Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [46]
I also succeeded in buying a more conventional book, for one of my old friends from Oxford, Colin M. Turnbull, had turned up in New York having spent a couple of years in the Ituri Forest of Rwanda-Burundi, living with the Pygmies. Colin, a tall, handsome, and engaging young man who reminded many people of T. E. Lawrence, had already created something of a stir in anthropological circles as the first white man to have lived with these small, secretive people. He had emerged from his stay with them convinced that they had a richer culture than the surrounding tribespeople who had always despised them and passed these attitudes on to the white colonialists. On the basis of a few articles Colin had written for Natural History, I persuaded S&S to give him a book contract for $5,000 and started to work with him on an account of his experiences that we eventually called The Forest People and which is still in print as of this writing, nearly forty years later.
The atomic bomb, Governor Alfred E. Smith, French fiction, and Pygmies—it did not occur to me at the time, but I was beginning to set a pattern for my future as an editor, which was to have no pattern.
CHAPTER 7
Editing is a skilled profession, but it is not one that publishers have ever particularly respected or well rewarded. Ultimately, the big money goes to those who bring in big books. Even if they can’t edit worth a damn, somebody can always be found to do the editorial donkeywork needed to make the book publishable. In extreme cases, a freelance editor can be brought in to get the manuscript in shape, and it is not an accident that most of them are thin, pale, and wear thick spectacles, since the only jobs in the publishing industry that require more education, absorb more hours of painstaking drudgery, and pay less well are copyediting and indexing.
To buy books it is necessary to cultivate agents, but that is easier said than done. Relationships with agents are treasured and closely guarded by senior editors, particularly when it comes to the agents with major clients and a track record of commercial success. It is not that agents themselves are inaccessible—for the most part they are willing to be taken to lunch by just about anyone—it’s just that no sensible junior editor wants to step on his superior’s toes by poaching. Editor/agent relationships have often been forged by years of friendship and mutually shared success, so it’s hard for a young and ambitious editor to get to the major agents without giving deep offense to the very people who decide on his or her raise.
This was even more true in the 1950s, when book publishing was a tighter, more “clubby” business, a small world in which everybody knew each other and in which personal relationships counted for everything. It was well known and understood that certain big-time agents such as Harold Matson, Sterling Lord, and Scott Meredith submitted their books to Peter Schwed, while others, such as Harold Ober and Paul Reynolds, sent their submissions to Henry Simon. Agents who specialized in more “literary” fiction, such as Candida Donadio and Phyllis Jackson, as well as the more showbiz-oriented agents such as Robert Lantz, Helen Strauss, and Irving Lazar, worked with Bob Gottlieb. Indeed, Donadio was so close to Gottlieb that some people thought they were the same person. One simply could not pick up the phone and call one of these people to say, “Hi, I’m new at S&S, but I’m looking for some good books, so why don’t you send me a manuscript?”
The Literary Market Place (LMP), the book industry’s bible, lists innumerable agents, but a great many of them are only one or two steps removed from the slush pile. I sent off fulsome letters to any number of them and got back a small avalanche of manuscripts, most of them so dog-eared that they had obviously made the rounds of every publisher in New York, not a few of them even containing previous rejection letters. Clearly, it was going to take more than this.
In the end, my first connection to an agent came about through