Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [31]
SHORT, BALDING, bent over with cares and burdens, a-twitch with a kind of demonic nervous energy, Max was prey to such a veritable frenzy of tics, tremblings, stutters, and rapid blinks so startling that most people who met him assumed that he suffered from some kind of nervous disease, Tourette’s syndrome, perhaps.
The truth was quite other: Schuster was an obsessive-compulsive workaholic, afflicted with an extreme case of shyness. In the right circumstances, he was a man of considerable charm and erudition, but he was also complex to a degree that would have baffled a Freudian analyst. At times, he seemed to those around him like a kind of secularized yeshivah bokher, one of those scholarly Jews who were content to daven for hours at an end over a text, rocking back and forth as he repeated it to himself and sought its meaning. Certainly Schuster read even the most innocuous memo as if it were a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, his lips moving as he mumbled it aloud to himself, his eyes behind thick, old-fashioned, perfectly round horn-rimmed glasses, giving him a certain owl-like look as he searched for hidden meanings, ballpoint pen at the ready, twitching in his right hand ready to scrawl corrections, emendations, and second thoughts in the margin.
I had seen him jogging breathlessly down the corridor, a nervous, worried figure, bent over crablike, his mouth open in an O as he gulped for air like a fish, wearing a blue suit with sleeves far too long for his arms and round glasses with lenses as thick as the bottoms of Coke bottles, a bulging briefcase under each arm, while scribbled notes fluttered from his pockets like autumn leaves and his secretary ran stooped behind him, picking them up. Yet other times, he radiated the kind of worldly self-confidence that tends to settle upon the owners of publishing houses when they have all the money they will ever need and the right to publish anything they want to, however dismal or self-indulgent.
When he was seated in his office, he constantly pecked away with a pen held in his right hand, a palsied, nervous tic that drove everyone else mad and left the arms of his chair and his sofa and the surface of his desk pitted as if a destructive child had been let loose with an ice pick. Though normally he spoke with a certain old-fashioned and formal courtesy, when he wanted something in a hurry, he pushed the buzzer on his desk rapidly, over and over again, like a man sending Morse code, until one of his long-suffering minions appeared, eyes agog like the victim of some kind of Pavlovian experiment. As soon as he or she had left to perform whatever task Schuster had in mind, Schuster would start buzzing again for something else. One of his assistants, it was rumored, had thrown himself out of a window, twenty-eight floors down to Fifth Avenue, driven mad by the constant buzzing from the “inner sanctum” (as Schuster called his office), as well as by Schuster’s passion for filing everything under a maddening variety of headings, most of them in coded initials known only to him.
Everybody at S&S soon learned to decipher the easier of these, invariably written in a firm hand with a thick black Chinagraph wax crayon marker and signed “M.L.S.”: “PAAIMA” meant “Please Answer As In My Absence,” “DTN,” “Do The Necessary,” “UYOJ,” “Use Your Own Judgment,” “RARB,” “Read and Report Back,” but these were merely the tip of the iceberg. Schuster rose early every morning and breakfasted alone at the Oak Room of the Plaza, and during these hours he devoted himself to clipping articles from the morning papers with a pair of folding scissors. These clippings usually represented ideas for books, which he would send to one or more of the editors, with cryptic instructions scrawled at the top of the clipping. They were also filed, under some arcane system, by any number of headings and cross-references, so that if you ignored one of them, it came back