Another Life (12 page)

Another letter was from Israel, where she recorded that Ben-Gurion asked her to sit on his right and drank a toast to her, calling her “his little American ray of sunshine” and saying that Israel would not be complete until she came to live there. The next morning, she told Max, she and Beattie combed Jerusalem buying antiques, which she would send home by air and which should be cleared through customs as quickly as possible. These letters were eventually bound up in a small book, with many photographs of Max and Ray, or Ray alone, with their famous hosts, and was sent out, signed by both of them, to Max’s enormous “celebrity list,” including all his fellow publishers. The copy sent to the Knopfs came back as if it had been a submission, with a card turning it down as unsuitable for the Knopf list. When the Knopfs found out about this, they apologized, but Ray never forgave them, suspecting that it had been a deliberate slight.

Ray was in the habit of dropping in at unpredictable moments during the day, often with one of her daughters, presumably in the hope of catching Max doing his dictation with a buxom secretary in his lap, like a tycoon in a Peter Arno cartoon.

Shortly after being made responsible for the Durants, I was called into the inner sanctum by Max to be introduced to Ray. She was a small, formidable woman, elegantly dressed, her fur coat thrown over the back of her chair. She reminded me of a certain kind of French or Hungarian older woman, indestructibly chic down to the smallest accessories, the kind of woman one used to see boarding the wagon-lit of the
Train Bleu
, bound for Monte Carlo, followed by two porters bent double under the weight of her matching Vuitton suitcases. She had the look of someone who never appeared in public without every hair in place and who believed that the best place for her good jewelry was on her hands and wrists, not in a safe.

I shook her gloved hand. “So you’re Max’s new young man?” she said, eyeing me up and down skeptically. Her English was heavily accented
but hard to place exactly. She managed to squeeze a couple of extra vowels into Max’s name, which took some doing. I felt obscurely as if I were back in school again, being examined.

“I met your uncle once,” Ray went on, giving me a look that suggested that I did not compare favorably with him. “In London, at one of Weidenfeld’s parties. Do you remember, Max?”

Max shook his head and stuttered something.

“He doesn’t remember anything,” she said, dismissing Max with a shake of her head. She continued, “Max tells me that you’re going to be the Durants’ editor.”

I said that I was honored to be and that I was reading
The Age of Reason Begins
even now and making copious notes.

“Notes,” she said contemptuously. “What do they need with notes, the Durants? Their whole lives are spent buried in paper, those two. Better they should buy some decent clothes instead of reading more notes.” Ray’s voice fell to a kind of piercing whisper, as if she were confiding something to me that she didn’t want Max to hear, though judging by the martyred look on his moon face, he had heard it all before. “She’s a
peasant
, that one. She wears men’s shoes. She doesn’t wash enough.” Ray wrinkled her nose in distaste. “You’re working for Henry, I hear?”

I said that I was.

She rolled her eyes and sighed. “Well, you have to start somewhere,” she said. “You’ll come to the house one day—we’ll talk again.” She dismissed me with an imperious wave of the hand.

As she went on, I noted that Ray spoke about Dick Simon in the past tense, even though he was still alive, and with a certain relish, which made Max shake his head in silent protest. Although Max and Dick had once been so close that, like Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer at Random House, they worked in one office with their desks facing each other, I intuited that their wives had not shared that closeness—and had perhaps even resented it. In Ray’s case, she had done everything she could to bring it to an end, with the result that when S&S moved to new and more glamorous quarters in Rockefeller Center, the two partners got separate offices for the first time. The inner sanctum had once been their shared office, then it became the book-lined meeting room between their offices, then finally the phrase referred only to Max’s office.

“Learn from Max,” she called out to me as I opened the door. “It’s a great opportunity for a young man to work alongside a genius.” It was
curious, I thought, that she was quite capable of treating Max like an idiot while insisting that he was a genius.

Max stared at me across his desk. It was hard to read his expression, beyond the embarrassment natural to any man who has just been called a genius by his wife, but whatever he looked like—a trapped animal begging for release without any hope of getting it, perhaps—it wasn’t a genius.

