Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [137]
It was thought at the time better to make as little fuss over this promotion as possible, since it could only draw more attention to the fact that Bob had left S&S for Knopf. No celebration took place, therefore—indeed, seldom has anybody received a promotion with less fanfare or amid a greater sense of gloom—and as Shimkin assured me, the title itself was a more than ample reward and would not, for the moment, be accompanied by any change in my salary. Had anybody told me that I would still be editor in chief of S&S thirty years later, I would have been amazed and perhaps disconcerted.
In the meantime, we were besieged by agents as their authors jumped ship. Almost immediately we received calls asking for the release of Joseph Heller, Robert Crichton, Chaim Potok, Mordecai Richler, Charles Portis, Jessica Mitford, Bruce Jay Friedman, Rona Jaffe, Doris Lessing, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, and many others—almost everybody, in fact, whom Bob had under contract or option. This was a difficult and delicate problem, but what made it worse was that it represented the more or less unanimous judgment among agents that those of us who remained at S&S were going to fail and, perhaps worse still, that we weren’t worthy of their clients. It was rather like being kicked in the stomach once you’ve been knocked down in a fight. A small number of Bob’s authors announced their loyalty to S&S and elected to stay, though I could not help noticing with a sinking heart—since they would be my responsibility—that at least two of them, Meyer Levin, the litigious author of Compulsion, and S. J. Perelman, were so notoriously difficult that Bob might almost have persuaded them to stay.
Curiously, the fact that we felt ourselves to be legally in the right made the literati even angrier. After all, none of the contracts gave the authors a right to leave simply because their editor had left (such “editor’s clauses” came into being after Bob’s departure but remained limited to a very small number of major writers and invariably contained any number of complicated loopholes); the writers had signed a contract with S&S and taken S&S’s money. Nothing obliged us to release them, especially under threat, and indeed it seemed to both Dick and me that a mass release of Bob’s authors to Knopf would create such an atmosphere of failure at S&S and seem such a confession of inferiority and defeat that the company might never recover its self-confidence or momentum. As I was going down in the elevator one evening, Dick got on at the twenty-seventh floor, looking tired and glum. “They’re going to hand it over to you and me just as it crashes,” he said. “No authors, the agents hate us, and everybody’s waiting to see us fail.” His face suddenly lit up with a broad smile. “It’s a great way to start,” he said. “We can only go up from here.”
This optimism was soon overshadowed by real anger, however, first of all at the “literary community,” which Dick perceived as being out to get us and as having written us off in favor of Bob. Dick saw it as a simple problem. Those who owed us a book should be made to deliver it, and that was that. After that, once we had published it, if they still wanted to leave us and go to Knopf, fine, but first they had to live up to their contractual obligation. A contract was a contract. If a writer could unilaterally cancel it, pay back the money, and leave for another publisher, why have contracts at all or option clauses? To this, the agents replied that writers are not indentured servants or slaves, they were artists. They couldn’t be treated like inanimate objects. If they were prevented from following their editor, their ability to