Another Life (20 page)

I seemed to have a magical attraction for writers with ambitious, crackpot plans and foundering personal lives. Of course, some of this is inevitable when starting out—the big, easy books by established authors are unlikely to come one’s way, and it would be a poor editor indeed who failed to be moved by a challenge while still earning his spurs. Besides, just about the only things a young editor has going for him- or herself are enthusiasm, a willingness to work harder than anyone else, and a certain naïveté. Book publishing, like most businesses, provides ample opportunities for cynicism over the long haul of a career, but it pays no dividends to start out a cynic.

I made any number of mistakes in those days—not the simple kind, which I still make, such as suppressing one’s doubts about a book or persuading oneself that what is patently second-rate is really first-rate, or might be made so with the right kind of editing. I made the kind of mistake that involves the heart: buying a book because the author is so
desperately needy, sincere, or wistfully appealing—the literary equivalent of a mercy fuck, in short. Learning to say no is the first, hardest, and most important lesson for a fledgling editor. The only thing harder to learn is when to say yes.

In any event,
no
was a word that I seldom used then, both because I found it hard to say and because I desperately needed books. This had its downside, of course—a lot of them were unsuccessful and took up an inordinate amount of time—but there was also an upside: I gained broad and unspecialized experience. Most editors stay with a well-defined area of interest and for good reason: It’s usually easier to do what you know and what you want to do than to venture into uncharted waters. Thus, literary editors stick with what they conceive to be literature, nonfiction editors with nonfiction, and so on. I was willing to do pretty much anything. It wasn’t that I didn’t have preferences or tastes of my own, but I was determined not to be fussy until I could afford to be. I found myself editing books on mathematics and philosophy, memoirs, fiction, translations from the French, politics, anthropology, science history, even an illustrated encyclopedia of technology translated from the German. In my determination to cast my net as wide as possible, I subscribed to numerous French literary journals as well as the Russian
Literaturnaya Gazyeta
, which the FBI came to inquire about. In those days, a letter or a package with a Soviet postmark was held up mysteriously by the post office for weeks and arrived showing the telltale signs of having been opened and clumsily resealed.

What they found to interest them in
Literaturnaya Gazyeta
I cannot imagine—it certainly produced slim pickings for me, though I did many years later pick up a novel called
Faithful Ruslan
, a very sad story about a guard dog in a Soviet prison camp who, after the camp is closed down, is retired and can’t adapt to freedom. It was clever, touching, and very convincingly told from Ruslan’s point of view—much more effective, I think, than Richard Adams’s
The Plague Dogs
—but for all my enthusiasm, it sank into oblivion, despite the cold war theme. Other editors seemed to have an enviable facility—or was it just plain luck?—for plucking best-sellers out of foreign waters, but my Hungarian, German, Russian, Italian, and Japanese writers, however highly praised by those in the know, never won the Nobel Prize or became best-sellers. I did have slightly better luck from time to time with French books, but then I don’t really regard French as a foreign language, and many American readers and critics are, in any case, under the impression that
they ought to take French writing seriously, even if they don’t like it much.

Fortunately for me, the idea of worrying about whether a junior editor’s books were making a profit had not yet occurred to anybody at S&S (or anywhere else), except perhaps Leon Shimkin. In book publishing, the motto for survival might have been that of academic life: publish or perish. The more books you bought, irrespective of any possible merit, the more seriously you were taken, and since there is very often a long gap between the signing of a contract and the delivery of a manuscript, it was possible for months or even years to go by before anybody knew whether one was buying best-sellers and works of genius or complete duds. Many a successful editorial career was launched by buying everything in sight, thus building up a long and impressive-looking list of acquisitions, then switching to a new job at another publisher before the manuscripts began to flood in. Some people did this several times in rapid succession, rising swiftly to positions of serious responsibility, while leaving behind them a flood tide of ghastly books and authors that would haunt other houses and editors for years.

