Back Then (32 page)

Despite these ventures into tie-in and premium publishing, Max's sustaining passion was for the dissemination of knowledge, a goal symbolized by the publishing logo he and his partner Dick Simon had chosen decades earlier, a rendering of Jean François Millet's painting of a peasant sowing seeds in a field. The house motto, “Give the Reader a Break” (cast in bronze as a paperweight), conveyed a commitment to editorial civility and tact he and Simon considered vital to the publisher's job.

When I worked for him (and long before as well as long after), Max was in the grip of a scheme to put together and publish a great Summa, or Novum Organum, or Five (or fifty) Foot-Shelf to be called
The Inner Sanctum Library of Living Literature
. It already included spectacular publishing successes like Thomas Craven's
A Treasury of Art Masterpieces
, a special edition of
War and Peace
, and Ernest Sutherland Bates's
The Bible Designed to Be Read as Living Literature
(the title aroused a fair amount of indignation and amusement). Taking all knowledge for its province,
The Inner Sanctum Library of Living Literature
was to cover the full range of human culture—verbal, musical, practical, and pictorial—from Homer, Plato, and Montaigne to state-of-the-art advice on how to achieve peace of mind and remove cat vomit from upholstery. Max's own and cherished contribution was a well-received anthology,
A Treasury of the World's Great Letters
. With a passion for explicitness and elaboration, and in case you weren't yet sure what it was that you were holding in your hand, Max had subtitled his collection of letters
From Ancient Days to Our Own Time, Containing the Characteristic and Crucial Communications and Intimate Exchanges and Cycles of Correspondence of Many of the Outstanding Figures of World History, and Some Notable Contemporaries
.

M. Lincoln Schuster and Albert Einstein, 1946.

Max often expounded on the
Inner Sanctum Library
and on other publishing matters over lamb or chicken curry at the Rockefeller Center Lunch Club, a midday feeding place (at night the Rainbow Room) for heavy hitters in publishing, broadcasting, and communications. When one of Max's friends there, J. David Stern, a little roostery man who owned newspapers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, announced as he left his table that he was going out to buy the
New York Post,
someone said, “Here, David, here's a nickel. Please buy a copy for me.” Stern's ego, like that of another familiar figure there, the public relations mogul Benjamin Sonnenberg, was invulnerable to ridicule. The food at these table-hopping lunches was invariably preceded by Max's purely ceremonial order—a gesture of hospitality to his guest—“a little Scotch with a lot of soda.” He never took more than a sip. When the main dish arrived he and I often tussled over the sauce boat of chutney—he assumed it was meant for him alone. He had a distressing habit of spraying food as he talked. You learned not to flinch but, between courses, to escape to the men's room to clean your eyeglasses. A good meal, in Max's idiom, earned “good reviews.”

Lunch was his time for dispensing general wisdom, instruction, and merriment—he had an infallible sense of the comic and a Talmudic gift for cutting through nonsense, and he was as funny as he was shy. Behind thick glasses his eyes teared with laughter. “Even authors have rights,” he told me, “although you don't have to invite them to dinner with you.” When pressed for a decision that he wasn't yet willing to make, his trademark stall was, “Let's give him a definite maybe.” He favored formula phrases like “hardening of the categories,” “twenty-twenty hindsight,” “faith, hope, and clarity.” He had learned from experience that the manuscript delivery date in publishing contracts was only “a baseline for postponements.” “Always read with a pencil in your hand,” he told me many times—since then I've never been able to do otherwise. “Rule number one in publishing: Shoot the widow”: he had learned this lesson in abrasive dealings with the estate of Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman, author of one of the firm's most successful books ever,
Peace of Mind
.

