Another Life (66 page)

Now that we were at least riding in the same direction, we were able to talk. It transpired that we were both English, though Margaret’s Englishness, unlike mine, was of the pure, nonhyphenated kind—she was the only daughter of a Gloucestershire farmer and had ridden since the age of three or four. Sophisticated, glamorous, and alarmingly well-traveled, she retained an English country girl’s dislike of the city, although she seemed to me to be the supreme example of a fashionable city-dwelling woman. She had married an officer in the Kenya police while in her teens, gone to live in Kenya, where the marriage swiftly dissolved, lived for a while in Paris in the motion-picture world, then met Burt Glinn and soon followed him to New York. Glinn had used her as a model, and initially they had lived together in a big apartment that he shared with his old friend Clay Felker. It was a typical bachelors’ digs, which sounded, as she described it, like that in
The Odd Couple
, with layers of newspapers on the floor and the smell of cigars in every room.

Burt might have been happy enough to stay there forever—he liked the comradeship and the sense of
la vie de bohème
, but Margaret, who was tired of communal life and living out of unpacked suitcases, eventually got him to move into a glamorous apartment of their own, with big windows overlooking Central Park, where they entertained lavishly and frequently. Years of traveling around the world with her husband as
he worked had taken their toll—Margaret had decided to stop traveling, an act of independence that baffled Burt and of which Tabasco and her morning rides were a symptom. Just as the young had cried out, “We ain’t marching any more,” Margaret had put her foot down and refused to travel, except during the winter, when she and Burt usually rented a house in Cuernavaca with the Halberstams, John Chancellor and his wife, JFK’s favorite photographer, Stanley Tretick, and his wife, Mo, and other media figures.

It sounded like such a glamorous life, in fact, that I was at once envious and somewhat overawed. Admittedly, I had been brought up surrounded by glamour and I was used to moving in fairly glamorous circles as an editor, but Casey and I lived rather simply. For several years we had rented a succession of immense old summer houses in Dark Harbor, Maine, on an island in Penobscot Bay, but we tended to live quietly up there, too.

Dark Harbor was a curious and unlikely place to choose for the summer, and perhaps if my mind had been less fixed on my work I might have wondered why Casey had chosen this remote island, where most of the tiny community of summer people were far richer than ourselves.

Dark Harbor might have been a place in which to repair whatever differences had begun to pull us apart, but as is so often the case, it had the opposite effect. Rather like Margaret’s travels with Burt, the more Casey and I were together, the further we drifted apart, and there didn’t seem anything to be done about it. By the time I met Margaret in Central Park, the thing we had most in common—though I didn’t know it then and resisted the notion for a long time—was that our marriages had drifted beyond the point of no return.

Oddly enough, the four of us became friends almost at once. Hardly a weekend passed that we didn’t go out to dinner together. Casey and I became frequent guests at the Glinns’ apartment, and we eventually even made plans to go away on a vacation together, renting a house in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with a third couple, despite the fact that Margaret and I had long since become lovers.

When Margaret’s marriage finally exploded (the only word that can describe the event), followed a year or so later by my own (which was more of a collapse than an explosion), it was as if we had known each other for a lifetime. After all, our balancing act had gone on for almost five years before we were finally able to go downtown to City Hall and
tie the knot, during which time I had nevertheless somehow managed to write two books and maintain a successful career, which is a tribute to either my single-mindedness or Margaret’s patience.

Whichever, it was a period of great excitement and happiness for Margaret and me and for Dick and Joni, who had married before us. It seemed, for a time, as if anything was possible, not just in our personal lives, but at S&S.

CHAPTER 28

B
luhdorn liked growth. It was the lifeblood of his empire, and he lived to make new acquisitions. Had Dick been content to sit around buying books and increasing the company’s sales, Bluhdorn would have lost interest in him quickly and possibly in book publishing too. Fortunately, Dick saw his own future and that of S&S as one of growth by acquisition, so Bluhdorn was not disappointed. Shimkin had sold S&S to Bluhdorn in 1976 for $11 million, most of it in Gulf + Western stock, which wasn’t bad for a company that had been launched in 1924 with capital of $25,000 and that was grossing about $50 million a year at the time of the sale. In 1974, when S&S celebrated its first fifty years, it was a major publishing house, but that was no longer enough. The outline of the future was easy enough to perceive, as one by one, with a few exceptions, some of the most famous and illustrious names in publishing—most of them, it was true, poorly managed and short of capital—surrendered their independence. The big fish swallowed the small, without it crossing the minds of the biggest ones that they too might eventually be swallowed.

