Another Life (10 page)

I had seen him jogging breathlessly down the corridor, a nervous, worried figure, bent over crablike, his mouth open in an
O
as he gulped for air like a fish, wearing a blue suit with sleeves far too long for his arms and round glasses with lenses as thick as the bottoms of Coke bottles, a bulging briefcase under each arm, while scribbled notes fluttered from his pockets like autumn leaves and his secretary ran stooped behind him, picking them up. Yet other times, he radiated the kind of worldly self-confidence that tends to settle upon the owners of publishing houses when they have all the money they will ever need and the right to publish anything they want to, however dismal or self-indulgent.

When he was seated in his office, he constantly pecked away with a pen held in his right hand, a palsied, nervous tic that drove everyone else mad and left the arms of his chair and his sofa and the surface of his desk pitted as if a destructive child had been let loose with an ice pick. Though normally he spoke with a certain old-fashioned and formal courtesy, when he wanted something in a hurry, he pushed the buzzer on his desk rapidly, over and over again, like a man sending Morse code, until one of his long-suffering minions appeared, eyes agog like the victim of some kind of Pavlovian experiment. As soon as he or she had left to perform whatever task Schuster had in mind, Schuster would start buzzing again for something else. One of his assistants, it was rumored, had thrown himself out of a window, twenty-eight floors down to Fifth Avenue, driven mad by the constant buzzing from the “inner sanctum” (as Schuster called his office), as well as by Schuster’s passion for filing everything under a maddening variety of headings, most of them in coded initials known only to him.

Everybody at S&S soon learned to decipher the easier of these, invariably written in a firm hand with a thick black Chinagraph wax crayon marker and signed “M.L.S.”: “PAAIMA” meant “Please Answer As In My Absence,” “DTN,” “Do The Necessary,” “UYOJ,” “Use Your Own Judgment,” “RARB,” “Read and Report Back,” but these were merely the tip of the iceberg. Schuster rose early every morning and breakfasted alone at the Oak Room of the Plaza, and during these hours he devoted himself to clipping articles from the morning papers with a pair of folding scissors. These clippings usually represented ideas for books, which he would send to one or more of the
editors, with cryptic instructions scrawled at the top of the clipping. They were also filed, under some arcane system, by any number of headings and cross-references, so that if you ignored one of them, it came back again and again, the thick black exclamation marks proliferating until you did something about it. I remember one of them, a frontpage photograph from the
Daily News
showing a mother held back by two policemen, screaming, her hands covering her eyes, as her children burned to death in some tenement fire. Schuster had written boldly at the top: FILE UNDER GRIEF.

“FILE UNDER GRIEF” became a phrase that described anything Max Schuster involved himself in. Schuster was an indefatigable
nudge
and
kibitzer
, sending endless memos about meaningless details, with cc’s or bcc’s to everyone at S&S, all of which had to be answered before they started coming back again and again like the tide, defaced with cryptograms of ever-increasing urgency.

It would be easy to dismiss Max Schuster as a comic figure—or at any rate, a case from the files of Dr. Sacher-Masoch—but he was at the same time exceedingly shrewd, as in the famous quote from Archilochus: “The fox knows many things—the hedgehog knows one big one.” Like the hedgehog, whom Schuster seemed to resemble in weak-eyed, hunchbacked timidity, he knew, if nothing else, how to curl up in a ball and survive. Odd he might look, with his curious round
yeshiva bokher
spectacles, his guileless expression and goggling eyes, his lips pursed like those of a goldfish blowing bubbles in an aquarium, but he was no fool. Not only had he survived the efforts of Dick Simon, Marshall Field III, and Leon Shimkin to oust him, in the end he outlived both Simon and Field.

On the whole, Schuster preferred to see the younger editors as little as possible. He avoided anything that might lead to argument or disagreement and painstakingly timed his arrival and departure from the office to give him the maximum possibility of not seeing anyone in the elevator or the halls. You could tell whenever he was about to arrive or depart by the presence of his staff in the halls, making sure that the coast was clear. He tried very hard
never
to see Bob Gottlieb, which suited Bob just fine. Most people at S&S tried to keep out of Schuster’s sight, not because they necessarily feared or disliked him, but because he seemed irrelevant.

