Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [14]
Nevertheless, being paid to read seemed like money for jam. It had simply never occurred to me that anybody would pay money, however little, for something that was as natural as breathing to me. The only problem was that I wasn’t being paid enough to live on and didn’t have any structure on which to build a life for myself.
Freelancers are generally not a clubby lot, but I had made one friend, Leslie Davison, and we sometimes met for coffee or a sandwich after we had picked up our work for the day. Her brother, Peter, she told me, was the editor of the Atlantic Monthly Press in Boston, a fact that did not deeply impress me, since I knew nothing about book publishing. Books appeared somehow, but the process by which they did so was a mystery to me.
The only writer I knew well was Graham Greene, and his relationship with his publisher seemed distant, to put it mildly. Once he had finished writing a book, his secretary typed it, sent it off to Max Reinhardt, the beaming and affable chairman and managing director of the Bodley Head, in London, and that was that. Apart from Reinhardt, the only book publisher I knew was George Weidenfeld. Just as the British film industry seemed to be run by Hungarian Jews, the British book-publishing business seemed to be run by German Jews.
Leslie Davison made it her task to persuade me that I should be working in book publishing. She had no wish to work for a publisher herself, but she thought I was ideally suited to be in the same business as her brother. I was not so much resistant as baffled—in all the fantasies I had had about my future, the one business I had never considered was book publishing. Still, I had to admit that there was something in what she said. I was a fast reader in three languages who liked books, after all.
Of course, I was too innocent at the time to realize the fatuousness of this reasoning. The fact that one likes good food does not carry with it any promise that one would make a good chef or be a competent restaurateur. A taste for wearing good suits does not make one a tailor. As it happens, many of the most successful people in book publishing hardly like books at all and very seldom read one, but I did not know this at the time.
There were, at the time, a lot of new and unfamiliar pressures on me. I was anxious to prove to my father that I could exist on my own in New York (or anywhere else) and even more anxious to get out of the no-man’s-land of freelance work into something more secure. Moreover, I was now living with Casey, whom I had started to date when I was working for Sidney and who seemed likely to lose her job fairly soon, since Sidney had a feudal sense of property about her and apparently felt that he should have been consulted. When we decided, shortly afterward, to marry, he took even greater offense, and no wedding gifts were forthcoming from him or Madge.
At this time of my life, I was still haunted by my experience in Hungary, which was becoming harder to deal with the more it receded into the past. Apparently, the Hungarian Revolution had seeped down to my unconscious, along some hidden, Freudian pathway, emerging at night in my dreams. I slept restlessly—my head full of violent scenes and hidden dangers, not vague or fantastic ones but horribly realistic and familiar—with a sense of dread that wouldn’t go away. Often I kept a loaded pistol under my pillow, as if I expected the AVO (the Hungarian secret police) or the Soviet military police to kick in the door at any moment. It was not a good frame of mind in which to begin a relationship, nor for job hunting, but I felt that regular employment at something I enjoyed might help get rid of the nightmares.
I began to make a few tentative calls.
CHAPTER 3
Book publishing, it turned out, was not by any means easy to enter. The first difficulty was that it appeared to be rather like one of those English institutions—certain clubs and regiments, the Life Guards, the Grid or the Bullingdon at Oxford, Lloyd’s of London—that you couldn’t join unless you not only knew the right people but