Another Life (15 page)

The flow of manuscripts continued, until one day, to my astonishment, I read one that actually excited me. I was so surprised that I had to read it twice. Even on a second reading, the novel still held my attention. What saved it from being an automatic reject was the fact that the author,
Dariel Telfer, was a natural storyteller, with a real subject that she cared (and knew) a lot about: nursing in a big city hospital.

Henry wouldn’t want S&S to buy a book from Chambrun, and it was just the kind of novel he hated: unformed, unpolished, raw, and full of sex scenes. It would have to be rewritten, replotted, and reconstructed to make it work, and that was just the kind of thing Henry didn’t approve of. Not knowing what else to do with it, I gave it to Bob Gottlieb to read.

Bob had a kind of split personality as an editor: He pursued high culture and low culture with equal intensity and seemed to enjoy both. More extraordinary, he was
good
at both. Apart from skill, shrewd judgment, complete confidence in his own taste (and willingness to submerge it in the interests of commerce when necessary), what Bob had above all was
enthusiasm
. When he liked something, he wanted the whole world to like it, which is what publishing is really about.

Like me, Bob was a fast reader, and the next day he appeared in my windowless cubbyhole cradling the manuscript in his arms, dark eyes blazing with excitement, Napoleonic forelock plastered low on his noble brow. “It’s just
great
,” he said. “We have to buy it.”

I noted, with pleasure rather than dismay, the
we
. I had been longing to work with Bob on something, rather than just looking on, my nose pressed against the windowpane. Bob had much the same effect on me as Irving Thalberg had had on F. Scott Fitzgerald when Fitzgerald went to work as a screenwriter in Hollywood: His energy, boldness, attention to detail, chutzpah, and intelligence set him apart from anyone else at S&S.

Where had the book come from? Bob asked. When I told him, his face darkened a bit, and he bit his lip thoughtfully. “Not so good,” he murmured. Then he brightened. I would deal with Chambrun, while Bob would take care of getting the book past Henry and Max.

It needed a lot of work, I suggested. Bob beamed. It needed
everything
, of course, but it had the two things that really made popular fiction sell: energy and sincerity. Dariel Telfer’s prose was often muddled and always verbose, but she cared about the nurses and patients in her book and somehow knew how to make the reader care along with her. “If a novel
doesn’t
have that, you can’t fix it, and if it does, the rest is easy to fix,” he said, with the intensity of a real teacher. “It needs to be shorter, of course. And clearer. And it needs a new beginning, and a new end.… And of course a
title
.”

The title came, almost immediately, from Nina Bourne—
The Caretakers
—but it took a good bit longer for Bob to persuade the editorial board of S&S to let us buy the book. It wasn’t just that Jacques Chambrun was the agent, it was more a question of the book itself. Dariel Telfer was as forthright and frank about sex as Grace Metalious had been in
Peyton Place
, though in a slightly more clinical way, inclining one to believe that she was a nurse herself. Nobody but a nurse, in fact, could have written in such detail about what goes on in a big hospital with such authenticity. Still, nurse or not, her sex scenes, tame as they would soon seem in popular fiction, were a source of much concern and heartburn among our elders. Max was deeply opposed to censorship and a passionate defender of the First Amendment, but when push came to shove, he wanted no part of sexually explicit books himself and retreated into mumbling, trembling paralysis when asked to read one. Like his colleagues, he fell back on Voltaire’s famous aphorism, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” A fine sentiment, but from the mouth of a publisher the equivalent of Pontius Pilate washing his hands. What, after all, is the use of backing the First Amendment, if you haven’t got the guts to
use
it? Bob and I found ourselves asking this more and more often as publishing moved with many misgivings into the era in which books such as
The Story of O, Lolita
, and
Portnoy’s Complaint
were to become big, popular bestsellers.

Frightened as the older generation was by the kind of language that Telfer used in her novel, they were more frightened still of being thought out of touch with the modern world. Enthusiasm—however ill placed—has always been the currency of book publishing, and Bob’s was irresistible. He did not exactly erase the doubts in the minds of those who supposed that he reported to them, but they gave him conditional approval, not quite daring to refuse it. We were to proceed cautiously, he and I, and offer Chambrun a $5,000 advance, on the promise that we would tone down the graphic sex scenes and keep S&S at an arm’s length from her agent. Normally an agent receives all the money that comes in, keeps his 10 percent, and forwards the balance to the client. In this case, given Chambrun’s reputation, we were to insist that S&S would pay the author directly and send Chambrun his commission separately.