Size, of course, does not protect a publisher from failure. On the contrary, the bigger you are, the easier it is to make expensive mistakes—and to hide them. The late Ronald Busch, at one time publisher of Ballantine Books, which was bought by Random House in 1973, and later the publisher of Pocket Books, part of S&S, was quoted as saying that buying the big books got easier as the company got larger. “With all the conglomerate money today,” he said, “it’s like playing Monopoly. If we had to use our own resources, we’d think twice about bidding as
much as we do.… But with a parent or a conglomerate that has annual sales of two or three billion dollars and up, with two or three million shareholders, what’s the risk?”

He might have added “Who cares?” Inevitably, the atmosphere changes when the people who own you are far away and deal in billions instead of being just down the hall, counting every penny, and it doesn’t always change for the better. Caution doesn’t get you noticed—on the contrary, it is generally better to fail big than to think small.

T
HIS ALONE
explains some of the larger failures in publishing, as does the belief that somebody who has written one successful book is likely to write another. In my case, the lesson that this is not necessarily—or even commonly—true came in the shape of a telephone call from Claire Smith, one of my favorite agents, who had first brought Susan Howatch to my attention and for years represented Ronnie Delderfield. A suggestion from her was one that ought to be taken seriously, so when she dropped a hint that one of her biggest and most famous clients, the English civil servant turned best-selling novelist Richard Adams, author of
Watership Down
, was thinking of changing publishers, I ran to inform Snyder of the news.

Watership Down
had been a huge best-seller, winning a readership of millions of devoted fans, including myself and Margaret. It had gone unnoticed for ages by American publishers because very few of them were attracted by a long novel about rabbits, told from the rabbits’ point of view. The few who took the trouble to read the manuscript thought it might work if it was drastically shorter and rewritten as a children’s book, but most simply passed on the opportunity to read what was to become one of the most successful and acclaimed works of fiction of the decade.

This particular form of blindness is not by any means rare. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
went unread by most American publishers, who found it too long, too demanding, and neither a children’s book nor an adult novel. James Herriot’s
All Creatures Great and Small
went unread, or was rejected, by visiting Americans for years, even though it was already a big best-seller in the United Kingdom. Fantasy and whimsy—particularly
British
fantasy and whimsy—make many
American publishers acutely nervous. There has always been a certain transatlantic fear that the English sense of humor doesn’t “travel,” still less the English fascination with small animals.

The tale of the rabbits eventually made its way to America and went on to become an instant best-seller on publication here. Like Tolkien’s hobbits and their friends, Adams’s rabbits captured the affection and the interest of all but the most hard-hearted, unsentimental, and obdurate of realists, even if there was about the book, on a second reading anyway, a whiff of sanctimonious and slightly self-conscious religiosity, together with the sense that the author might be too clever for his own good. Still, in its own way, the book was a work of genius, deeply imaginative and satisfying, though the author himself, once he had been brought over for a publicity tour, appeared to be something of a queer fish, and a fish out of water at that.

Of course, most writers who have produced a work of genius
are
queer fish. The deeper a person plunges into his or her own imagination and the stronger the hold of the invented world becomes, the less the writer is likely to appear “normal” to other people. Tolstoy was a very queer fish (or odd duck), even in nineteenth-century Russia, where odd ducks abounded, and English literature is full of even odder ducks. The writer is even more likely to be an odd duck when his or her great work of imagination is essentially childlike. To see the world’s complexities with the simplicity of a child’s eyes is a special form of genius, the Reverend Charles Dodgson being a perfect example of the type, and Adams had much the same curious, divided view of the world as the author of
Alice in Wonderland
. He was at once a serious adult, carrying a heavy load of religious and moral baggage, and a wondering child, able to imagine a whole rich world in a country hedgerow full of rabbits.

