Another Life (34 page)

The order of things, which had seemed so settled through the 1950s, was suddenly bewildering to those in charge, who were facing simultaneously the growing anger of women, the sea change in American culture, the revolt of youth (very often among their own children, not just in newsmagazine profiles and nonfiction outlines from authors), the civil-rights movement, and the first signs of widespread public disenchantment with the war in Vietnam. The last was a special problem, since many editors, most academics, and a large percentage of authors were speaking out against the war with increasing passion and expecting publishers to take a stand on it. This was something new. Book publishers had hitherto considered themselves to be under a kind of self-imposed
obligation to publish both sides of most issues more or less impartially, rather than to take the moral high ground. There were exceptions, of course—few publishers would have been comfortable with a pro-Nazi book, and in general publishers have always tried to avoid books bearing unmistakably incendiary or subversive opinions, preferring to stay within the mainstream as much as possible. Those who had come of age in or before World War Two and who for the most part believed that you could trust the U.S. government and accepted the morality of the cold war (if not necessarily that of nuclear weapons) found it hard to adjust to the increasingly heated and partisan debate; in many publishing houses, the management hunkered down against the editors and vice versa. The confusion of the era was perhaps typified by the fact that at the same National Book Award ceremony (then in the midst of one of its many doomed attempts to make the giving of prizes to writers and poets seem glamorous and newsworthy) a streaker ran across the stage, followed shortly by a good third of the audience standing up and walking out of the hall in protest at the appearance of a member of the Johnson administration. Those who stayed were thus hit square between the eyes with both barrels of the counterculture—the sexual revolution and the antiwar movement—leaving many of them indignant and confused.

Neither at S&S nor at Random House was there any serious attempt on the part of management to throttle dissent, but that is not to say there was no friction as the war escalated. Before, there had always been plenty of young editors (more than there were jobs for, as a rule), but they tended to do much the same kind of books as other editors, perhaps on a less exalted plane, while waiting for their elders to die, retire, or change jobs. Now, for the first time, publishers actively sought out young editors who could bring them a different
kind
of book—for perhaps the first time since the invention of movable type it became an
advantage
to be young, and young editors with the right kind of hip and defiant attitude were briefly in demand. The years when S&S was to publish books by Jerry Rubin, Wavy Gravy, and Jill Johnston (among others) were still ahead, but already some of us were moving into uncharted waters. My small contribution was a book by the Venceremos Brigade—American college students who had volunteered to harvest sugar cane in Cuba—which caused a certain amount of heartburn at S&S.

Max had once turned down the memoirs of Albert Speer, when they
were on offer to S&S. I had read much of the manuscript and thought that for all its evasions and self-deception, it was a unique and extraordinary book, one that provided a portrait of Hitler and the higher echelons of the Nazi leadership that nobody else could match, whatever one thought of Speer himself. I also thought it would be a huge success. Max listened intently to what I had to say, nodding his agreement. I was right, he told me, when I had finished. He had no doubt the book would be a big best-seller, and he, too, thought it was an extraordinary and valuable document and a major publishing opportunity. Then he leaned back in his chair and let out a sigh. “There is only one problem,” he said, “and it’s this: I do not want to see Albert Speer’s name and mine on the same book.”

You couldn’t argue with that, I thought then and still think now. Max was broad-minded, but there were limits to his tolerance, and who was I to argue with him? Besides, I agreed and used much the same argument many years later to argue against publishing a book by Louis Farrakhan. I didn’t think Max would have wanted his name on that book either. As Dick Snyder was later to say, “A publisher has an obligation to believe in the First Amendment but not to publish everything that’s sent to him.”

T
HE MID
-
SIXTIES
changed publishing radically. Sex scenes in fiction became permissible almost overnight, as did the use of obscene expletives. Even the book clubs, which had long advocated a certain artificial purity in the fiction they chose for their readers, gave in to the relaxation of the old standards (all except the
Reader’s Digest
Condensed Book Club, which to this day does not take books in which the characters swear or have sex out of marriage). Arguments like those between Hemingway and Maxwell Perkins over how to suggest the use of the word
fuck
in dialogue without actually printing it were no longer necessary or even thinkable. I remember with what trepidation I approved the use of the word
fuck
for the first time—in a Harold Robbins novel, of course—and with what indignation it was received by S&S and the printer, both of which tried to remove it and predicted dire consequences if it was kept in. I did not think the sky would fall, myself, and it didn’t, though Max didn’t like it a bit and put up a rather feeble rearguard struggle on the subject.

