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By Root 912 0

write might be impaired. Did we want to be responsible for destroying their creative ability? Were we aware that many of them had said that if they couldn’t go with Bob, they wouldn’t write a word for S&S? Both Dick and I were well aware of these threats, resented them bitterly, and didn’t believe a word of them. Both of us were in agreement that this kind of emotional blackmail was at once ridiculous and unlikely to last. If we kept up a firm front, refused to let anybody go, and above all refused to make exceptions, sooner or later the fuss would die down. If there is one thing that’s true about writers, it’s that they need to write; it would not be long before even the most adamant of them sat back down at the typewriter. In the end, we might gain more respect from having toughed it out than from giving in. Certainly, so far as Dick could see, we had nothing to lose.

Peter Schwed, however, did not altogether agree. Persuaded that S&S would gain in the long run from behaving in an honorable and decent way, he let a couple of the writers who were closest to Bob go (most of them Candida Donadio’s clients, for she was the most vociferous in her demands), thus undercutting Dick’s position. After all, Dick argued, if we were willing to let Joe Heller go, what argument could we make for keeping, say, Wallace Markfield?

This was to be a fateful difference of opinion in many ways. In the first place, it confirmed Dick in what was to become his “us against them” view of the literary world and thereby set the tone for much of what was to follow; second, it led to a certain enmity between Dick and Schwed, with the result that in the very moment when Schwed’s career seemed to have been capped by assuming complete authority over S&S, Dick was already determined to take his place.

I HAD a stormy drink date with Candida Donadio that to this day stands out in my mind as one of the more unpleasant and demeaning social occasions of a lifetime. I don’t remember where Candida and I met—probably the Italian Pavilion. Bubbling over with enthusiasm and gossip, sharp-tongued and endowed with a wicked sense of humor, Candida resembled a Sicilian Earth Mother, her heavy frame wrapped like an untidy, bulky package in yards and layers of black schmatta, her enormous handbag weighted down with the manuscripts of her clients. A one-woman fountain of publishing news, she spent her life on the telephone. If you were about to get fired or lose a major author, Candida was likely to know about it before you did and spread the news from one end of publishing to the other before you’d had a chance to digest it yourself. In the days of the blockbuster paperback auctions, when rights sales were the big news, the rights managers of the major publishers were the source of every rumor, leak, and gossip item, their phone lines glowing red-hot from use. Candida was one of the few non-rights people plugged into their network and reveled in being the first to know whatever the hot secret of the day was.

She had a way of dismissing those she thought unimportant that made her no friends, and she was not shy about letting editors know that they didn’t come up to the standards of her clients. Her loyalty to her clients was unquestioned, though not a few of them may have found it suffocating, which perhaps explains why some left her as soon as they had succeeded. She was also endowed with that rarest of commodities in the world of book publishing: a sharp, shrewd, sure taste for interesting new fiction. Whatever her other faults, you had to admire her judgment about books. When she really liked something, she was never halfhearted about it and almost always right.

Candida was, in short, exactly the person you wanted to have on your side if you were a publisher or editor, which made it all the more aggravating that she wanted to pull her authors away. We sat at a small table near the bar and ordered a drink. Now that we were here, I realized that I had made a mistake. Almost everybody in the bar was in publishing, and it must be perfectly clear to them why I was having