Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [122]
It is conventional in publishing to divide good line editors, who can blue-pencil a manuscript in detail, from editors who are more concerned with the big picture, but Bob was good at both, and watching him work one soon learned that it is no good doing the one if you don’t do the other, that sometimes the big fix was needed, sometimes every line had to be corrected, and on occasion both. You did what you had to, and that was that.
But no editor, no matter how good, can turn a bad book into a good one, so an editor ought to work only on those books he or she loves, for whatever reason. Loving the book makes the work worthwhile and makes it at least possible that something useful will be accomplished by working on it. Working on a book you hate, dislike, or are indifferent to accomplishes nothing at all.
Beyond all his other abilities, Bob was a great teacher, the kind who teaches without being aware of it, and for a period of about four years, during which he reigned as S&S’s editorial star, he turned the editorial department into a kind of school, almost rabbinical in its method of instruction and entirely dominated by his firm but gentle insistence on getting everything right. Perhaps Bob’s only weakness was that while he himself was a remarkably shrewd businessman and seldom overpaid for a book he wanted, he was determined to prevent the business people from intruding into the decisions that mattered to him: which books to publish and how to publish them. These were precisely the decisions, however, that the business people were determined to control, or at any rate to subject to some process of decision making more quantifiable and objective than, say, Bob’s instinctive feel that this or that book was worth publishing and called for a printing of twenty thousand copies. This eventually became a serious problem for him in later positions at Knopf and as the editor of The New Yorker. At S&S, however, these problems did not arise. Fortunately for Bob and his authors, Shimkin’s attention was fixed on getting Max out, while Max’s attention was fixated on staying put.
For a time, no doubt, it might have passed unnoticed by Schuster and Shimkin that S&S was in the process of becoming something it had never been before: a “hot” literary house, putting out a remarkable list of new writers, one after another. The discovery and launching of Heller was followed by innumerable launches of new stars, whether from the United Kingdom, like Edna O’Brien, Len Deighton, and Doris Lessing, or from the United States and Canada, like Bruce Jay Friedman, Mordecai Richler, James Leo Herlihy, and Charles Portis. Unexpectedly, improbably, Bob had transformed S&S, with its reputation for nonfiction and self-help best-sellers, into the hottest fiction house in New York. The smart, irreverent, wisecracking Jewish black-comic novel, exemplified by books such as Stern and A Mother’s Kisses, was virtually his invention and led to many anxious discussions with Max. Max was of the generation that did not think there was anything particularly funny about being Jewish—rather the contrary—and was made nervous by the fact that this new school of fiction tended to portray Jews as whining, complaining, neurotic, sex obsessed, and burdened with hellishly dominating mothers and weak fathers. In A Mother’s Kisses, the hero’s monster-mother begs and threatens a counterman, “I want you to cross your heart and swear to Christ that my son’s patties aren’t greasy,” and most of these books prefigured the “self-hating” Jews of Philip Roth’s later fiction (Portnoy’s Complaint and after), caricaturing the urban Jewish family in ways that Julius Streicher himself might have envied.
It was not only Max who was sensitive to this kind of thing. Even Peter Schwed, who hardly admitted to being Jewish at all, expressed his doubts about Bob