Another Life (47 page)

It was not so much a question of Dick’s bark being worse than his bite—his bark was certainly menacing, but he could bite fiercely, too—as it was of dealing with his naturally combative nature. He expected people to put up a fight and relished it when they did; at the slightest sign of fear or timidity, he bored in relentlessly, seeking the weak, vulnerable spot, going instinctively for the soft underbelly. What nobody understood is that he had an essentially Darwinian view of the world: People ought to fight for what they wanted or believed in and fight hard. Those who fought back for what they wanted to do gained his respect; those who didn’t, he lost interest in.

Nobody in the industry would have put S&S high on the list of places that were fun to work at, but the odd thing was that those of us who made the grade were happy and wouldn’t have wanted to work anywhere else. Like the Marines, people at S&S were proud of themselves for working under conditions that elsewhere were thought barbarously harsh. As one graduate of this trial by terror said, “If you can survive this, you can survive anything.”

Dick worked harder and longer than anybody, setting the pace by example. Those who thrived did so because they gave 100 percent to the job and cared about doing things right; those who failed failed because it was a tough, unforgiving environment, very unlike the “loved ones” atmosphere of S&S under Bob Gottlieb, when Bob had played the indulgent and wise papa bear to an adoring circle of acolytes that shared his views and lived for his praise. The reward for the members of Dick’s inner circle was to have passed the test.

•  •  •

S
INCE
S
CHWED
was still doing his London trip, largely as a reward for having acquiesced to Dick’s taking his place without a fight, and since I was still unwilling to sit around waiting for agents to send me manuscripts, I devoted myself for a while to traveling around the United States in search of books. Next on my agenda was Texas, a state I had always liked, ever since visiting my mother in Dallas, whence she had moved from Chicago when my stepfather took over one of the major hotels there. I was at a stage of my marriage when travel seemed an interesting alternative to staying at home, and I developed a passion for the West. During the time I spent in Hollywood in the 1940s, my father, partly out of guilt at being absent so often, partly to escape from domestic difficulties, had taken me to the desert, to the Grand Canyon, to Yosemite, and to ski at what were then pretty backwoodsy and primitive ski resorts in the Rockies, hardly more than miners’ camps in the early stages of becoming tourist attractions. I learned how to ride, and horses became a part of my life. Even in New York City, I managed to ride as often as I could and on my own horse. I became the only member of the New York book-publishing community to be a paid-up member of the Rodeo Cowboy Association (whose permanent secretary, I was later to discover when I met him on a trip to Montana, had been the young boy for whom Hugh Lofting wrote
Dr. Dolittle
) and subscribed to their newspaper. I joined the American Quarterhorse Association and even rode in the rodeo in Madison Square Garden, cantering into the arena on a chunky palomino in the opening parade behind Monty Montana and his Wonder Horse Rex. I carried, prophetically, for I was to one day build a house there, the state flag of New Mexico.

I was thus understandably interested when an agent I knew only slightly, Dorothea Oppenheimer, called to tell me about a new novel by a young writer from Texas. Larry McMurtry, she explained, had published three novels, two of which had been made into very successful motion pictures,
Hud
and
The Last Picture Show
, which was gratifying in its own way, of course, but had not led to any real sales of his books.

In a world of agents who make more money and get more publicity than their clients, Dorothea Oppenheimer was perhaps the last of a dying breed. That she was an Olympic-level kvetch cannot be denied, but beneath all that was a woman endowed with extraordinary taste,
courage, humor in the face of adversity, and loyalty. She was completely devoted to her clients’ interests, but once she knew that you shared her enthusiasm for an author’s work, she was fair and never asked for the impossible. Shy, retiring, and always apologetic for not asking more for her clients, Dorothea shied away from conflict, but she more than made up for that by sheer stubbornness and patience. In one of those odd twists of fate that are so common in publishing, Dorothea had chosen Irving Lazar, of all people, to handle her movie rights (most East Coast authors’ agents find it expedient to use a West Coast agent to sell movie rights for them), and Lazar criticized her endlessly for not being tough enough. Dorothea had few clients, but they were all real writers. “She’s sitting on a gold mine, but she doesn’t know what to do with it,” Lazar said about her, implying that he did, which only made her more nervous. Most people complained that Dorothea drove them crazy; she drove
me
crazy, too—the mere sound of her voice was enough to transform me into Lazar, shouting, “You don’t know what you’re
talking
about!” to her over the telephone, while she sniffled gently, but I liked and respected her, and at the end of every conversation, we always made up and reverted to friendly banter again. If Dorothea said something was good, it was worth taking seriously, which was more than you could say for Lazar.

