Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [35]
“Ariel sits by Will’s side and turns the pages as he reads,” Max said. He did not say it with envy. His own ambition, it was said, was to lock himself in the library with his favorite books where Mrs. Schuster couldn’t get at him. “Well, you get the idea. You have to include her, listen to her ideas, treat her as if she were Will’s partner. Walk on eggshells, yes?”
I got the idea.
“It’s a great opportunity for a young man like yourself,” Max went on, more upbeat. “This is a monumental project, you know. Each volume is a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and a guaranteed best-seller. Why, Harry Scherman often calls the Book-of-the-Month Club ‘the house that Will Durant built.’ … This is commerce, you see, as well as culture. You’ll be working with one of the great thinkers of our time.… I envy you. Of course, you’ll have to be careful not to take too much time away from the work you’re doing for Henry,” Max added hastily. “We have a contract with the Book-of-the-Month Club, and I promised Will and Ariel we’d have the book out in September, so you’ll have your work cut out for you. Come to me with any problem. My door will always be open to you.” He paused. “Within reason.”
Max’s buzzer was keening noisily before we were out the door. On his assistant’s desk was a huge stack of manuscript, neatly tied with string. It showed no sign of having been opened by Max. I looked at it with a certain degree of awe mixed with apprehension. It was almost unimaginable that any living human being could have written this number of pages without going blind. “If Durant is such a prize, why is he getting a junior editor?” I asked Henry.
Henry lit a cigarette and coughed. “The Durants are a little … ah … difficult,” he said cautiously.
“How difficult?”
“On a scale of one to ten, ten. They won’t work with me because they hate academics. They feel that everybody in the academic world looks down on Will as a popularizer. Which, of course, he is. Nothing wrong with that, really, but it gives them a monumental inferiority complex, as well as a chip on the shoulder.… It’s not that Will’s books need a lot of editing, by the way—it’s just that he and Ariel are very fussy about details. My advice is to keep them away from Max as much as you can.”
“I thought he liked them.”
Henry grimaced. “Oh, Max likes them all right,” he said. “He just doesn’t want to see them.”
FULL AS S&S was of odd people, Max Schuster was far and away the oddest. Office legend had it that because of Max’s shyness when faced with a member of the opposite sex, he had married the wrong woman. Max had been a bachelor until well into his middle age, living a fairly hermitlike existence except when he was obliged to entertain authors or agents and apparently content with his lot. At some point in the thirties, he had apparently rented a house for the summer in Sands Point, on the North Shore of Long Island—Gatsby territory. His next-door neighbor turned out to be a well-preserved recent widow named Ray Levinson, who had three daughters. The late Mr. Levinson had been a local landscape and nursery czar, and his widow was wealthy, but with social ambitions that went beyond gardens and pools. At some point during that summer, Max fell in love with one of the daughters. Max’s courtship was pursued so timidly that the young woman might not even have been aware of the feelings of her ungainly suitor, but at some point he finally got the nerve up to talk to her mother and seek her permission to propose to her daughter.
Max visited the widow Levinson and haltingly managed to approach the reason for his visit. He was, he told her, in love, and felt he had to unburden himself of his feelings. Ray put her fingers to his lips and in a sharp, piercing voice, strongly marked by a Russian-Jewish accent, cried out: “Shush! Not another word!” Alarmed, Max fell silent. “I know just what you are going to say, Max,” Ray went on. “I accept.”
Whether from sheer timidity or the undeniable fact that