Schulte was forceful, clean-cut, cheerful, handsome, and athletic. Reputedly heir to a cigar-store fortune, he was one of those rare people who actually understand the whole publishing process, not just one small part of it, and was as much at home perched on Bob’s sofa in the evenings, talking about books, as he was downstairs, schmoozing with the guys in sales and marketing.
Snyder, as I was soon to discover, also had the ability to fit in anywhere he wanted to, together with a truly remarkable gift for not getting stuck in any one department or at any one level. His promotions and moves from one department to another took place at such a dizzying rate that it was hard to keep up with him, with the result that his business cards were always out of date. He seemed to soak up useful knowledge like a sponge, according to Schulte, who was at once admiring and dismayed, perhaps because he already saw in Snyder a potential and formidable rival.
The truth was, however, that they were oil and water. Schulte was laid-back, calm, and good-humored, a kind of New York Jewish patrician who did not as a rule take the trials and tribulations of publishing too seriously. Snyder was fiercely concentrated and totally focused on what he was doing, with the kind of steely determination that comes precisely from not having anything to fall back on. He could be very funny and enjoyed a joke as much as the next person, but it could not be said that he was calm or good-humored by nature. On the contrary, he was like a tightly wound spring, and to those who knew him he seemed often to be holding himself back from an explosion of temper by sheer willpower. One guessed, too, that his bark and his bite were likely to be equally unpleasant, especially when it came to ill-prepared or sloppy work or a reluctance to go the extra mile.
He himself went the proverbial extra mile almost every day, and his working hours were already legendary. He was in early, he left late, and he didn’t go home until he had cleaned off his desk, according to Schulte, who was no slouch himself.
I was absent for a good deal of this time—Casey’s difficult pregnancy, during which she was confined to bed for several months—ended successfully with the birth of a son, and I soon found myself plunged unprepared into the world of first-time parenting, made even more traumatic by the fact that Casey appeared to have no relatives to rely on except for her mother, whom she regarded as naive and unrealistic, and her grandmother, a difficult old woman. Since my family was in London and Casey would rather have died than ask hers for advice or assistance, we were without the safety net that most young parents have.
Once we had returned to some kind of routine, however different it might be from our previous way of life, my attention returned to S&S—it was a lot more rewarding to think about books and authors than about diapers, formula, and middle-of-the-night feedings. To my surprise, I was asked to attend the annual convention of librarians in Atlantic City, a request that was puzzling, since I could think of no very good reason why librarians would want to meet me, nor I them. Clearly this assignment was not a plum—Bob Gottlieb, I learned, had already turned it down—but I was in no position to be fussy. In those days, of course, Atlantic City was not Las Vegas East, as it has now become. It was a 1920s seaside town slipping ungracefully into terminal decay, its once elegant seafront hotels declining into single-occupancy rooming houses for the poor and the old or worse, its famous boardwalk now a haunt for drug addicts and muggers. It was a place that no sensible person would have chosen to visit, not even the librarians, who, I thought, could surely have picked better.
A COUPLE of days after I had written this into my calendar and more or less forgotten about it, I received a call from Snyder, saying that he, too, was going to the librarians’ convention, to represent sales and marketing. He suggested that we join forces. I said that sounded like a good idea and a chance to get to know each other. He offered to rent a car, so we could drive there together.
It did not occur to me at the time that being sent to Atlantic City was S&S’s way of putting us in our places—Snyder for making too many waves, me for expressing my opinion too often and too loudly. Nor did it occur to me that Snyder might have included me deliberately. The one area of the company about which he had little knowledge was the editorial department of S&S. I might have seemed like his best bet to get a foothold there, however small—after all, we were almost exactly the same age and both struggling to get ahead of numerous layers of entrenched and more senior people. I was more or less content with my position, but Snyder was not. He positively glowed with ambition in a company—indeed, in an industry—in which it was crass to admit to personal ambition.
In those days, the renting of a car was by no means the easy and everyday transaction it is now, nor was S&S particularly liberal when it came to that kind of thing. The best we were able to do was a yellow Rambler of uncertain vintage, which Snyder had picked up from some discount rental place known only to the S&S business department. He was, however, happy to leave the driving to me.*
Dick—we were on a first-name basis at once—lived only two blocks away from me, in an apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, where he and his wife, Ruth, were soon to have their first child. Far from being the fearsome personality that most people at S&S believed him to be, he could not, in fact, have been more simpatico. He was better at asking questions than at answering them, with the result that by the time we were in New Jersey, he already knew everything he wanted to about me. I had picked up only a few facts about him. Despite the broad Harvard intonation, he had gone to Tufts and was drafted into the army. Following the army, he had expected, without much enthusiasm, to go to work in his father’s successful clothing business, but his father surprised him, saying, “I’d rather have a son than a partner.”
Dick ended up as a trainee salesman at Doubleday, having chosen the business of book publishing as casually and accidentally as I had. Perhaps for that reason, we got along well from the very first. Almost everybody in the book business says that he always wanted to be involved with books, and perhaps it’s true, but Dick and I were alike in never having given the matter any thought at all. Disappointment is a well-known spur to ambition, and it seemed to have worked in both our cases.
