Searching for Schindler (16 page)

He seemed appeased. Then he asked her how many copies she would print for the first run.

She replied, “Somewhere around thirty-three to thirty-five thousand copies. This is in hardcover.”

“Only thirty-five thousand? Patricia, my darling, you’re going to need more than that. Print one hundred and fifty thousand copies and they’ll go in a week.”

“Hardcover?” asked Patricia.

“Of course, hardcover,” said Poldek, from the depths of his expertise in the publishing industry. “You’ll be a legend by the next weekend. Your bosses will love you, and why shouldn’t they? Beauty and brains!”

His hopeful prophecy would in fact prove closer to what the demand would be, though it would certainly take more than a mere week to sell that number. He did not understand that the decision would not have been made by Patricia alone. Patricia laughed nervously, and I wished Poldek would just stop extolling the book.

“We can always go back to print,” she said.

This was an assurance publishers often gave, but in those days going back to print meant three lost weeks. When writers meet in bars, they always trade horrifying tales of a book’s momentum stalled when the first printing was snapped up early because of radiant reviews, and the second printing came too late to revive the initial impact.

Dan Green, Simon & Schuster’s head of publishing, had made his repute by publishing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
Pumping Iron
and
The Jane Fonda Workout Book
. He took an unexpected stand on the title of the book. I had suggested two titles—
Schindler’s Ark
and
Schindler’s List
—indicating to Ion Trewin in London that I liked
Ark
better than
List
. It was not only the question of evoking Noah’s Ark, but also the Ark of the Covenant, a symbol of the contract between Yahweh and the tribe of Israel. A similar though very rough compact existed between Oskar and his people. If they did their work properly—if the accountant kept the books well, if the engineers and the people on the floor produced, or, later in the war, if they
appeared
to be producing for the sake of covering his black-market operations—then he would rescue them. I call it a “rough compact” because of those people who were lost to the list through factors Schindler could not control. His behavior in regard to the three hundred women sent to Auschwitz, however, indicates that in all probability he did what he could to keep his list intact.

Patricia now took us along to see Dan Green himself. He was an athletic-looking man and seemed to have benefited from the advice of Arnold himself. He adopted something of a tough-guy air. He raised the issue of the title.

“I’ve discussed it with the Brits,” I told him. “Hodder’s are going with
Schindler’s Ark
rather than
Schindler’s List
. And I prefer
Ark
too.”

Green said that it was impossible to have
Ark
. I asked him why. He said that American Jewry was very sensitive to the accusation that the Jews had been somehow passive in the face of their destruction. And
Ark
implied passivity, the prisoners entering two by two.

I told him there was no way that I wanted to offend Jewish people in America, but the issue had not been raised in Britain. He said the Jewish community in Britain was more diffuse, less focused on apparent slights.

“But what about the Ark of the Covenant?” I asked. “The idea that there had been a covenant between Schindler and his people?”

“No,” said Green. “People wouldn’t get that. They’d only get this passive thing, and see it as a slur.”

For once Poldek didn’t have an opinion. As long as they printed one hundred and fifty thousand copies as a first print run, he was happy, and that was his objective with Dan Green. “It is the great story of humanity man to man,” as his mantra went and as he now told Green. “You’re printing too few. But whatever you call it, you and Thomas should subtitle it
A Great Story of Humanity Man to Man
.”

Green thought that such a subtitle was “clunky,” and I had already told Poldek as much. I argued with Green, though, that the British proofs were about to arrive at my place in Australia, and that as soon as I got home I had to correct them. Not only that, but the book had already appeared in Hodder’s autumn catalogue as
Schindler’s Ark
. A change now was impossible for them. Naturally, Pat Solomon did not buy into my debate with Green, but I could see that what British publishers were doing was always something of a minor matter with their Manhattan counterparts.

In between arguments with Green, I asked a few of the Jewish kids, young playwrights and directors who hung around New Dramatists in Hell’s Kitchen, whether they would be offended by the title Dan Green abominated. They had certainly heard of the issue: the accusation of some supposed endemic passivity in Jews was raised by many Gentiles. Others, including Poldek, were not so fussed.

