Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [235]
He might have added “Who cares?” Inevitably, the atmosphere changes when the people who own you are far away and deal in billions instead of being just down the hall, counting every penny, and it doesn’t always change for the better. Caution doesn’t get you noticed—on the contrary, it is generally better to fail big than to think small.
THIS ALONE explains some of the larger failures in publishing, as does the belief that somebody who has written one successful book is likely to write another. In my case, the lesson that this is not necessarily—or even commonly—true came in the shape of a telephone call from Claire Smith, one of my favorite agents, who had first brought Susan Howatch to my attention and for years represented Ronnie Delderfield. A suggestion from her was one that ought to be taken seriously, so when she dropped a hint that one of her biggest and most famous clients, the English civil servant turned best-selling novelist Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, was thinking of changing publishers, I ran to inform Snyder of the news.
Watership Down had been a huge best-seller, winning a readership of millions of devoted fans, including myself and Margaret. It had gone unnoticed for ages by American publishers because very few of them were attracted by a long novel about rabbits, told from the rabbits’ point of view. The few who took the trouble to read the manuscript thought it might work if it was drastically shorter and rewritten as a children’s book, but most simply passed on the opportunity to read what was to become one of the most successful and acclaimed works of fiction of the decade.
This particular form of blindness is not by any means rare. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings went unread by most American publishers, who found it too long, too demanding, and neither a children’s book nor an adult novel. James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small went unread, or was rejected, by visiting Americans for years, even though it was already a big best-seller in the United Kingdom. Fantasy and whimsy—particularly British fantasy and whimsy—make many American publishers acutely nervous. There has always been a certain transatlantic fear that the English sense of humor doesn’t “travel,” still less the English fascination with small animals.
The tale of the rabbits eventually made its way to America and went on to become an instant best-seller on publication here. Like Tolkien’s hobbits and their friends, Adams’s rabbits captured the affection and the interest of all but the most hard-hearted, unsentimental, and obdurate of realists, even if there was about the book, on a second reading anyway, a whiff of sanctimonious and slightly self-conscious religiosity, together with the sense that the author might be too clever for his own good. Still, in its own way, the book was a work of genius, deeply imaginative and satisfying, though the author himself, once he had been brought over for a publicity tour, appeared to be something of a queer fish, and a fish out of water at that.
Of course, most writers who have produced a work of genius are queer fish. The deeper a person plunges into his or her own imagination and the stronger the hold of the invented world becomes, the less the writer is likely to appear “normal” to other people. Tolstoy was a very queer fish (or odd duck), even in nineteenth-century Russia, where odd ducks abounded, and English literature is full of even odder ducks. The writer is even more likely to be an odd duck when his or her great work of imagination is essentially childlike. To see the world’s complexities with the simplicity of a child’s eyes is a special form of genius, the Reverend Charles Dodgson being a perfect example of the type, and Adams had much the same curious, divided view of the world as the author of Alice in Wonderland. He was at once a serious adult, carrying a heavy load of religious and moral baggage, and a wondering child, able to imagine a whole rich world in a country hedgerow full of rabbits.
To a casual