The function of an editor, he often told me, was not to pass judgment on an author's work—anybody can do that—but to recognize whatever potential it had and either help the author dig it out or dig it out yourself. The supreme exemplar of such “creative editing,” as almost every publishing novice knew, was the late and legendary Maxwell Perkins, credited with having nurtured Hemingway and Fitzgerald and turning Thomas Wolfe's trunkloads of manuscript into something like novels. The trouble with the Perkins exemplar, Max argued, was that some authors expected magic from their editors, abdicated responsibility for their work, and acted like children.

He was addicted to quoting from a four-page dittoed collection of epigrams—
The Wisdom of the S(ages), or, Short Sentences Based on Long Experience
(in other words,
Max-ims
)—that he compiled, updated from time to time, and distributed to friends. Among his favorites were “God is subtle but not malicious” (Albert Einstein); “There is no cure for birth or death except to enjoy the interval” (George Santayana); “Always do right; you will gratify some people, and astonish the rest” (Mark Twain); and “Great thoughts come from the heart” (Vauvenargues). Another referred to the denizens of Boca Raton, Palm Beach, and Juan-les-Pins, places Max and his wife often visited in the winter: “Shady people in sunny places.” My own favorite during these recitations of gnomic wisdom was: “This too shall pass.”

Max had a stock of inescapable routines and fetishes, like sending a messenger for an advance copy of
Publishers Weekly
—he had to be first with the news. Every morning at eight-forty-five he phoned whoever was in charge of publicity and asked, “What's new on the city desk?” Another routine: “This bulletin just in. Someone was seen attempting to buy a book at Brentano's [or Doubleday, or Scribner's]. The manager called the police, and the man is now at Bellevue being held for observation.” I attended these daily performances with an aplomb verging on catatonia.

As part of my training I had to learn Max's system of abbreviations and verbal algorithms, great time-savers when bucking letters down the line. His scribbled PAAIMA UYOJ DTN MLS at the top of a letter he had received meant, when decoded, “Please answer as in my absence. Use your own judgment. Do the necessary. M. Lincoln Schuster.” The tiresome but officially approved formula for my replies: “In Mr. Schuster's absence from the office, I am taking the liberty of responding to your letter of such-and-such a date.” (It was amazing how often he was supposed to be absent from the office.) His alphabet code was as much a Schuster trademark as the straight pins, a menace to beginners, that he used instead of paper clips (he abhorred them) to fasten papers together. Another trademark: the pink, blue, and green three-byfive slips, each color with a particular significance, he kept in his left-hand coat pocket. He used them for recording instructions, ideas, and, of course, maxims and then moved them to his right-hand or “out” pocket from which they would go to his secretaries for action or filing.

Drafting Max's own letters in triple space for his revisions and eventual signature, I became, in effect, a ghostly presence in his publishing affairs. Over his name I carried on phantom correspondences with all sorts of people, including Henry Ford II, whose equivalent phantom, impressively named Forrest D. Murden Jr., I once had lunch with. Each of us knew but neither acknowledged the other's role in the exchanges between our masters. In time I achieved a modest command of Schuster boilerplate, hyperbole, and formulaic closings and learned from him not to raise more than one question per letter if you wanted results, and always to close with a request for action (the “what to do next” paragraph). On my own I also learned that if you wanted to confuse and exasperate a letter writer who made the mistake of raising several questions, you had only to answer just one.

Working for Max Schuster, I thought, was like playing for the New York Yankees. I was proud that I had been recruited in the first place, lasted as long as I did (about five years), and worked with authors I admired and brought into the house—the sociologist C. Wright Mills, the memoirist Niccolò Tucci, the poet Muriel Rukeyser. Tucci's
Before My Time
, an account of his early years in Mussolini's Italy, was a work of genuine literary distinction, comparable to Vladimir Nabokov's
Speak, Memory
. Tucci had seen the rise and demise of fascism only to find himself living in the America of do-nothing President Dwight Eisenhower and Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, the first, “crazy and cancer-ridden,” Tucci raged in one of his operatic appearances in my office (making significant moves toward the open window), and the second, equally “crazy,” bent on plunging the world into another hot war.

