Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [50]
The title came, almost immediately, from Nina Bourne—The Caretakers—but it took a good bit longer for Bob to persuade the editorial board of S&S to let us buy the book. It wasn’t just that Jacques Chambrun was the agent, it was more a question of the book itself. Dariel Telfer was as forthright and frank about sex as Grace Metalious had been in Peyton Place, though in a slightly more clinical way, inclining one to believe that she was a nurse herself. Nobody but a nurse, in fact, could have written in such detail about what goes on in a big hospital with such authenticity. Still, nurse or not, her sex scenes, tame as they would soon seem in popular fiction, were a source of much concern and heartburn among our elders. Max was deeply opposed to censorship and a passionate defender of the First Amendment, but when push came to shove, he wanted no part of sexually explicit books himself and retreated into mumbling, trembling paralysis when asked to read one. Like his colleagues, he fell back on Voltaire’s famous aphorism, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” A fine sentiment, but from the mouth of a publisher the equivalent of Pontius Pilate washing his hands. What, after all, is the use of backing the First Amendment, if you haven’t got the guts to use it? Bob and I found ourselves asking this more and more often as publishing moved with many misgivings into the era in which books such as The Story of O, Lolita, and Portnoy’s Complaint were to become big, popular bestsellers.
Frightened as the older generation was by the kind of language that Telfer used in her novel, they were more frightened still of being thought out of touch with the modern world. Enthusiasm—however ill placed—has always been the currency of book publishing, and Bob’s was irresistible. He did not exactly erase the doubts in the minds of those who supposed that he reported to them, but they gave him conditional approval, not quite daring to refuse it. We were to proceed cautiously, he and I, and offer Chambrun a $5,000 advance, on the promise that we would tone down the graphic sex scenes and keep S&S at an arm’s length from her agent. Normally an agent receives all the money that comes in, keeps his 10 percent, and forwards the balance to the client. In this case, given Chambrun’s reputation, we were to insist that S&S would pay the author directly and send Chambrun his commission separately.
I had anticipated difficulties from Chambrun over this, but he didn’t seem at all concerned when I told him, over another luncheon, nor were his feelings hurt. “Très bien,” he said. When could he have the contract and his check? It occurred to me that his sangfroid might come from the simple fact that he had no shame.
Up until then I had mostly edited nonfiction. With nonfiction, there was only so much that you could do. You could rewrite it, cut it, sometimes reshape it, but the book was essentially defined by the subject, which you couldn’t change without destroying the whole thing. With fiction, however, the only limits are set by the editor’s energy and the author’s willingness to live with big changes. Character, motivation, and plot can be changed, subplots and minor characters can be thrown out, whole scenes eliminated or created from scratch. After all, why not? It works in the movie business, where stories go through countless metamorphoses and countless hands before reaching the screen. Apart from his shrewd judgment and his ability to know the difference between salable trash and real quality (something that often gets hopelessly blurred in editors’ minds), Bob’s real