Another Life (46 page)

That Castaneda was a real person and not, as some suspected, a literary invention was apparent the next morning, when I called the university and was connected directly to his office. The voice that greeted me was rich, modulated, and had a slight Hispanic accent. I expressed my enthusiasm for his book and my desire to meet him. He chuckled. “I would be happy to,” he said, “but first you ought to talk to my agent. You see, I am a
pushover
, but
he
is really fierce and mean, so I have to be careful not to anger him.” I asked who his agent was. To my surprise, it was Ned Brown, whom I knew. Brown was a diminutive man with a choleric red complexion and a white mustache who had modeled himself somewhat on Irving Lazar. No spring chicken himself, Brown had been an agent for decades and was one of the few in Los Angeles who handled book writers, as opposed to screenwriters. He was Jackie Collins’s agent at the time, and the fact that Castaneda had somehow found his way to Ned Brown seemed an indication that he was not as unworldly as his book made him out to be.

I contacted Brown immediately, who told me that his desk was piled sky-high with offers, but if I wanted to meet with his author, it was OK with him. He had already talked to Castaneda (who was either quick on the phone or possessed Don Juan’s telepathic powers), and I was to wait in the parking lot of my hotel at eight tonight. How would I recognize Castaneda? I asked. Brown gave a mirthless laugh. “Don’t worry,” he said. “He’ll recognize
you
.”

At the appointed time, I stood in the parking lot, scanning the people in arriving cars for anyone possibly resembling Castaneda. Most of
the cars were limos, disgorging plump, middle-aged men escorting young starlets—hardly Castaneda’s style, I guessed. A neat Volvo pulled up in front of me, and the driver waved me in. He was a robust, broad-chested, muscular man, with a swarthy complexion, dark eyes, black, curly hair cut short, and a grin as merry as Friar Tuck’s, displaying perfect teeth. I got in, and we shook hands. He had a firm handshake. The hands, I noticed, were broad, strong, with blunt fingers, although the clothes proclaimed him to be an academic: a light brown tweed jacket, a neat shirt and tie, tan trousers, well-polished loafers. I asked him how he had recognized me. He laughed. “I’m a sorcerer,” he said mischievously. “How could I miss you?” He turned down Sunset Boulevard. “Of course, it didn’t hurt that Ned described you to me.”

I had seldom, if ever, liked anybody so much so quickly—a feeling that remains undiminished after more than twenty-five years. It wasn’t so much what Castaneda had to say as his presence—a kind of charm that was partly subtle intelligence, partly a real affection for people, and partly a kind of innocence, not of the naive kind but of the kind one likes to suppose saints, holy men, prophets, and gurus have. Castaneda’s spirit was definitely Rabelaisian and ribald, and he had a wicked sense of humor, but nevertheless he gave off in some way the authentic, potent whiff of otherworldly power, to such a degree that I have never doubted for a moment the truth of his stories about Don Juan or of the miracles he says he witnessed and, later, participated in.

Something of this was borne out by his choice of a restaurant, a small, elegant steak house off Santa Monica. I had vaguely supposed that he might be a vegetarian, but he ordered rack of lamb and, when it arrived, ate it with gusto. There was, in fact, nothing at all of the vegan, sandal-wearing, ascetic, California crank about him. That his mind was on this world as opposed to the next was evident from the glint in his eyes whenever an attractive woman entered the room. Celibacy, it was clear, was not part of his belief system, nor was he opposed to drink, for he ordered wine with a discriminating judgment and drank it with obvious pleasure. Smoking, however, was against his principles, for reasons of health and wind—the sorcerous path, he made it clear, called for
physical
strength. It was not just the mind that had to be trained but the body.

Carlos, as I was already calling him, was not only a good talker in a town where good talkers are a dime a dozen, but, far rarer, a good listener. He transformed listening into a physical act, his dark eyes fixed on me, his mobile, expressive face showing, like a good actor’s, a combination
of attention, sympathy, and warm amusement. Chunky and solid as he was—he was no beauty—Castaneda had an actor’s physical grace and an exact sense of timing, together with the ability to convey, by small subtle gestures and changes of expression, a whole range of emotion. I wondered if he had ever actually
been
an actor, but he laughed and denied it. Since, however, everything he said about his early years was open to dispute and he often contradicted himself, I was not convinced. But then, the truth is that all successful shamans and holy men are performers, and none more so than Don Juan, who combined the gifts of a stage magician with a great actor’s gift for the dramatic moment. Perhaps Castaneda had acted on stage at school, in Brazil, or Argentina, or wherever it was that he had grown up (a matter that was never altogether clear), but his natural gift for acting would have made him a successful student at the Actors Studio. Nevertheless, I believed every word of his book then and still do. Behind the sly tricks—the Garbo-like seclusion, the deliberate obfuscation of his biography, his delight in leaving false clues to confuse journalists—Carlos Castaneda was the real thing. More real, in fact, then even his most devoted readers supposed him to be, for he had a kind of earthy, peasant common sense that is sometimes missing from the bumbling and innocent academic whom he describes in his books and at whose embarrassing antics he often laughed.