Whatever
Life
might suppose, the truth was that book publishing at the beginning of the 1960s was still very much a business run by amateurs who took a certain pride in their fecklessness. Accountability was looked upon as an infringement upon an editor’s right to follow his or her instinct. Given the general inefficiency with which the business was run, it would have seemed pointless to subject the performance of the editors to intense scrutiny, even had the machinery for doing so existed. The system of accounting itself was so slipshod as to be risible, in those halcyon days before the computer made numbers king. Whole rooms full of white-haired old ladies labored with pencils and adding machines to produce royalty statements that hardly ever reflected any kind of financial reality, since the books, which were returnable, drifted back from the bookstores for years, like flotsam and jetsam on the tide. Royalty statements were regarded with deep suspicion by authors and agents, with some reason.

T
HE LAID
-
BACK
inefficiency of publishing in New York paled when compared to publishing in London, where monstrous lunches accompanied by a variety of wines were the rule, followed shortly afterward by
tea. The shipping room was very often to be found under the stairs in a kind of cupboard, as at the august premises of Jonathan Cape, where a few wizened old men in brown coveralls wrapped parcels when they were not boiling the water for tea. Many if not most American publishers looked toward London with envy. There, the Anglophiles (who ranged from such hearty philistines as Simon Michael Bessie and Peter Schwed to aesthetes like Bob Gottlieb) would say, is where publishing is done
right
, at a nice leisurely pace, with plenty of room on everybody’s list for first novelists and less vulgar obsession about profit. The difference between the two sides of the Atlantic was, in fact, one of scale. In the United Kingdom, book publishing was not only a well-regarded and honorable profession but one that loomed large in people’s minds. London is a big city, but England is a small country, and most of it looks to London for news. Book news was treated with the same interest as every other kind, even by people who didn’t read books.

Quite the reverse was true of America, a big country, in which New York is only one of many major cities, albeit the media center, and in which people were most interested in local news. News of book publishing seldom reached the hinterlands. Even today, there is no fevered national speculation about who will win an American Book Award, unlike the interest that surrounds, say, the Booker Prize in the United Kingdom, or the Prix Goncourt in France.

Much of this was about to change and in a big way. As Wall Street became interested in publishing as “a growth industry,” there were people who actually thought that it might be made profitable as well and who observed its present arrangements with a cold eye. And even bigger change was in store with the rising popularity of television talk shows. The
Today
show had been going on for years, spawning imitations, before it occurred to anybody that authors were a cheap way of filling up time—in fact, they were
free
and only too happy to talk about their books. Television, which everybody had expected would destroy book publishing, in fact saved and reinvented it. Until television, the only way that publishers could get their books noticed was to advertise or pray for good reviews. Now, at last, they could do an end run around the reviewers and put the author in direct contact with millions of people at one time.

•  •  •

F
EW PEOPLE
guessed at the time how significant these changes would be. Among them was one of America’s most successful novelists, whom I was at last to meet, when circumstances made it necessary for me to work with Harold Robbins personally, and I was summoned to the great man’s hotel suite by a call from Paul Gitlin.

Gitlin, not a man easily awed, talked about his biggest client in a relatively hushed voice, as a cardinal might talk of the Holy Father. Harold wanted to meet me, he said, but I should be careful. Harold could be pretty rough, especially if he thought he was being bullshitted.

I had no reason to bullshit Harold Robbins, I said. My job, like that of my predecessor, Cynthia White, was simply to tidy up his prose and to point out holes in his plot and suggest ways of filling them. The larger questions, such as how much was going to be spent on advertising, how many copies we were printing, or what television shows he should appear on were, after all, not in my province. On these matters, Robbins was known to be sensitive. Gitlin had long since secured for him “most favored nation” treatment, meaning that if anybody else should ever get a bigger first printing, advertising guarantee, or promotion budget, Robbins’s would automatically be raised to match the new terms. The same applied to his royalty rates and almost anything else Gitlin could think of.

