Another Life (27 page)

Snyder waited for Schwed to pause, then spoke in a voice that dominated the room. “How do we
know
this novel is that good?” he asked.

“I just told you,” Schwed snapped.

“That’s all we have to go on, to set a first printing of twenty thousand? That you liked it?” Snyder smiled. He had big, square, even teeth, very white, and when he smiled they seemed to fill his mouth. At this moment, however, his smile conveyed no particular humor—it was more of a grimace, in fact. He did not look indignant, merely interested, as if his only reason for his presence was so he could learn more about the mysteries of hardcover-book publishing.

Schwed bit down hard on his pipe stem. “It’s all we had a lot of times before, and they’ve all worked out just fine, goddamn it. Now let’s move on.”

But Snyder had pulled out of his pocket a list of his own, which he unfolded slowly. “Not all of them,” he said agreeably, looking it over.

It was one of Schwed’s boasts that his books never lost money and that he had the facts and figures to prove it. Nobody had ever challenged him on this point, to my knowledge, if only because nobody cared enough to do it. Besides, it was a patently absurd claim.
Every
editor
has failures, and it was unlikely that Schwed had been spared them. As in the movie business, anything better than a 50 percent rate of success made you a genius. In book publishing there is no such thing as R and D. The only way to find out if a book is going to sell is to publish it. Most editors (and almost all agents and authors) invariably base their estimate of how well a book has done on the
gross
sale, before returns (sometimes six months or a year after publication) have come in, thus ignoring the fact that returns can turn an apparent success into a dismal fiscal failure. Since the lifeblood of book publishing is enthusiasm, it is easy to be misled—and to mislead oneself.

There was a certain tension in the air between the two men. Everybody else in the room was silent. Then the meeting resumed at a much faster pace. Schwed’s only ambition now was to get us all out of his office. Snyder kept his mouth shut during the rest of the meeting, merely scribbling an occasional note from time to time on his piece of paper.

At the end of the meeting, Snyder left before anyone could talk to him, creating—as he no doubt intended—the impression that a new power had arrived on the scene. Schwed may have been tempted to complain about being second-guessed by a young man he didn’t even know, but since he was very quiet about the results, it was possible to guess that somebody—probably Shimkin—had told him this was the way it was going to be from now on, like it or lump it, though knowing Shimkin, he was perfectly capable of wrapping up the message in mumbled flatteries and promises to control young Snyder, so that Schwed may have regained the twenty-eighth floor more cheerfully than was warranted. But the writing was on the wall for all to see, and shortly afterward Snyder took the first of the many jobs and titles he was to hold until he eventually became CEO of a much larger S&S.

Soon his initials were cc’d on almost every significant memo, and people were straining their eyes to interpret his almost unreadable handwriting, a powerful, hurried, energetic scrawl that was usually demanding more information right away.

I had not had a real opportunity to meet this wunderkind. For the moment, he was busy elsewhere and seldom appeared in the editorial department. (His office was still “downstairs.”) From the area of sales and marketing there came rumors of firings, reorganizations, coups, and new alliances, like news from a Renaissance Italian city-state. These departments, which were hard for an outsider to separate in the first place, had always been run like feudal fiefdoms, and like most publishing
houses we had one person, Tony Schulte, whose job it was to act as the liaison between all these vital services and the editors, who were either too busy or too lost in their own precious little worlds to involve themselves in the grubby business of actually
selling
the books.

Schulte was forceful, clean-cut, cheerful, handsome, and athletic. Reputedly heir to a cigar-store fortune, he was one of those rare people who actually understand the whole publishing process, not just one small part of it, and was as much at home perched on Bob’s sofa in the evenings, talking about books, as he was downstairs, schmoozing with the guys in sales and marketing.