He ate with a certain delicacy—there were many signs that Castaneda had been brought up with a considerable degree of gentility—but great determination. What did I think of the book, he asked, between mouthfuls. I was bowled over by it, I said. At one level I thought it could be read as a straightforward adventure story, in the doughty Lawrence of Arabia tradition—city boy goes to the desert and learns how to survive there; at another, it was an anthropological classic, like Colin M. Turnbull’s
The Forest People
. Turnbull, who was to become one of the few orthodox anthropologists who was an enthusiastic supporter of Castaneda’s work, portrayed himself similarly as a fool among the Pygmies of the Iruti. Some readers were certain to see Castaneda’s book as a how- to manual for hallucinogenic drugs, which at the time more or less guaranteed the book considerable success, but oddly enough I saw it as containing many of the elements of Machiavelli’s
The Prince
, without, of course, the political context. What Don Juan was proposing, it seemed to me, constituted a way of looking at the world
objectively, of breaking life down into acts—big and small, important or unimportant—each one of which had to be performed as well as one possibly could. Carlos nodded, beaming.
“Impeccably!”
he said. “Everything you do has to be impeccable.” (It was one of his favorite words, as I was to discover.) His expression was wry and self-mocking. “It isn’t easy,” he said. “Half-assed doesn’t count.” He paused. “There is an impeccable way of doing everything,” he said. He popped a piece of lamb into his mouth, with evident satisfaction, chewing powerfully. “Even eating lamb.”

So it’s a code of conduct? I asked. Carlos nodded thoughtfully. It could be. Yes, perhaps. You had to submit to discipline—that was what the kids who came to his lectures didn’t get, of course. “They thought the book was about freedom, about doing whatever the hell you wanted, about smoking
pot
!” He laughed. But this was a mistake, he went on. Drugs were an initiation, a way of going deeper, no fun at all. Above all, they were part of a way of looking at the world and a way of ordering one’s life. A code of conduct, yes, that was very good. He finished his lamb, and we ordered coffee. He drank his sweet and black—caffeine did not seem to cause him problems. He slept, he said, like a baby. Don Juan was firm on such matters. There was a time for sleeping, and you slept. There was a time for waking up, and you woke up. No complaints, no whining, no saying “I can’t sleep” or “I’m so tired, I don’t want to get up.” Don Juan, he said confidentially, was a hard taskmaster. Much worse than the nuns in school.

How had he come to pick Ned Brown as his agent? I asked. “Don Juan found him for me,” he said, laughing hard. “He told me to pick the meanest little man I could find, and I did.” He paid the bill, and we stepped outside into the warm night. I told him I would walk back to the hotel, and he nodded approvingly. Carlos believed in walking. The body had to be healthy or what use was the mind? Besides, Don Juan always walked, straight across the desert, moving so fast that it was hard to keep up with him, never getting lost. Carlos breathed deeply. “He told me you would come too,” he said, shaking my hand. “ ‘Somebody will come along who’s interested in power,’ he told me. You’ll see.”

“
Am
I interested in power?” I asked.

He gave me a crushing hug; then, as he tipped the parking attendant and stepped into his car, he smiled at me and said, “Do bears shit in the woods?” and was gone.