•  •  •

I
WAS
drawn into Schuster’s orbit because of my background in history and my English upbringing. Henry had made my services available to Max without telling me; no doubt he thought it might do him some good with Schuster, and it could certainly do my career at S&S no harm. The opportunity arose from the fact that Justin D. Kaplan, who had worked closely with Schuster for many years on some of Schuster’s more difficult books, was planning to leave. The reasons for Kaplan’s departure were many. On one level, there was a certain rivalry between Bob Gottlieb and Kaplan, and it was apparent enough that Bob was going to be a force at S&S for the foreseeable future. Their dislike for each other was mild but visceral, a blend of envy and the slight contempt of a well-dressed, urbane Harvard man for a scruffy bohemian nonconformist with a dislike for stuffy academics—oil and water, in brief.

On another level, Kaplan—who was married to Anne Bernays, and thus son-in-law to the fabulously wealthy public-relations genius Edward Bernays, himself the son-in-law of Freud—was tired of being a junior editor, apparently doomed forever to worrying about Will Durant, Nikos Kazantzakis, Bernard Berenson, Bertrand Russell, and the rest of Schuster’s worthies. Kaplan was anxious to carve out a bit of fame for himself as a writer (which he shortly did, with a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Mark Twain).

Schuster was a snob of a gentle, old-fashioned kind. He liked the people who worked closely with him to be “connected” to somebody—Kaplan had been Eddie Bernays’s son-in-law; I was Sir Alexander Korda’s nephew. He also, not unnaturally, liked people who were interested in the kind of books that he liked: history, philosophy, new editions of the classics. Whenever Max Schuster was interviewed, he said that his favorite way of spending an evening was to sit at home reading Spinoza, though since he also said that the only form of exercise he took was to go to the office every day and exercise his options, it was hard to know whether he was serious. I had not read history at Magdalen, but I had attended lectures by Alan Bullock, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and A. J. P. Taylor and was a protégé of Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, official biographer of King George VI, and had mentioned this in my job application. Schuster had apparently read it closely, even if nobody else had bothered, and what he saw there he had liked.

Kaplan’s impending departure eventually moved me toward the enviable position of being more or less independent of any real authority.
I worked for Henry, to be sure, but since I was also going to be working for Max, I could pretty much set my own priorities. A man with two bosses effectively has none. In addition, I was to take over Kaplan’s role as “secretary of the editorial board.” The editorial board of S&S met on Thursday mornings in Max’s office and at that time consisted of Max, Henry, and Peter Schwed. On very rare occasions, one of the other editors might be called in to describe a book he or she wanted to buy, but Schuster’s shyness and his determination to have eye contact with as few people as possible meant that most editorial business was based on written reports and memos. It was a source of some bitterness in the company that the editors, however successful they might be, were excluded from the weekly meeting, but Schuster clung to the tradition stubbornly.

It was my job to attend the meeting and take the minutes, but there was no vow of silence involved. Schuster, I at once discovered, was as likely to ask me for my opinion as anyone else’s. Since the minutes of these meetings were central to his claim that he was truly running the business, the person who took the notes and drafted the minutes played an important role, from his point of view (though not from anybody else’s).

M
Y FIRST
serious meeting with Max (he put us almost immediately on a first-name basis) had been interesting but unsettling. Henry and I sat facing his desk, as his right hand tapped out a speedy rhythm with the business end of a ballpoint pen. On close inspection, Max’s toilette left something to be desired: There were bristly patches on his neck and cheeks that he had missed while shaving, small tufts of Kleenex clung to a couple of places where he had cut himself with his razor, he had neglected to put stays in the collar of his shirt, and several of his buttons were unbuttoned. He looked ever so slightly unkempt, despite the expensive, tailored, three-piece blue suit and the Sulka shirt and tie. One of his eyes strayed toward the side—he was a bit walleyed, as if searching, like a flounder, for danger on the periphery of his sight. His whole demeanor, for a man sitting in his own office in a company he half-owned, was remarkably nervous and edgy. In fact, I toyed with the notion that it was I who was making him nervous, but that didn’t seem to be the case. His desk was littered—quite literally—with clippings,
memos, notes, three-by-five index cards in various colors, bulging files full of Thermofaxes (those pale pink, curly, shiny precursors to xerography) and smudged carbon copies, all of them marked with his energetic, restless pencil.

