Another Life (9 page)

In the meantime, quite unfairly, poor Henry soon became known as the man who turned down
The Carpetbaggers
. In the end, even Max Schuster couldn’t forgive Henry for letting such a hugely profitable book go, and Ray Schuster was heard to say that her husband was too softhearted for keeping on Dick Simon’s
nebbish
brother, who had been unable to recognize a gold mine when it was right before his eyes.

I
T IS
amazing how much one can learn from somebody who is not generally thought of as successful. In the first place, Henry looked down on what he thought of as “the popular taste” and despised himself for pandering to it. Nothing is more doomed in book publishing than an editor who tries to publish “popular” books without really enjoying them himself. Then, too, everybody who mattered at S&S had been under the sway of one or two magnetic personalities: Dick Simon, who had retired, and Jack Goodman, his editor in chief, who had died recently of a heart attack. Henry had been promoted to editor in chief because nobody else was available, but his promotion offended both those who thought that he was only a shadow of his brother and those who thought he wasn’t fit to sit in Goodman’s office. Merely by accepting an unlikely promotion, Henry had alienated many people at S&S, right down to the assistants and the mail-room boys. Worse, Henry was deeply embittered by all those years in his brother’s shadow, and he nursed an endless list of resentments and grudges; at the same time, he was too old to recognize that a new era in book publishing was just beginning. Very shortly, S&S would publish Rona Jaffe’s
The Best of Everything
—the very prototype of the hot “women’s novel” that would eventually reach its climax with Jacqueline Susann’s
Valley of the Dolls
—and Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22
, which was to start a whole new school of black humor in American literature. Neither of these books was Henry’s, nor was Henry even given an opportunity to read them in manuscript.

The Best of Everything
would be a landmark in a number of ways: It had been bought as a movie by Jerry Wald before the manuscript had even been edited, so the movie company would be involved from the
beginning in marketing the book; and it would begin, as well, a new tradition in popular fiction of using the author as a marketing tool. Philippe Halsman’s haunting, full-color jacket photograph of Rona Jaffe took as much time to get right as the jacket itself and cost a good deal more. Until then, it had been thought sufficient for writers—particularly first novelists—to send in an old snapshot to appear on the back flap of the jacket;
The Best of Everything
was to usher in the new era in which the author’s potential for glamour, real or faked, mattered almost as much as the writing, and the photographer’s fee often exceeded what the average first novelist was likely to make from his or her book.

It was as if there were a whole separate, parallel publishing house operating on the same floor, with the express intention of keeping the older generation from finding out what was going on. At its center was the late Jack Goodman’s former assistant, Robert Gottlieb, with Phyllis S. Levy, Goodman’s former secretary, and Nina Bourne, the S&S advertising director. In uneasy alliance with them was Richard L. Grossman, nominally in charge of marketing, who was determined to carry on Dick Simon’s tradition of photographic books, which had led to the publication of such successes as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s
The Decisive Moment
and Edward Steichen’s
The Family of Man
. Nevertheless, a nucleus of bright, ambitious youngsters had acquired just enough power to do what they wanted to do, and what they wanted to do was to change the face of book publishing.

O
F COURSE
book publishing, like any other business, needs to be shaken by a revolution from time to time. The last big one had been in the late 1920s, but the war had since then delayed any further major changes in the zeitgeist of publishing, sending the young men who might have taken over from Max and Dick, or Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, or Alfred and Blanche Knopf, off to fight. When these men returned after 1945, they were happy to publish the same old safe books in the same old safe way as they and the whole country slipped quietly toward the Eisenhower years. It was the era of the suburban house, the six-o’clock cocktail shaker, and the regulation suit, a world defined by S&S with the publication of
The Organization Man
and
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
. The revolution was now overdue and not only at S&S.