Max, however, was becoming an increasingly feeble presence at S&S. Most of what was being published was now done without his knowledge or, perhaps more important, interest. He was not alone in this. Except for the Knopfs, who despite having sold their company to Random House maintained strict control over their list, the sixties was the period in which many of the founders of the “new” publishing houses willingly or unwillingly began to surrender editorial control.

Publishing had once been a placid stream in which it was common for publishers to go on working well into extreme old age, since the public taste in books didn’t change much; now, it was increasingly part of the media business, linked to television talk shows and movie companies, supplying not only popular entertainment but trendy advice for upwardly mobile readers. In this atmosphere, trends were hard to spot and seldom lasted long. The publisher almost
had
to be part of the generation he was publishing for, to share the same tastes and needs, to be able to turn on a dime, and, above all, to have a certain
Fingerspitzengefühl
for the popular culture. It was not an art that could be practiced successfully from the ivory tower, nor from Max’s home in Sands Point. Besides, the growth of the industry was turning the founder publishers, one by one, into businessmen, however reluctant they might be. Bennett Cerf now had to deal with stockholders and Wall Street, and later with the directors of RCA and General Sarnoff himself, not just with importunate editors and prima donna authors; Max had to deal with Shimkin and the ever-present demand for increased capital outlays. Given their temperaments, it was natural that Cerf should come to enjoy his new role as Wall Street’s publishing guru and that Max should hide himself away, revising endless drafts of letters to the Durants and to Madame Helen Kazantzakis, the formidable widow of the author on whom Max had staked his claim to cultural immortality. In neither case were they looking for new talent—they had reached the age (and the positions) where, increasingly, the old talent looked just fine to them.

Under the circumstances, the post of editor in chief (or its equivalent) was bound to become more and more important. He or she was to soon come to be a combination of rainmaker, intellectual gadfly, and live connection to the popular culture—roles that the owner-founders in simpler times had been able to fulfill themselves. What had once been an honorific became, almost overnight, the hottest position in publishing. Hitherto, there had been star authors, of course, but now, for the first time, there were about to be star editors, some of them bigger stars,
in fact, than their authors. Even the best known of editors had been, in the old days, essentially bureaucrats and subservient to the owner or owners of their publishing house. Certainly, they neither sought nor were given fame. Maxwell Perkins in his own lifetime was very much an éminence grise, careful not to steal the limelight from his owner-boss Charles Scribner, let alone from his major authors. It is notable that when Perkins died, Hemingway neither recognized the immense value of Perkins’s suggestions, enthusiasm, loyalty, and support to his work nor wasted a moment in suggesting to Scribner that somebody else could take on the role. The deep bond between author and editor that was to actually make writers leave their publishers en masse when their editor changed jobs only came later, with the demise of the owner-publisher and the advent of the publisher-businessman—for by that time the editor was the only person with whom the author had any meaningful contact, except perhaps for the publicity director. Perkins’s fame was posthumous (alas for Perkins). In his own lifetime he worked in the shadow of his own authors and in that of Charles Scribner. He would not have recognized Bob Gottlieb, say, as his successor.

But it was, in fact, Bob who set the pattern that still holds in book publishing, in which the major editor or editors of a publishing house are generally believed (rightly or wrongly) to be capable of miracles by turning a manuscript into a successful book if they want to—the editor as a miracle worker. And not just miracle worker, for Bob was a father figure, even to people far older than himself, an analyst, always willing to delve into other people’s problems, a father-confessor, on call twenty-four hours a day, as well as the fastest and most sensitively tuned reader on the block. Almost single-handedly, Bob managed to turn what had hitherto been thought of as a somewhat stuffy job into a glamorous one.

It might have been a power base, had Bob
wanted
a power base, but he showed no desire for one as yet, being for the moment content to create what amounted to a publishing house within a publishing house and to surround himself with faithful admirers—his “loved ones,” as he liked to refer to those closest to him. Bob’s publishing style was in part based on the new English model—in the sixties, many of the older English publishing houses, tottering on the brink of insolvency or irrelevance, sought new leases on life by bringing in as editorial directors young men whom the owners would never have tolerated in their houses or clubs in more normal circumstances. The members of the
new breed were the publishing equivalent of the “angry young men” who changed the British theater in the late fifties. Sharper, tougher, rougher edged, borderline scruffy, openly ambitious (never a popular thing in England), and eager to change things, they came from outside the stuffy, middle-class background of most British publishers and were often openly contemptuous of their good manners, lack of passion for books or ideas, and banker’s hours.

