Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [117]
Most publishers are slow to pick up on change, in part because they are merchants, in part because they have a vested interest in the status quo. If they put an ear to the ground, it is usually to listen to what the bookstores are saying (via the sales reps), rather than to learn what is going on in the streets. Then, too, the more successful publishers are part of the “establishment” (the less successful ones merely aspire to be) and tend to share the opinions of those who are, or fancy themselves to be, like themselves: wealthy and powerful. Max Schuster and Bennett Cerf were somewhat more liberal in their politics than their WASP competitors, but they were not by any means radical or inclined to make waves. They held the more or less middle-of-the-road liberal opinions of their social group, which is to say that they voted Democratic, had admired Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, had preferred Truman to Eisenhower, supported (cautiously) Israel, had their doubts (even more cautiously) about Alger Hiss’s guilt, and believed in the First Amendment without necessarily wanting to publish, or even read, Lolita or The Story of O themselves. Their spiritual center, as it were, was The New York Times, and few of their opinions differed from those expressed on its editorial page, which is not by any means the worst thing one can say about somebody.
As a consequence they were caught flat-footed by the violent social changes that engulfed the nation in the sixties, at just the point when it seemed to most people of fifty and above that after the Depression and the war things were pretty good and only going to get better. Then the pace of events speeded up dizzily, moving too fast for the usual leisurely pace of book publishing, in which it takes a year or two for somebody to write the book and nine months to a year for somebody to publish it. Before the returns were even in on the various panegyrics to Camelot, publishers were rushing out illustrated souvenir books on JFK’s funeral, always one step behind the weekly newsmagazines and two steps behind television. The civil-rights crisis caught them not only unprepared but undecided and embarrassed. Book publishing, as an industry, was pretty much a white man’s business, and while it gradually and with many delays and complaints began to accept women in positions of executive authority during the sixties, it was hard to find a single black person outside the mailroom in most publishing houses. This left book publishers in the uncomfortable position of being in favor of civil rights and racial equality everywhere but in their own offices (a position that has not changed noticeably some thirty years later).
The order of things, which had seemed so settled through the 1950s, was suddenly bewildering to those in charge, who were facing simultaneously the growing anger of women, the sea change in American culture, the revolt of youth (very often among their own children, not just in newsmagazine profiles and nonfiction outlines from authors), the civil-rights movement, and the first signs of widespread public disenchantment with the war in Vietnam. The last was a special problem, since many editors, most academics, and a large percentage of authors were speaking out against the war with increasing passion and expecting publishers to take a stand on it. This was something new. Book publishers had hitherto considered themselves to be under a kind of self-imposed obligation to publish both sides of most issues more or less impartially, rather than to take the moral high ground. There were exceptions, of course—few publishers would have been comfortable