Another Life (6 page)

The key to Shimkin’s success lay in his experience as business manager for
P.M
., the liberal New York City afternoon daily into which Field had poured a fortune in a forlorn attempt to prove that a left-wing newspaper could survive in a big city. Shimkin had no sympathy with Field’s political ideas, Herb pointed out quickly—this was still America of the fifties—but he very quickly learned everything there was to know about newspaper and magazine distribution.

That bookstores wouldn’t carry mass-market books turned out to be true, but Shimkin hadn’t been dismayed. The price of a paperback book meant that it could be treated like a magazine and displayed in racks in the same places where magazines were sold—newsstands, candy stores, drugstores, railway stations, and bus depots—thus reaching a whole new readership. The idea of linking books to the newspaper and magazine distribution business launched a whole new industry, which came of age suddenly in World War Two, when troops read paperbacks by the millions.

The clear outlines of a massive inferiority complex, combined with an outsize chip on his shoulder, were beginning to appear in Herb’s lecture. Hardcover publishers, he went on, had accepted the mass-market paperback book grudgingly but still looked down their noses at those who worked in that end of the business. This was bound to change, he believed, and soon. Paperback people were just as cultured and well educated
as hardcover people but had their feet planted more firmly on the ground. There was a lot more to publishing than bringing out a whole lot of unreadable first novels or new translations of the complete works of Gide or Proust.

I should not misunderstand him, he added hastily—there was a place for Gide, for Proust, even for the kind of snot-nosed little first novels your typically effete hardcover editor bought and that nobody else ever read, but mass-market publishing was attuned first and foremost to the needs of the marketplace, to what people
really
wanted to read. Pocket Books gave them what they wanted, even if that was Harold Robbins. What was so fucking bad about reading a Harold Robbins novel, anyway, he wanted to know? If they wanted to read Shakespeare, well, by Christ, Pocket Books
did
Shakespeare; if they wanted to read Pearl S. Buck, well, God damn it, Pocket Books did Pearl S. Buck too—in fact
The Good Earth
was Pocket Books’ all-time, number-one best-seller. What did I think of
them
apples?

I wasn’t sure what I thought of them apples, since I had never read Pearl S. Buck, nor, for that matter, Harold Robbins, but I kept my mouth zipped on the subject, rightly guessing that the question was rhetorical. Herb had me typed, I realized, as an effete snob, but before I could find a polite way to tell him that I wasn’t the Gide/Proust type, he was off and running with a long list, recited from memory, of all the distinguished books and classics that Pocket Books had published over the years.

He seemed to be under the mistaken impression, thanks to Morris Helprin I felt sure, that I was a person of a scholarly nature, prodigious learning, and refined taste. He paused frequently to roll his head sideways so he could see me and say, about whatever arcane point he had reached in his narrative, “Of course, being an Oxford man, you already know all that,” or, “Being an Oxford man, you’ve already guessed what I’m getting at.”

It seemed best to nod wisely rather than argue, in the hope that silence would be taken for wisdom. In any case, Herb took care not to give me a chance to interrupt his flow of words—he apparently intended to talk until hoarseness or sheer exhaustion silenced him. In the event, the barber eventually silenced him with a hot towel, though not before Herb had explained to me that he was the kind of guy who needed to shave at least twice a day, hence the barber’s chair. I felt my own cheeks, for which one shave a day was sufficient, and wondered if
I was cut out for the mass-market business. Apparently it was a manly undertaking, on the order of lumberjacking.

While the hot towel was doing its work, I managed to ask Herb if he thought he had a job for me.

Herb launched into a new tirade as the barber splashed him with bay rum. His beard seemed to be growing back already—he had the kind of five-o’clock shadow that used to make Richard Nixon look so sinister in photographs. The best thing for me, frankly, Herb thought, would be to throw me into the mass-market business, right up to the goddamn neck, and get rid of all my fucking Oxford, Limey intellectual pretensions and prejudices once and for all, so I could get a grip on what real people did in the real world. It would do me no harm to go out at dawn with “the guys in the trucks,” carrying cartons of mass-market titles and arranging them in the racks. That’s how you learned the business, the
only
way, if I wanted his opinion, and if I didn’t, what the hell was I doing here? (I was later to discover that this was something of a romantic illusion in the mass-market business—neither Herb nor any of the other Pocket Books senior executives and editors had ever gone out with the trucks, nor served their apprenticeship by handing a druggist a five-dollar bill so he would turn his back while you threw all your competitor’s titles out of the racks and replaced them with your own. There
were
people who did this, of course, but they did not as a rule get to the company’s offices at Rockefeller Center.)

