Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [114]
Public sympathy, moreover, was usually on the side of the writer in such cases. This was an attitude largely shared by editors, most of whom were quite used to waiting for years for a manuscript to come in and to treating the delivery date on a contract as infinitely elastic, fiercely resisting any attempt on the part of “the business people” to go after authors for late delivery, however much water had flowed under the bridge since the contract was signed. Bob Gottlieb, for instance, leaped to the passionate defense of writers whom he himself accused of being deadbeats at the first sign of interest in them from the business department.
The gap between “us”—editors, intellectuals, people of a certain sensibility—and “them”—suit-wearing apparatchiki who went around turning off the lights and didn’t read books—was nowhere greater than at S&S, where the slightest intervention of the business people in editorial matters was seen as part of Shimkin’s long struggle to gain control of S&S and deprive editors of their cherished privileges and independence. Even those who did not like Max Schuster—or dismissed him as a henpecked figure of fun—preferred him to the alternative, which was Shimkin.
IT IS the misfortune of most men that they achieve what they have always wanted at the point when it is too late for them to enjoy it or make good use of it, and Shimkin was no exception. Shrewd and patient, one of the rare figures in publishing who was a businessman first and actually preferred going over the account books to reading the books the company published, Shimkin was to secure complete control over S&S long after his energy and vision had already been eclipsed.
By the time that Shimkin and Schuster were equal partners in S&S (they rotated the offices of president and chairman of the board on a yearly basis), Shimkin was in almost as much danger of becoming a caricature of himself as Max was, despite the fact that he was by many years the younger man. Max’s many eccentricities were equaled by Shimkin’s endless financial homilies—the summit of his wisdom was “Fifty percent of something is better than one hundred percent of nothing,” which he managed to work into every conversation at least once—not to speak of his unconvincing (and undependable) facade of Pickwickian good humor, his unflagging attention to unimportant details, his struggle with depression, and his growing drinking problem. To see the two men together was to be exposed to such a catalog of tics, quirks, manias, idées fixes, and compulsive behavior as to call for the talent of Dr. Oliver Sacks.
By the early 1960s, though Shimkin was in sight of his goal—as Max’s deterioration and declining health began to be obvious—he was an angry and embittered man, no longer in complete control of himself. Already, it was well known throughout the company that there was no point in seeing Shimkin about anything that mattered after lunch, when two or three stiff martinis would have ignited his suspicion and his temper to a white-hot glow. His motherly secretary kept a pitcher of martinis ready in a thermos bottle for the late afternoon, when the ones he had drunk at lunchtime were beginning to wear off. By the end of the day, when he left for home, he was rolling unsteadily on his feet as he stood on Fiftieth Street looking for his car and very often looking for a fight as well.
CHAPTER 16
The mid-sixties were a troubled and uncertain time for everybody at S&S, as they were, by and large, for the rest of the publishing industry. Although on