P
ERHAPS THE
most admired of these new brooms was Tony Godwin, a former bookseller, whom Sir Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, one of England’s most respected cultural institutions, brought in to sweep clean his editorial office. Godwin, with his wiry, bushy mop of hair, his narrow body dressed in casual clothes, his very un-English gift of enthusiasm, and his even more un-English dislike of bullshit, was a man determined to have his own way and absolutely certain of his taste and judgment (characteristics that were to lead him from Penguin to Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and finally, fatally, to the United States). Even more charismatic was Tom Maschler, who had improbably been picked to revitalize the august and revered house of Jonathan Cape, Ltd., perhaps England’s most distinguished publishing house. Maschler was as abrasive and impassioned as Godwin but with a darker charm that was very different from Godwin’s engaging candor and with more unconventional and ambitious literary tastes. It was hard to find anybody who did not like Tony Godwin, even among those who thought he was a fraud, and even harder to find anybody who would admit to liking Tom Maschler, but the two of them provided Bob with a sense of what could be done if one combined a powerful personality and a willingness to take publishing risks with some real degree of control over the publishing process.

Because S&S was so much larger, Bob was never to gain the complete independence that Godwin enjoyed for a time at Penguin (until Godwin published a collection of fierce anticlerical cartoons by Siné, the author of
The French Cat
, at which point Sir Allen fired him) or that Maschler, always more subtle than his rival, was to have at Cape for many decades, until it passed into the hands of that Great Accumulator of publishing properties, S. I. Newhouse, making Maschler, at last, a rich man. Nevertheless, within the limits of what was possible at S&S,
Bob Gottlieb set out to acquire similar status for himself and did so very successfully.

Part of his strategy was to work closely with Maschler and Godwin, and with such younger and more unconventional agents as Candida Donadio or Deborah Rogers. At first, a remarkable number of Bob’s books came from the Cape and Penguin lists, but very soon the tide began to flow in the other direction, as Bob’s own well-developed personal taste was increasingly reflected in his list. It became clear that Bob was by far the strongest personality among these competing enfants terribles, with the surest sense of what would sell and the amplest resources. Eventually it came to seem that Maschler was somehow imitating Bob, or that he was merely a lesser British version of him, and the friendship between the two men, while it remained close, was fraught with competition and anxiety, at least on Maschler’s side.

Still, for all the angst, a certain style had been found, and Bob was soon the first book editor to become a celebrity in his own right, much as he claimed to be embarrassed by the phenomenon and shunned the limelight. The story of how he had edited and renamed
Catch-22
became publishing legend, as did his clever promotion of Rona Jaffe with
The Best of Everything
. What made Bob formidable was that he combined a refined literary sensibility with first-rate commercial judgment. He was not an intellectual snob.
Crass commercialism
was not a phrase that frightened him, and he enjoyed a bad book as much as a good one, provided that it was, as he said with delight, “a
good
bad book.” What he meant by that seemed mysterious to a lot of people in publishing (and most people at S&S) and even hypocritical, but in fact, I soon discovered, it was really very simple. A novel had to be written with
sincerity
and out of some genuine passion; if it was, then it didn’t really matter at what level it was written, so long as it was honest. Deliberate, plodding attempts to construct long-winded production-line best-selling fiction, like the books of Irving Wallace, or fiction written with fake feelings and deliberate, empty sensationalism (like most of Harold Robbins’s novels after
The Carpetbaggers
) bored Bob. He had a nose for the real thing, an authentic vision or view, whether it was “literary” or not. He could enjoy Jacqueline Susann’s
Valley of the Dolls
or Grace Metalious’s
Peyton Place
just as sincerely as he could Jane Austen—for what they all had in common, from Bob’s point of view, was that they were
sincere
writers, trying as best they could to show the world as they understood and lived in it. Of course, Jane Austen was doing it in better
English and with a more refined sensibility, but the quality of the writing or the sensibility was not what mattered.