Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [34]
Max’s handshake was trembly and damp and offered rather unwillingly, not, I felt sure, from any aversion to me but rather from a desperate need to keep a desk width between himself and any stranger. As I let go of his hand, he sighed with relief and collapsed back into his chair. The leather on the right arm of the chair had been holed so that the stuffing was emerging in unsightly gray clumps.
“Welcome to the inner sanctum,” Max said. He had a resonant voice, spoiled by a tendency to stutter and by long pauses while he gathered his strength for the next consonant. “Have you read Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization?” he asked, pointing to his bookshelves, where the first six volumes of Durant’s life’s work stood together. They were massive, each one of them a veritable Missouri-class battleship of a book, formidably bulky and armed with every possible footnote, index, and bibliography.
I indicated that I had not yet had the pleasure.
“No matter,” Max said breezily. “It’s never too late to start, is it, Henry?”
Henry nodded glumly.
“Will has just sent in the latest volume,” Max went on, his face aglow with enthusiasm. “Wonderful stuff! I sat up all night reading the manuscript. It’s called The Age of Reason Begins. A work of monumental importance. I cabled Will this morning telling him how proud I was to be his publisher.” He shuffled through the papers on his desk, sending pieces of paper flying in all directions, looking for a copy of the telegram, but failed to find it. “I only wish I had the leisure to go through the manuscript in detail, but of course I don’t.” Max waved his hands at his desk and the piles of clippings that were waiting to be filed. He sighed. “History is an adventure,” Max said. “A voyage. Will Durant sails the seas of history and time like a Columbus, discovering new continents of knowledge.”
At first I thought that Max must surely be making fun of me, but since Henry wasn’t laughing—if anything, he looked gloomier than ever—I assumed that Max often spoke like this, and I was right. He could spout advertising copy like Moby-Dick surfacing for air, some of it not half bad. In his time, Max had written—or dictated—any number of groundbreaking advertisements for books. He was at his best with the breathless style of mail-order book advertising, which S&S had practically invented, and had a gut instinct for great headlines such as YOUNG FOREVER! for a book about vitamins or FAT NO MORE! for a diet book. An ad for an anthology of the wisdom of the ages began, “Last night I walked hand-in-hand with Jesus by the Sea of Galilee.” His prose was unmistakable and over the years became the S&S house style, a heady, oracular mash of superlatives, puns, and one-liners that most people at S&S could write by the yard but that only Max actually spoke.
“Will needs to have his hand held by someone,” Max said. “Someone who cares about history.” I nodded earnestly, to show my love of history, but Max was off on a riff of his own and didn’t notice. “Ariel—Mrs. Durant—is still after me to get him the Nobel Prize,” Max said plaintively. “It’s not as if I haven’t tried, but of course she just doesn’t understand how difficult that kind of thing …” He paused and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Ariel is very much part of the picture.… Did you know that Will was trained as a priest, and when Ariel made up her mind to marry him she was so young that she actually went to the marriage bureau on her roller skates? He renamed her ‘Ariel,’ and she called him ‘Puck.’ ” Max paused for breath again, eyes goggling. “Of course, all that was a long time ago. She’s no longer young. But they remain a very devoted couple, wouldn’t you say, Henry?”
Henry shrugged. “You bet,” he said glumly.
The two men sat for a few moments, apparently contemplating the state of marriage in a spirit of mutual gloom. Max, it was said, lived in fear of Ray Schuster’s piercing voice, while Henry’s bride was allegedly disliked by everyone at S&S, as well as by the rest of the widespread Simon family.