Another Life (45 page)

We had taken S&S from the shame and ignominy of defeat to a dazzling position of success. We were suddenly a hot house, with the number-one best-selling novel and, simultaneously, the number-one best-selling nonfiction book,
The Last Battle
, Cornelius Ryan’s account of the fall of Berlin in 1945. Many of the agents who only a few months previously had been doubtful about sending us manuscripts at all were now on the telephone offering us their major clients.

It was a curious time. In keeping with his familiar techniques of personnel management, Shimkin had not as yet rewarded us in any significant way for bringing S&S back from the brink. Apparently having failed to learn from Bob’s departure, he seemed to feel that the excitement of working long days and nights was all the reward we needed and would serve as an incentive to work harder still. In a sense, of course, he was right. Dick often said (though not to Shimkin) that he would have paid for the privilege of working at S&S in those days, and it was not much of an exaggeration. To be in one’s mid-thirties and suddenly successful is heady stuff—there is probably no other period in life when success means as much or when it is so much fun, before one’s lifestyle makes success mandatory, before one gets old enough to feel the hot breath of younger competitors, before the price of all those long hours and easy temptations has to be paid in failed marriages and broken promises. All that was still ahead, and in the meantime, for one glorious moment, we had grabbed the brass ring. Everything we did seemed to turn to gold, and if we did not have the big salaries or stock options or bonuses that were later to assume such importance (life expands inevitably to absorb income, however high), we were working hard, the office was full of pretty girls (at a time in which it was not yet a provocation to use the phrase), and every moment of the day seemed exciting and full of promise.

With what little could be pried from Shimkin in the form of raises, the Snyders moved to a large apartment on Central Park West, while Casey and I moved to an apartment near Sutton Place. Between the hours and the temptations of the workplace, the Snyders’ marriage was beginning to unravel, and, though it was not immediately as apparent, so was mine. At this long distance it is hard to assign blame—and hardly necessary—but like so many of our contemporaries we were paying for
a whole slew of mistakes: of marrying too young, of giving more thought to work than to marriage, of sowing wild oats once one was married rather than before, of being perhaps the last generation to look at marriage in the old, conventional way. It had not dawned on any of us as yet that this was an arrangement that guaranteed that the woman felt stifled, while the man felt he was being taken advantage of, and that offered the maximum opportunity to both for resentment and infidelity.

I
N THE
meantime, there was no sitting on our laurels, such as they were. The main disadvantage of success is that it has to be repeated. I had the good fortune to have inherited from Bob the English writer R. F. Delderfield, whose enormous multigenerational family sagas, set for the most part in the English countryside, suddenly acquired great popularity in the United States. This started a vogue that lasted for more than a decade for huge novels in the Trollopian mode, usually wearing on their dust jackets wraparound paintings in full color of the English countryside, with a pair of riders cantering along a country lane on the front. God only knows why Bob had not taken Delderfield with him to Knopf—perhaps, for once, he had merely guessed wrong and underrated the potential of this hitherto obscure writer, who seemed able to dash off a thousand-page novel almost overnight and whose productivity was alarming. In addition to other works of his, we published
The Green Gauntlet
with enormous success—a perfect example of being lucky rather than smart, since nobody had predicted that the book would sell—and went on to do
God Is an Englishman
, which established Delderfield as such a major best-selling novelist that it was thought necessary for me to go to England to meet him, lest he decide to follow Bob to Knopf now that he had vaulted onto the best-seller lists. R. F. Delderfield (Ronnie, as he was known to those close to him) lived outside Sidmouth, a small English seaside resort between Torquay and Lyme Regis, and indicated that he would be delighted to see me.

I flew to London, rented a car, drove down to Sidmouth and checked into the Hotel Victoria Regina, a vast red-brown nineteenth-century brick structure that combined the potted-palm grandeur of the late Victorian age—it actually had an all-girl string orchestra playing in the palm court at lunchtime—with the pervasive odor of furniture polish, mildew, and Brussels sprouts peculiar to English provincial hotel
keeping. The empty promenade and the shingled beach on this gray afternoon in late October were windswept and wet with rain, even the seagulls huddled miserably for cover beneath the empty band shell on the pier. Through rain-lashed plate-glass windows I could see the English Channel busily demonstrating why Napoleon and Hitler had hesitated to cross it—slate-gray swells several feet high, crowned with plumes of wind-driven white sea spray, came pounding in one after another to crash on the rocks and shingles of the shoreline. This was familiar country to me. Not far from here was the school to which I was evacuated at the beginning of the war, when it had been assumed that London would be reduced to rubble overnight by the Luftwaffe. As it turned out, my school was one of the first places in England the Germans bombed, and I can still remember the excitement of watching the bombs fall one by one onto the beach, sending up plumes of sand, until the last one blew up the school’s brick gardener’s shed with a satisfying bang. During my national service, I had taken the same road to go back and forth to London on weekends from my training camp at Bodmin, riding the motorcycle my Aunt Alexa had bought me over my father’s strong objections.

