He might have added “Who cares?” Inevitably, the atmosphere changes when the people who own you are far away and deal in billions instead of being just down the hall, counting every penny, and it doesn’t always change for the better. Caution doesn’t get you noticed—on the contrary, it is generally better to fail big than to think small.
THIS ALONE explains some of the larger failures in publishing, as does the belief that somebody who has written one successful book is likely to write another. In my case, the lesson that this is not necessarily—or even commonly—true came in the shape of a telephone call from Claire Smith, one of my favorite agents, who had first brought Susan Howatch to my attention and for years represented Ronnie Delderfield. A suggestion from her was one that ought to be taken seriously, so when she dropped a hint that one of her biggest and most famous clients, the English civil servant turned best-selling novelist Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, was thinking of changing publishers, I ran to inform Snyder of the news.
Watership Down had been a huge best-seller, winning a readership of millions of devoted fans, including myself and Margaret. It had gone unnoticed for ages by American publishers because very few of them were attracted by a long novel about rabbits, told from the rabbits’ point of view. The few who took the trouble to read the manuscript thought it might work if it was drastically shorter and rewritten as a children’s book, but most simply passed on the opportunity to read what was to become one of the most successful and acclaimed works of fiction of the decade.
This particular form of blindness is not by any means rare. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings went unread by most American publishers, who found it too long, too demanding, and neither a children’s book nor an adult novel. James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small went unread, or was rejected, by visiting Americans for years, even though it was already a big best-seller in the United Kingdom. Fantasy and whimsy—particularly British fantasy and whimsy—make many American publishers acutely nervous. There has always been a certain transatlantic fear that the English sense of humor doesn’t “travel,” still less the English fascination with small animals.
The tale of the rabbits eventually made its way to America and went on to become an instant best-seller on publication here. Like Tolkien’s hobbits and their friends, Adams’s rabbits captured the affection and the interest of all but the most hard-hearted, unsentimental, and obdurate of realists, even if there was about the book, on a second reading anyway, a whiff of sanctimonious and slightly self-conscious religiosity, together with the sense that the author might be too clever for his own good. Still, in its own way, the book was a work of genius, deeply imaginative and satisfying, though the author himself, once he had been brought over for a publicity tour, appeared to be something of a queer fish, and a fish out of water at that.
Of course, most writers who have produced a work of genius are queer fish. The deeper a person plunges into his or her own imagination and the stronger the hold of the invented world becomes, the less the writer is likely to appear “normal” to other people. Tolstoy was a very queer fish (or odd duck), even in nineteenth-century Russia, where odd ducks abounded, and English literature is full of even odder ducks. The writer is even more likely to be an odd duck when his or her great work of imagination is essentially childlike. To see the world’s complexities with the simplicity of a child’s eyes is a special form of genius, the Reverend Charles Dodgson being a perfect example of the type, and Adams had much the same curious, divided view of the world as the author of Alice in Wonderland. He was at once a serious adult, carrying a heavy load of religious and moral baggage, and a wondering child, able to imagine a whole rich world in a country hedgerow full of rabbits.
To a casual observer, Adams looked a little unhinged in his appearances on American television, but that might have been because most of his interviewers wanted him to be funny about rabbits, whereas he wanted to talk about morality and religion. He was also undergoing the equivalent of the deep-sea diver’s bends, having emerged suddenly from a lifetime of obscurity into the limelight of celebrity and wealth.
It is possible that I read Shardik in something of a daze. Watership Down had seemed to me a work of real talent, totally convincing and entertaining, and Shardik, which I sat up all night reading, seemed far more ambitious and darker, almost like The Lord of the Rings in that it presented a whole imagined society, with all its history, folklore, and religion meticulously invented. At its center was Shardik himself, a great bear who is at once the object of a cult and a perfectly real bear, a kind of ursine equivalent to the rabbits of Watership Down.
This was a potent mix, and I was able to report the next morning that Adams had successfully avoided the dreaded “second novel” syndrome with a book that was as original as the first but richer. I was not alone in this opinion. Peter Mayer, then running Avon Books, a major paperback publisher, had been the U.S. paperback publisher of Watership Down, and was determined to keep Adams. When he heard that we were anxious to buy Shardik, he called immediately to propose that S&S and Avon copublish it. He had read the manuscript overnight as well and was overcome by it, though not rendered inarticulate—indeed, he talked to me about it for what seemed like hours, his voice trembling with enthusiasm, describing the plot in detail as if I had not read the book myself.
The next day, he repeated it all word for word on the telephone to Dick Snyder, who had not read the book, of course, but had already heard about it from me. Dick rolled his eyes and interrupted from time to time to say that he didn’t want to hear another word about Kelderek, the lone hunter who discovers Shardik the great bear fleeing from a forest fire and believes him to be the avatar of the god of his people, or the cult of the virginal priestesses, or Genshed, the evil slave dealer who mutilates children, that he wanted to talk about the deal, not the goddamn plot—but Mayer was not to be stilled until he fell silent and hoarse from talking, at which point Dick wisely told me to negotiate a deal with Mayer, who would otherwise, he guessed, get him to give away points just to get him off the phone.
