• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 822 0

’s new wave of young Jewish writers (the old wave included writers such as Meyer Levin, who wrote about being Jewish with glum seriousness). Shimkin also occasionally chimed in with complaints from rabbis in Larchmont or Westchester, none of whom, of course, had read the book in question but were merely passing on the unease of their congregations in the face of these new assaults on their faith. Jews poking fun at Jews—worse yet, at the fact of being Jewish—was still a controversial phenomenon in the 1960s, and to those whose minds were still on the Holocaust (which had not yet acquired that name) it was deeply shocking. It was one thing for Gentiles to hate and ridicule Jews—there was nothing new in that—but quite another for Jews to hate and ridicule themselves and, most sinister of all, for other Jews (Jewish publishers, for instance) to make money out of it.

It is to Max’s credit that whatever his own doubts (and whatever pressures may have been put on him by Shimkin and many of his own friends), he did not prevent Bob from taking the S&S fiction list in a direction that cannot have pleased him. Of course, it helped that Bob was successful and increasingly famous—the Schusters might not necessarily like the books he was publishing, but they knew success when they saw it. Besides, Ray, though she was not much of a reader of new fiction, had a wicked sense of humor and was, in this area at least, comparatively unshockable. “So nu, what’s so terrible about all these books?” she once whispered to me at the yearly office outing, which took place at the Schusters’ Sands Point house. “Jews can’t be funny?”

This was the occasion when Ray first announced (to her neighbor W. Averell Harriman) that Bob was “my Max’s new young genius,” a role for which Bob would have been well suited, with his Napoleonic lock of hair and his disheveled clothes, had it not been that he took none of this seriously; indeed, Bob at the Schusters’ looked as if he were slumming far more than former governor Harriman, and in a way he was: Harriman, for all his wealth, was just a politician, whereas Bob was an intellectual.

For a brief time, Bob made S&S, by the sheer force of his personality, intellectually chic, a house very much in his own image, at least on the surface, for S&S was not nor could ever be a Farrar, Straus and Giroux or a Knopf—it was simply too big. Like its chief rival, Random House, it might, for a time, acquire a conspicuous frosting of avant-garde literature, but the cake itself remained made of self-help books, “inspirational” books, business books, big-time popular fiction, and middlebrow nonfiction, as well as such tried-and-true publishing staples as mysteries, puzzle books, income-tax guides, and books on gardening, cooking, bridge, poker, stock-market investment, and almost every known human interest. However much attention Bob’s books might get in the New York literary world, the financial stability of S&S rested on its backlist and on its continued publication of relatively humdrum titles. Stability and profit in book publishing are more likely to come from What to Name the Baby or income-tax guides than from the latest new novel, however critically acclaimed.

A publishing house can only be so big if it is to represent the taste and vision of one person, even of one person’s clique; above that size, if it is to survive, it must be more of a supermarket than a boutique. That is not to say that a publishing house doesn’t need a trendy or famous editor who follows his or her distinctive taste; a house without such a person rapidly becomes dull and sooner or later begins to lose authors. For a good many years during the fifties, sixties, and seventies, Doubleday, then the largest American trade house, was financially successful while producing a seemingly endless flood of solid, safe, middlebrow books without any strong editorial figure. By the early eighties, however, Doubleday went into a sharp decline, and authors no longer wanted to be published there. A sensible publisher knows that any major house needs books that will