T
HAT IS
not to say that Max didn’t
have
a genius of a kind. Whenever I read the purple prose of a certain kind of mail-order advertising, I close my eyes and can see Max Schuster writing it. Max understood, as very few people in publishing have, the power of simple ideas. Nobody was ever better at inventing books that filled a
need
, or at describing them with the kind of enthusiasm that sold them in quantity, or at breaking down the reasons for buying them into punchy, one-line sentences.

It was a shame that by the time I came to S&S Max had degenerated into a parody of what had once made him successful and that what he had invented other people could by then do as well, or better. There was a whole subindustry based on “words to live by” or “words of wisdom,” of books on self-improvement, etiquette, self-enrichment, even sex, most of it born from Max’s passionate belief that you could learn anything, change anything, help yourself ahead in any way merely by reading the right book. With an instinct based on his own bookwormish shyness and a childhood of reading Horatio Alger and Julius Haldeman’s famous Little Blue Books (cheap digests of all the world’s great philosophers), Max made S&S and himself rich. The key to it was the little rectangular order form at the bottom of each advertisement, which you could fill in and send, with your check, to “Dept. SM” at S&S to receive the book that would get you a better job, make your marriage happier, teach you the wisdom of the ages and the sages (as Max, with his love of puns, would have written), or make you rich or healthy.
^*

Still, whatever it was that Max knew, he didn’t see it as his task to teach it to me. It was from Henry that I was to learn the most valuable lesson about book publishing, though at second hand. One evening, as I was heading for home, burdened down with several manuscripts and a sizable chunk of the Durants’, Henry told me that years ago he had once met his brother Dick in the elevator, going home. Henry was carrying a heavy briefcase, buckled straps and handle straining with the weight of manuscripts, while Dick was nonchalantly carrying a thin leather portfolio under one arm. Dick stared at Henry’s load and chuckled. Pointing to Henry, he said, in mock Indian, “You, editor.” Then, pointing to his thin portfolio, he said: “Me, publisher.”

*
This probably explains why Billy Rose gave me a fishy look when I was introduced to him as an S&S editor and also why June Havoc, Gypsy’s younger sister and rival, chose S&S to be her publisher when, in a successful attempt to outshine Gypsy, she wrote her autobiography,
Early Havoc
.

*
Department SM was, in fact, a charming gentleman named Sam Meyerson, who was hired as the office boy when S&S was founded and who eventually rose to head the mail-order department. When well into his eighties, he still personally picked up the mail from the post office early every morning. The one thing that Max and Leon Shimkin shared was that the first thing each of them wanted to know each morning was how many orders Meyerson had received and for which books.

CHAPTER 6

A
lmost the first thing I learned about being an editor was that it was hard work. To be sure, ditchdiggers and miners have it worse, but for sheer, numbing, endless (I do not, deliberately, say
mindless
) work, editing books is hard to beat.

First of all there’s the sheer
quantity
of reading. From behind an editor’s desk, it sometimes seems as if the entire population of the United States is writing a book or sending in long, cramped, single-spaced letters, eccentrically typed, proposing to write one. Every mail delivery brings a fresh load of bulky, shapeless, poorly wrapped packages, many of them leaking that unpleasant gray stuffing that is impossible to get off your clothes, not to speak of rubber-banded piles of letter proposals, ranging from the insulting to the heartbreaking, and outlines for improbable books.

Many people in book publishing ignore this tide of flotsam and jetsam or return most of it unopened (a chore in itself), but it goes almost without saying that Max Schuster had devised a complicated and difficult procedure for numbering and tracking each of these unwelcome submissions. No matter how dog-eared, tatty, or unpromising the manuscript, it had to be logged in, a reader’s report form (“R.R.F.”) had to be attached to it, after which it was read, rejected, logged out, and the report filed. A very pleasant though much harassed elderly lady, Molly Singer, was responsible for this vast overload of paperwork, which was
one of Max’s favorite management achievements and which absorbed a good deal of his attention.

Editors senior to myself (which was almost everybody) were always arriving back from lunch with a “hot” manuscript they had received directly from an agent, which they then took home and read without bothering to log it in. If these made their way to the editorial board for further readings without the proper form, they were sent back again to be entered properly into the system. As for the unsolicited manuscripts, the infamous “slush pile”—those that came to us unagented, from total strangers—only Molly Singer knew by what arcane numerology of Max’s they were divided up among the junior editors for reading. Seniority obviously had something to do with it, since my pile filled every square foot of space in my cubicle, including the space under my desk. Like mushrooms, the manuscripts seemed to sprout overnight.