Herb paused for breath, while my heart sank. I wasn’t fussy when it came to a job, but I didn’t like the sound of starting off my career in book publishing at dawn in a delivery truck. It wasn’t, as Herb seemed to feel was the case, that I thought this kind of thing was beneath me—I just didn’t believe then, and don’t now, that you can learn much about a business by carrying cartons.

If it depended solely on him, Herb went on, that’s what I’d be doing, and who knew? It might even make a man of me. But he had two problems, when it came to me: One was that he just didn’t have any jobs available at Pocket Books; the other was that he had sort of promised Morris Helprin that he would take good care of me, and he felt that Morris would be happier if I started out at a somewhat classier level. As it happened, there
was
a job available upstairs—he rolled his eyes heavenward—at Simon and Schuster, which was owned partly by Leon Shimkin, so the two companies had a relationship of sorts. Henry W. Simon (as I was beginning to discover, almost everybody of any importance
in book publishing used a middle initial), the editor in chief, one of cofounder Richard L. Simon’s brothers, was looking for an assistant even as we spoke.

Henry Simon, Herb went on, with a certain invisible sneer in his voice, was a former Columbia University professor, a Shakespearean scholar of some note, and a classical musician. I would probably feel more at ease upstairs with him than downstairs in the rough-and-tumble world of Pocket Books, though he hoped that when I’d found my feet I might realize where the action really was and transfer my allegiance to the mass-market business. In the meantime, I should go upstairs and see Henry, who was expecting me.

I thanked him, but he cut me off abruptly.

“Don’t worry about it, kid,” he said, examining the manicurist’s work carefully. “If it doesn’t work out with Henry, you come on back down here, and I’ll find something for you, even if it’s in the warehouse, you have my word on it.”

The barber removed the towel, and Herb got out of his barber’s chair and moved back to his desk. I had imagined he would tower over me, but to my surprise he wasn’t any taller than me—he was broad in the beam, all right, but short, built rather like a Dutch barge.

“Tell Henry from me he’s wrong about Harold Robbins,” he said, and dismissed me.

H
ERB
A
LEXANDER
’
S
secretary led me to a stairway that took us up to the Simon and Schuster offices on the floor above. The stairway had been opened only recently, she told me. It had been bricked up for some years, on the orders of Mr. Simon and Mr. Schuster, but Mr. Shimkin had recently had it opened again, so people could go back and forth between the two floors more easily. It took very little imagination on my part to guess what the relationship was between the owners of Simon and Schuster if they had been struggling for years over whether their employees could get from Pocket Books to Simon and Schuster and vice versa by the stairs.

Indeed, my guide looked nervous on the floor above her own, as if we had ventured into Indian territory, and seemed relieved when she handed me over to Henry Simon’s secretary, who showed me right in. Seated behind a pale wood desk in a large corner office, Henry Simon
was an impressive figure. It was easy enough to guess that he had once been a very handsome man indeed, almost theatrically so in fact, but age and what I imagined was ill health had given him a ghostly look. His pallor was alarming, and his long, thin hands—the hands of a musician, with narrow Giacometti-like fingers—trembled noticeably. I guessed him to be in his sixties (he was, in fact, then in his late fifties, but the young are never good at guessing older people’s ages). His hair was silver, there were dark circles under his eyes, and his face was hollow-cheeked and deeply lined, as if all the cares of the world were on his shoulders. When he rose, I could see that he was tall, six foot or more, but painfully thin and slightly stooped. He came around from behind his desk and shook my hand, a quick, dry, whispery handshake, unlike Herb Alexander’s, which had felt like being squeezed hard by a pipe wrench. Henry slipped behind his desk like a shadow, sat down again, and lit a cigarette.

