Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [116]
Given this weak and divided authority at the top, it is hardly surprising that there was a certain amount of not very discreet jockeying for power below. This resulted in the resignation of Henry Simon, ostensibly for reasons of health but actually because he had been badly outmaneuvered by his peers. As Max declined, Henry must have had every expectation of getting—at long last—a chance to wield some kind of power. But by the time Max got around to relinquishing some of his powers, Henry was old, cranky, embittered, and simply too tired to take on a real fight against younger, hungrier men. Peter Schwed was promoted over him to become de facto publisher, while Bob Gottlieb made his peace with Schwed and became managing editor.
What this meant, in practice, was that the two people who most disliked Henry Simon were now running exactly those parts of the company that affected him most closely. The bottom line was that his books were neither exciting enough nor profitable enough to reward him with the kind of position he craved. Bob had brought in a whole roster of new talent, while Schwed was responsible, despite his London trips, for a solid list of sports books and fiction and nonfiction best-sellers. In the final analysis, in book publishing nothing really matters but the books, and Henry had simply been outpaced by his rivals.
I had long since switched, with whatever pangs of conscience, to the winning side, and Henry knew it—and he wasn’t about to forgive my defection. When I said good-bye to him as he was leaving his office, he shook my hand limply, an ironic smile on his gaunt face. “Good luck,” he said. Then, with a bitter expression, he added, “but I don’t think you’ll need it.”
Shortly afterward, Bob moved into Henry’s corner office, I moved into Bob’s, and Dick Snyder moved upstairs to join us on the twenty-eighth floor.
I was perfectly content and assumed that there would be no more changes for a long, long time. In fact, they had only just begun.
PUBLISHING, DESPITE a lot of humbug to the contrary, is a reactive business—which is to say that publishers and editors do not as a rule make taste or determine people’s political opinions or effect major social changes. In the final analysis, they adapt, however unwillingly or hesitantly, to the demands, taste, and opinions of the marketplace or they go under. That is not to say that there are no exceptions. From time to time a book published in a spirit of stubborn contrarianism—written and published against the flow, so to speak—will become a major bestseller, but in retrospect this has often been because it accidentally tapped some nascent change in public opinion. To take a famous example, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the biggest best-sellers in the history of American publishing, is often credited with having created in its many millions of readers a revulsion against slavery that led directly to the Civil War—even Abraham Lincoln, on meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, remarked that she was the little lady who had written the book that had begun the big war—but the truth is that the book capitalized on feelings that were already there. The success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin merely signified that there were more people opposed to slavery—and to any compromise on slavery with the Southern states—than politicians, including Lincoln, had hitherto supposed; indeed, had the bestseller list existed in the mid-nineteenth century, Southerners might have viewed the success of Stowe’s novel in the rest of the country—and the civilized world—as a good indication of the overwhelming number of people ranged against their cause.
To take another example, Wendell Willkie’s One World, which S&S published in extraordinary numbers in 1943, did not convince the public that the United Nations was a desirable idea—the public had already formed that opinion and were therefore in sympathy with Willkie’s book when