Shimkin, of course, I could understand. Max was anxious to show his partner that he was in charge of things. Since Shimkin had known Max since the mid-1920s, I doubted that he was taken in by Max’s mild and harmless deception, but it was really Ray whom Max was trying to impress. Having chosen Max over any number of other suitors (at least if she was to be believed), Ray was obliged to present her Max to the rest of the world as a “genius”—an eccentric genius, perhaps, but a genius all the same. Seldom have two people worked so hard to appear devoted to each other.
More than anybody else, Ray had been responsible for the hostility between Max and Shimkin. Many years ago, before the war, Max had prevailed upon Ray to invite Shimkin and his wife, Rebecca, to one of their parties in their apartment at the old Pulitzer mansion. In Ray’s eyes, Shimkin was still “the bookkeeper.” Deeply resentful of being obliged to invite him, she deliberately neglected to tell the Shimkins that it was a black-tie affair, so that they were the only couple not formally dressed, to their great embarrassment. Shimkin never forgave this insult (particularly to his beloved Rebecca), and it went far toward dividing the ownership of S&S into two implacably hostile opposite camps.
By making it obvious that her husband was terrified of her, Ray succeeded in making him seem foolish to his own employees—particularly the more talented and ambitious among them. This is not to say that she was a stupid woman—on the contrary, there was a side to her that was notably shrewd and smart—but her energy and ambition exceeded her husband’s. Unfortunately, she had been brought up in an age when there was no outlet for those qualities except through poor Max.
This was, in those days, a far more common phenomenon than it is now. Indeed, the model on which Ray based herself was that of Blanche Knopf. Alfred and Blanche Knopf presented themselves as something of a publishing team. Elegant and sharply intellectual, Blanche Knopf was what Ray would like to have been seen as, the loving and equal partner of a famous husband, but unfortunately for her, she had neither the education nor the taste for such a task, nor did Max’s choice in books and authors lend themselves to the kind of literary nurturing that the Knopfs were famous for as a couple.
In the contest for book publishing’s most famous couple, the Knopfs remained light-years ahead in class, and there seemed nothing the Schusters could do about it. While the Knopfs were being photographed with André Gide or publishing the definitive translation of Proust, the Schusters were stuck with the Durants. Max and Ray fought back with what weapons they could, not always with happy results. When, in 1958, after years of labor by Justin Kaplan, Max finally published Kimon Friar’s translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s monumental epic poem, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, he sent a copy to all his major publishing colleagues. Alfred Knopf, who had once referred to people like Max and Dick, among others, as “fresh young Jews,” responded with a personal note: “Welcome, at last,” he wrote, “to the ranks of the real publishers.” Since S&S had been in business since 1924, this praise was rather faint; however, Max put on a good face and sent copies of the letter to everyone, as if there were no sting in it.
A further attempt to emulate the Knopfs was the publication of a small book by Max and Ray entitled Home Thoughts from Abroad, intended to memorialize one of the Schusters’ yearly transatlantic visits to the great and near great, culminating with a pilgrimage to see “B.B.” (Bernard Berenson) and his constant companion, Nicky Mariano, at I Tatti. Unfortunately, Max was obliged to cut short his trip, while Ray went on undaunted. As a result, their letters to each other make up the bulk of the text. In one, Ray (who was traveling with her daughter Beattie) wrote to Max that they had dined with B.B., that B.B. had placed her on his right and told her that her visit was like a ray of sunshine in his life and that if he had been a younger man he would have asked her to come and live with him. (What Nicky Mariano thought of this conversation, if it ever took place, is not recorded.) “The next day,” she added, “we went shopping in Florence and bought several thousand dollars worth of antiques, which I am sending home, and which you should clear through customs.”
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 Rockefell
er 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.
THAT 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
Almost 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. Fa
r 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.
Another Life Page 9