Having been invited for tea, I arrived at the Delderfields’ cottage just before four in the afternoon and was greeted by Mrs. Delderfield, who led me into the sitting room, where we sat on either side of the much-needed fire. The cottage was just what I had imagined the home of the author of
The Green Gauntlet
would be like: low, timbered ceilings, mullioned windows, dim, old, chintz-covered, cozy furniture, dogs and cats everywhere, a grandfather clock ticking away, the sound of a kettle boiling in the kitchen. May Delderfield was a bulky woman wearing a purple cardigan that she appeared to have knitted herself, who spoke with a gentle North Country accent, entirely unaffected by her husband’s success. Ronnie, it appeared, was still working in his study but would be out promptly at four. The grandfather clock whirred and groaned, chimed four times, and on the fourth ring Delderfield appeared, rubbing his hands jovially, to greet me. He was a big man, close to six feet tall, and broad with it, with the build and the hands of a manual laborer. He had a bluff, honest countryman’s face, red cheeked and contented, and an engaging shyness, as if he still couldn’t believe his good fortune. Clad in a heavy sweater and corduroys, he sat down in an armchair and lit his pipe, while May bustled after tea. Delderfield apologized for keeping me waiting, but he always worked
until four on the dot, he said. He believed it was important to treat writing like any other job and put in a good day’s work. He was particularly happy to see me here today, he went on, because it was something of a red-letter day. In what way? I asked. Delderfield beamed. At exactly three o’clock this afternoon, he said, he had finished his new novel. I congratulated him as May poured tea and passed around plates of biscuits and cake. I nerved myself to ask, If Delderfield had finished a new novel at three, what had he been doing from three to four? Ah, Delderfield said, just what he always did. As soon as he ripped the last page of the novel out of his typewriter, he put a fresh piece of paper in, typed page one, chapter one, and started a new novel. Time and tide, he said, in his soft countryman’s voice, waited on no man.

Dick, sending me off to England, had given me strict instructions that I was to win Delderfield over, heart and mind. Whatever he wanted, I should do. He was not to even
think
about Bob Gottlieb from now on. After dinner at my hotel, as we sat over our port and cigars, Ronnie, as I now called him, had asked if I would like to join him in the morning. Sure, I said, imagining a brisk walk over the downs, followed by an English country breakfast. But not at all. It turned out that Ronnie began every day with a swim in the sea, winter or summer, rain or shine. It was to that which he attributed his ruddy good health and his ability to write ten thousand words a day. Remembering Dick’s words, I agreed to join him and found myself at dawn clad in borrowed swim trunks, stepping gingerly into the same slate-gray sea that I had seen yesterday from the hotel. Viewed close-up, it was even more uninviting. Ronnie, who had driven down in his new Jaguar, the first fruit of his new success, accompanied by a black Labrador, took off his dressing gown, breathed deeply a few times (“Every deep breath is a penny in the bank of health!”), and strode slowly, majestically, and without hesitation into the water. The Labrador, I noticed, was too smart to follow him.

I knew there was no earthly way I could get into that water slowly—the only way was to plunge in as quickly as possible. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and ran as fast as I could on the slippery shingle—there was a thin coating of ice on the larger stones—then, as I felt the water come up to my knees, I dived headfirst. I thought for a moment that the water was so cold that I had been knocked out—and, indeed, it
was
cold, cold enough for me to remember that pilots who parachuted into the Channel during the Battle of Britain often died of
hypothermia before they were picked up by rescue boats. The reason that I had been knocked out, however, was that the shingle at Sidmouth extends a good way out to sea. I had supposed that the water was getting deeper when I plunged in, but instead I had landed headfirst on the rocks. Fortunately, I was floating, but I was quite unable to move. Not far from me, as my vision came back into focus again, I could see Ronnie sporting about in the freezing water like a whale, his breath forming clouds of vapor. He waved at me cheerfully. “Grand, isn’t it?” he called out. By now my teeth were chattering, my fingernails had turned an ugly purple color, and I could feel a warm trickle running down my forehead that was surely blood. I gave a hoarse bellow, and Ronnie swam over with a stately breaststroke to investigate. “Bloody ’ell!” he said, as he caught a closer look at me, and hauled me ashore. In a moment, he had me wrapped in his dressing gown, and before long I was back at the cottage, drinking tea with rum. Whether it was from the guilt of having nearly killed me or because we became, in fact, really good friends, Ronnie Delderfield remained an S&S author until his death, many years and many thousands of pages later.

