Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [121]
Part of his strategy was to work closely with Maschler and Godwin, and with such younger and more unconventional agents as Candida Donadio or Deborah Rogers. At first, a remarkable number of Bob’s books came from the Cape and Penguin lists, but very soon the tide began to flow in the other direction, as Bob’s own well-developed personal taste was increasingly reflected in his list. It became clear that Bob was by far the strongest personality among these competing enfants terribles, with the surest sense of what would sell and the amplest resources. Eventually it came to seem that Maschler was somehow imitating Bob, or that he was merely a lesser British version of him, and the friendship between the two men, while it remained close, was fraught with competition and anxiety, at least on Maschler’s side.
Still, for all the angst, a certain style had been found, and Bob was soon the first book editor to become a celebrity in his own right, much as he claimed to be embarrassed by the phenomenon and shunned the limelight. The story of how he had edited and renamed Catch-22 became publishing legend, as did his clever promotion of Rona Jaffe with The Best of Everything. What made Bob formidable was that he combined a refined literary sensibility with first-rate commercial judgment. He was not an intellectual snob. Crass commercialism was not a phrase that frightened him, and he enjoyed a bad book as much as a good one, provided that it was, as he said with delight, “a good bad book.” What he meant by that seemed mysterious to a lot of people in publishing (and most people at S&S) and even hypocritical, but in fact, I soon discovered, it was really very simple. A novel had to be written with sincerity and out of some genuine passion; if it was, then it didn’t really matter at what level it was written, so long as it was honest. Deliberate, plodding attempts to construct long-winded production-line best-selling fiction, like the books of Irving Wallace, or fiction written with fake feelings and deliberate, empty sensationalism (like most of Harold Robbins’s novels after The Carpetbaggers) bored Bob. He had a nose for the real thing, an authentic vision or view, whether it was “literary” or not. He could enjoy Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls or Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place just as sincerely as he could Jane Austen—for what they all had in common, from Bob’s point of view, was that they were sincere writers, trying as best they could to show the world as they understood and lived in it. Of course, Jane Austen was doing it in better English and with a more refined sensibility, but the quality of the writing or the sensibility was not what mattered.
This was a controversial opinion at the time and remains so for many people, who tend to simplify this into a battle between crass commercialism and serious literature, as if there was not some common gray area into which the two merged—and have merged, more or less, since the beginning of the written word. In any case, it was Bob’s stroke of genius to understand this, right from the beginning, and to approach the manuscripts he read with a far more open mind than the vast majority of his colleagues—and with higher standards, too.
Beyond this, Bob was a gifted reader. It might seem strange to suggest that reading is a talent, since most people assume that almost everybody can and does read every day, but Bob read as a great music critic might listen, with attention, pleasure, a high degree of discrimination, and a sense of perfect pitch. A sentence off balance, a few lines that could be cut, a wrong note, caught his attention, but he did not read, as so many editors do—as poor Henry Simon had, for instance—for the sole purpose of finding flaws. He read for and with pleasure, yet