Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [120]
But it was, in fact, Bob who set the pattern that still holds in book publishing, in which the major editor or editors of a publishing house are generally believed (rightly or wrongly) to be capable of miracles by turning a manuscript into a successful book if they want to—the editor as a miracle worker. And not just miracle worker, for Bob was a father figure, even to people far older than himself, an analyst, always willing to delve into other people’s problems, a father-confessor, on call twenty-four hours a day, as well as the fastest and most sensitively tuned reader on the block. Almost single-handedly, Bob managed to turn what had hitherto been thought of as a somewhat stuffy job into a glamorous one.
It might have been a power base, had Bob wanted a power base, but he showed no desire for one as yet, being for the moment content to create what amounted to a publishing house within a publishing house and to surround himself with faithful admirers—his “loved ones,” as he liked to refer to those closest to him. Bob’s publishing style was in part based on the new English model—in the sixties, many of the older English publishing houses, tottering on the brink of insolvency or irrelevance, sought new leases on life by bringing in as editorial directors young men whom the owners would never have tolerated in their houses or clubs in more normal circumstances. The members of the new breed were the publishing equivalent of the “angry young men” who changed the British theater in the late fifties. Sharper, tougher, rougher edged, borderline scruffy, openly ambitious (never a popular thing in England), and eager to change things, they came from outside the stuffy, middle-class background of most British publishers and were often openly contemptuous of their good manners, lack of passion for books or ideas, and banker’s hours.
PERHAPS THE most admired of these new brooms was Tony Godwin, a former bookseller, whom Sir Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, one of England’s most respected cultural institutions, brought in to sweep clean his editorial office. Godwin, with his wiry, bushy mop of hair, his narrow body dressed in casual clothes, his very un-English gift of enthusiasm, and his even more un-English dislike of bullshit, was a man determined to have his own way and absolutely certain of his taste and judgment (characteristics that were to lead him from Penguin to Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and finally, fatally, to the United States). Even more charismatic was Tom Maschler, who had improbably been picked to revitalize the august and revered house of Jonathan Cape, Ltd., perhaps England’s most distinguished publishing house. Maschler was as abrasive and impassioned as Godwin but with a darker charm that was very different from Godwin’s engaging candor and with more unconventional and ambitious literary tastes. It was hard to find anybody who did not like Tony Godwin, even among those who thought he was a fraud, and even harder to find anybody who would admit to liking Tom Maschler, but the two of them provided Bob with a sense of what could be done if one combined a powerful personality and a willingness to take publishing risks with some real degree of control over the publishing process.
Because S&S was so much larger, Bob was never to gain the complete independence that Godwin enjoyed for a time at Penguin (until Godwin published a collection of fierce anticlerical cartoons by Siné, the author of The French Cat, at which point Sir Allen fired him) or that Maschler, always more subtle than his rival, was to have at Cape for