Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [29]
Rather like the Manhattan Project, Catch-22 (which was called Catch-18 until it was discovered that Leon Uris’s forthcoming novel was called Mila 18) was hatched in secrecy and on a strict “need to know” basis. It was Heller’s first novel, and he had been rewriting it for nearly two years, following Gottlieb’s suggestions. An aura of myth hovered around the book, all the stronger since nobody but Gottlieb and his acolytes had read it. He had shrewdly stage-managed a sense of expectation that grew with every delay, in part by allowing a few bits and pieces of the manuscript to appear in places such as The Paris Review from time to time, just to whet the appetites of reviewers.
I had already heard a good deal about this wunderkind (much of it cautiously negative) from Henry Simon before I actually met him, about a week after having been hired. One morning, a tall young man, looking rather like one of those penniless perpetual students in Russian novels, squeezed his way into my office and sat down on the edge of my desk. He wore thick glasses with heavy black frames, and his lank, black hair was combed across his brow rather like the young Napoleon’s. The eyes behind the glasses were shrewd and intense, but with a certain kindly, humorous sparkle that I had not so far seen at S&S. He wore worn tan corduroy trousers, scuffed penny loafers, and a button-down shirt without a tie: the uniform of a graduate student rather than a young publishing genius. Gottlieb looked to be about my age, but he projected a certain deep wisdom, as well as layers of publishing experience. We shook hands and he introduced himself. “How do you like working for Henry?” he asked genially.
I said I liked it fine. He nodded. He did not look as if he believed me. “Henry showed me a couple of your reports,” he said. “They weren’t bad. If you like, you can read some of my submissions. I do some French fiction, you know. Not a lot, but there’s some very interesting stuff being published there. You read French, don’t you?”
I said I did, happy to have found, at last, somebody in book publishing who apparently wanted to take advantage of my knowledge of languages. I already guessed that Bob Gottlieb’s submissions, whatever language they were in, would be very different from Henry’s—much more literary and avant-garde, which suited me fine, since Henry’s tended to be rather old-fashioned novels or on nonfiction subjects that didn’t interest me.
My current task—which seemed likely to keep me busy for months, if not years—was to “fine-tune,” as Henry put it, the revision of an interminable history of religion by an elderly Unitarian minister, Dr. Charles Potter. Dr. Potter’s views on religion seemed to me so benign and ecumenical as to be meaningless. Dr. Potter’s prose style, unlike his theology, was thickly convoluted and erratic, so I had my work cut out for me. Henry had made it clear, however, that even when time was lying heavy on my hands, it was his time. “Won’t Henry mind?” I asked Gottlieb cautiously.
Gottlieb had a nervous habit of flipping back the lock of hair that crossed his brow with one hand, after which it immediately fell back into its former position. His glasses, I noticed, were so smeared with fingerprints that it was a wonder he could see through them. “Well, he might,” he said cautiously. “You’d have to do it on your own time. He can’t possibly object to that. If you like, I’ll talk to him.”
I said that would be great.
The legend was that Gottlieb had been rejected by his parents because he married a Gentile girl—a story that might have come straight out of a Philip Roth novel. His wife, Muriel,