On the walls hung a number of framed photographs, obviously designed to impress: Max and Ray at I Tatti with Bernard Berenson; Max and Ray in Jerusalem with David Ben-Gurion; Max and Ray with Bertrand Russell at Plas Penrhyn, his Welsh castle; Max and Ray with Sir Max Beerbohm at Rapallo; Max and Ray with Nikos Kazantzakis somewhere in the Mediterranean. In all these photographs Ray Schuster—a firm-jawed, compact, stylish, and good-looking woman of a certain age—stood close by the famous personality, sometimes even touching, smiling directly into the camera, while Max stood shiftily to one side, as if he suspected that his presence was an intrusion. In most of them the famous personality looked old and bewildered, as if uncertain about why he was being photographed with this energetic American woman. Beerbohm looked positively senile.

Max’s handshake was trembly and damp and offered rather unwillingly, not, I felt sure, from any aversion to me but rather from a desperate need to keep a desk width between himself and any stranger. As I let go of his hand, he sighed with relief and collapsed back into his chair. The leather on the right arm of the chair had been holed so that the stuffing was emerging in unsightly gray clumps.

“Welcome to the inner sanctum,” Max said. He had a resonant voice, spoiled by a tendency to stutter and by long pauses while he gathered his strength for the next consonant. “Have you read Will Durant’s
The Story of Civilization?
” he asked, pointing to his bookshelves, where the first six volumes of Durant’s life’s work stood together. They were massive, each one of them a veritable
Missouri
-class battleship of a book, formidably bulky and armed with every possible footnote, index, and bibliography.

I indicated that I had not yet had the pleasure.

“No matter,” Max said breezily. “It’s never too late to start, is it, Henry?”

Henry nodded glumly.

“Will has just sent in the latest volume,” Max went on, his face aglow with enthusiasm. “Wonderful stuff! I sat up all night reading the manuscript. It’s called
The Age of Reason Begins
. A work of monumental importance. I cabled Will this morning telling him how proud I was
to be his publisher.” He shuffled through the papers on his desk, sending pieces of paper flying in all directions, looking for a copy of the telegram, but failed to find it. “I only wish I had the leisure to go through the manuscript in detail, but of course I don’t.” Max waved his hands at his desk and the piles of clippings that were waiting to be filed. He sighed. “History is an adventure,” Max said. “A
voyage
. Will Durant sails the seas of history and time like a Columbus, discovering new continents of knowledge.”

At first I thought that Max must surely be making fun of me, but since Henry wasn’t laughing—if anything, he looked gloomier than ever—I assumed that Max often spoke like this, and I was right. He could spout advertising copy like Moby-Dick surfacing for air, some of it not half bad. In his time, Max had written—or dictated—any number of groundbreaking advertisements for books. He was at his best with the breathless style of mail-order book advertising, which S&S had practically invented, and had a gut instinct for great headlines such as
YOUNG FOREVER!
for a book about vitamins or
FAT NO MORE!
for a diet book. An ad for an anthology of the wisdom of the ages began, “Last night I walked hand-in-hand with Jesus by the Sea of Galilee.” His prose was unmistakable and over the years became the S&S house style, a heady, oracular mash of superlatives, puns, and one-liners that most people at S&S could write by the yard but that only Max actually
spoke
.

“Will needs to have his hand held by someone,” Max said. “Someone who cares about history.” I nodded earnestly, to show my love of history, but Max was off on a riff of his own and didn’t notice. “Ariel—Mrs. Durant—is still after me to get him the Nobel Prize,” Max said plaintively. “It’s not as if I haven’t
tried
, but of course she just doesn’t understand how difficult that kind of thing …” He paused and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Ariel is very much part of the picture.… Did you know that Will was trained as a priest, and when Ariel made up her mind to marry him she was so young that she actually went to the marriage bureau on her roller skates? He renamed her ‘Ariel,’ and she called him ‘Puck.’ ” Max paused for breath again, eyes goggling. “Of course, all that was a long time ago. She’s no longer young. But they remain a very devoted couple, wouldn’t you say, Henry?”