Another Life (26 page)

I have no idea what Shimkin made of these reports or if he even
read them, but they were, of course, just the kind of thing that Max loved. He annotated them in thick blue Chinagraph writing, adding his own comments, demanding further reports and readings, and circulating them throughout the company, often to people who had little or no idea what they were about.

It was as a result of this that I was drawn more directly into Schwed’s orbit. He needed somebody to help him with the editing of his list, now that it was growing in size. I was not at all sure that I wanted to move from reporting directly to Henry to reporting to Peter, who would doubtless make more use of my time, but my doubts were as nothing compared to his about me.

If I wanted to work for him, he told me, I would get far more to do. He was happy to leave much of the editing to me, except with those authors whom he couldn’t delegate, such as P. G. Wodehouse. He would square things with Henry, and of course I would continue to work with Max and to do whatever I was doing with Bob. The only thing that gave him pause, he said, looking at me intently, was whether I was altogether trustworthy.

It had not occurred to me that my trustworthiness was an issue. I had been conspicuously loyal to Henry, which was more than anyone else in the company could say, and so far as Max was concerned, I had been not only loyal but discreet. Others might make fun of Max, but I did not.

Perhaps because of his background at Provident Loan, Schwed was one of the few executives at S&S who favored the banker style in office furnishings. He sat behind an enormous varnished-wood desk with a dark brown leather top, tooled in gold, on top of which was a fake colonial brass lamp of the kind favored by bank vice presidents in those days, and a whole array of matching leather desk furnishings—blotter, in tray, out tray, calendar, as well as a pen set on an alabaster base—so that one felt about to be turned down for a mortgage. To one side of him was an impressive array of pipes, which he smoked nonstop. From time to time he knocked the ashes out of his pipe and fieldstripped it before lighting it again.

In what way, I asked, did he find my loyalty questionable?

Schwed rammed a pipe cleaner down the bore of his pipe and drew out a thick wad of brown goo. I had to understand something, he muttered, examining the results of his probe, unlike a lot of guys around
here, he was a straight shooter. He was the kind of guy who always called the shots as he saw them.

I nodded vaguely. Sports metaphors have never meant much to me, and I have always had a tendency to distrust those who use them, a prejudice that was by no means limited to Americans. Englishmen who refer to any kind of difficulty as “a sticky wicket” leave me just as cold, if not colder. Besides, I am a born skeptic. The moment someone tells me how honest and straightforward they are, I find myself mistrusting them.

I had a certain reputation, Schwed went on, for being a Machiavellian type, rather than a team player. That wasn’t his way of operating at all. He was open, up-front, honest, outspoken, blunt. Did I think I could live with that? And did I think I could play a straight game with him?

I looked him in the eye as firmly as I could and said yes, upon which we both stood up and shook hands, leaning across the big desk. Schwed’s handshake was of the kind that feels as if you’ve just put your hand in a rock crusher. I continued to smile while he squeezed my hand in his. Once he let it go, I slipped it in my pocket, hoping to regain the use of it soon. Schwed waved his pipe at me from behind a self-created fog bank of tobacco smoke. “Welcome to the team,” he said.

T
HE TEAM
, as it turned out, was strikingly modest—no larger, really, than Henry’s. Whereas Bob did, in fact, have a substantial team (though it would not have occurred to him to apply that word to his loved ones, admirers, and supporters), Peter’s team consisted of himself, his charming and faithful secretary, Nelle Haber, his former secretary, Mildred Marmur, who was now running the S&S rights department and in the process of declaring her independence from Schwed, and now me—and I was not by anyone’s definition a team player, as Schwed had rightly guessed.

As things turned out, no big change actually occurred to me. My salary was not increased significantly, and I stayed in the same small office. But I could not complain that I was being left without work to do, and certainly I was spared that most frustrating of experiences for most neophyte editors: staring at a bare desk, waiting for manuscripts to come in.