After a week, rightly or wrongly, I consented to Green’s proposition. I did not have quite Poldek’s scale of confidence in the story. I certainly had no sense that this would be my best-known book, and that the two-title issue would haunt me and generate questions for the next twenty years and more. Ultimately, I thought that I couldn’t take the risk of offending American Jewry, not only because I wanted to sell them books, but also for Green’s reasons. And I had other things to concentrate on, being still busy with legal and other matters. I had also sent the full text for correction to Poldek, Pemper, Bejski, Mrs. Stern and the Dresners. I had sent sections of the text to the Fagens, the Korns, the Rosners, the Horowitzes, Dr. Schindel, and so on. I would incorporate their corrections.

Now came the question of whether the book should be categorized as fiction in the Library of Congress classification system. For both commercial reasons and reasons of passion, I didn’t want this book stuck in that section against the back wall of most American bookstores labeled
JUDAICA
. Books classified as such are often splendid works, but I feared that Gentiles might feel they need not apply. Poldek agreed with me on that. I felt that in Schindler I had written as a novelist, with a novelist’s narrative pace and graphicness, though not in the sense of a fictionalizer. If three or four people told me that Schindler had more or less said certain things, I certainly put them in quotation marks, but otherwise the manuscript was largely innocent of dialogue.

Dan Green agreed on this proposition. People would ever afterward ask why it was classified as fiction—apparently deniers would later point to that classification to undermine the book’s clear faith in the Holocaust’s reality. I was convinced at the time that this “documentary novel” qualified as fiction, though was at the extreme end of the phylum or genus. I might have made both of these decisions the same way if I had them to make again, but I would certainly not defend them to the death.

Twelve

The final legal permissions and revisions of the book were done, and Judy and I left our perch in Hell’s Kitchen and flew back to the stillness of Sydney’s Bilgola Beach, impinged upon merely by the noisy traffic of waves.

My mother and father, as we so automatically expected, had done a splendid job looking after the girls.

By the end of the process of reediting according to the notes of sundry associates of Oskar, I had got to become friends by correspondence and telephone calls with genial Ion Trewin, the editor at Hodder’s. I could tell from his letters that he was one of those Englishmen who were passionate about writing, and who also loved cricket as an art form—indeed, when I got to know him and his broad, piratical, bearded features in person, I would see he generally wore a Lords Cricket Ground member’s tie, when not wearing the tie of the Garrick Club, which was frequented by actors, publishers and newspapermen (no women). He appeared to me a good blend of artist and British establishment.

As the book neared its October 1982 publication in Britain, I heard from Ion that on the basis of the proofs, it had been short-listed for the Booker Prize. This is the premier British literary prize, for which writers from all over the Commonwealth can be nominated. Hodder’s considered
Schindler
to belong to the species Novel, had submitted it, and the book had now been short-listed. I had had three earlier books of mine short-listed, so I didn’t think there was much danger of winning the thing, especially given what one could call the genre uncertainty of the book. When I told Poldek, he took the news calmly. “There you are, Thomas. What did I tell you? What did I tell you?”

The Booker had become so renowned in part because of a literary scandal, an attack the prolific and ever-entertaining Anthony Burgess had made on it two years previously. I was in London for a book tour at the time, and had had to do some editing in a suite at the BBC, the Shepherd’s Bush studio, of a documentary I had made for a series named
Writers and Places
. I had been formed by two localities—the Sydney suburb of Homebush, in which I had spent my late childhood and adolescence, and the Macleay Valley, four hundred kilometers north, in which I had spent early childhood, and which had always had a very strong impact on my writing.

Another writer was in the editing suite that evening, also involved in a final edit of his
Writers and Places
segment. It was Anthony Burgess, who came with his Maltese wife and a satchel of Tiger Beer, the beer of Singapore, to honor the impact that city-state had had on his writing career. He was in robust form, and told us that later that evening he would appear on television with William Golding, who had won the 1980 Booker Prize ahead of Burgess’s own brilliant book,
Earthly Powers
. He considered Golding’s book,
Rites of Passage
, the third part of a trilogy about a voyage to Australia in the nineteenth century, effete by the standards of Golding’s earlier work, which included
Lord of the Flies
and
Pincher Martin
.

