Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [236]
It is possible that I read Shardik in something of a daze. Watership Down had seemed to me a work of real talent, totally convincing and entertaining, and Shardik, which I sat up all night reading, seemed far more ambitious and darker, almost like The Lord of the Rings in that it presented a whole imagined society, with all its history, folklore, and religion meticulously invented. At its center was Shardik himself, a great bear who is at once the object of a cult and a perfectly real bear, a kind of ursine equivalent to the rabbits of Watership Down.
This was a potent mix, and I was able to report the next morning that Adams had successfully avoided the dreaded “second novel” syndrome with a book that was as original as the first but richer. I was not alone in this opinion. Peter Mayer, then running Avon Books, a major paperback publisher, had been the U.S. paperback publisher of Watership Down, and was determined to keep Adams. When he heard that we were anxious to buy Shardik, he called immediately to propose that S&S and Avon copublish it. He had read the manuscript overnight as well and was overcome by it, though not rendered inarticulate—indeed, he talked to me about it for what seemed like hours, his voice trembling with enthusiasm, describing the plot in detail as if I had not read the book myself.
The next day, he repeated it all word for word on the telephone to Dick Snyder, who had not read the book, of course, but had already heard about it from me. Dick rolled his eyes and interrupted from time to time to say that he didn’t want to hear another word about Kelderek, the lone hunter who discovers Shardik the great bear fleeing from a forest fire and believes him to be the avatar of the god of his people, or the cult of the virginal priestesses, or Genshed, the evil slave dealer who mutilates children, that he wanted to talk about the deal, not the goddamn plot—but Mayer was not to be stilled until he fell silent and hoarse from talking, at which point Dick wisely told me to negotiate a deal with Mayer, who would otherwise, he guessed, get him to give away points just to get him off the phone.
Dick had no objection to going into partnership with Mayer—“Fifty percent of something is better than a hundred percent of nothing” might have been Leon Shimkin’s motto, but Dick was not above using it too when it suited his purpose, and felt that the amount of money involved—$550,000, which was big money then—made it sensible to share the risk. Further, when it came to Richard Adams, Peter Mayer knew what he was doing, and Pocket Books might not. Dick just didn’t want to spend more time listening to how good the book was or being told how to publish it. Mayer positively reveled in details, so it took a very long time to get a contract drawn up, particularly since Mayer made a moral and personal issue out of even the smallest disagreement and was capable of talking about his feelings and the rightness of his position for hours, or even days, to make his point.
It was some time before I actually met Mayer, who was, until then, merely an impassioned, unstoppable voice over the telephone. As it turned out he was charm itself in person, a tall, exceedingly attractive man, about my age, chain-smoking like a chimney, and with the kind of furious, eclectic erudition that I recognized as basically European. His enthusiasm—not just on the subject of Shardik—was overwhelming and infectious, and it was very hard to resist him when he was in a good mood—he is perhaps the only person I had ever met about whom the old cliché “His eyes blazed with enthusiasm” was literally true. When he was not in a good mood, he was capable—though never