Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [197]
Godwin, who had left his wife and children and seemed to be beginning a whole new life virtually from scratch, had started as that rarest of creatures, an enthusiastic and unorthodox bookseller. He founded the famous Better Books store on Charing Cross Road just after the war, and later revived Bumpus, one of the more revered of London’s bookshops. Picked by Sir Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, to modernize Penguin’s fiction line, Godwin’s innovations astonished the London literary world and eventually led to a clash with Lane, who was alarmed by the far-reaching changes Godwin was making in one of Britain’s most respected cultural institutions, and more than a little jealous of the younger man as well.
From there Godwin went to Weidenfeld and Nicolson, where he swiftly acquired a reputation for commissioning large quantities of books on outline, always a risky way of building up a list quickly. As it happened, his boss, George Weidenfeld, had been doing just that for years, but he usually commissioned large, illustrated coffee-table books by titled celebrities, which were usually ghostwritten, and on which Weidenfeld usually made his money back by selling finished books at inflated prices to American publishers and book clubs before the manuscript had even been written. Godwin, on the contrary, was commissioning long books on serious nonfiction subjects by major writers and academics, many of which had a limited appeal to American readers. Those in the know thought he was lucky to have jumped before he was pushed, though not necessarily into Jovanovich’s arms.
Small, rail-thin, sharp-featured, with an engaging smile, a full head of wiry gray hair—a kind of Anglo-Welsh “afro”—and bright, sparkling eyes, Godwin’s greatest asset was his charm. He was a brilliant talker, with an endless supply of lubricious anecdotes about everyone he knew, and the kind of infectious enthusiasm that other publishers envied. He had good taste, too: His authors in England had included Len Deighton, Edna O’Brien, Joan Didion, Eric Ambler, and Antonia Fraser, though he never managed to acquire that kind of stellar list for Jovanovich, perhaps because he was now competing directly against more powerful houses such as Random House and S&S.
He had a way with women, too. He managed to combine a lower-class defiance, then having been made fashionable by the success of movies such as Alfie, with a certain weary vulnerability, like a bantam gamecock that needs looking after, but despite the buzz that surrounded him, by 1974, a year or so after his arrival in New York, he seemed to have missed the boat and looked somehow diminished and sad. Perhaps the tide was running against him. Publishers were being acquired by corporations that didn’t know anything about the book business and were more interested in the bottom line than in owning the hot new candidate for the Booker Prize or a 200,000-word work of history by a fashionable Oxford don. Jovanovich himself was already spending more of his time on educational publishing, which was less risky and far more profitable. He eventually bought SeaWorld and moved Harcourt Brace Jovanovich down to Orlando, closer to the seals and killer whales, which made far more money for the company than trade books.
Before that happened, Godwin was dead—he collapsed alone in his apartment from an asthma attack, a sad way to go for a man who loved company and disliked being alone. It was as if with his death the business on which he had scarcely made an impact suddenly changed. The age in which the editor was the center of things was over. The businessmen were taking over.
CHAPTER 24
For me, oddly enough, this brave new age was ushered in by Jovanovich. For some time now, Leon Shimkin had been making no secret of his desire to cash in his chips and sell S&S. Naturally, he did a kind of fan dance, alternately attracting buyers