CHAPTER 13

B
y the beginning of 1963, I felt—albeit with a certain innate caution—that I was a full-fledged member of the S&S “family.” I had expected that S&S would be a good place to work until I finally discovered what it was that I really wanted to do, but the thought was gradually entering my mind that I might have already found it. To an extraordinary degree, I felt I had, at last, a
stake
in S&S, not in the form of ownership, of course, but in the sense that I had joined it as one might have joined a regiment in the British Army: for life.

I was confident enough to move with Casey into a larger apartment and to accept the news that she was pregnant with a calm I would not have felt a year or two earlier. When I called my father to give him the news, I heard him sigh deeply, followed by a long silence. “My poor Miki,” he said, and that was that. It was not, I realized, that Vincent had anything against bringing another child into the world—within reason he was in favor of that—it was that he did not think that Casey and I were even remotely ready for parenthood.

It goes without saying that he was right.

T
HERE HAD
been rumors of change on the floor below us, where Shimkin and his cronies (no other word will do) ran Pocket Books. New blood was said to have been injected into the company, Young Turks were reported to be making their force felt, particularly in the marketing department. Since our own marketing department was not run on anything like scientific, efficient lines, it was felt, no doubt chiefly by Shimkin, that it would do S&S no harm to receive a little advice and help from downstairs.

Shortly afterward, though I was increasingly preoccupied with Casey’s pregnancy, which was turning out to be a difficult one, I began to hear a name repeated over and over again, with various degrees and types of emotion. I did not pay much attention. Editors, by definition,
are more interested in what is happening in the lives of their authors and agents than in the other departments of a publishing company, which in part explains why they are seldom chosen for higher management positions and so often fail when they are chosen. Editors should be looking
outward
, not inward.

With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that I had paid no attention to the name Dick Snyder, which was usually prefaced by, “You’ll never believe what this guy said!” It was apparent that Richard E. Snyder, whoever he might be, was a man of action, and that anywhere he appeared, things changed quickly, if not always smoothly. It did not diminish the awe that surrounded him that nobody knew what his job actually was or even by what authority he appeared mysteriously from time to time at S&S.

Although invisible to most of us, Snyder was reported to have shaken up the Pocket Books sales department, to have breathed new life into Golden Books’ marketing, to have turned up at meetings of the S&S sales department uninvited. He seemed determined to learn all about the hardcover-book business, and he was, by all accounts, a fast and impatient learner. Those who had met him commented on his high level of energy, his quick intelligence, and his sharp temper. He was not, it seemed, a patient or unassuming fellow, and a few bruised feelings were said to have been experienced among the sales and marketing people. This did not cause much grief in the editorial department, where life went on as usual and where change of any kind was frowned upon. Nobody worried or even gave the matter much thought—other brash young newcomers had come and gone over the years or stayed on to become sedate middle-aged executives who knew the importance of the old adage, “To get ahead you have to get along.”

It was some time before I finally collided with this new phenomenon myself. Schwed had returned recently from one of his London trips, and, as was his habit, he called a large meeting to go over all the books he had mentioned in his many missives to S&S. We assembled in Schwed’s office, each of us carrying a yellow legal pad, as if we were about to be examined—which was literally the case for most of us, as Schwed would not end the meeting until he knew exactly what had happened to every book and outline he had mentioned from London. Under the circumstances, it was no easy task to have to report that a
book had been unreadable or, as was very often the case, simply wouldn’t travel across the Atlantic, usually because the subject was simply too English to survive the journey.
^*

