Another Life (51 page)

In this particular genre, most editors, then as now, don’t really
like
this kind of fiction nearly as much as the public does—they looked down on it, in fact, and on those who read it. Most of the real enthusiasts for this kind of fiction were at the book clubs and the paperback houses or were buyers for the major bookstores rather than editors. The leading expert on the genre at the time was Barbara Bannon, the fiction reviewer for
Publishers Weekly
.

Barbara Bannon
loved
big romantic sagas and, perhaps more important, could tell the difference between the ones that were deliberately
and cynically contrived to meet the demands of the market and the ones that were written from the heart. She was small, plump, emotionally needy, slightly disheveled, apt to drink too much at lunch, and resentful of the fact that she was unappreciated by her male superiors at
PW
, but she was fanatically loyal to her friends and to those authors who delivered the goods, always willing to go out on a limb for new talent, and, unlike a good many reviewers at more august publications, she genuinely loved reading fiction. Her excitement when she found a novel she liked was undisguised and unaffected, completely genuine, and totally unstoppable. She would not rest until she had gotten the word out to the right buyers (such as Faith Brunson at Rich’s in Atlanta, or her equivalents at Higbee’s in Cleveland or Kauffman’s in Pittsburgh), the major paperback editors (such as Fawcett’s Leona Nevler), and of course the ladies at the Literary Guild and
Reader’s Digest
. Together, these women constituted a powerful support group for a certain kind of fiction and could turn the right kind of novel into a major best-seller.

The agent who more or less specialized in such books was Claire Smith, of the old and very respected Harold Ober Agency. One of the first things an editor ought to learn is that there are certain agents whose enthusiasm can absolutely be counted upon. One might not always
agree
with them, it goes without saying, but their enthusiasm is always genuine and sincere. Claire’s enthusiasms—like Dorothea Oppenheimer’s for Larry McMurtry—were transparent, passionate, and fierce. The very reverse of a high-powered or high-pitched agent, Claire was quiet, witty, clever, good company, and often startlingly frank and outspoken about her clients, toward whom she was, however, entirely loyal. She had been one of Bob Gottlieb’s admirers, and it was therefore a surprise important enough to communicate to Snyder when she called out of the blue one day to announce that she had discovered a wonderful book. Was I, she inquired, afraid of long novels? I said I wasn’t (which was true) and mentioned my qualifications as Delderfield’s editor. This one, Claire said, was even longer than Delderfield’s novels. Except for
War and Peace
, no such book came to mind. I would have to read the manuscript overnight, she warned me—other people were interested, and she might receive a blind offer at any moment. Undaunted, I asked her to send it over.

It proved to be very long indeed—three huge boxes full of typescript, under the unpromising title of
The Standardbearers
, but no sooner
had I begun to read it than I knew it was the real thing. I read on and on until my eyes were weary. Sustained by many cups of coffee, I finished the book at four in the morning and called Claire as soon as I reached the office to tell her that I wanted to buy it. I had mentioned it to Dick in the elevator that morning and tried to convey my enthusiasm to him. He waved me to silence. “Don’t tell me the fucking plot,” he growled, “just buy the goddamn thing.” Claire was a little surprised—I suspect she had invented the need for an overnight reading to add drama to the submission and had not expected that I would really read the book in one night—and perhaps for that reason accepted what seemed to me a rather modest offer. The author, she told me, was Susan Howatch, a young Englishwoman who had actually written the novel at the kitchen table of her house in New Jersey while looking after her infant daughter.

It is a frequently stated basic belief of book publishing that somewhere in the country at any given moment some unknown woman is writing a major best-seller (usually referred to as “the next
Gone with the Wind
”) at her kitchen table while looking after her baby, but this was the first time I had experienced the phenomenon in real life. Susan Howatch had written her massive novel with one hand on the cradle and the other doing the typing, but, like most authors who succeed, she had never doubted that her book would be a best-seller.