Snyder, as I was soon to discover, also had the ability to fit in anywhere he wanted to, together with a truly remarkable gift for not getting stuck in any one department or at any one level. His promotions and moves from one department to another took place at such a dizzying rate that it was hard to keep up with him, with the result that his business cards were always out of date. He seemed to soak up useful knowledge like a sponge, according to Schulte, who was at once admiring and dismayed, perhaps because he already saw in Snyder a potential and formidable rival.

The truth was, however, that they were oil and water. Schulte was laid-back, calm, and good-humored, a kind of New York Jewish patrician who did not as a rule take the trials and tribulations of publishing too seriously. Snyder was fiercely concentrated and totally focused on what he was doing, with the kind of steely determination that comes precisely from
not
having anything to fall back on. He could be very funny and enjoyed a joke as much as the next person, but it could not be said that he was calm or good-humored by nature. On the contrary, he was like a tightly wound spring, and to those who knew him he seemed often to be holding himself back from an explosion of temper by sheer willpower. One guessed, too, that his bark and his bite were likely to be equally unpleasant, especially when it came to ill-prepared or sloppy work or a reluctance to go the extra mile.

He himself went the proverbial extra mile almost every day, and his working hours were already legendary. He was in early, he left late, and he didn’t go home until he had cleaned off his desk, according to Schulte, who was no slouch himself.

I was absent for a good deal of this time—Casey’s difficult pregnancy, during which she was confined to bed for several months—ended successfully with the birth of a son, and I soon found myself
plunged unprepared into the world of first-time parenting, made even more traumatic by the fact that Casey appeared to have no relatives to rely on except for her mother, whom she regarded as naive and unrealistic, and her grandmother, a difficult old woman. Since my family was in London and Casey would rather have died than ask hers for advice or assistance, we were without the safety net that most young parents have.

Once we had returned to some kind of routine, however different it might be from our previous way of life, my attention returned to S&S—it was a lot more rewarding to think about books and authors than about diapers, formula, and middle-of-the-night feedings. To my surprise, I was asked to attend the annual convention of librarians in Atlantic City, a request that was puzzling, since I could think of no very good reason why librarians would want to meet me, nor I them. Clearly this assignment was not a plum—Bob Gottlieb, I learned, had already turned it down—but I was in no position to be fussy. In those days, of course, Atlantic City was not Las Vegas East, as it has now become. It was a 1920s seaside town slipping ungracefully into terminal decay, its once elegant seafront hotels declining into single-occupancy rooming houses for the poor and the old or worse, its famous boardwalk now a haunt for drug addicts and muggers. It was a place that no sensible person would have chosen to visit, not even the librarians, who, I thought, could surely have picked better.

A
COUPLE
of days after I had written this into my calendar and more or less forgotten about it, I received a call from Snyder, saying that he, too, was going to the librarians’ convention, to represent sales and marketing. He suggested that we join forces. I said that sounded like a good idea and a chance to get to know each other. He offered to rent a car, so we could drive there together.

It did not occur to me at the time that being sent to Atlantic City was S&S’s way of putting us in our places—Snyder for making too many waves, me for expressing my opinion too often and too loudly. Nor did it occur to me that Snyder might have included me deliberately. The one area of the company about which he had little knowledge was the editorial department of S&S. I might have seemed like his best bet to get a foothold there, however small—after all, we were almost exactly the same age and both struggling to get ahead of numerous layers of entrenched
and more senior people. I was more or less content with my position, but Snyder was not. He positively glowed with ambition in a company—indeed, in an industry—in which it was crass to admit to personal ambition.

In those days, the renting of a car was by no means the easy and everyday transaction it is now, nor was S&S particularly liberal when it came to that kind of thing. The best we were able to do was a yellow Rambler of uncertain vintage, which Snyder had picked up from some discount rental place known only to the S&S business department. He was, however, happy to leave the driving to me.
^*

Dick—we were on a first-name basis at once—lived only two blocks away from me, in an apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, where he and his wife, Ruth, were soon to have their first child. Far from being the fearsome personality that most people at S&S believed him to be, he could not, in fact, have been more simpatico. He was better at asking questions than at answering them, with the result that by the time we were in New Jersey, he already knew everything he wanted to about me. I had picked up only a few facts about him. Despite the broad Harvard intonation, he had gone to Tufts and was drafted into the army. Following the army, he had expected, without much enthusiasm, to go to work in his father’s successful clothing business, but his father surprised him, saying, “I’d rather have a son than a partner.”