Harold didn’t like to be talked down to, either, Gitlin went on. And Harold did not like snotty people—I shouldn’t forget that for a moment.

“I don’t talk down to people,” I protested. “And I’m not snotty.”

“He might think you are because you’re a Limey,” Gitlin said.

“For God’s sake, what’s he got against the English?” I asked. “He’s a huge best-seller there.”

“He knows they like him. But that don’t mean he likes them.”

On that cheerful note, Gitlin hung up. I was to meet Robbins at noon, and we would lunch together, the three of us, at his hotel.

I had my own doubts about the meeting on the grounds that it represented an argument lost on my part. I have always had a real dislike of editorial discussions held outside my office. I had already found that things usually went much smoother and faster on my own turf, however cramped and unglamorous. Off it, some element of authority seemed to be missing. Later on, I mostly managed to get my way about this—in fact, I took to saying that I didn’t pay house calls—but I was in no position to do so at that time with Robbins. Still, this was a compromise of
sorts, since Gitlin’s original suggestion was that I should fly to France and spend a week or so on Robbins’s yacht at Cannes.

Gitlin had been both surprised and angered at my refusal to join Robbins’s yachting party. Other editors, he snapped, would have killed for the chance to spend a week on Harold’s yacht. Harold was a lavish host, he pointed out, who made sure that all his guests had a good time. My heart sank at the very thought of it, and to my own astonishment I dug my feet in and absolutely refused to go.

If there was one thing I already knew, it was never to accept that kind of hospitality from a major author, since you could never argue as an equal thereafter. Besides, like my father, I preferred to pay my own bills and decide for myself where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do, whenever possible.

Robbins’s first words to me were “I hear you pissed on my fucking invitation.”

Robbins was a muscular, compact man, with the battered face of a middleweight fighter who had seen better days. The corners of his mouth were permanently turned down, as if he had just finished sucking a lemon, and he hid his beady, suspicious eyes behind thick, wraparound dark sunglasses, of the kind then favored by Aristotle Onassis and Darryl F. Zanuck. His handshake was firm but moist, and his voice gravelly, rough, and full of suspicion and aggression, as if he had taken elocution lessons from a loan shark. Robbins’s skin was deeply, expensively tanned, and his sandy, graying hair was sparse and combed artfully across his scalp to hide a growing bald spot. He wore a silk shirt, open to the navel, exposing a thick mat of chest hair and several gold chains. His hairy wrists were adorned with chunky gold bracelets and a gold watch, so that every time he moved them he clinked and clanked. The hands, I couldn’t help noticing, were those of a working man, with short, stubby fingers, except that they were soft to the touch and well manicured, the nails apparently finished with several coats of polish. He wore black silk trousers and pointed, woven huaraches, of the kind favored by Hollywood producers in the 1940s. There was something anachronistic about Robbins, as if at an impressionable age his ideas about class and success had been forever fixed by exposure to studio czars such as Harry Cohn and Jack Warner when he had first gone west to work as a publicity man and would-be screenwriter in Hollywood after his enthusiastic reception as the author of
A Stone for Danny Fisher
. By
the early 1960s the people Robbins had modeled himself on had vanished, leaving him behind as a kind of caricature of a bygone age.

Although Robbins had something of a reputation for generosity and unexpected acts of kindness, he usually faced the world with a grumbling snarl and a tough-guy attitude, as if he had a monumental chip on his shoulder, despite his enormous success as a writer, or perhaps because of it. Certainly his sales were in the millions—he was the world’s most widely read living novelist—but that did not appear to give him much satisfaction, except for the money. At first, I assumed that this was because the critics either ignored him or attacked his books as perfect examples of what was wrong with American culture, but I was soon to discover that Robbins was indifferent to all that and even took a certain amount of perverse pride in it. Robbins positively
laughed
all the way to the bank. He said he “didn’t give a shit” about reviews; he wrote for money, and as long as the money kept pouring in, he was content.