Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [32]
“FILE UNDER GRIEF” became a phrase that described anything Max Schuster involved himself in. Schuster was an indefatigable nudge and kibitzer, sending endless memos about meaningless details, with cc’s or bcc’s to everyone at S&S, all of which had to be answered before they started coming back again and again like the tide, defaced with cryptograms of ever-increasing urgency.
It would be easy to dismiss Max Schuster as a comic figure—or at any rate, a case from the files of Dr. Sacher-Masoch—but he was at the same time exceedingly shrewd, as in the famous quote from Archilochus: “The fox knows many things—the hedgehog knows one big one.” Like the hedgehog, whom Schuster seemed to resemble in weak-eyed, hunchbacked timidity, he knew, if nothing else, how to curl up in a ball and survive. Odd he might look, with his curious round yeshiva bokher spectacles, his guileless expression and goggling eyes, his lips pursed like those of a goldfish blowing bubbles in an aquarium, but he was no fool. Not only had he survived the efforts of Dick Simon, Marshall Field III, and Leon Shimkin to oust him, in the end he outlived both Simon and Field.
On the whole, Schuster preferred to see the younger editors as little as possible. He avoided anything that might lead to argument or disagreement and painstakingly timed his arrival and departure from the office to give him the maximum possibility of not seeing anyone in the elevator or the halls. You could tell whenever he was about to arrive or depart by the presence of his staff in the halls, making sure that the coast was clear. He tried very hard never to see Bob Gottlieb, which suited Bob just fine. Most people at S&S tried to keep out of Schuster’s sight, not because they necessarily feared or disliked him, but because he seemed irrelevant.
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I WAS drawn into Schuster’s orbit because of my background in history and my English upbringing. Henry had made my services available to Max without telling me; no doubt he thought it might do him some good with Schuster, and it could certainly do my career at S&S no harm. The opportunity arose from the fact that Justin D. Kaplan, who had worked closely with Schuster for many years on some of Schuster’s more difficult books, was planning to leave. The reasons for Kaplan’s departure were many. On one level, there was a certain rivalry between Bob Gottlieb and Kaplan, and it was apparent enough that Bob was going to be a force at S&S for the foreseeable future. Their dislike for each other was mild but visceral, a blend of envy and the slight contempt of a well-dressed, urbane Harvard man for a scruffy bohemian nonconformist with a dislike for stuffy academics—oil and water, in brief.
On another level, Kaplan—who was married to Anne Bernays, and thus son-in-law to the fabulously wealthy public-relations genius Edward Bernays, himself the son-in-law of Freud—was tired of being a junior editor, apparently doomed forever to worrying about Will Durant, Nikos Kazantzakis, Bernard Berenson, Bertrand Russell, and the rest of Schuster’s worthies. Kaplan was anxious to carve out a bit of fame for himself as a writer (which he shortly did, with a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Mark Twain).
Schuster was a snob of a gentle, old-fashioned kind. He liked the people who worked closely with him to be “connected” to somebody—Kaplan had been Eddie Bernays’s son-in-law; I was Sir Alexander Korda’s nephew. He also, not unnaturally, liked people who were interested in the kind of books that he liked: history, philosophy, new editions of the classics. Whenever Max Schuster was interviewed, he said that his favorite way of spending an evening was to sit at home reading Spinoza, though since he also