When we met, Howatch turned out to be a serious and attractive young woman with intense, soulful eyes, partly concealed by bangs, and a determined chin. She was open to editorial suggestions and quickly agreed to change the title of the novel to
Penmarric
(the name of the great country house at the center of the book), but that firm chin made it clear that she took her writing in earnest and was not going to be a pushover when it came to changes. It was apparent, too, that she was a serious student of literature and something of a moralist, as well as a student of philosophy and religion. She seemed uneasy about writing popular fiction and needed to be reassured that it was worthwhile. Good as she clearly was at it, her heart did not seem to be in it. At the end of lunch—we became instant friends and have remained so ever since—I felt emboldened to ask a question about the plot. Although the book was set in nineteenth-century Cornwall, there was something very familiar about the story, I said. Was there not a certain uncanny resemblance to the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II? Susan Howatch blushed prettily. Yes, she admitted, she had in fact borrowed the plot directly
from history, but after all, Shakespeare had borrowed most of
his
plots from somebody else. Did I think anybody would notice?

I wasn’t sure, but I decided there was nothing to be gained by worrying her. After all, the book was written—she could hardly change or obscure the plot at this point. Time passed, and everything good that could happen to a book happened. The S&S sales reps loved the book, Dick decided to go for broke with a big printing, Barbara Bannon not only loved it but adored the author, once she had met her, and the buyers at the major stores predicted huge sales.

They were right, too.
Penmarric
launched Susan Howatch on a career as a major worldwide-best-selling novelist. At intervals of two years, one big novel followed another, each of them hugely successful—
Cashelmara, The Rich Are Different, Sins of the Fathers, The Wheel of Fortune
—each of them based on either the plot of a Shakespeare tragedy (
The Rich Are Different
, for example, though set in America in the 1920s, follows the story of
Antony and Cleopatra
) or the life of a major historical figure. The parallels were absolutely clear-cut, and yet never from 1971 to 1984 did any reviewer ever notice! Some readers did, though they were not disturbed by the fact.

With each success, Susan seemed to become more uneasy about what she was doing. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy the fruits of success up to a point, it was as if the kind of popular fiction she was writing simply didn’t satisfy her own intellectual and moral needs. Indeed, with every new book we fought a well-mannered tug-of-war over the packaging and the flap copy, with Susan pulling for seriousness and me, needless to say, pulling for commercial appeal. “Tell her she’s not Dostoyevsky, for chrissake!” Snyder instructed me when I reported to him Susan’s concerns and misgivings, but even if I could have told her that it wouldn’t have helped. She
knew
she wasn’t Dostoyevsky, but she
yearned
to be, or rather an English, Anglican equivalent of him, dealing with serious moral issues as opposed to simply entertaining people. This resulted in an unfortunate paradox: The more copies we sold of her books, the more unhappy she was with us. We were treating her as a big commercial best-seller, not a “serious” writer, she complained, perhaps unable to recover from
The New York Times
’s curt dismissal of
Penmarric
as “a leaden lump of a novel,” written in “early Prince Valiant style.” There is no angst like that of a best-selling novelist who yearns for good reviews and doesn’t get them, and nothing more sure than that she (or he) will blame the publisher.

Eventually, Susan’s serious side simply won out over the side of her that was very ably writing entertaining romantic family sagas, and she moved on to religious novels, in a spirit of expiation for the frivolity of her previous works. She thus became the only best-selling novelist in my experience to walk away from her own success or to leave her publisher because he had sold too many copies of her books.

CHAPTER 22

B
y 1971, three years after Bob’s departure, Dick had made good the loss and then some. He had proven we could publish big commercial novels (
The Love Machine
), we had acquired a string of best-selling fiction writers who delivered a book every year or two (Delderfield and Howatch), and we had acquired a lot of important celebrity books. Snyder was soon to prove his own instinct for the big nonfiction best-seller with a single stroke of genius: the acquisition of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s
All the President’s Men
, which among many other things, was to bring Dick out of the obscurity of being a first-rate manager and businessman and into the limelight as a kind of impresario and publishing celebrity in his own right.

