Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [135]
“Nice guys finish last,” he said, by way of greeting.
I agreed that this was certainly what most people believed in the United States. The general opinion in England is the reverse, but I saw no point in mentioning that.
“I blame Shimkin most,” Snyder went on. “He should have given Bobby what he wanted. Shimkin nickel-and-dimed him instead and look what happened.”
I agreed that Shimkin was penny-wise and pound-foolish, and not only when it came to Bob. However, I found it difficult to believe that money was the only reason why Bob was moving to Knopf. There he would be, in effect, his own publisher as well as editor in chief, the heir apparent and chosen successor to the Knopfs. At S&S, Schwed was publisher, and it was not a marriage made in heaven, despite Schwed’s belief to the contrary.
Snyder grimaced. His facial appearance seemed to change so often that it was something of an adventure seeing him at intervals. At one point his hair was short, and the frames of his glasses dark, thick, and of executive caliber; at the next, his hair was transformed into a thick, wild tangle of curls, like Medusa’s, while he sported tinted aviator glasses. He even grew a mustache for a while. It was as if he were trying out different personae in the hope of pinning down the one that would take him to the top. “Who would you rather have running things?” he asked. “Schwed or Bobby? Shimkin should have bitten the bullet and made the choice between them. Still, it’s lucky for you, isn’t it?”
I must have looked puzzled and naive. “Come on,” he snapped. “Don’t tell me you haven’t worked out that his job is yours if you go for it. You don’t have any competition. There isn’t anybody else here who can take the job, and just at the moment nobody in their right mind wants to come here. They all figure we’re done for, going down for the fucking third time, losers.… You may not know it yet, but you’ve got S&S by the balls.”
I thought about this, and it gradually dawned on me that Dick might be right—indeed, when it came to this kind of thing, he was almost always right.
Of course, even then Dick, like most people, credited me with Machiavellian deviousness, fueled by fierce ambition, a misunderstanding of my character that I had always found puzzling. Bob, trying to explain his own success at S&S, had once told an interviewer that although his was a competitive nature, he was too busy to have time left over for ambition, a statement that was widely ridiculed as naive and self-serving by those who didn’t know him well but seemed to me right on the mark, not only about himself but about me. A person who is compulsively busy is unlikely to have much time left over for plotting his or her rise. I was often in the right place at the right time, but I had made no particular effort to find my way there, so I was momentarily baffled and even frightened by Dick’s assumption that I not only coveted Bob’s title but was planning how to get it. The idea had simply not crossed my mind.
Now that it had been placed there, it was hard not to think about it. In ten years, I had gone from an assistant editor to executive editor (one step below editor in chief on the publishing totem pole, at least theoretically) and was doing more books than any other editor except Bob—too many, in fact. My immediate reaction was that nobody else at S&S seemed any better qualified for the job than I was—whatever the job might be, for the truth was that the very idea of having an editor in chief was something of a puzzle. Max had assumed the title for most of the company’s history but in the past had delegated it briefly from time to time to such varied personalities as Quincy Howe (later to find greater fame as a writer of popular history), Wallace Brockway (who went on to become a noted anthologizer), Clifton Fadiman, Jr. (who gave it up to become a book reviewer and book-club judge), Jerome Weidman (who resigned from S&S to write a long list of best-selling novels, the best remembered of which was I Can Get It for You Wholesale, a book that was rejected