Dick had no objection to going into partnership with Mayer—“Fifty percent of something is better than a hundred percent of nothing” might have been Leon Shimkin’s motto, but Dick was not above using it too when it suited his purpose, and felt that the amount of money involved—$550,000, which was big money then—made it sensible to share the risk. Further, when it came to Richard Adams, Peter Mayer knew what he was doing, and Pocket Books might not. Dick just didn’t want to spend more time listening to how good the book was or being told how to publish it. Mayer positively reveled in details, so it took a very long time to get a contract drawn up, particularly since Mayer made a moral and personal issue out of even the smallest disagreement and was capable of talking about his feelings and the rightness of his position for hours, or even days, to make his point.
It was some time before I actually met Mayer, who was, until then, merely an impassioned, unstoppable voice over the telephone. As it turned out he was charm itself in person, a tall, exceedingly attractive man, about my age, chain-smoking like a chimney, and with the kind of furious, eclectic erudition that I recognized as basically European. His enthusiasm—not just on the subject of Shardik—was overwhelming and infectious, and it was very hard to resist him when he was in a good mood—he is perhaps the only person I had ever met about whom the old cliché “His eyes blazed with enthusiasm” was literally true. When he was not in a good mood, he was capable—though never with me—of becoming snappish and withdrawn, and in his own way he could be as difficult and imperious as Snyder. A gifted publisher, rather than an editor, Mayer rather perversely prided himself on his skills as a businessman, about which Dick, who regarded him, in this area, at least, as an amateur, was cautiously skeptical. “He falls in loves with books,” Dick would say. “That’s OK for editors, but not for publishers.” In the long run, Dick would be proven right, when Mayer went on to become a major figure in world publishing as the CEO of
Viking/Penguin, after a short and deeply unhappy stint as the head of Pocket Books with Dick as his boss, but at the time of Shardik it seemed to a lot of people that Mayer was emerging as the Renaissance man of book publishing, equally adept at high culture and low culture, at home with foreign literature to a degree remarkable in American publishing, and with a remarkable flair for both promotion and, as some pointed out enviously, self-promotion. Few other publishers would have spent their spare time running a small private press of their own, as Mayer did, or done it as well, come to that.
Egged on by Mayer—an active partner if ever there was one—we drew up an enormously ambitious plan for publishing the book, not just because we wanted to earn our money back but because it had been a high-profile purchase. The fact that Adams had moved to S&S for his eagerly awaited second book was major news, and not just in publishing circles. We would look, not to put too fine a point on it, like putzes if it didn’t succeed. A big American tour was planned for Adams, specially bound reading copies, stamped with a gold-foil emblem of Shardik’s head, were prepared (that had not yet become a staple of book PR), and every effort was made to whip up the enthusiasm of the S&S sales force.
• • •
IN THOSE days, sales conferences were still relatively modest events, and the sales reps were mostly middle-aged men, schooled in a certain weary cynicism about “the product” they were called upon to sell. They had heard it all before, and their eyes showed it—novels that were supposed to be number-one best-sellers that went down the drain, books that were hailed by the editor as if they were the Second Coming incarnate that were ignored or reviled by the critics; in short, theirs was not a happy lot.
In those days, the editor presented his or her own books, and there was therefore a premium on being a “good presenter.” Bob Gottlieb’s presentations had been justly famous—he was capable of making even the dreariest and least promising of first novels sound like potential best-sellers and Nobel Prize winners. While the sales reps knew better than to believe more than 50 percent of what he said, they admired his performances and were willing to follow his lead. The truth was that they were always more than willing to be seduced. Besides, Bob was right just often enough to have gained some credit in their eyes. He had been right about Catch-22, he had been right about Charles Portis’s True Grit, right about Robert Crichton’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria, right about Chaim Potok, Jessica Mitford, and James Leo Herlihy, so they could forgive the number of times he had been wrong. Track record counted with the reps, and they had an infallible nose for bullshit.
I had inherited Bob’s mantle as the star performer at sales conference. I had learned from him to rise to my feet to present a book that was particularly important, to speak extemporaneously (very important, since most editors spoke from notes and droned on interminably, boring the sales reps to death with details they didn’t need to know or the plots of novels), to convey as much enthusiasm and sincerity as possible, even at the risk of being thought corny, and to elicit the maximum audience participation. That is not to say that the reps actually believed me any more than they had Bob—the only person they truly believed was Dick, because he told them the hard, basic facts of life, such as that anybody who failed to get so many copies of this or that book into their accounts would be fired, or that their bonus depended on getting out twice as many copies of a book as they thought possible.
