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By Root 663 0

had given up her career as an actress to work as a waitress, so that Gottlieb could complete his studies at Columbia and go on to Cambridge, where he had dazzled everyone with his knowledge of literature and his enthusiasm for the criticism of F. R. Leavis. (His only treasured possession was one of the few complete sets of Leavis’s magazine, Scrutiny, outside a library; he kept it in milk cartons under his bed and read himself to sleep with them.) All this had done him, at first, no good. On his return to America—Muriel was by then pregnant—he was obliged to take a job selling Christmas cards at Macy’s, whence he had been rescued when he was hired as Jack Goodman’s assistant at S&S, and rose from that lowly position like a rocket. If I knew the story by heart already, it was because it represented just what I was hoping would happen to me, sooner rather than later.

“Call me Bob,” he said, rising to his feet. One of the many inconveniences of an English education is the difficulty in getting on a first-name basis with anyone. Americans always seemed to expect that I would address them by their first name on sight, just as many of them called me “Mike,” which I hated but didn’t know how to correct. I still hadn’t found a way of addressing my boss as “Henry,” however often he invited me to.

Bob and I shook hands ceremoniously. He paused and looked at my desk critically. “You’ll never meet anybody if your back is all they see,” he said. He grasped one end of my desk. “You take the other side.” Together, we lifted the desk and turned it around, so it faced outward. Now I could see down the whole length of the corridor. Anybody coming in or going to the bathroom would pass in front of me.

Bob nodded with satisfaction, though whether at the change in my position or at the discomfiture Henry would feel, I wasn’t sure. Henry said nothing when he saw that my desk had been turned around. He merely sighed, his face paler and grayer than ever, went into his office, and lit another cigarette, followed by a dry, racking cough.

I knew that I had disappointed him, and I felt bad about it. I already understood that my loyalty was going to be deeply, sometimes painfully divided. More than anything else, I wanted to be part of that tight little circle that revolved around Bob, where, for the moment, the real excitement was.

* In the same period, Leon Shimkin also suffered episodes of depression so severe that he was sometimes found in tears in his bedroom closet in the morning, unable to face the task of choosing a tie for the day; unlike Richard Simon, he underwent successful shock treatment to overcome the problem.

CHAPTER 5

By the end of my second week at S&S, Bob and I were friends. He was also a mentor—a role in which he reveled—at a time when I badly needed one. I had two mentors, in fact: Bob, who taught me the importance of enthusiasm and imagination in publishing, and Henry, who taught me the importance of paying attention to details and of long hours of laborious, slow work over unrewarding manuscripts. Sitzfleisch, he called it, a German word signifying the ability to put one’s ass down on a chair for many hours of uninterrupted work at a time. A plodder Henry might be, but he was indefatigable, a martyr to his own fussy perfectionism, as he sat lighting cigarette after cigarette, eyes red with fatigue, making tiny alterations in sentence after sentence with a succession of sharpened pencils.

I soon fell into the habit of working for Henry like a medieval monk toiling patiently over a piece of parchment; when I’d finished, I read manuscripts for Bob, with a sense of relief that kept me going until the small hours of the morning. Gradually, I became accepted in the group that centered around Bob, and took to joining them in his office, early in the evening, after the “grown-ups” had gone home. Almost everything that involved editorial decisions, advertising, jackets, and marketing was discussed here. The group also made by no means gentle fun of Max Schuster, from whom they tried to keep as far away as possible. Little