Another Life

by Michael Korda

  Dick, sending me off to England, had given me strict instructions that I was to win Delderfield over, heart and mind. Whatever he wanted, I should do. He was not to even think about Bob Gottlieb from now on. After dinner at my hotel, as we sat over our port and cigars, Ronnie, as I now called him, had asked if I would like to join him in the morning. Sure, I said, imagining a brisk walk over the downs, followed by an English country breakfast. But not at all. It turned out that Ronnie began every day with a swim in the sea, winter or summer, rain or shine. It was to that which he attributed his ruddy good health and his ability to write ten thousand words a day. Remembering Dick’s words, I agreed to join him and found myself at dawn clad in borrowed swim trunks, stepping gingerly into the same slate-gray sea that I had seen yesterday from the hotel. Viewed close-up, it was even more uninviting. Ronnie, who had driven down in his new Jaguar, the first fruit of his new success, accompanied by a black Labrador, took off his dressing gown, breathed deeply a few times (“Every deep breath is a penny in the bank of health!”), and strode slowly, majestically, and without hesitation into the water. The Labrador, I noticed, was too smart to follow him.

  I knew there was no earthly way I could get into that water slowly—the only way was to plunge in as quickly as possible. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and ran as fast as I could on the slippery shingle—there was a thin coating of ice on the larger stones—then, as I felt the water come up to my knees, I dived headfirst. I thought for a moment that the water was so cold that I had been knocked out—and, indeed, it was cold, cold enough for me to remember that pilots who parachuted into the Channel during the Battle of Britain often died of hypothermia before they were picked up by rescue boats. The reason that I had been knocked out, however, was that the shingle at Sidmouth extends a good way out to sea. I had supposed that the water was getting deeper when I plunged in, but instead I had landed headfirst on the rocks. Fortunately, I was floating, but I was quite unable to move. Not far from me, as my vision came back into focus again, I could see Ronnie sporting about in the freezing water like a whale, his breath forming clouds of vapor. He waved at me cheerfully. “Grand, isn’t it?” he called out. By now my teeth were chattering, my fingernails had turned an ugly purple color, and I could feel a warm trickle running down my forehead that was surely blood. I gave a hoarse bellow, and Ronnie swam over with a stately breaststroke to investigate. “Bloody ’ell!” he said, as he caught a closer look at me, and hauled me ashore. In a moment, he had me wrapped in his dressing gown, and before long I was back at the cottage, drinking tea with rum. Whether it was from the guilt of having nearly killed me or because we became, in fact, really good friends, Ronnie Delderfield remained an S&S author until his death, many years and many thousands of pages later.

  When I told Dick the story on my return, he was delighted. For a long time afterward he told it himself, as an example of just how far an editor ought to go to keep an author happy. He always added at the end, “They say Bobby Gottlieb’s a great editor, but let me tell you this: he doesn’t have the balls to go swimming in the English Channel at dawn, the way Korda did.”

  PERHAPS AS a reward for service above and beyond the call of duty in England, Dick shortly afterward encouraged me to go to Los Angeles, partly to mend fences with Irving Wallace, Harold Robbins, and the Durants, partly in the belief, common to all those who live on the East Coast, that California is full of interesting new writers who don’t have a New York agent. In those days, before the advent of the chain stores, I considered it part of my job to visit local bookstores and schmooze with the owners, a breed only slightly more pessimistic than dirt farmers, who blamed the publishers for most of their misfortunes, despite having the only product that can be returned unsold months, even years, after they have received it and for full credit. Given this, it has always been hard to understand how it is possible to lose money selling books, but most booksellers skated on the thin edge of bankruptcy. The visit of a book publisher always brought out the gloomiest side of them—here, after all, was, in their eyes, the person responsible for all their woes—so I usually approached any bookstore with a sinking heart. I usually asked if anything was selling, in the hope of at least hearing something cheerful, and this time, from bookstore to bookstore throughout Beverly Hills and Brentwood, the surprising answer was that something was indeed selling like crazy. Needless to say, it wasn’t an S&S book, nor a book from any of the major East Coast publishers that had brought a ray of sunshine to the lives of the booksellers of Southern California—it was a paperback from the University of California Press, and it was selling so fast that they couldn’t keep it in stock. Intrigued, I tried to buy a copy, but the booksellers were not exaggerating for once: There were none available. In the end, I managed to borrow a well-thumbed copy from one of the clerks at the Pickwick Book Store on Sunset Boulevard and took it back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where I read it in one gulp, with absolute fascination.

  The book was The Teachings of Don Juan by a UCLA professor of anthropology named Dr. Carlos Castaneda, and it purported to tell of his initiation into a peyote cult by a Yaqui shaman named Don Juan. In the drug-obsessed culture of the late sixties and early seventies, it was hardly surprising that Castaneda’s doctoral thesis should have broken out of the academic world to become a local best-seller, though it was very possibly the first (and last) doctoral thesis in history to do so.

  In later years, when Castaneda had become a kind of guru to a whole generation of college kids and his books had sold in the millions of copies, he was to take on a kind of mystic significance—indeed, when Time did a cover piece on him (albeit with a smudged and unrecognizable portrait of him, since he refused to be photographed or drawn), they portrayed him, perhaps inadvertently, as a mystery man and tried in vain to pin down his exact identity, as if it mattered. By that time, there were false Castanedas appearing on campuses all over the country, like false czars in Russia, and Castaneda was being sighted in all sorts of improbable places by people who swore that he was tall or blue-eyed or a kind of hippie god, with long hair and fringed clothing. Nobody laughed harder at this deification than Castaneda himself—Carlitos, as he often referred to himself slyly, as if he were the modern equivalent of the sorcerer’s apprentice, which was not, in fact, too far from the truth and which explained a great deal of the literary appeal of his early books. On one level, at least, they formed a kind of bildungsroman in which Don Juan played the cunning sorcerer-teacher and Carlitos the bumbling, naive, and eternally hopeful apprentice. There was a side to Castaneda’s work that appealed to the same needs in young people as J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone. The elements were all there: adventure, sorcery, the hard path to knowledge on which a young man risks everything to learn wisdom from his teacher. Castaneda was a kind of real-life hobbit, following the path laid down by the mysterious sorcerer Gandalf, or, in another context, the young Arthur seeking the wisdom of Merlin. Perhaps without knowing what he was doing, Castaneda had touched upon a surefire theme for a best-seller, even without the peyote lore, which was to give his work an extra allure of the forbidden and dangerous.

  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.

  • • •

  THE NEXT morning, I called Dick and told him I wante
d 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.