I quickly read McMurtry’s first novel,
Horseman, Pass By
(the novel on which
Hud
had been based),
Leaving Cheyenne
, and
The Last Picture Show
. Though in later years I sometimes jokingly referred to McMurtry as “the Flaubert of the Plains,” he was already an unusual phenomenon in American writing. He came out of the gate (to use rodeo terminology) with a remarkable ability to write about women and an absolutely sure eye for the bleak landscape of small-town Texas and the isolated ranches of the Panhandle, as well as the history of the West. You can count on the fingers of one hand (and still have a lot of fingers left over) the number of male American novelists who can create believable, sympathetic women characters—or who really
like
women, for that matter. In most of American fiction, the women are cardboard cutouts, not living human beings, reflecting the prejudices or the fears of the author. You can read the whole of Hemingway’s work without finding a single really convincing woman character or the slightest hint that the author knew or cared what made women tick, and much the same can be said of every other male American fiction writer from Melville to Mailer. McMurtry, it was apparent, liked and understood women and wrote
about them sympathetically and intelligently. He came with a perfectly developed sense of place, which gave all his fiction a deep, solid bedrock, but he was able to put women into that landscape as no other Western writer ever has, and he did it in his very first novel with the sure touch of a mature artist.

Unfortunately, as Dorothea Oppenheimer made clear, East Coast reviewers just didn’t get McMurtry. It was, she thought, a question of urban prejudice—they simply couldn’t take seriously a novelist who had been born in Archer City, Texas, was raised as a cowhand, and wrote about life in Texas. There was some truth to this, I thought. Most reviewers were urban or had come to New York City anxious to leave their rural or small-town upbringings as far behind them as possible. Not a few of the reviewers had come from places where there were cows, never wanted to see or hear of a cow again, and McMurtry’s novels were full of cows. Besides, the prevailing tone of American fiction at the time was urban, Jewish, and Eastern—the West was seen, in the eyes of the literati, as “a colossal mistake” (to quote Freud’s famous remark about America), a land given over to violence, deprived of culture, and essentially rednecked—a view that was not improved by the experience of having had Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House. McMurtry, Dorothea said, did not feel he had gotten a fair shake from the reviewers, nor did he think he was likely to. The fact that his books had been made into movies made the reviewers only that much less likely to take him seriously, of course—if there is one thing New York reviewers can’t stand it’s an author getting rich despite them. McMurtry’s feelings on the matter were strong enough that he often wore a sweatshirt bearing a dismissive phrase often used about him by East Coast reviewers: “Minor Regional Novelist.”

The reason why all this mattered was that McMurtry had just finished a huge novel (his earlier books had been quite slim), on quite a different scale from anything he had done before. It was called
The Country of the Horn
(cows again) and was the first (and perhaps still the only) big American novel with a rodeo background. McMurtry’s present publisher had showed no enthusiasm for the book, and he was looking for a new home with an editor who not only understood what he was doing but might even take on the New York critics.

As it happened, I have never had the slightest respect for critics or any degree of interest in their opinions, despite my own sideline as a film critic. In most areas of artistic endeavor, film and theater, for instance,
the major reviewers have at least some conception of and respect for popular taste and do not simply ignore anything that might appeal to it. Any theater reviewer of
The New York Times
who limited himself or herself only to off-Broadway productions of avant-garde plays and utterly ignored or automatically condemned anything with popular appeal, such as a big musical, or who judged a big musical by the standards of avant-garde theater, would be fired. Book reviewers for the
Times
—and, alas, not only the
Times
—however, get away with completely ignoring the vast majority of books that people actually buy and read, and on the rare occasions when they
do
review such books, they judge them by the literary standards of the esoteric books that nobody reads
except
critics. That the New York reviewers had not paid sufficient attention to McMurtry did not surprise or dismay me.