I had anticipated difficulties from Chambrun over this, but he didn’t seem at all concerned when I told him, over another luncheon, nor were
his feelings hurt. “
Très bien
,” he said. When could he have the contract and his check? It occurred to me that his sangfroid might come from the simple fact that he had no shame.

Up until then I had mostly edited nonfiction. With nonfiction, there was only so much that you could do. You could rewrite it, cut it, sometimes reshape it, but the book was essentially defined by the subject, which you couldn’t change without destroying the whole thing. With fiction, however, the only limits are set by the editor’s energy and the author’s willingness to live with big changes. Character, motivation, and plot can be changed, subplots and minor characters can be thrown out, whole scenes eliminated or created from scratch. After all, why not? It works in the movie business, where stories go through countless metamorphoses and countless hands before reaching the screen. Apart from his shrewd judgment and his ability to know the difference between salable trash and real quality (something that often gets hopelessly blurred in editors’ minds), Bob’s real talent was that he had no compunction in applying to a novel the methods of the movie business.

Telfer turned out to be a plump, gentle woman from Colorado who had fallen into Chambrun’s hands by accident and was willing enough to let Bob and me tear her manuscript apart and to write endless new scenes to replace the ones we had cut. It is, I discovered, always much easier to do this with first novelists, whose major anxiety is whether or not their book will ever get published at all. Step by step, we reconstructed Telfer’s book into what it ought to have been in the first place: a strong, shocking “commercial” novel with a simple story line and a lot of sex. The key, as I learned from Bob during many evenings in his apartment working on the manuscript, was to keep what was best about the book—its obvious sincerity and the author’s righteous anger about the way the system treated decent nurses and patients—and eliminate what wasn’t needed or didn’t make sense. I had admired from afar the way he had revamped
Catch-22
, but now I was doing it myself, at his side, and could see that what was emerging, draft after draft, was a much stronger book. Since then, I have done this, with others or by myself, a hundred times and always found that nothing in publishing gives me more satisfaction if the book works. Some of these editorial reconstructions led to enormous best-sellers such as Shirley Conran’s
Lace
or Jacqueline Susann’s
The Love Machine
, others—many—were a lot of work for no result, but the fascination has never worn off. It is my substitute for Scrabble or crossword puzzles and perhaps explains why I do neither.

Of course there is nothing new to this. Maxwell Perkins’s total reconstruction of Thomas Wolfe’s sprawling novel
Look Homeward, Angel
is something of a publishing legend, but Perkins was forgiven because he was working on
literature
. What irked our colleagues at S&S was that Telfer wasn’t a “serious” writer in their eyes and that we were therefore helping somebody who didn’t
deserve
to be published in the first place. Henry, particularly, felt strongly that we were somehow prostituting the profession. In fact, by the time we had finally finished rewriting and retyping
The Caretakers
, it had become something of a symbol of the generational clash at S&S and perhaps the most disliked book the house had ever published. Naturally, we saw all this as mere sour grapes, old-fashioned fuddy-duddy thinking by people whose idea of a good read was Will Durant (Max Schuster), Henry Morton Robinson, the author of
The Cardinal
(Henry Simon), or P. G. Wodehouse (Peter Schwed).

The truth is that this kind of intergenerational fight is normal in book publishing, even healthy—indeed, its absence is usually a sure sign that an editorial group is ready to be certified brain-dead. Younger editors always want to publish books that trouble their elders for one reason or another, and this is normal, even desirable, or the book industry would still be chugging along happily publishing nothing more shocking than Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s
The Yearling
or Felix Salten’s
Bambi
. It is equally axiomatic that once the Young Turks have pushed their elders out of their corner offices into pasture and taken power themselves, they are likely to become as cautious and conservative as their predecessors were. At S&S, for example, the very same people who had fought to publish books by Jerry Rubin (who caused a seismic stir in the publishing industry by urging high school students to burn down their schools) or the Venceremos Brigade’s account of their adventures in Castro’s Cuba, or Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s
All the President’s Men
—all books that seemed to wiser, older, more cautious heads dangerous, subversive, or irresponsible—found themselves twenty years later making headlines by turning down Bret Easton Ellis’s novel
American Psycho
.