It is a curious fact that one makes the really significant friendships of one’s life in much the same way as one falls in love, with one sudden, fell swoop—un coup de foudre, as the French say—and almost never by small degrees. It takes a lot of time and shared experience to make a friendship permanent, to harden it, but in my life the friendships that matter have been made instantly, and nothing afterward has ever changed or diminished them. Somehow, there formed between Dick and me in that claustrophobic little car a friendship that was to last through the decades, despite the fact that we had very little in common. In some ways, in fact, we appeared to be opposites. Dick was a born businessman, with a head for numbers and a real thirst for confrontation, whereas I was a born editor, happiest alone with a book or a manuscript, and in business matters, as in everything else, a natural compromiser. I do not think either of us realized how valuable these different qualities might be if they were wielded together, for a purpose. But that, of course, was in the future.
As we entered Atlantic City, the view became more and more depressing. Beyond the deserted boardwalk a gray sea met an equally gray, damp sky. Most of the old hotels were closed, their windows boarded up with plywood, their facades moistly crumbling with decay. The hotel we were booked into did not look any better, though it did have glass in the windows instead of plywood. A wizened old man dressed in a threadbare bellboy’s outfit took us up to our suite in a trembling, clanking old elevator, which looked to have been the first one Otis ever made. “You guys come here for the convention?” he asked. I signified that we had. He sighed deeply. “Tell you one thing,” he went on, in a lugubrious voice. “The librarians don’t tip worth a damn.”
The suite itself had ancient maroon curtains laced with dust and cobwebs, the beds were creaking and lumpy, the bathroom a nightmare of cracked, yellowing tiles and wheezing pipes. Having dragged
our luggage into the suite with great difficulty, the bellboy stood forlornly at the door, a pillbox hat perched ridiculously at a slant on his bald head, the sleeves of his tattered bum-freezer jacket shiny where he had rubbed his nose on them, his gnarled hand extended for a tip. Dick palmed several bills into his hand and sent him off for a bottle of scotch and some ice. The only thing that cheered Dick up was the fact that there would be several hundred women downstairs at cocktail time, with practically no men. “We’ll wash up,” he said, “have a drink, then check out the talent.”
But when we went downstairs to the hotel ballroom, the talent was disappointing. It was basically a room full of middle-aged women, intent on talking about books, especially literary novels and poetry, and even Dick’s enthusiasm for the opposite sex soon melted. The lights dimmed, and we all trooped into the banquet room, where Dick and I found ourselves at a table with six pleasant but rather elderly librarians from Cleveland. Since my wife had often sung the praises of Cleveland’s library system, I, at least, had something to talk about—perhaps the only time in my life when a familiarity with the cultural institutions of Shaker Heights was to prove a useful asset. Dick was not so fortunate. Although he knew more about library discounts than I did (no great feat since I knew nothing), it was not a subject calculated to keep his spirits high. Bravely, he held to it, through three execrable courses, but by the time coffee was being served he was rolling his eyes toward me in supplication. I quickly pleaded a headache, and we returned to our dismal suite, with its peeling wallpaper and forty-watt bulbs. Dick sat down and took his shoes off. Despite his ruddy complexion, he looked worn out.
“Cheer up,” I said. “Tomorrow may be better.”
He looked pensive. “Do you think anybody would miss us if we left?” he asked.
I didn’t think so, but it seemed like deserting one’s post under fire. On the other hand, anything seemed better than staying. What if somebody at S&S found out that we hadn’t stayed? I wondered. What would happen to us?
Dick shrugged. “Nobody will care. Anybody asks, we’ll tell them it was a great learning experience.” He spoke, as he always would over the coming decades, with absolute confidence.
Quietly, as if stealth was called for, we sneaked downstairs, checked out, and got back into our rented Rambler. Dick’s spirits rose as we hit the highway and put some distance between ourselves and the librarians. Through the mist, we could see the glow from the lights of New York. “Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?” he asked solemnly. “What’s your ambition?”
I was silent for a few moments. I didn’t have a clue about where I wanted to be next year, let alone in ten years’ time. The truth was that I didn’t really have a specific ambition. Fatherhood or not, my mind was still full of unrealistic or mutually contradictory ideas about the future, a well-stuffed cloud-cuckoo-land: I dreamed vaguely of going back to England, or taking up photography, or even of going into the movie business, the very thing I had run away from in the first place. To have a lot of different ambitions, I realized, was to have no ambition at all.
At S&S, where ambition might have made some sense and even done me some good, I really had none. Above me there were layers of people more senior than myself, who showed every sign of staying there for the rest of their lives (or mine)—starting with Bob Gottlieb, Henry Simon, and Peter Schwed—although it did occasionally occur to me that I might be able to leapfrog over one or two of the lesser ones without great difficulty and perhaps had already done so. With the appropriate modesty, I suggested to Dick that my ambition was to go on doing pretty much what I’d been doing but at a higher rate of pay.
“Bullshit,” he said firmly. He lit a cigarette. “You’re as ambitious as I am.”
I denied it. “You’re full of shit,” he went on in a cordial tone, his deep voice rumbling. He sounded sincere and well intentioned rather than argumentative.
