Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [125]
At some deep level, Bob was beginning to know his own strength and to chafe at having to remain under the control of people he made no secret of despising. Yet seldom had I ever met anybody who found it so necessary to deny his own ambition. Bob believed—had to believe—that everything he wanted was in the best interests of the company, of his friends, of his authors. Promotion, more power, a bigger office, he maintained, had been thrust upon him. He had accepted them unwillingly, humbly, because he had the best interests of S&S at heart. Nobody had worked harder (which was true), nobody cared as much (which was almost true), nobody loved S&S more or was loved with such intensity by almost everybody who mattered at S&S.
The truth was that Bob’s character disguised not only his ambition but a certain steely authoritarianism. He wanted to run things by himself, in his own way, but in spite of this need to dominate he always wanted to be loved. His was altogether the spirit of a benevolent monarch who both craves and needs his subjects’ love. It was at all times evident to him that he knew best and that his opinion was formed out of his love of S&S, of literature, of other people, and with no selfish motive in mind. All, in short, was for the best in the best of all possible worlds—or would be, if only Schwed would stop interfering and if Shimkin finally saw the light and let Bob run the company.
What Shimkin saw instead was that Bob had a shrewd eye for commercial success, a kind of natural instinct for “good trash,” and that it was therefore worth humoring him, but he had no intention of putting Bob or his “fan club” in charge of S&S. Shimkin believed in doling out small raises and bonuses, spoon-feeding a bit at a time, always encouraging the employee to believe that what he or she wanted was just around the corner, and in this way he strung Bob on for longer than anyone could have imagined, mostly because Bob was perfectly sincere when he said that S&S was his home and his family. It had not yet occurred to anyone that he might be able to take those of his family he needed most to a new home—it had probably not even occurred to him. It was as if he could not even conceive of working anywhere else. S&S was where he had come of age, where the most important and productive years of his career had taken place, where he turned himself from a penniless student into the loved and admired arbiter of literary fashion.
Nor could any of those of us who were Bob’s friends imagine working elsewhere or without him. To an extraordinary degree, he inspired loyalty, affection, even love. Despite the fact that he did not enjoy the autonomy he coveted, he was unfailingly supportive of those he liked. He did not confine his support or his interest to the group around him, however. He involved himself in any S&S book that caught his attention or seemed to have some possibility of success, whoever the editor might be.
Bob’s hand reached far and wide through the S&S list. Although he was not much interested in history himself, he spotted such original books as Peter Tompkins’s A Spy in Rome and encouraged me in my effort to add more books on history to the list. Whether it was the rise of the Zulu nation, in Donald R. Morris’s The Washing of the Spears, or the mutinies in the French army in World War One, in Richard M. Watt’s Dare Call It Treason, Gottlieb was as undaunted by long, fact-filled books with lots of notes and pictures and a whopping great index as he was by first novels. Provided you could show him genuine enthusiasm