The Caretakers
was not the kind of book that was likely to have any real effect on the culture or on history—though it
was
the first to portray the lives of nurses, doctors, and patients in a realistic light—but it had a decided effect on S&S. In the hands of Bob Gottlieb and Nina Bourne, the book was talked up outside the house while it was still in
manuscript, a process that I had not yet witnessed at first hand, and that I now realized for the first time was a question of focus. Not a phone call or a letter went out from them that did not mention
The Caretakers
. Extraordinary efforts were made to get the advance bound-galley proofs into sympathetic hands for its first prepublication review in
Publishers Weekly
. Long before the book was out, people in the trade were already talking as if they had read it.

As things turned out, not even all these combined efforts could float
The Caretakers
onto the
New York Times
hardcover best-seller list (the Holy Grail of book publishing), but to everybody’s astonishment the mass-market paperback rights were bought before publication by Victor Weybright of New American Library for $90,000. It would be as if someone were to pay over a million dollars for the paperback rights of a first novel today, perhaps even more. Anybody might have thought that we had somehow upset the balance of nature by selling the book for such a lot of money. It was as if we had opened the gates and let the Vandals into Rome.

It was my first experience with being criticized for having succeeded. Within S&S, the general feeling was that selling a sexy first novel for this kind of money was somewhat disgraceful, even shameful. When Henry heard about it, he shook his head sorrowfully and wondered what the world was coming to. Max seemed too embarrassed to talk about it at all, while Leon Shimkin merely wondered why we hadn’t let Pocket Books have
The Caretakers
if it was so valuable. Inadvertently, we had changed the rules. All of a sudden, first novels seemed potentially valuable, the slush heap a potential gold mine.

More important, perhaps, the sale of
The Caretakers
ushered in the age of the high-stakes paperback auction. Up until then, mass-market paperback sales had represented a nice windfall for the hardcover publisher, but the sales of
The Caretakers
set off a long period in which popular fiction (and even some nonfiction) was sold to paperback publishers for ever larger amounts. We had not only hit the jackpot but raised the stakes for everyone else. Worse still, from the perspective of the old guard, we had drawn the attention of the media and of Wall Street. A business in which an unknown author’s first novel could sell for $90,000 overnight—before it was even available in the stores—sounded to many people more like the movies than their traditional idea of book publishing, and not everybody thanked us for what we’d done.

Dariel Telfer, far off in Pueblo, Colorado, was grateful, of course
(unlike a good many authors, she remained graceful and kind under the pressure of success, although, to our regret, she never managed to write another book like
The Caretakers
, despite many tries), though slightly puzzled by the fuss. For Bob, this was another step on his way to confirming his reputation as a major publishing figure. He had proven he could publish groundbreaking literature successfully with
Catch-22
and “commercial” women’s fiction with
The Best of Everything
; now he had turned an unpublishable first novel into a record-breaking paperback sale. He seemed to the publishing world like a miracle worker, though inside S&S this new triumph merely hardened the rivalry between himself and his elders. For myself, the paperback sale of
The Caretakers
had a whole host of consequences. For the first time, my salary was raised to a point where we could actually
live
on it—up until then, I had been making less money than my wife, who was still working as a secretary. I was moved out of the windowless cubbyhole in which I had been placed as Henry’s editorial assistant and given an office of my own, with a window, though I would continue to work on Henry’s books. Perhaps most important, it moved me firmly over into Bob’s camp and ushered in one of the happiest periods of my career. Bob was not only a natural and gifted mentor, he soon became a close friend with a wonderful capacity for making even the most difficult problem seem like fun and a sense of humor that saw him through even the darkest of publishing crises. If I had felt any secret regrets at not having gone into the movie business, I lost them now in the warmth of being accepted into Bob’s band of friends and admirers. Even without my new office and more money, I would have been happy.