Despite hiring endless numbers of distinguished literary editors, most of whom left before they had made any impact on the S&S list, the one area in which we remained deficient was serious literature. Dick liked to pretend that this didn’t matter, and of course in a way it didn’t, but it still annoyed him, and he yearned for an author of Nobel Prize potential.

Unexpectedly, one fell into our laps in the shape of Graham Greene, whom I had known—and loved—since I was a teenager and whose difficult, convoluted personality and wishes it soon became my job to interpret for Dick over the next few years.

T
HERE WERE
always three separate and distinct Graham Greenes—the writer, the public figure, and the private man—so it is hardly surprising that his character seems to have eluded his biographers, both Professor Norman Sherry, whose definitive, authorized, multivolume
biography idolizes Greene, and Michael Shelden, whose revisionist biography,
Graham Greene: The Enemy Within
, reviles and demonizes him. Greene himself was an acerbic, contradictory, and complicated man. He had a wry sense of humor and a schoolboy’s taste for pranks and practical jokes, and he loved making a mystery of his life. Apparently, he took a malicious pleasure in leading both Sherry and Shelden down the garden path.

The Graham Greene I knew best was the private man, and on my part it was love—or at any rate besotted admiration—at first sight. I met him for the first time in 1948, at the age of fifteen, in Antibes on my Uncle Alex’s yacht
Elsewhere
.

Greene had—as I was soon to discover—an intuitive sympathy for young people, together with a sly, subversive determination to help them break the rules, the result, no doubt, of his own unhappy childhood as the son of an English public-school headmaster, from which he attempted to escape by playing Russian roulette with a revolver. I, somewhat overwhelmed by a party that included Carol Reed, Vivien Leigh, Randolph Churchill, and his about-to-be ex-wife, Pamela, was doing my best to hide when a tall, lean Englishman with thinning sandy hair and the most alarmingly penetrating bright blue, protuberant eyes—rather like intelligent gooseberries, I thought—appeared beside me and handed me a cocktail. I looked at it suspiciously. My father had encouraged me to drink a glass of wine at dinner, but I did not think he would have approved of a cocktail before lunch. “Drink up,” the stranger said. “You look as if you need it.”

He had a curious way of speaking, very English, clipped, precise to the point of being old-fashioned and high-pitched, with a slight trace of a speech impediment and a tendency to turn every sentence into a question—a very donnish voice, as I was to discover when I eventually went to Oxford. I sipped the cocktail gingerly.

“Go on,” he said. “It’s a martini. It can do you no possible harm. I’m Graham Greene, by the way.”

We shook hands rather formally. I had heard of him, of course. He had cowritten the script for
The Fallen Idol
(based on one of his stories, “The Basement Room”), and my father, who had done the art direction, spoke of him with great affection.

Despite Greene’s promise, I felt that my lips seemed to have become anesthetized, not a bad thing under the circumstances, since Alex’s view was that teenagers should be seen only if absolutely necessary but
certainly not heard. I had no idea how I was going to get through a long luncheon with these people, all of whom were shouting at one another at the top of their voices about friends whose names meant nothing to me. Randolph Churchill’s face loomed before me, gross, red, puffy, prominent bad teeth, a caricature of his father’s. He had a laugh that hurt my ears and seemed drunk before lunch.

“The great advantage of being a writer,” Greene told me, staring at Randolph as if he were an animal on display in the zoo, “is that you can
spy
on people. You’re
there
, listening to every word, but part of you is observing.
Everything
is useful to a writer, you see, every scrap—even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.”

His voice dropped to a husky, confidential whisper. “Even Randolph,” he added. “How fortunate for Pamela that she’s never been faithful to him.” He turned toward me with a schoolmasterly look. “There’s always something a writer can use, later on. Nothing is wasted.” (He took his own advice, too—the cruise on Alex’s yacht he turned into a masterful piece of ironic comedy in
Loser Takes All
.)