When I told Dick the story on my return, he was delighted. For a long time afterward he told it himself, as an example of just how far an editor ought to go to keep an author happy. He always added at the end, “They say Bobby Gottlieb’s a great editor, but let me tell you
this
: he doesn’t have the balls to go swimming in the English Channel at dawn, the way Korda did.”

P
ERHAPS AS
a reward for service above and beyond the call of duty in England, Dick shortly afterward encouraged me to go to Los Angeles, partly to mend fences with Irving Wallace, Harold Robbins, and the Durants, partly in the belief, common to all those who live on the East Coast, that California is full of interesting new writers who don’t have a New York agent. In those days, before the advent of the chain stores, I considered it part of my job to visit local bookstores and schmooze with the owners, a breed only slightly more pessimistic than dirt farmers, who blamed the publishers for most of their misfortunes, despite having the only product that can be returned unsold months, even years, after they have received it and for full credit. Given this, it has always been hard to understand how it is possible to
lose
money selling books,
but most booksellers skated on the thin edge of bankruptcy. The visit of a book publisher always brought out the gloomiest side of them—here, after all, was, in their eyes, the person responsible for all their woes—so I usually approached any bookstore with a sinking heart. I usually asked if anything was selling, in the hope of at least hearing
something
cheerful, and this time, from bookstore to bookstore throughout Beverly Hills and Brentwood, the surprising answer was that something was indeed selling like crazy. Needless to say, it wasn’t an S&S book, nor a book from any of the major East Coast publishers that had brought a ray of sunshine to the lives of the booksellers of Southern California—it was a paperback from the University of California Press, and it was selling so fast that they couldn’t keep it in stock. Intrigued, I tried to buy a copy, but the booksellers were not exaggerating for once: There were none available. In the end, I managed to borrow a well-thumbed copy from one of the clerks at the Pickwick Book Store on Sunset Boulevard and took it back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where I read it in one gulp, with absolute fascination.

The book was
The Teachings of Don Juan
by a UCLA professor of anthropology named Dr. Carlos Castaneda, and it purported to tell of his initiation into a peyote cult by a Yaqui shaman named Don Juan. In the drug-obsessed culture of the late sixties and early seventies, it was hardly surprising that Castaneda’s doctoral thesis should have broken out of the academic world to become a local best-seller, though it was very possibly the first (and last) doctoral thesis in history to do so.

In later years, when Castaneda had become a kind of guru to a whole generation of college kids and his books had sold in the millions of copies, he was to take on a kind of mystic significance—indeed, when
Time
did a cover piece on him (albeit with a smudged and unrecognizable portrait of him, since he refused to be photographed or drawn), they portrayed him, perhaps inadvertently, as a mystery man and tried in vain to pin down his exact identity, as if it mattered. By that time, there were false Castanedas appearing on campuses all over the country, like false czars in Russia, and Castaneda was being sighted in all sorts of improbable places by people who swore that he was tall or blue-eyed or a kind of hippie god, with long hair and fringed clothing. Nobody laughed harder at this deification than Castaneda himself—Carlitos, as he often referred to himself slyly, as if he were the modern equivalent of the sorcerer’s apprentice, which was not, in fact, too far from the truth and which explained a great deal of the literary appeal of
his early books. On one level, at least, they formed a kind of bildungsroman in which Don Juan played the cunning sorcerer-teacher and Carlitos the bumbling, naive, and eternally hopeful apprentice. There was a side to Castaneda’s work that appealed to the same needs in young people as J. R. R. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
and T. H. White’s
The Sword in the Stone
. The elements were all there: adventure, sorcery, the hard path to knowledge on which a young man risks everything to learn wisdom from his teacher. Castaneda was a kind of real-life hobbit, following the path laid down by the mysterious sorcerer Gandalf, or, in another context, the young Arthur seeking the wisdom of Merlin. Perhaps without knowing what he was doing, Castaneda had touched upon a surefire theme for a best-seller, even without the peyote lore, which was to give his work an extra allure of the forbidden and dangerous.