Even in those innocent days when almost everybody smoked—as I did—Henry’s consumption of tobacco was remarkable. There were two racks of pipes on his desk, all of them well used, and a huge, round ashtray the size of a pie plate that contained too many cigarette butts to count. His desktop was littered with cigarette packages, matchbooks, and tobacco ash, and his fingernails had a nicotine stain so dark that it seemed baked on. Not surprisingly, his voice, though soft and melodious, was a hoarse whisper. He spoke slowly, with the slightly prissy exactitude of the university professor he had once been, and it all seemed to me very much like an Oxford tutorial, except that neither of us was wearing a gown and he didn’t offer me sherry.

If Herb Alexander had considered me to be rather too much of a hothouse flower for the world of mass-market paperback publishing, Henry’s suspicion, perhaps because Alexander had sent me to him, appeared to be that I was an ignorant yahoo from the movie business, unsuitable for the refined world of hardcover publishing. My family’s fame—then very much greater than it is now—had seemed to Alexander something I would have to overcome but not otherwise of any concern. At worst, he had feared it would prevent me from being “one of the guys” and make me a poor bet for servicing the racks. Henry Simon, to my consternation, was deeply suspicious of it. Why wasn’t I working in the movie business? he wanted to know. How could he be sure I wouldn’t rush off to Hollywood at any moment, if he hired me?

It would have been helpful if I had understood then that Henry’s
whole adult life had been a tug-of-war between his own inclinations as a teacher, writer, and musician and his older brother Richard’s determination to find a place for him at Simon and Schuster. The phrase
love-hate relationship
might have been coined for Henry’s feelings about his glamorous, dashing, wealthy, brilliantly talented brother, whose unerring instinct for commercial books and riverboat gambler’s skills Henry lacked totally. Henry had been pulled out of a respected academic career by his brother and given a job at Simon and Schuster where he would always be in his shadow. Not unnaturally, he saw in me somebody who had similar problems, and it made him nervous.

We chatted briefly, and with a certain embarrassment (in those innocent days, I didn’t know how hard this kind of job interview is from the other side of the desk), about my studies at Oxford, my languages (Henry was fluent in German but knew no French), my aspirations. Henry was, in fact, the first person I had met so far in book publishing who could actually be described as cultured and well-read in the European sense, who had read the same books I had, could talk about them like an Oxford don, and seemed to feel they mattered. I felt at home. He had traveled widely in England with his first wife, Margaret Halsey, and knew Oxford well.

Henry had edited the complete works of Shakespeare for the Pocket Books edition that Herb Alexander was so proud of and had published an edition of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. That his was not a donnish job, however, was made clear by how his telephone rang constantly. From time to time, his secretary, Nancy, appeared to say that the call was from an important agent or author. Henry grimaced, lit a fresh cigarette, and, cradling the receiver between his shoulder and his ear, leaned back in his leather desk chair, placed his feet on the desk, closed his eyes, and engaged in what appeared to be difficult discussions, each of which seemed to depress him deeply. Once we were interrupted when a stranger, his face puffy and contorted with rage, strode briskly into the room, flung a piece of artwork down on Henry’s desktop, shouted, “You tell your goddamn author he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about!” then turned on his heel and stalked out. Henry winced. His gray face looked suddenly weary, and he shook his head. “That was our art director,” he explained. He held up a sketch for a book jacket. It showed a man in what looked like a Roman helmet, set against a scene of mild Attic debauchery. The title was
Dara, the Cypriot
, by Louis Paul.

“What do you think?” Henry asked. “It’s a historical novel set in ancient Greece and Crete.”

“The helmet is all wrong.”

He sighed and put it back on his desk. “That’s what the author said.” He lit a fresh cigarette and inhaled deeply. “I think you and I would get along,” he said, breathing out two plumes of smoke. “On the other hand, you’ve had no experience at editing.”

“I’m a quick learner.”

“I don’t have time to teach you, frankly. And I’m even not sure that it’s a skill that can be taught. It really requires
Fingerspitzengefühl
—a certain instinct which you’ve either got or you don’t.… Would you mind very much if I gave you a manuscript to read, as a kind of test?”