Muriel Rukeyser's
One Life
combined poetry, biography, reportage, meditation, and history in a boldly original way that was bound to baffle and repel some readers. It told the story of Wendell Willkie, a lawyer and corporate leader (president of Commonwealth and Southern, a giant utility holding company), a Democrat turned liberal Republican, who had entered the political arena, his critics joked, as a “barefoot boy from Wall Street.” He ran for president against F.D.R. in 1940; he toured wartime England, Russia, and China as F.D.R.'s personal emissary; and in 1943 he published
One World
, a book (written with Joe Barnes's help) that described his travels, preached globalism, and sold about four and a half million copies by the time he died in 1944. A foe of Amerian isolationism, Willkie had been one of my heroes. I would have voted for him in 1940 if I had been of voting age. But by 1957, when Muriel's book came out, he was pretty well forgotten or, if remembered at all, counted among the freaks of recent political history. The first book I sponsored when I came to Simon and Schuster,
One Life
, described by its author as “a story and a song,” earned me as its editor a plea from
Post
columnist Murray Kempton, in his review in the
New York Post
, to get down on my knees and pray for forgiveness.

CHAPTER 14

During the early and mid-1950s
there seemed always to be a party, small or large, at Bernie Winebaum's walk-up apartment at 950 First Avenue: a mix of writers (William Gaddis, Jimmy Merrill, and David Jackson, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler), museum and gallery curators (William S. Lieberman, Jacob Bean), and occasional society night creatures. Bernie's impromptu, ad hoc parties simply happened, like flurries of snow.

I had known Bernie only from a distance when we were students togther in a freshman German course at Harvard. The instructor, Heinrich Kruse, said to have been an officer in the
Kaiser's army in World War I, recognized a natural victim in me, and after three weeks of systematic humiliation I dropped his course. Bernie, as I was to learn, soldiered on, and seven years later, when we ran into each other at a wine cellar in Paris, he recalled my ordeal in detail. It was impossible not to love him for such concern. In the intervening years he had acquired the confident manners and style of the WASP upper class along with a certain stylish fastidiousness, but he managed to do this without selling out his loyalty to middle-class Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where his father, prominent in the Jewish community, ran the Hearst news agency for northern New England, acquired valuable real estate, and prospered. When we met in Paris Bernie was on leave from a liaison job in Germany with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, one of several organizations trying to deal with the vast tide of displaced persons the war had left in the hands of the victors. “Guilt and officialdom, dirt and depravity,” he wrote to me from Schweinfurt. “You can picture, if you care to, sniveling Germans, black marketing DP's, bribe-taking petty officials, the habitual smut of occupation army people,
und so weiter
.” He managed to do his job with the little German he had learned in Herr Kruse's class supplemented by a smattering of Yiddish picked up from his grandparents.

A year later he made a binary shift, from inferno to paradiso, from Schweinfurt in the Allied Zone of occupied Germany to the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. He rented an apartment there that he said looked a little like the Museum of Modern Art, took his meals with Wystan Auden and Chester Kallman, and joined a “small but ferocious American colony” that had touched down like a flock of migrating birds: Truman Capote, the poet James Schuyler (then Auden's secretary), Tennessee Williams, and an assortment of “literary chasers” and remittance people from New York.

When his money ran out Bernie left Ischia for New York. Endowed with considerable charm and worldly experience, a fluent writer and an accomplished artist, over the next few years he worked at a succession of prize jobs: at
Time
; at
Flair
, Fleur Cowles's glossy magazine of fashion and the arts; at a top advertising agency, Ogilvy, Benson, and Mather. He was never able to stay put, after a brief euphoria sinking into a state of chronic disgruntlement, picking fights with his employers, unable to satisfy whatever it was that he expected of himself. I hadn't begun to realize how constantly he drank—our favorite was a medium-price blended whiskey called Bellows Partner's Reserve—until one weekend when we flew to Miami to stay with an aunt of his and he vomited on the tarmac.