Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [45]
Shimkin was always on the prowl for ways of proving that Max was playing fast and loose with his money, and he frequently took editors out for lunch to grill them on the subject—even editors as junior as myself. Fortunately, Shimkin was only dangerous as an inquisitor until he had downed the last of his first vodka martini of the lunch. After that, he was voluble, indiscreet, and easily misled. The trick was to avoid seeing him before noon, when his mind was still focused.
Of course, a lot of people suffered from the same problem in those days. Book publishing and drinking had gone hand in hand ever since Horace Liveright kept an open bar in his offices during Prohibition and put a good part of his profits, not to speak of his authors’ royalties, into the pockets of bootleggers. Writers have always been notorious drinkers, and those who want to be their editors all too often learn to drink with them.
But it was not just writers and editors who drank. Publishers drank, advertising people drank, in the Christmas season a flood of liquor poured into the production and art departments from grateful printers and suppliers, the sales reps drank (which made the twice-a-year sales conferences of most publishing houses seem like drunken bacchanals), and office parties were occasions of awesome drunken revels. The whole industry sometimes seemed to be kept afloat on a sea of booze.
AS MY first year at S&S came to an end, I felt a certain sense of achievement. I had edited two complete books for Max, however boring they might be, and several for Henry, I was attending editorial board meetings, and I felt myself, at last, to be part of something, as if S&S were my home. I had actually, after a good many false starts, been permitted to buy a couple of books myself—a serious rite de passage for any editor, since you can only go so far by working on other people’s books.
The first I owed to Bob Gottlieb, who taught me the value of buying contemporary French novels as a way of getting started. In the first place, nobody at S&S except Bob and me read French, so there was no objective way in which his claims or mine for a French book could be put to the test; in the second, French books could be bought cheaply, since hardly anybody else in American publishing read the language or took even the slightest interest in the French literary world, which was in any case then at its most hermetic, as if intentionally repelling any possible American interest. As a sideline to his career as a teacher of French literature at NYU, Georges Borchardt acted as the agent for most of the French publishers. He worked out of the living room of his apartment on Sixth Avenue, and since most of his wares were returned to him unread, he was happy to add me to his mailing list. Bob had already bought a series of avant-garde French detective mysteries and an intriguing novel by Michel Butor, then all the rage in Paris, in which the pages, packed in a box instead of bound, were printed on one side only and without page numbers, so that the reader could shuffle the pages like cards and read a novel with a different narrative every time, though the characters stayed the same.
Once Bob had introduced me to Borchardt, I managed to buy a slim, elegant novella by a Spanish nobleman about the Spanish Civil War that had been published in Paris to acclaim. Like most French fiction, it failed over here, but in the meantime I had edited and published a novel of my own, and with that I was content. Success in terms of sales would hopefully come in its own sweet time. In the meantime, I felt myself to be an editor