whose work he could recite in large chunks, Schwed set out to keep his head, when all about him were losing theirs, and thereby made the mistake of his career.

It was, needless to say, Dick Snyder who brought my mind sharply to bear on the realities of the situation, a day or so after Bob’s decision had been announced, by plunking himself down beside my desk and opening his mind to me. He looked tired and irritable.

“Nice guys finish last,” he said, by way of greeting.

I agreed that this was certainly what most people believed in the United States. The general opinion in England is the reverse, but I saw no point in mentioning that.

“I blame Shimkin most,” Snyder went on. “He should have given Bobby what he wanted. Shimkin nickel-and-dimed him instead and look what happened.”

I agreed that Shimkin was penny-wise and pound-foolish, and not only when it came to Bob. However, I found it difficult to believe that money was the only reason why Bob was moving to Knopf. There he would be, in effect, his own publisher as well as editor in chief, the heir apparent and chosen successor to the Knopfs. At S&S, Schwed was publisher, and it was not a marriage made in heaven, despite Schwed’s belief to the contrary.

Snyder grimaced. His facial appearance seemed to change so often that it was something of an adventure seeing him at intervals. At one point his hair was short, and the frames of his glasses dark, thick, and of executive caliber; at the next, his hair was transformed into a thick, wild tangle of curls, like Medusa’s, while he sported tinted aviator glasses. He even grew a mustache for a while. It was as if he were trying out different personae in the hope of pinning down the one that would take him to the top. “Who would you rather have running things?” he asked. “Schwed or Bobby? Shimkin should have bitten the bullet and made the choice between them. Still, it’s lucky for you, isn’t it?”

I must have looked puzzled and naive. “Come
on
,” he snapped. “Don’t tell me you haven’t worked out that his job is yours if you go for it. You don’t have any competition. There isn’t anybody else here who can take the job, and just at the moment nobody in their right mind wants to come here. They all figure we’re done for, going down for the fucking third time,
losers
.… You may not know it yet, but you’ve got S&S by the balls.”

I thought about this, and it gradually dawned on me that Dick might be right—indeed, when it came to this kind of thing, he was almost always right.

Of course, even then Dick, like most people, credited me with Machiavellian deviousness, fueled by fierce ambition, a misunderstanding of my character that I had always found puzzling. Bob, trying to explain his own success at S&S, had once told an interviewer that although his was a competitive nature, he was too busy to have time left over for ambition, a statement that was widely ridiculed as naive and self-serving by those who didn’t know him well but seemed to me right on the mark, not only about himself but about me. A person who is compulsively busy is unlikely to have much time left over for plotting his or her rise. I was often in the right place at the right time, but I had made no particular effort to find my way there, so I was momentarily baffled and even frightened by Dick’s assumption that I not only coveted Bob’s title but was planning how to get it. The idea had simply not crossed my mind.

Now that it had been placed there, it was hard not to think about it. In ten years, I had gone from an assistant editor to executive editor (one step below editor in chief on the publishing totem pole, at least theoretically) and was doing more books than any other editor except Bob—too many, in fact. My immediate reaction was that nobody else at S&S seemed any better qualified for the job than I was—whatever the job might be, for the truth was that the very idea of having an editor in chief was something of a puzzle. Max had assumed the title for most of the company’s history but in the past had delegated it briefly from time to time to such varied personalities as Quincy Howe (later to find greater fame as a writer of popular history), Wallace Brockway (who went on to become a noted anthologizer), Clifton Fadiman, Jr. (who gave it up to become a book reviewer and book-club judge), Jerome Weidman (who resigned from S&S to write a long list of best-selling novels, the best remembered of which was
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
, a book that was rejected by S&S because it made Max uncomfortable but eagerly
acquired by Cerf for Random House), Joe Barnes (who gave up the title almost as soon as it was conferred on him), and Jack Goodman, who was best remembered for having hired Bob. Max reclaimed the title after Goodman’s untimely death and relinquished it reluctantly, first to Henry Simon then to Bob, who liked to pretend that he had never wanted it.

No recognizable duties or benefits came with it. In theory, the editor in chief was merely
primus inter pares
, first among equals, with no particular authority over the other editors. Henry had wisely never attempted to exercise any such authority, and while Bob did, he managed it with such delicacy and grace and by such exquisite indirection and subtlety that, except for the end results, it was seldom visible. A managing editor performed the onerous task of keeping track of every book S&S had under contract and trying to pry out from the editors the truth about exactly what the state of progress was of each title on their list; an executive editor (myself at this time) dealt with the paperwork necessary to put through contracts and such routine housekeeping as the assistants’ raises; and a secretary of the editorial board (also myself) kept the minutes of the weekly editorial meeting and drew up the agenda. What the editor in chief did was unclear, and at times the title had been allowed to fall into abeyance, since that seemed simpler (and less conducive of bad feelings in the editorial department) than to let one editor lord it over the others.