To a casual observer, Adams looked a little unhinged in his appearances on American television, but that might have been because most of his interviewers wanted him to be funny about rabbits, whereas he wanted to talk about morality and religion. He was also undergoing the equivalent of the deep-sea diver’s bends, having emerged suddenly from a lifetime of obscurity into the limelight of celebrity and wealth.

It is possible that I read
Shardik
in something of a daze.
Watership Down
had seemed to me a work of real talent, totally convincing and entertaining, and
Shardik
, which I sat up all night reading, seemed far more ambitious and darker, almost like
The Lord of the Rings
in that it presented a whole imagined society, with all its history, folklore, and religion
meticulously invented. At its center was Shardik himself, a great bear who is at once the object of a cult and a perfectly real bear, a kind of ursine equivalent to the rabbits of
Watership Down
.

This was a potent mix, and I was able to report the next morning that Adams had successfully avoided the dreaded “second novel” syndrome with a book that was as original as the first but richer. I was not alone in this opinion. Peter Mayer, then running Avon Books, a major paperback publisher, had been the U.S. paperback publisher of
Watership Down
, and was determined to keep Adams. When he heard that we were anxious to buy
Shardik
, he called immediately to propose that S&S and Avon copublish it. He had read the manuscript overnight as well and was overcome by it, though not rendered inarticulate—indeed, he talked to me about it for what seemed like hours, his voice trembling with enthusiasm, describing the plot in detail as if I had not read the book myself.

The next day, he repeated it all word for word on the telephone to Dick Snyder, who had
not
read the book, of course, but had already heard about it from me. Dick rolled his eyes and interrupted from time to time to say that he didn’t want to hear another word about Kelderek, the lone hunter who discovers Shardik the great bear fleeing from a forest fire and believes him to be the avatar of the god of his people, or the cult of the virginal priestesses, or Genshed, the evil slave dealer who mutilates children, that he wanted to talk about the
deal
, not the goddamn
plot
—but Mayer was not to be stilled until he fell silent and hoarse from talking, at which point Dick wisely told me to negotiate a deal with Mayer, who would otherwise, he guessed, get him to give away points just to get him off the phone.

Dick had no objection to going into partnership with Mayer—“Fifty percent of something is better than a hundred percent of nothing” might have been Leon Shimkin’s motto, but Dick was not above using it too when it suited his purpose, and felt that the amount of money involved—$550,000, which was
big
money then—made it sensible to share the risk. Further, when it came to Richard Adams, Peter Mayer knew what he was doing, and Pocket Books might not. Dick just didn’t want to spend more time listening to how good the book was or being told how to publish it. Mayer positively reveled in details, so it took a very long time to get a contract drawn up, particularly since Mayer made a moral and personal issue out of even the smallest disagreement and was capable of talking about his feelings and the rightness of his position for hours, or even days, to make his point.

It was some time before I actually met Mayer, who was, until then, merely an impassioned, unstoppable voice over the telephone. As it turned out he was charm itself in person, a tall, exceedingly attractive man, about my age, chain-smoking like a chimney, and with the kind of furious, eclectic erudition that I recognized as basically European. His enthusiasm—not just on the subject of
Shardik
—was overwhelming and infectious, and it was very hard to resist him when he was in a good mood—he is perhaps the only person I had ever met about whom the old cliché “His eyes blazed with enthusiasm” was literally true. When he was
not
in a good mood, he was capable—though never with me—of becoming snappish and withdrawn, and in his own way he could be as difficult and imperious as Snyder. A gifted publisher, rather than an editor, Mayer rather perversely prided himself on his skills as a businessman, about which Dick, who regarded him, in this area, at least, as an amateur, was cautiously skeptical. “He falls in loves with books,” Dick would say. “That’s OK for editors, but not for publishers.” In the long run, Dick would be proven right, when Mayer went on to become a major figure in world publishing as the CEO of Viking/Penguin, after a short and deeply unhappy stint as the head of Pocket Books with Dick as his boss, but at the time of
Shardik
it seemed to a lot of people that Mayer was emerging as the Renaissance man of book publishing, equally adept at high culture and low culture, at home with foreign literature to a degree remarkable in American publishing, and with a remarkable flair for both promotion and, as some pointed out enviously, self-promotion. Few other publishers would have spent their spare time running a small private press of their own, as Mayer did, or done it as well, come to that.