He pointed his cigarette at me in the dark. “Look at the facts,” he said. “You joined the company as Henry’s goddamn assistant. Then what happens? You look around, you see that Henry’s not going anywhere, so you start editing manuscripts for Bob, who is going somewhere. As if that isn’t enough, you jump ship from working for Henry to Peter—who, by the way, is going to eat Henry alive. You even get to work with Max and go to editorial board meetings.” He chuckled knowingly. “Somebody looking at your career at S&S so far just might think you were pretty ambitious for a goddamn Oxford man, that’s all I’m saying.”
Seen from Dick’s point of view, perhaps Schwed had been right to see me as Machiavellian after all. I laughed. “It’s nothing I planned. It all just happened.”
Dick snorted. “Nothing just happens, my friend.” He puffed on his cigarette contentedly. “Listen, if all this comes naturally to you, you’re way ahead. The best way to get ahead is not to be obvious about it, believe me.” He was silent for a moment. Dick’s ambition, it must be said, was unconcealed—far from being bashful on the subject, he was proud of it. This was one of his more appealing traits. You could call him a lot of things, but Machiavellian wasn’t one of them, then or later.
“What’s your ambition?” I asked, as much to get him off the subject of me as out of curiosity.
He didn’t answer for a very long time. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him slouched against the door, one arm slung over the seat back. He was gazing ahead, at what? I was reminded of Gatsby’s green, orgiastic light at the end of Daisy’s dock, but in this case there were only the twinkling lights of the oil refineries and chemical plants on either side of the highway, blinking mysteriously in the dark. There was something of Gatsby in Dick, I thought, as there is in every American who wants to rise above his father’s station and dreams of gaining wealth, class, or both. Dick had already begun that process long ago, I guessed. His eagerness to learn was voracious, passionate, sometimes a little frightening. He was not just a fast learner but an instant one, soaking up what he wanted to know deftly. Already, in the few months since he had made his first appearance on the twenty-eighth floor, he had changed. The thick-soled shoes with blunt toes had given way to elegant English wing tips, his suits already showed signs of hand tailoring, the button-down shirts had been replaced by English ones with elegant, hand-sewn collars and showing just the right amount of cuff. Some time later, he admired one of my shirts and asked where it came from. I told him I had bought it at Pierce, Hilditch, and Key in London. A couple of weeks later, I noticed that he was wearing a similar shirt, having had his secretary call the London shirtmakers and give them his measurements. It was not just clothes—like Gatsby, he absorbed what he wanted to, adapted it effortlessly to himself, and soon knew more about it than you did. Even his Harvard accent had become more pronounced, now that he had one elegantly shod foot in the hardcover-book world, for it was clear that his immediate ambition was to become a hardcover publisher (Peter Schwed, watch out! I thought) though equally clear that his ambitions went beyond that, into some stratosphere that only he could see or imagine.
“I want it all,” he said.
“All? Money? Fame? Power? A limo? Beautiful women? That kind of thing?”
He laughed, but I could tell that he was being serious. “Something like that,” he said.
“Do you think book publishing is the right profession? It sounds to me as if the movie business might be a better choice.”
Dick shook his head emphatically. “Nah,” he said. “This is the one I’m in. Books have class. And look at the people who are running the goddamn book industry! Most of them don’t know what they’re doing. I mean, look at S&S. You and I could run it a hundred times better than it’s being run now. A thousand times better! We’d make a good team, too.”
If Dick wanted to team up with an editor, why hadn’t he picked Bob, who was already successful? I wondered. But then I realized Bob already had a partner of sorts in Tony Schulte. Also, Bob would always want to be the star, and Schulte was willing enough to let him have the limelight. Dic
k would never be comfortable in anybody’s shadow. He was picking a dark horse in me, certainly, but at the time he didn’t have much of a choice.
“You know what I’ve left out?” he asked. Answering the question himself before I could, he said: “We’re going to have a lot of fun, whatever happens.”
We shook hands on that.
* This is a loaded subject, even today—the work of some English writers travels perfectly well, while that of others, for no very discernible reason, doesn’t at all. Some English best-sellers—Dr. Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small, for example, or the novels of John le Carré—go on to become huge best-sellers in the United States, while others sink without a trace into the Atlantic. Much English literary fiction, and almost all French and European fiction, doesn’t travel at all, like certain kinds of cheese, but every once in a while there will be a startling exception, like Salman Rushdie or Martin Amis. The situation is complicated by the immense hunger for American books of all kinds in England, and, for that matter, in the rest of the world. Like Big Macs and blue jeans, American writing is by and large welcome everywhere, which tends to make the transatlantic traffic more or less one way. Thus, the novels of Mary Higgins Clark invariably top the French best-seller lists, whereas it is hard to remember the last time that any French novel, literary or otherwise, even appeared at the bottom of The New York Times’s best-seller list. The French complain bitterly about American cultural hegemony, while the British, who experience it much more severely, don’t seem to care.
* He was playing the role of an African chieftain in my Uncle Zoli’s film Sanders of the River at the time, and that remains for me the stump puller of all voices.
Another Life Page 21