Dick ended up as a trainee salesman at Doubleday, having chosen the business of book publishing as casually and accidentally as I had. Perhaps for that reason, we got along well from the very first. Almost everybody in the book business says that he always wanted to be involved with books, and perhaps it’s true, but Dick and I were alike in never having given the matter any thought at all. Disappointment is a well-known spur to ambition, and it seemed to have worked in both our cases.

It is a curious fact that one makes the really significant friendships of one’s life in much the same way as one falls in love, with one sudden, fell swoop—
un coup de foudre
, as the French say—and almost never by
small degrees. It takes a lot of time and shared experience to make a friendship permanent, to
harden
it, but in my life the friendships that matter have been made instantly, and nothing afterward has ever changed or diminished them. Somehow, there formed between Dick and me in that claustrophobic little car a friendship that was to last through the decades, despite the fact that we had very little in common. In some ways, in fact, we appeared to be opposites. Dick was a born businessman, with a head for numbers and a real thirst for confrontation, whereas I was a born editor, happiest alone with a book or a manuscript, and in business matters, as in everything else, a natural compromiser. I do not think either of us realized how valuable these different qualities might be if they were wielded together, for a purpose. But that, of course, was in the future.

As we entered Atlantic City, the view became more and more depressing. Beyond the deserted boardwalk a gray sea met an equally gray, damp sky. Most of the old hotels were closed, their windows boarded up with plywood, their facades moistly crumbling with decay. The hotel we were booked into did not look any better, though it did have glass in the windows instead of plywood. A wizened old man dressed in a threadbare bellboy’s outfit took us up to our suite in a trembling, clanking old elevator, which looked to have been the first one Otis ever made. “You guys come here for the convention?” he asked. I signified that we had. He sighed deeply. “Tell you one thing,” he went on, in a lugubrious voice. “The librarians don’t tip worth a damn.”

The suite itself had ancient maroon curtains laced with dust and cobwebs, the beds were creaking and lumpy, the bathroom a nightmare of cracked, yellowing tiles and wheezing pipes. Having dragged our luggage into the suite with great difficulty, the bellboy stood forlornly at the door, a pillbox hat perched ridiculously at a slant on his bald head, the sleeves of his tattered bum-freezer jacket shiny where he had rubbed his nose on them, his gnarled hand extended for a tip. Dick palmed several bills into his hand and sent him off for a bottle of scotch and some ice. The only thing that cheered Dick up was the fact that there would be several hundred women downstairs at cocktail time, with practically no men. “We’ll wash up,” he said, “have a drink, then check out the talent.”

But when we went downstairs to the hotel ballroom, the talent was disappointing. It was basically a room full of middle-aged women, intent on talking about books, especially literary novels and poetry, and
even Dick’s enthusiasm for the opposite sex soon melted. The lights dimmed, and we all trooped into the banquet room, where Dick and I found ourselves at a table with six pleasant but rather elderly librarians from Cleveland. Since my wife had often sung the praises of Cleveland’s library system, I, at least, had something to talk about—perhaps the only time in my life when a familiarity with the cultural institutions of Shaker Heights was to prove a useful asset. Dick was not so fortunate. Although he knew more about library discounts than I did (no great feat since I knew nothing), it was not a subject calculated to keep his spirits high. Bravely, he held to it, through three execrable courses, but by the time coffee was being served he was rolling his eyes toward me in supplication. I quickly pleaded a headache, and we returned to our dismal suite, with its peeling wallpaper and forty-watt bulbs. Dick sat down and took his shoes off. Despite his ruddy complexion, he looked worn out.