So, after we had worked for a while on the Steinbeck editing machines with our producer, Burgess
did
descend to a studio at Television House where he made his robust denunciation. That controversy seemed to be stoked far more by Burgess than it was responded to by Golding, but like all literary brawls it drew considerable attention, and irrationally added to the mystique of the Booker as a prize which caused some people to read all short-list contenders and take passionate positions on this book or that, often positions undercut by the jury’s final decision. By the time the glamorous young writer Salman Rushdie won the prize in 1981 for
Midnight’s Children
, it had become more than a literary event, with notable British actors reading segments from the short-listed novels on awards night, and Ladbrokes betting agency running a book on the result.

Flown to London both to promote
Schindler’s Ark
and to attend the 1982 Booker dinner, I discovered with astonishment that
Ark
was firming up as second favorite at Ladbrokes. What fatuity for a book on life and death, heaven and hell. My price was 7–2, but the splendid William Boyd’s
An Ice-Cream War
was the favorite.

I began to see the new importance of the Booker when Ion Trewin collected me from the quaint but wonderful Basil Street Hotel in Knightsbridge to take me out to sign books around town. The bookstores each had a table with the books of the six short-listed writers on it. The playwright John Arden’s
Silence Among the Weapons
, Lawrence Durrell’s
Constance, or Solitary Practices
. Alice Thomas Ellis, the fey contributor to
The Spectator
, had a book named
The 27th Kingdom
, which no one, including her exuberantly ironic self, expected to win. Then there was Boyd’s
An Ice-Cream War
, and Timothy Mo’s
Sour Sweet
. Tim Mo was perhaps the first notable Anglo-Chinese writer, and his book, which I began to read, was complex and engaging. I could not imagine the quasi-novel
Schindler’s Ark
succeeding over it. To be nominated had itself become a mechanism for selling books.

I was a little bemused to find out, though, that I would need a dinner suit for the Booker evening at the Guild Hall. But Moss Bros, the traditional London outfitters, were very kind and exacting in that regard. I went to Ladbrokes and put fifty pounds on the nose of William Boyd, and a smaller sum, which my wife had given me, on myself. On awards night, as Ion and I both detoured for a safety urination in the Guild Hall toilets downstairs, my Moss Bros rented dinner suit didn’t look too inferior to Ion’s own, which, by the jaunty bulge at his waist-band, I judged he might have had since his university days.

A famous Australian-born publisher, Carmen Callil, one of the judges, came up to me as I entered the glittering dining room with its escutcheons and wonderful stained glass, and gave me a vague message that I took as a mere compliment. She said later it was a coded message that I’d won, but if so, I was unable to interpret it as such. I felt no sickening tension as we sat at our tables, though my English agent, Tessa Sayle, was breathless with hope. Despite being an Austrian baroness connected to the Hapsburgs, Tessa had always had a soft spot for Australians in general, and Australian clients. She had been married to an Australian named Murray Sayle, a renowned
London Times
journalist, and the breakup of the marriage didn’t seem to diminish her enthusiasm for the outrageous and sometimes unconsciously inappropriate things Australians were likely to say among the British.

The dinner began in culinary splendor, and it was not until afterdinner drinks that the BBC Two producer gave us our instructions as an audience and the television show started—Derek Jacobi reading a segment from
Schindler’s Ark
and other actors reading segments from the other short-listed novels. Dessert and then calvados were served, and I opportunistically drank Ion’s, seeing that he was much too nervous. I was happy to have met and to be in the company of renowned Londoners. I was content to have seen the dazzling interior of the Guild Hall. The Stoics would have been proud of my repose of soul.

When a fashionably stammering Professor John Carey read out my name from the rostrum, I felt momentarily electrocuted by an electric pulse of disbelief as direct as an arrow. Walking forward with a dazed half-smile on my face and two glasses of calvados the worse, I remember at the rostrum commending the judges for the recklessness of the great mistake they had just made. I thanked Poldek, not only for his merchandise, I said, but for the wonderful tale he had harbored and then surrendered to me. As I descended for interviews, there was barely time to caress Ion and Tessa Sayle before I was taken by a phalanx of Booker-minders to a press conference. I said an occasional daring thing, such as that, being the first Australian to have won the Booker, I hoped it was the beginning of the death of
our
cultural cringe and
their
cultural contempt. I was asked to defend
Schindler’s Ark
’s claim to be a novel. It must be, I said, opting out perhaps too cutely, because the judges thought so, and who am I to argue with them? But the controversy was well away by the next afternoon’s papers, and would not cease for some time. Like most controversy, it initiated a frenzy of interest in the book.

