Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [51]
Telfer turned out to be a plump, gentle woman from Colorado who had fallen into Chambrun’s hands by accident and was willing enough to let Bob and me tear her manuscript apart and to write endless new scenes to replace the ones we had cut. It is, I discovered, always much easier to do this with first novelists, whose major anxiety is whether or not their book will ever get published at all. Step by step, we reconstructed Telfer’s book into what it ought to have been in the first place: a strong, shocking “commercial” novel with a simple story line and a lot of sex. The key, as I learned from Bob during many evenings in his apartment working on the manuscript, was to keep what was best about the book—its obvious sincerity and the author’s righteous anger about the way the system treated decent nurses and patients—and eliminate what wasn’t needed or didn’t make sense. I had admired from afar the way he had revamped Catch-22, but now I was doing it myself, at his side, and could see that what was emerging, draft after draft, was a much stronger book. Since then, I have done this, with others or by myself, a hundred times and always found that nothing in publishing gives me more satisfaction if the book works. Some of these editorial reconstructions led to enormous best-sellers such as Shirley Conran’s Lace or Jacqueline Susann’s The Love Machine, others—many—were a lot of work for no result, but the fascination has never worn off. It is my substitute for Scrabble or crossword puzzles and perhaps explains why I do neither.
Of course there is nothing new to this. Maxwell Perkins’s total reconstruction of Thomas Wolfe’s sprawling novel Look Homeward, Angel is something of a publishing legend, but Perkins was forgiven because he was working on literature. What irked our colleagues at S&S was that Telfer wasn’t a “serious” writer in their eyes and that we were therefore helping somebody who didn’t deserve to be published in the first place. Henry, particularly, felt strongly that we were somehow prostituting the profession. In fact, by the time we had finally finished rewriting and retyping The Caretakers, it had become something of a symbol of the generational clash at S&S and perhaps the most disliked book the house had ever published. Naturally, we saw all this as mere sour grapes, old-fashioned fuddy-duddy thinking by people whose idea of a good read was Will Durant (Max Schuster), Henry Morton Robinson, the author of The Cardinal (Henry Simon), or P. G. Wodehouse (Peter Schwed).
The truth is that this kind of intergenerational fight is normal in book publishing, even healthy—indeed, its absence is usually a sure sign that an editorial group is ready to be certified brain-dead. Younger editors always want to publish books that trouble their elders for one reason or another, and this is normal, even desirable, or the book industry would still be chugging along happily publishing nothing more shocking than Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling or Felix Salten’s Bambi. It is equally axiomatic that once the Young Turks have pushed their elders out of their corner offices into pasture and taken power themselves, they are likely to become as cautious and conservative as their predecessors were. At S&S, for example, the very same people who had fought to publish books by Jerry Rubin (who caused a seismic stir in the publishing industry by urging high school students to burn down their schools) or the Venceremos Brigade’s account of their adventures in Castro’s Cuba, or Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men—all books that seemed to wiser, older, more cautious heads dangerous, subversive, or irresponsible—found themselves twenty years later making headlines by turning down Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho.
The Caretakers was not the kind of book that was likely to have any real effect on the culture or on history—though it was the first to portray the lives of nurses, doctors, and patients in a realistic