For my part, I sympathized with them and liked them. I had been out “on the road” briefly myself, as a very junior editor, when I was taken from store to store and jobber to jobber throughout Georgia by J. Felton Covington, Jr., one of our most senior sales reps, a Southern gentleman of the old school, whose laid-back manner, slow drawl, and deep courtesy were so appreciated by booksellers of his region that he was able to place some of Bob Gottlieb’s most difficult first novels in stores that normally only carried Bibles. Cov’s patience, his ability to sit for hours swapping stories with some small-town bookseller in order to get him or her to take half a dozen more copies of some book that Dick wanted pushed, or, not infrequently, some book that Cov himself fervently believed in, for like most sales reps, Cov was a big reader—there was not much else to do in the evenings, when you were on the road—his genuine interest in the lives of his customers, right down to the names and health of their dogs and cats, his inexhaustible good humor and bottomless stomach for coffee—no matter how many cups he had been offered and drunk during the course of a day, he always accepted another at the next or the last bookstore as if he hadn’t had a cup since breakfast—all this was the part of the book business that editors and the people at the top tended to overlook, or simply accept as normal.
Dick knew better. He drove the reps mercilessly, but he understood how important their job was, and on the whole was more at ease with them than with the editors, most of whom expected all their books to be taken at face value. Most editors lacked the reps’ fine, bracing cynicism and their hearty masculine hedonism. In those days, reps tended to be men’s men who ate well, drank a lot (after hours), played poker, enjoyed a game of golf, and were happy enough to relax by the pool at break times, trading publishing gossip and watching the girls go by.
All the same, being a sales rep was just about the toughest job in book publishing—the hours were punishing, the demands imposed on them were often unreasonable, and they were routinely bullied, prodded, and threatened at the end of every sales meeting, after days of having had to sit for hours on end in stuffy conference rooms, glassy-eyed with boredom, feigning interest as best they could. It was little wonder that they cut loose after dinner in the hospitality suite. The truth was that the reps truly loved books—cynical they might be, but in the end the people who really believed in the list in any publishing house were the reps themselves, not the editors. There wasn’t one of them who couldn’t have made more money selling almost anything else, but season after season they went out with their sample cases full of galley proofs and catalogs, convinced that this was the best list ever and determined to convince the even more skeptical booksellers and book buyers of the same.
• • •
IN ANY event, the reps had to be convinced that Shardik was going to work. At Dick’s suggestion, I sent each of them a bound galley with a personal letter, asking them to read the book before the sales conference and giving them my considered opinion that what we had here was a work of genius and a huge best-seller.
The presentation itself was considered by Dick to be so crucial that he sent me to bed early the night before, shooing me out of the hospitality suite by 10 P.M. “Tomorrow is the big one,” he said, like a football coach. “Don’t blow it! Take my advice—get some sleep. Tomorrow morning I want to see you knock their socks off!”
Somewhat resentful at being sent to bed early like a child (just as things in the hospitality suite were getting interesting—somebody had pushed the poker players into the bedroom and set up a tape player in the living room for dancing), I brooded on what I would tell the troops. There was no question about it, this would have to be the presentation of a lifetime.
The agenda had been arranged so that there were lesser books before my big moment, which was to come just before the coffee break, so the reps would leave the room on a high—this was the kind of thing that Dick was a past master at orchestrating, down to the smallest details. I rose to my feet, the jacket of Shardik flashed on the screen, complete with the twenty-four-karat-gold bear mask, and I launched into my spiel. I talked to them about Watership Down, reminded them of its huge success, tried to convey the richness and subtlety of the plot, acted out key scenes, key characters, and rose to a crescendo of optimism and enthusiasm. I was moved myself, and I could see that I had my audience in the palm of my hand, that they would go straight from here to put out the biggest number of advance orders that S&S had ever had for a work of fiction. For once, I could see, there was no doubt in their faces. They were with me 100 percent.
Shortly before the morning session, I had been
in the men’s room and overheard one of the reps saying to another that Hugh Collins, our Chicago rep, had read Shardik and loved it. Collins was perhaps the most prickly and curmudgeonly of the older reps, a hard-drinking Irishman with a hair-trigger temper who was not afraid of arguing even with Snyder. Collins was a difficult man to impress, so the fact that he was a fan of the book would mean a lot to the rest of the reps. As I reached the end of my presentation, I saw Collins in the first row, among all the heavy hitters of the S&S sales force, and caught his eye. He looked cheerful enough, so I took the plunge. Sweating, exhausted by the sheer force of my own enthusiasm, basking in the admiration of everybody on the dais, I finally finished my presentation, and in the complete silence that followed—the phrase “you could have heard a pin drop” came to mind—I pointed at Collins and said, “But you don’t have to believe me. I know somebody else here who has read the book, and he’ll tell you what he thinks.” I paused for effect. “Hugh,” I said, “you’ve read Shardik. What did you think of the book?”
There was another long pause, during which just the slightest trace of doubt crossed my mind, now that it was too late. Everybody was looking at Collins, and I could see on his face a curious mixture of expressions. Enthusiasm was not among them, I thought. Finally he spoke. Somebody had passed him a microphone, so his voice boomed out, filling the room. He waved one hand from side to side. “Comme ci, comme ça,” he said, with the look of a man who has just bitten into a lemon.
Another Life Page 51