When, late on that night of the award, Ion and I got back to the Basil Street Hotel for the last thoughtful drink of the day, the bar was closed.

I did not sleep. While I was breakfasting in the Basil Street’s wonderful restaurant, one which would have suited Henry James, I was called away to answer the phone. It was the Australian actor Bryan Brown, who had been with me in Sorrento two years before. He had also acted in
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
, and was having success at that time through the miniseries
A Town Like Alice
. As did many Australians, he saw all these Australian phenomena as strikes against our cultural ignominy. “Isn’t it great,” he asked me, “when two boys from the western suburbs really rip it up the Poms?” I felt that perhaps this attitude took no account of the fact that a British jury had generously chosen me, but at the same time I shared in Bryan’s felon delight.

I was still prodigiously awake at ten that morning. I sat in the hotel’s living room, where I had a scheduled interview with a journalist from the
Irish Times
. Her name was Maeve Binchy, and she’d already had a manuscript accepted by Hodder. Indeed, she would become an outrageously successful writer of fiction. But for the moment she saw herself as the supplicant journalist, which bespoke her Irish no-nonsense, no-airs ways. She thanked me for not having canceled the interview now that I was, as she said, “a rock star.” In the Basil Street’s lounge, full of its chinoiserie, she murmured to me, “It’s late in the day.” She waved a hand at a waiter. It was just after ten. “Do you think they’d mind if we had whiskey in our tea?” Maeve Binchy and I became friends for life. She often holidayed in Australia, she told me, because her English husband, Gordon Snell, who worked for Irish radio and television, RTÉ, had spent years there after he was evacuated from Singapore as a boy.

I had lived a limited life as a youth, and my naivety was largely unpracticed. It was only arduously, and through extensive travel, that I had become anything approaching a man of the world. With Maeve and others, I showed my colonial lack of class by not disapproving of the Booker’s hoopla, which is the de rigueur pose of anyone destined to win it. “It’s all nonsense, it’s all a lottery, it makes the book no better than it was yesterday.” It is fashionable for writers to despise the prize till they are short-listed, and from there on to declare the whole exercise crass and, as some argued, rather like a beauty contest. But no one ever turned down his short-listing, though one admirable winner, John Berger, donated his prize to the industrial struggle of the West Indians who worked on the Booker McConnell sugar plantations. And no writer, as far as I know, ever withdrew his nomination from the Booker short list.

At home in Sydney, Judy heard in the small hours of the morning from a neighbor who came rushing down our street, crying out that the ABC news said I had won.

For Poldek, this was the validation of his belief that this story was for Gentiles. He showed it by giving away a signed copy of the book with every purchase of goods in the Handbag Studio over one hundred dollars. The question about whether the book was a novel or not raged on, but every morning new stocks of the book, printed the day before and rushed up from Kent, cluttered the marble lobbies of Hodder’s beautiful eighteenth-century headquarters in Bedford Square. Salesmen got there early so that they could pick up enough copies to satisfy the bookshops they served. What a heady and extremely rare time for a writer, when demand could not quite be satisfied!

I remember a glorious, boozy press-and-publishing bash in the back garden of the old Bedford Square house. But behind the celebration there lay the reality that this book was built on the blood of innocents. I went on suffering a merited and intimate nightmare, perhaps fueled by an excess of celebratory wine and spirits, of Amon Goeth selecting me from a line of prisoners for some unspecified death. The taste one gets of death in dreams I find more penetrating and atmospheric than the ordinary fear one might suffer while awake.

In the following week I was called on as if a Londoner to perform civic duties—to open a new library in the City of London, for example. I wondered if I should tell them about my Irish Republican great-uncle, who was sentenced to transportation to Western Australia for sedition. Or my Uncle Johnny, who had come to London on rowdy Australian leave from the Western Front and fallen in love with a Scottish nurse in 1917, an ardor from which nothing developed.

Now, laden with accidental renown, I flew back to Australia. Judy organized a wonderful welcome party. The tension between Bookerdom and the knowledge that my work had benefited from testimonies from people who had suffered extremities of terror made me frequently but privately uneasy, and Judy understood this. Yet there was undeniable joy in the homecoming, and acceptance among my own. I was above all grateful for the excitement my teenage daughters felt over what had happened. They didn’t adopt any air of adolescent boredom at all.