• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 884 0

he left to live in London, where his boulevardier presence was more appreciated and where there was a certain respect for him as a literary exile, though he complained bitterly of the rye bread without seeds. There, he improbably formed a liaison with a much younger woman (his wife, Laura, had eventually succumbed) and set about the task of writing his autobiography, The Hindsight Saga. Alas, funny as Perelman could be at the expense of other people, he was unable to be funny about himself, or even frank, and the book was never completed, perhaps mercifully. Further embittered by this, he eventually quarreled with me and announced his departure from S&S by publishing a piece about me in The New Yorker called “Under the Shrinking Royalty the Village Smithy Stands,” in which my fondness for horses and riding was caricatured brilliantly. I was none too gently lampooned as Mitchell Krakauer, editor in chief of “Diamond & Oyster,” wearing riding breeches to work and hammering out horseshoes in a leather apron before my very own forge in my Rockefeller Center office. Seldom has an author expressed his unhappiness with his publisher more clearly.

The oval anteroom of Diamond & Oyster, my publishers, had been refurbished since my last visit with a large bas-relief plaque of their logo, a diamond-studded oyster bearing the motto “Noli unquam oblivisci, Carole: pecuniam sapientiam esse” (“Never Forget, Charlie: Money Is Wisdom”), and under it a blond, oval-shaped receptionist strikingly reminiscent of Shelley Winters. As thirty-five minutes ticked away without any word from Mitchell Krakauer, the editor I was calling on, I began to develop paranoid symptoms. Heretofore there hadn’t been any hassle about seeing him; what was amiss now? Had some stripling in patched denim fresh out of Antioch whispered into his ear that I was vieux jeu, old hat, nye kulturny? Or had Krakauer learned in some devious way that Shelley Winters was in a 1941 play of mine, “The Night Before Christmas,” and deliberately planted her double here to taunt me as a slippered pantaloon? I felt myself inflate like a blowfish at the veiled insult. Surely nobody could be so base, and yet in this carnivorous age of four-hundred-thousand-dollar sales and instant remainders worship of the bitch goddess Success overrode a decent respect for the aged. I got to my feet, cheeks flaming.

“Try Mr. Krakauer’s line again, Miss. I can’t understand why they don’t answer.”

DESPITE THIS portrait of myself, I was still trying to give the S&S list the commercial fiction that was rapidly becoming the lifeblood of publishing, as huge mass-market paperback sales provided a welcome new source of profits. Bob had been a master of gilding popular fiction with a literary veneer—thus making everybody involved feel good about it—but he had also recognized that to succeed a publisher needed to seek out fiction within the categories (or genres, as he preferred to call them) that mass-market publishers thought the public wanted. The genre that did best for them, apart from the big contemporary tearjerker like The Love Machine, was the romantic family saga (usually set in the spacious nineteenth century), with a strong, sympathetic woman as the heroine.

In this particular genre, most editors, then as now, don’t really like this kind of fiction nearly as much as the public does—they looked down on it, in fact, and on those who read it. Most of the real enthusiasts for this kind of fiction were at the book clubs and the paperback houses or were buyers for the major bookstores rather than editors. The leading expert on the genre at the time was Barbara Bannon, the fiction reviewer for Publishers Weekly.

Barbara Bannon loved big romantic sagas and, perhaps more important, could tell the difference between the ones that were deliberately and cynically contrived to meet the demands of the market and the ones that were written from the heart. She was small, plump, emotionally needy, slightly disheveled, apt to drink too much at lunch, and resentful of the fact that she was unappreciated by