Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [38]
In the contest for book publishing’s most famous couple, the Knopfs remained light-years ahead in class, and there seemed nothing the Schusters could do about it. While the Knopfs were being photographed with André Gide or publishing the definitive translation of Proust, the Schusters were stuck with the Durants. Max and Ray fought back with what weapons they could, not always with happy results. When, in 1958, after years of labor by Justin Kaplan, Max finally published Kimon Friar’s translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s monumental epic poem, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, he sent a copy to all his major publishing colleagues. Alfred Knopf, who had once referred to people like Max and Dick, among others, as “fresh young Jews,” responded with a personal note: “Welcome, at last,” he wrote, “to the ranks of the real publishers.” Since S&S had been in business since 1924, this praise was rather faint; however, Max put on a good face and sent copies of the letter to everyone, as if there were no sting in it.
A further attempt to emulate the Knopfs was the publication of a small book by Max and Ray entitled Home Thoughts from Abroad, intended to memorialize one of the Schusters’ yearly transatlantic visits to the great and near great, culminating with a pilgrimage to see “B.B.” (Bernard Berenson) and his constant companion, Nicky Mariano, at I Tatti. Unfortunately, Max was obliged to cut short his trip, while Ray went on undaunted. As a result, their letters to each other make up the bulk of the text. In one, Ray (who was traveling with her daughter Beattie) wrote to Max that they had dined with B.B., that B.B. had placed her on his right and told her that her visit was like a ray of sunshine in his life and that if he had been a younger man he would have asked her to come and live with him. (What Nicky Mariano thought of this conversation, if it ever took place, is not recorded.) “The next day,” she added, “we went shopping in Florence and bought several thousand dollars worth of antiques, which I am sending home, and which you should clear through customs.”
Another letter was from Israel, where she recorded that Ben-Gurion asked her to sit on his right and drank a toast to her, calling her “his little American ray of sunshine” and saying that Israel would not be complete until she came to live there. The next morning, she told Max, she and Beattie combed Jerusalem buying antiques, which she would send home by air and which should be cleared through customs as quickly as possible. These letters were eventually bound up in a small book, with many photographs of Max and Ray, or Ray alone, with their famous hosts, and was sent out, signed by both of them, to Max’s enormous “celebrity list,” including all his fellow publishers. The copy sent to the Knopfs came back as if it had been a submission, with a card turning it down as unsuitable for the Knopf list. When the Knopfs found out about this, they apologized, but Ray never forgave them, suspecting that it had been a deliberate slight.
Ray was in the habit of dropping in at unpredictable moments during the day, often with one of her daughters, presumably in the hope of catching Max doing his dictation with a buxom secretary in his lap, like a tycoon in a Peter Arno cartoon.
Shortly after being made responsible for the Durants, I was called into the inner sanctum by Max to be introduced to Ray. She was a small, formidable woman, elegantly dressed, her fur coat thrown over the back of her chair. She reminded me of a certain kind of French or Hungarian older woman, indestructibly chic down to the smallest accessories, the kind of woman one used to see boarding the wagon-lit of the Train Bleu, bound for Monte Carlo, followed by two porters bent double under the weight of her matching Vuitton suitcases. She had the look of someone who never appeared in public without every hair