When I told Dorothea Oppenheimer this, she was in ecstasy. I must read McMurtry’s new book immediately—she would get it over to me at once. I read it that night, and it was love at first sight. I found it difficult to conceive that any reader, even a
Times
reviewer, could dislike the heroine, Patsy Carpenter, around whose marriage to a young graduate student the whole book revolves. As for rodeo, here it was. If the American public wanted the
Moby-Dick
of rodeo, McMurtry had provided it. I called Dorothea the next morning and said I had to meet McMurtry.

She had been about to suggest that herself. McMurtry had developed something of a suspicion toward Eastern editors as well as Eastern book critics—toward anyone, in fact, who might think of him as a minor regional novelist—and a meeting might not be a bad idea, just to dispel any fears he might have that I was in this category. Would I fly down to Houston to see him?

I was eager to go. I called Snyder and explained what I was doing, which was fine with him. He liked action and would have been happy to have the entire editorial staff flying around the country in search of books. It was the sight of them sitting in their offices that provoked him.

I had arranged to meet McMurtry in the lobby of a downtown hotel, and it was only once I was there that it occurred to me that I hadn’t the slightest idea what he looked like, nor, presumably, he me. The lobby was jammed with people, mostly tall, well-dressed Texans of a certain age with their equally tall wives. I could see nobody who resembled a minor regional novelist.

I paced the lobby until the crowd began to disperse—it was dinnertime—until there were only two people in it except for the staff; myself
and a very tall, lean, serious-looking fellow, dressed in a sports jacket. He did not, at first glance, look like a Texan to me. He wore glasses and had a thick head of black hair, emphasizing his pallor. He was staring hard at me, which I thought was odd, since I had dressed, with Texas in mind, in jeans, my best pair of cowboy boots, handmade for me in El Paso with custom sharkskin bottoms and my initials in multicolored stitching, and the same pearl-colored Stetson I had worn in the Madison Square Garden rodeo. Instead of a tie, I wore a silver bolo of a cow’s skull, which I had picked up in New Mexico. Eventually, the tall young man made his way over to me and coughed discreetly. “You wouldn’t be Michael Korda,” he asked, “would you?” I said I was, and we shook hands. “I was expecting somebody who looked a little different,” he said warily.

I explained my interest in rodeo as we walked to his car. “Uh-huh,” he said. He said “uh-huh” a lot, I was to discover, and it conveyed many meanings, from approval to outright disagreement, if one listened carefully. His accent identified him as northwest Texan (or southwest Oklahoman) to any amateur Henry Higgins, but he spoke in flawless, carefully articulated sentences, not at all those of a country boy, and didn’t swear—a noticeable omission from his speech pattern, since most people at S&S laced even the most ordinary and innocent remarks with swear words. I did it myself, having fallen into the habit in the RAF, and those around Snyder did it because he did it, and also because, at least among the younger members of the staff, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement had won them the right. Now that the shock value of swearing had worn off, it was surprising—and pleasant—to note its absence. There was a grave, old-fashioned courtesy to McMurtry, which put me immediately at ease.

I told him how much I liked his work, especially the rodeo novel, although it turned out that his own interest in rodeo was rather less than mine. He had seen plenty of rodeo in his life, and he could take it or leave it alone. He did not share my enthusiasm for horses, either, having spent his full share of time on them as a teenage ranch hand for his father. So far as he was concerned, he had seen as much of horses as he ever wanted to. Still, we had a lot in common (our sons were the same age), and we got on well (so well that we are still close friends nearly thirty years and many books later), and I returned to New York as his publisher, carrying with me a carton of Diet Dr Pepper, to which McMurtry had converted me and which was at that time unobtainable in the Northeast.