Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [39]
I shook her gloved hand. “So you’re Max’s new young man?” she said, eyeing me up and down skeptically. Her English was heavily accented but hard to place exactly. She managed to squeeze a couple of extra vowels into Max’s name, which took some doing. I felt obscurely as if I were back in school again, being examined.
“I met your uncle once,” Ray went on, giving me a look that suggested that I did not compare favorably with him. “In London, at one of Weidenfeld’s parties. Do you remember, Max?”
Max shook his head and stuttered something.
“He doesn’t remember anything,” she said, dismissing Max with a shake of her head. She continued, “Max tells me that you’re going to be the Durants’ editor.”
I said that I was honored to be and that I was reading The Age of Reason Begins even now and making copious notes.
“Notes,” she said contemptuously. “What do they need with notes, the Durants? Their whole lives are spent buried in paper, those two. Better they should buy some decent clothes instead of reading more notes.” Ray’s voice fell to a kind of piercing whisper, as if she were confiding something to me that she didn’t want Max to hear, though judging by the martyred look on his moon face, he had heard it all before. “She’s a peasant, that one. She wears men’s shoes. She doesn’t wash enough.” Ray wrinkled her nose in distaste. “You’re working for Henry, I hear?”
I said that I was.
She rolled her eyes and sighed. “Well, you have to start somewhere,” she said. “You’ll come to the house one day—we’ll talk again.” She dismissed me with an imperious wave of the hand.
As she went on, I noted that Ray spoke about Dick Simon in the past tense, even though he was still alive, and with a certain relish, which made Max shake his head in silent protest. Although Max and Dick had once been so close that, like Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer at Random House, they worked in one office with their desks facing each other, I intuited that their wives had not shared that closeness—and had perhaps even resented it. In Ray’s case, she had done everything she could to bring it to an end, with the result that when S&S moved to new and more glamorous quarters in Rockefeller Center, the two partners got separate offices for the first time. The inner sanctum had once been their shared office, then it became the book-lined meeting room between their offices, then finally the phrase referred only to Max’s office.
“Learn from Max,” she called out to me as I opened the door. “It’s a great opportunity for a young man to work alongside a genius.” It was curious, I thought, that she was quite capable of treating Max like an idiot while insisting that he was a genius.
Max stared at me across his desk. It was hard to read his expression, beyond the embarrassment natural to any man who has just been called a genius by his wife, but whatever he looked like—a trapped animal begging for release without any hope of getting it, perhaps—it wasn’t a genius.
THAT IS not to say that Max didn’t have a genius of a kind. Whenever I read the purple prose of a certain kind of mail-order advertising, I close my eyes and can see Max Schuster writing it. Max understood, as very few people in publishing have, the power of simple ideas. Nobody was ever better at inventing books that filled a need, or at describing them with the kind of enthusiasm that sold them in quantity, or at breaking down the reasons for buying them into punchy, one-line sentences.
It was a shame that by the time I came to S&S Max had degenerated into a parody of what had once made him successful and that what he had invented other people could by then do as well, or better. There was a whole subindustry based on “words to live by” or “words of wisdom,” of books on self-improvement, etiquette, self-enrichment, even sex, most of it born from Max’s passionate belief that you could learn anything, change anything, help yourself ahead in any way merely by reading the right book. With an instinct