There had been a brief flurry of excitement when the men who had gone to war came home with their novels—among them Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Irwin Shaw—and there had been a seismic tremor when the Beats became sufficiently commercial, like Jack Kerouac, who made that typically American jump from penniless outlaw to book-club selection and bookstore celebrity in one leap, with
On the Road
. But for the most part, publishing, like literature, slumbered on. It had upset many people when Mailer wrote the first war novel in which the troops swore the way they have always sworn in all armies since the beginning of warfare, but nobody in American publishing was prepared for a novel like
Catch-22
that made savage fun of war, had a hero who was proud to be a coward, and ridiculed both our side and the enemy’s alike. It was all very well for that kind of thing to have been done in a Czech book like
The Good Soldier Schweik
, but it was unthinkable in this country.

Rather like the Manhattan Project,
Catch-22
(which was called
Catch-18
until it was discovered that Leon Uris’s forthcoming novel was called
Mila 18
) was hatched in secrecy and on a strict “need to know” basis. It was Heller’s first novel, and he had been rewriting it for nearly two years, following Gottlieb’s suggestions. An aura of myth hovered around the book, all the stronger since nobody but Gottlieb and his acolytes had read it. He had shrewdly stage-managed a sense of expectation that grew with every delay, in part by allowing a few bits and pieces of the manuscript to appear in places such as
The Paris Review
from time to time, just to whet the appetites of reviewers.

I had already heard a good deal about this wunderkind (much of it cautiously negative) from Henry Simon before I actually met him, about a week after having been hired. One morning, a tall young man, looking rather like one of those penniless perpetual students in Russian novels, squeezed his way into my office and sat down on the edge of my desk. He wore thick glasses with heavy black frames, and his lank, black hair was combed across his brow rather like the young Napoleon’s. The eyes behind the glasses were shrewd and intense, but with a certain kindly, humorous sparkle that I had not so far seen at S&S. He wore worn tan corduroy trousers, scuffed penny loafers, and a button-down shirt without a tie: the uniform of a graduate student rather than a young publishing genius. Gottlieb looked to be about my age, but he projected a certain deep wisdom, as well as layers of publishing experience. We shook hands and he introduced himself. “How do you like working for Henry?” he asked genially.

I said I liked it fine. He nodded. He did not look as if he believed me. “Henry showed me a couple of your reports,” he said. “They weren’t bad. If you like, you can read some of my submissions. I do some French fiction, you know. Not a lot, but there’s some very interesting stuff being published there. You read French, don’t you?”

I said I did, happy to have found, at last, somebody in book publishing who apparently wanted to take advantage of my knowledge of languages. I already guessed that Bob Gottlieb’s submissions, whatever language they were in, would be very different from Henry’s—much more literary and avant-garde, which suited me fine, since Henry’s tended to be rather old-fashioned novels or on nonfiction subjects that didn’t interest me.

My current task—which seemed likely to keep me busy for months, if not years—was to “fine-tune,” as Henry put it, the revision of an interminable history of religion by an elderly Unitarian minister, Dr. Charles Potter. Dr. Potter’s views on religion seemed to me so benign and ecumenical as to be meaningless. Dr. Potter’s prose style, unlike his theology, was thickly convoluted and erratic, so I had my work cut out for me. Henry had made it clear, however, that even when time was lying heavy on my hands, it was
his
time. “Won’t Henry mind?” I asked Gottlieb cautiously.

Gottlieb had a nervous habit of flipping back the lock of hair that crossed his brow with one hand, after which it immediately fell back into its former position. His glasses, I noticed, were so smeared with fingerprints that it was a wonder he could see through them. “Well, he might,” he said cautiously. “You’d have to do it on your own time. He can’t possibly object to
that
. If you like, I’ll talk to him.”

I said that would be great.

The legend was that Gottlieb had been rejected by his parents because he married a Gentile girl—a story that might have come straight out of a Philip Roth novel. His wife, Muriel, had given up her career as an actress to work as a waitress, so that Gottlieb could complete his studies at Columbia and go on to Cambridge, where he had dazzled everyone with his knowledge of literature and his enthusiasm for the criticism of F. R. Leavis. (His only treasured possession was one of the few complete sets of Leavis’s magazine,
Scrutiny
, outside a library; he kept it in milk cartons under his bed and read himself to sleep with them.) All this had done him, at first, no good. On his return to America—Muriel was by then pregnant—he was obliged to take a job selling
Christmas cards at Macy’s, whence he had been rescued when he was hired as Jack Goodman’s assistant at S&S, and rose from that lowly position like a rocket. If I knew the story by heart already, it was because it represented just what I was hoping would happen to me, sooner rather than later.

