Another Life

by Michael Korda

  The Wall Street Journal, too, commented on the “book boom,” though more cautiously, noting that book publishing was now “a growth industry.” But it pointed out that many of “the perplexing problems” of the business—like picking the winners from the losers—had yet to be licked and described the process as “a gigantic dice game.”

  Publishers have always been eager to eliminate the risk factor, either by branching out into what might seem to be more “secure” businesses, such as textbooks or “information” (dictionaries, encyclopedias, et cetera), or by concentrating on “staples,” such as cookbooks, auto-repair manuals, and the like. As Wall Street beckoned, they became even more concerned to show that theirs was a fundamentally sensible, predictable, feet-on-the-ground business, not a crapshoot—a business for grownups, not one dominated by spoiled children in the form of editors and authors. Interviews and articles tended to emphasize marketing and merchandising, as if the editorial side of the book business didn’t exist. About this time, a business expert called in to evaluate S&S came to the conclusion that we would be better off if we published only bestsellers—advice that was passed on to us with a straight face by Leon Shimkin, whose pained expression made it seem as if we were stubbornly resisting the obvious. He had charts drawn up to show how much better off we would be by not publishing books that didn’t sell and concentrating our energies on those that did. Just think, he would whisper hoarsely, how much work we would save if we published only best-sellers!

  IF THERE was one thing I had learned after almost two years in book publishing, it was that the amount of work invested in a book seldom bears any relationship to its success. Most editors, in fact (I am no exception) spend a lot of their time on the literary equivalent of rescuing stray animals. Every editor has a list of projects that looked compelling when they were bought but have since become proverbial albatrosses around one’s neck: novels that have grown out of control, the pages multiplying crazily like kudzu beside Southern roads; nonfiction projects that have taken sharp turns away from the original premise of the work; books that have been delayed far beyond their deadlines until nobody can remember why they were bought in the first place or even who bought them.

  To this day, I dread going over the “inventory” of my undelivered books, since it never fails to reveal projects I have forgotten about altogether or which were bought when the current managing editor was still in school. No matter how late an author is with a book, it’s my tendency to say, “Oh, don’t worry, he’s working on it,” rather than pull the plug and terminate the contract for lateness.

  It’s not just a certain sympathy for writers, being one myself, or a degree of optimism, without which one would never become an editor in the first place—it’s also that in my first years as an editor I gravitated naturally toward “problem” books and authors, or they toward me. Having bought a book, I hadn’t the luxury of writing it off or letting it fail, as older, more successful editors can do. I felt myself responsible for getting it in and making it publishable, however late, off course, or unreadable it might have become over time.

  This can be a positive, character-building experience, but it might also derive from a stubborn determination not to admit to a mistake. In either case, I became something of a specialist in the long-term resuscitation of doubtful projects that most editors would have left to die merciful deaths. I simply could not let them go and was willing to spend hours beyond counting to make them as readable as possible, only too often over the objections of the author—the worse somebody writes, the more they are likely to cling to their prose.

  Early on in our friendship, I remember Bob Gottlieb handing me a badly written and unnumbered manuscript, heavily etched with laborious, inked revisions and second thoughts in an unreadable hand. “See if you can get this to the point where it’s not a shame before the neighbors,” he said—a shondeh, to use the Yiddish. It took almost twelve years before the novel saw the light of day, only to sink like the Titanic. By the time it was published, Bob was no longer at S&S, and during that long period the author’s own life became as melodramatic as the plot of his book. All the while, every six months or so, another package of badly typed manuscript would arrive on my desk from him, together with a long letter chronicling yet another round of disasters, and pleading for something, anything by express mail, even if only fifty or a hundred dollars, to keep his head above water. “My life is in your hands!” one letter ended dramatically. Each time, I faithfully trudged down to the office of Shimkin’s latest financial watchdog to beg for a check, despite the facts that the novel was equally out of control and nobody had read it but me.

  In these circumstances, it is easy to persuade oneself that one is dealing with a work of genius, if only to justify the amount of time and energy spent on it or the endlessly growing file full of ill-spelled, single-spaced, stream-of-consciousness letters. Once a writer is far enough from shore, his or her editor invariably takes on something of the nature of a life buoy thrown to a drowning man—a relationship that is at once deeply flattering and profoundly wearisome for the editor, who can neither pry loose the kind of money that might help nor guarantee the eventual success of the book. This is not always an easy cross to bear. It is hard enough to be responsible for what happens to somebody’s work—very often their lifework at that, in every meaning of that word—but being responsible for their life is something else again.

  With age and experience, one learns to avoid playing this role, but in 1961 it was still a heady challenge to which I responded only too eagerly. I became involved in the rescue of a would-be novelist who had descended from job to job until he was living in a tar-paper shack in Northern California, reduced to the point where we had to send him typing paper so he could continue an interminable novel that we eventually published with one of the lowest net sales in S&S’s history. Then I became entangled in the darkly comic life of a self-taught historian and respected businessman whose apparently prim and proper suburban marriage went adrift when his white churchgoing wife, the mother of his two children, ran off with a black dope dealer from Newark. A pioneering student of animal psychology persuaded me to buy a book he proposed to write about his attempt to make wolves in Alaska bring up his infant son as one of their pack. This was not exactly an original idea, but having spent a part of my own childhood watching my Uncle Zoltan and my father on the set of The Jungle Book, I was interested enough to persuade S&S to put up $2,500 to send him on his way to Alaska, where he promptly disappeared into the tundra with the boy, never to be heard from again, leaving me to many years of difficult correspondence with the boy’s mother. Another of my authors, an old friend from Oxford, fled to a Tibetan monastery with his advance; another, apparently driven to a suicide attempt by writer’s block, wound up in a padded cell at Payne-Whitney, where I visited him almost daily in the hope of rekindling his interest in his book.

  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.

  THE 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.

  • • •

  FEW 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.