The room was crowded enough so that I did not at first realize that there was a stranger among us, sitting comfortably on the brown leather sofa facing Schwed’s desk. Schwed himself, busy with his lists and his pipe, had perhaps not noticed the newcomer himself. I noted that the young man, who appeared to be about my age and height, was not carrying a yellow legal pad and looked so at ease that one might have thought it was
his
office. He was slender but with a solid build that suggested strength, and the rather protuberant eyes behind his glasses had a boldly purposeful, steely glint to them, as did the firm, dimpled chin. His complexion was on the reddish side, and his brownish hair was cut short. He wore the standard American businessman’s uniform of the time: a gray suit, a white shirt, a neat tie, and shiny shoes with blunt toes and thick soles. There was nothing particularly elegant about his clothes, but they clearly identified him as a businessperson of some kind, not an editor, for even in those days editors were somewhat bohemian in their dress. Even those few who wore suits did so with a certain donnish flair or eccentricity, as if their ideal was to resemble a Harvard professor rather than a successful banker or advertising executive. Schwed, for example, usually wore a sports coat and favored a French beret on rainy days, while Bob wore corduroy trousers and open-necked shirts.

Not having noticed the interloper, Schwed plunged into his list. He began with the books that he had actually bought while he was in England. I sketched on my yellow legal pad. These books were no concern of mine at this point. I would read them later, if I had to draft the flap copy or do any editing to Americanize them or to compensate for the
fact that English editors seldom do any editing at all and in general tend to regard the whole process as one of those odd American obsessions, like putting ice in whiskey or going to the dentist regularly.

Lost in my own thoughts—mostly having to do with prospective fatherhood, about which role I didn’t have as yet a useful clue—I only half heard Schwed enthuse over an English novel about two tramps who tried to rescue small animals, rodents, pets, birds, and so on that had been hit by cars. It occurred to me vaguely that this very slight work of fiction might be difficult to sell to the mass of American fiction readers. Of course, it’s hard to guess what will appeal to more intellectual American readers, who have hailed many a foreign oddity as a masterpiece; still, sentimentality about animals, while a more or less universal emotion in England (Graham Greene once said that while you could probably get away with beating a child in Trafalgar Square at high noon, you would be lynched for hitting an animal), didn’t seem to me likely to win praise from the more serious literary critics here. All the same, I didn’t feel it was my place to argue about something that Schwed was already committed to and about which he waxed fervently, his face shining with enthusiasm. This, he would have us know, was the real thing, the most talked-about novel in London. Every American publisher in London had been after it, and when Simon Michael Bessie heard that Schwed had nabbed the book right from under his nose, he almost cried, right there in the bar at Brown’s Hotel. If he did say so himself, Schwed said, it was a coup, something to be really proud of, and proof that all his wining, dining, and tennis playing in London paid off in the end. Why, the biggest agent in London, Gerald Pollinger, though it wasn’t his book, had called him at the hotel to congratulate him on buying
the
novel of the season. Of course, we were going to have to get behind the book, that went without saying.

At some point during this peroration, Schwed must have noticed the stranger on his sofa, because he stopped and stared at him. The stranger stared right back, one leg crossed confidently over the other, his expression inscrutable but not, one would say, convinced. Schwed cleared his throat noisily, and said, “Ah, excuse me …”

He didn’t challenge the intruder, no doubt because the intruder’s eyes were fixed unwaveringly on his, and nothing on his face showed even the slightest trace of self-doubt.

“Dick Snyder,” the young man said pleasantly. His voice was a
deep, husky, basso profundo growl, by far and away the deepest register I had ever heard in a white man’s voice (as a child, I had once heard Paul Robeson sing “Ol’ Man River” for my father at home).
^*
Snyder’s voice was harsh, rather than melodious, the accent was curious and hard to place—a combination of Brooklyn Jewish and Harvard that hesitated, from syllable to syllable, between the two.

“Did I send you a copy of this memo?” Schwed asked, holding up a thick sheaf of paper.

“No,” Snyder said, pleasantly enough, but with the air of somebody who couldn’t be moved by a bulldozer and wasn’t about to explain his presence to anyone.

Schwed puzzled over this briefly, then decided to get on with his agenda. He continued to sing the praises of the novel he had bought in London, while Snyder doodled, lips slightly pursed as if he were tunelessly whistling. The more he thought of it, Schwed said, warming to his subject, the more sure he was that twenty thousand copies was the right number—maybe more.