•  •  •

T
HE NEXT
morning, I called Dick and told him I wanted to buy the rights from University of California Press for the doctoral thesis of a UCLA professor of anthropology. Dick grumbled a bit, but that was merely his way. By now, we had learned to trust each other’s instincts. He always backed my hunches, even when he thought I was crazy, and never, ever second-guessed me. “Anybody in this business who is right more than fifty percent of the time is a genius” was one of his favorite sayings. The truth was that for a man who boasted about being “a numbers guy,” Dick was in fact just the opposite. When it came to buying books, he had no patience with numbers, which he knew better than anyone could be skewed to prove anything. If you prepared a careful financial analysis for him on a book you wanted to buy, he was likely to glance at it, crumple it up, toss it in his wastepaper basket, lean back in his swivel chair, and say, “Now tell me why you want to buy the fucking thing.” Dick enjoyed a daring gamble and had no respect for people who weren’t willing to take a plunge on instinct. “Go with your gut,” he liked to say, and, unlike most people, he believed it. If I wanted to buy some professor’s doctoral thesis, it was OK with him.

I told him why, as quickly as I could. I could see him in my mind’s eye, feet on his desk, leaning as far back as his chair would tilt, the way he always did when he wanted to think. “Anthropology’s a good category,” he said at last. “And all the kids are into drugs and Indians these days. Is anybody else after it?” I told him that Ned Brown had claimed his desk was piled high with offers, but that even if this was true, I was the only publisher who had actually met Castaneda. “Brown is probably lying,” Dick said, “but you never know. Find out what he wants and give it to him. No point in nickel-and-diming him.” He paused. “Don’t come back without it,” he said gruffly, his usual way of wishing me good luck, and hung up.

I called Ned Brown and after a spirited round of bargaining—Don Juan’s recommendation had been spot on, for Ned was not only mean but tenacious, like one of those small terriers with big jaws that can hang on for dear life—I ended up owning the hardcover rights to Castaneda’s book for about twice what I had wanted to pay. I returned a day or two later to New York to try to convince a skeptical sales force that we should put a major effort behind it.

Fortunately for me, Dick did not believe in democracy. His view was that the sales department existed to sell the books they were given, and he was not interested in opinions from the floor at sales conferences. When, on rare occasions, the sales director or one of the reps offered an opinion about the merits of a book, he was liable to snap, “Are you an editor? No. Just sell the goddamn thing.” In this case, his confidence in my judgment (or, more important, in his judgment of me) was well justified. Our edition of
The Teachings of Don Juan
, despite a certain skepticism at S&S, pole-vaulted onto the best-seller list, and for the next ten years, Castaneda, in book after book, became a staple in our lives, one of the props on which the success of the new, post-Gottlieb S&S rested.

As the years went by, Carlos’s view of sorcery became darker and more complex, particularly after he finished his apprenticeship and became a full-fledged sorcerer himself, but he remained, personally, as cheerful as ever, and we became close friends. He had an uncanny knack for guessing when I was in trouble or needed help, and at such moments called from a telephone booth in Flagstaff or, sometimes, downstairs in the lobby, “Michael! It’s Carlos! Are you feeling
powerful
today?” His voice was enough to cheer me up, even at the worst of times, and did, indeed, have the effect of making me feel more powerful, or in control of events, so I had no doubts about Carlos’s sorcerous abilities. Many years later, when a friend of mine from New Mexico, Rod Barker, insisted on taking a set of galleys of his first book up to Shiprock, at the heart of the Navajo reservation, “The Big Rez,” and having a medicine man cast a spell over them with different colors of pollen, I was not surprised when the book was greeted with good reviews. Carlos had taught me, if nothing else, the importance of getting on the good side of the spirit world.

I
N THE
material world—what with Jacqueline Susann, Ronnie Delderfield, and Carlos Castaneda—we had made enough of a recovery for Shimkin, however ungenerous and suspicious his nature, to reward Dick by giving him, at last, firm and complete authority over S&S. He swiftly set about reconstructing it in his own image. Schwed found himself shorn of authority, Dick’s office was enlarged and glamorized, and the long hunt for the right combination of tough, vigorous, ambitious, well-connected editors, which was to consume the next
twenty-five years of Dick’s publishing career and give S&S a reputation as a kind of roller-coaster ride for senior editors, began. Dick wanted an all-star team, and he was willing to pay for it—in salary, perks, inflated titles, and liberal expense accounts—but not everybody understood that he expected them not only to produce but to stand up to him. Person after person came to S&S, introduced as “a miracle worker,” only to fail Dick’s intimidating psychological obstacle course. Most of them left looking back on S&S as the worst experience of their professional career. Some were so shaken by the experience that they left publishing altogether. At other houses, editors were treated with respect. At S&S they were flung into the trenches from the first day, expected not only to acquire books at a tremendous rate but to hold their own vigorously against Dick’s criticism and his demand of perfectionism.