Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [134]
Fortunately for me, the hysteria surrounding Bob’s departure soon swamped my regrets. It is hard to describe the furor that his move created. Until that point, editors tended to stay with the same publishing house for their whole career—Maxwell Perkins, who stayed at Scribner’s until he died, was fairly typical. What is more, frequent job changing was discouraged—a lingering effect of the Depression in the minds of those who remembered it or whose parents had lived through it. Nothing was more precious than keeping the job you had, however green the pasture might look on the other side of the fence, and loyalty to the company that employed you was assumed to be both owed and rewarded. The notion that a job was simply a stepping stone to the next (and better) job, or that the company might regard its employees, even the key ones, as essentially dismissable and replaceable cogs in the machine had not yet penetrated to the publishing business. In the circumstances, the fact that Bob was transferring himself and his key collaborators to Knopf (and by extension, to the rival Random House camp) was as if a Cambridge don had defected to Oxford or the admiral commanding the Naval Academy at Annapolis had put on an army uniform and taken command of West Point.
Of course, the more praise was thrown at Bob, the more S&S seemed to be lost without him, and very soon it became apparent that unless we acted quickly and carefully those of us who were left behind might be stranded. It was a strange and rapid change of mood. At first, people were overcome by the sense of loss, and wished Bob well, but almost overnight the tears and lamentations gave way to outright fear, as agent after agent called to say that this author or that one wanted to go to Knopf with Bob. Worse, they threatened never to send S&S another book if we made a fuss about it.
The extent to which Bob himself stirred up this incipient exodus is hard to guess, and it is perhaps a measure of the strength of his personal relationships with his writers that so many of them wanted to jump ship. Still, the effect it had on S&S was dispiriting and alarming.
Nobody was more shaken by Bob’s departure than Peter Schwed, though his emotions on the subject seemed to me conflicted. Schwed was an intensely ambitious man, with a prickly pride, and it can hardly have escaped his attention that Bob and his followers were mildly dismissive of the kind of books he liked, and in general thought him better suited to run the rights department than to take on the role of publisher. So long as Bob was there, Schwed, whatever his title, was overshadowed by Bob’s mere presence and undercut by Bob’s feline wit. On the other hand, Schwed was a sentimental man, with generous impulses and strong, old-fashioned loyalties, and he felt a great debt to Bob, who had been at S&S almost as long as he had. Though Schwed was fiercely competitive on a personal level—indeed, it was the dominating characteristic of his personality—he had a certain ancien régime attitude when it came to publishing, perhaps the legacy of a youth spent at Lawrenceville and Princeton, where competition was reserved for the playing fields and gentlemanly behavior was encouraged off them. For whatever reason, Schwed was determined to behave like a gentleman at this first major test of his authority, as if what he sought from authors and agents—and perhaps from Bob—was some kind of recognition that he acted like the Princeton man he was. Fond of Kipling, whose work he could recite in large chunks, Schwed set out to keep his head, when all about him were losing theirs, and thereby made the mistake of his career.
It was, needless to say, Dick Snyder who brought my mind sharply to bear on the realities of the situation, a day or so after Bob’s decision had been announced, by plunking himself down beside my desk and opening his mind to me. He looked