The sheer volume of material that had to be read was daunting, but the task was essentially extracurricular, a built-in, routine burden of the profession, like getting up to go to mass in the middle of the night for a monk. Night after night, those of us who read—it was regarded as a kind of badge of honor that set us apart from people in marketing or sales, who were also, by the way, making more money than us—dragged home shopping bags full of manuscripts, always hoping to find buried somewhere in the pile a literary pearl, and morning after morning we wearily dragged them back to the office to reject them. The rejection letters ran to form and, having all been drafted by Max, were as unalterable as the Holy Writ. It was soul-destroying work, apt to turn anyone cynical, for the sad, awful truth was that there was hardly any evidence at all of talent in the slush pile and plenty of proof, for those who needed it, that the country was full of crazy people armed with typewriters—far more of them even than of crazy people armed with guns.

The worst of it was one could never get ahead of the flow—it was the lesson of King Canute, applied to paper instead of water. Perhaps even worse, nobody paid the slightest attention to these labors, which went totally unrewarded. You could read yourself blind and it wouldn’t add a penny to your paycheck.

Still, compared to editing, the reading was easy work. At least with the reading, you were buoyed, however implausibly and against all evidence, by hope. The next manuscript might, after all, prove to be a work
of genius, or at any rate talent, the discovery of which can make an editor’s career overnight. Such things
do
happen; Bob Gottlieb
had
discovered Joseph Heller, after all, and
Catch-22
was about to change both their lives. The element of chance is as important as that of choice. Everybody in book publishing knows that if Macmillan’s editor had not been overcome by a cold while visiting Atlanta, he wouldn’t have stayed in bed and read the huge manuscript a lady had given him in the hotel lobby, which was to become, after much editing and renaming,
Gone with the Wind
. Miracles
do
happen.

Editing a manuscript is, however, a whole different story. To begin with, the publishing house already
owns
the manuscript, so the basic decision has been made. Far from hope entering into it, the question is: How can we fix this? And, of course, less usefully, How on earth did we get into this in the first place, and why? There is a kind of Don Juan—like quality to reading manuscripts–the next one, or the one after, might be the love of one’s life—but editing them is a slow, painstaking effort to patch up and make presentable what has already been botched and fudged. It is possible to spend hours unraveling someone else’s prose or trying to decide what he or she was trying to say and finding some way to make the words express it without starting from scratch in one’s own words.

In editing, time becomes meaningless. A single page can sometimes absorb hours, like the most infuriating kind of puzzle. For most editors, there is no time to edit in the office, where they are caught up dealing with the problems of real live authors, talking to agents, being called to meetings, or trying to explain to the marketing people or the business people or the publicity people just what this or that book is about and why it’s important to buy it or print fifty thousand copies of it or reject it. This in turn means that editors do most of their serious work at night and over the weekends and explains why so many of the better ones eventually become publishers, if only to have some kind of social or personal life.

It
is
possible to simultaneously overwork and underachieve—indeed, for an editor, nothing is easier. You can spend weeks—months, even—lovingly rewriting a manuscript that was never worth anything in the first place. You know it’s somebody else’s mistake, even as you sit up late every night with half a dozen sharpened number-two pencils, long after your partner has gone to bed with a martyr’s sigh and a strong hint that he or she won’t be responsible for what happens if this kind of
thing doesn’t stop so the two of you can have a normal marriage in which a person doesn’t get pushed aside in favor of a manuscript every night of the week and gets fucked like a normal person every once in a while, not to speak of taken to the movies every once in a blue goddamn moon. Still, you just
have
to unravel another hundred pages or so before tomorrow, knowing that in the end nobody will thank you, there won’t be a miracle that will make the book become a best-seller, nobody will know or care how awful the manuscript was before you began to work on it, none of your colleagues will thank you for the work you’ve done, nor will the author, who will think either you destroyed his book or that any improvements were his or her own work.…