“Call me Bob,” he said, rising to his feet. One of the many inconveniences of an English education is the difficulty in getting on a first-name basis with anyone. Americans always seemed to expect that I would address them by their first name on sight, just as many of them called me “Mike,” which I hated but didn’t know how to correct. I still hadn’t found a way of addressing my boss as “Henry,” however often he invited me to.

Bob and I shook hands ceremoniously. He paused and looked at my desk critically. “You’ll never meet anybody if your back is all they see,” he said. He grasped one end of my desk. “You take the other side.” Together, we lifted the desk and turned it around, so it faced outward. Now I could see down the whole length of the corridor. Anybody coming in or going to the bathroom would pass in front of me.

Bob nodded with satisfaction, though whether at the change in my position or at the discomfiture Henry would feel, I wasn’t sure. Henry said nothing when he saw that my desk had been turned around. He merely sighed, his face paler and grayer than ever, went into his office, and lit another cigarette, followed by a dry, racking cough.

I knew that I had disappointed him, and I felt bad about it. I already understood that my loyalty was going to be deeply, sometimes painfully divided. More than anything else, I wanted to be part of that tight little circle that revolved around Bob, where, for the moment, the real excitement was.

*
In the same period, Leon Shimkin also suffered episodes of depression so severe that he was sometimes found in tears in his bedroom closet in the morning, unable to face the task of choosing a tie for the day; unlike Richard Simon, he underwent successful shock treatment to overcome the problem.

CHAPTER 5

B
y the end of my second week at S&S, Bob and I were friends. He was also a mentor—a role in which he reveled—at a time when I badly needed one. I had two mentors, in fact: Bob, who taught me the importance of enthusiasm and imagination in publishing, and Henry, who taught me the importance of paying attention to details and
of long hours of laborious, slow work over unrewarding manuscripts.
Sitzfleisch
, he called it, a German word signifying the ability to put one’s ass down on a chair for many hours of uninterrupted work at a time. A plodder Henry might be, but he was indefatigable, a martyr to his own fussy perfectionism, as he sat lighting cigarette after cigarette, eyes red with fatigue, making tiny alterations in sentence after sentence with a succession of sharpened pencils.

I soon fell into the habit of working for Henry like a medieval monk toiling patiently over a piece of parchment; when I’d finished, I read manuscripts for Bob, with a sense of relief that kept me going until the small hours of the morning. Gradually, I became accepted in the group that centered around Bob, and took to joining them in his office, early in the evening, after the “grown-ups” had gone home. Almost everything that involved editorial decisions, advertising, jackets, and marketing was discussed here. The group also made by no means gentle fun of Max Schuster, from whom they tried to keep as far away as possible. Little did I know that Henry had already volunteered my services to him and that I would soon get to know him better than I could possibly have imagined.

S
HORT
,
BALDING
, bent over with cares and burdens, a-twitch with a kind of demonic nervous energy, Max was prey to such a veritable frenzy of tics, tremblings, stutters, and rapid blinks so startling that most people who met him assumed that he suffered from some kind of nervous disease, Tourette’s syndrome, perhaps.

The truth was quite other: Schuster was an obsessive-compulsive workaholic, afflicted with an extreme case of shyness. In the right circumstances, he was a man of considerable charm and erudition, but he was also complex to a degree that would have baffled a Freudian analyst. At times, he seemed to those around him like a kind of secularized
yeshivah bokher
, one of those scholarly Jews who were content to
daven
for hours at an end over a text, rocking back and forth as he repeated it to himself and sought its meaning. Certainly Schuster read even the most innocuous memo as if it were a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, his lips moving as he mumbled it aloud to himself, his eyes behind thick, old-fashioned, perfectly round horn-rimmed glasses, giving him a certain owl-like look as he searched for hidden meanings, ballpoint pen at
the ready, twitching in his right hand ready to scrawl corrections, emendations, and second thoughts in the margin.