Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [239]
The agenda had been arranged so that there were lesser books before my big moment, which was to come just before the coffee break, so the reps would leave the room on a high—this was the kind of thing that Dick was a past master at orchestrating, down to the smallest details. I rose to my feet, the jacket of Shardik flashed on the screen, complete with the twenty-four-karat-gold bear mask, and I launched into my spiel. I talked to them about Watership Down, reminded them of its huge success, tried to convey the richness and subtlety of the plot, acted out key scenes, key characters, and rose to a crescendo of optimism and enthusiasm. I was moved myself, and I could see that I had my audience in the palm of my hand, that they would go straight from here to put out the biggest number of advance orders that S&S had ever had for a work of fiction. For once, I could see, there was no doubt in their faces. They were with me 100 percent.
Shortly before the morning session, I had been in the men’s room and overheard one of the reps saying to another that Hugh Collins, our Chicago rep, had read Shardik and loved it. Collins was perhaps the most prickly and curmudgeonly of the older reps, a hard-drinking Irishman with a hair-trigger temper who was not afraid of arguing even with Snyder. Collins was a difficult man to impress, so the fact that he was a fan of the book would mean a lot to the rest of the reps. As I reached the end of my presentation, I saw Collins in the first row, among all the heavy hitters of the S&S sales force, and caught his eye. He looked cheerful enough, so I took the plunge. Sweating, exhausted by the sheer force of my own enthusiasm, basking in the admiration of everybody on the dais, I finally finished my presentation, and in the complete silence that followed—the phrase “you could have heard a pin drop” came to mind—I pointed at Collins and said, “But you don’t have to believe me. I know somebody else here who has read the book, and he’ll tell you what he thinks.” I paused for effect. “Hugh,” I said, “you’ve read Shardik. What did you think of the book?”
There was another long pause, during which just the slightest trace of doubt crossed my mind, now that it was too late. Everybody was looking at Collins, and I could see on his face a curious mixture of expressions. Enthusiasm was not among them, I thought. Finally he spoke. Somebody had passed him a microphone, so his voice boomed out, filling the room. He waved one hand from side to side. “Comme ci, comme ça,” he said, with the look of a man who has just bitten into a lemon.
That did it for Shardik. In the laughter that followed Hugh Collins’s comment—it turned out that whoever had said that he liked the book was thinking of somebody else—the book’s chances wilted. Unfortunately, the rest of the world voted with Hugh Collins. The New York Times Book Review, in a front-page review, even speculated that Adams might in fact have written the book before Watership Down. “How else,” the reviewer asked, “can one explain the amateurish quality which pervades so much of this book by a writer who has previously displayed such masterful gifts?” Most reviewers advised Adams to stick with rabbits, and Time made it clear to parents that Shardik was no children’s story.
Even Adams’s publicity tour did little to ameliorate the debacle. The truth was that his readers deeply resented the fact that he wasn’t writing about the rabbits of Watership Down and were not much interested in anything else he had to say or write. In the end, Hugh Collins’s remark was just about on the money.
Of course nothing lasts forever. In publishing there is always a new list, new books to enthuse about, more unforeseen failures and successes. Rather like farming, each new season cancels out the previous one and restores hope. By the time the disaster of Shardik was over (Mayer’s hopes had been washed away, too—the public didn’t want the book in paperback, either), we were on to new things, this time centered on a very different figure than Richard Adams, whose popularity