Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [55]
The sales conference, at which the sales reps (who were then referred to, altogether accurately, as “the men”) were introduced to the next season’s list of books by the editors, was held in a New York hotel in one day, as opposed to the present custom of spending the best part of a week at some lush Florida resort hotel. Back then, the sales force of a major publisher consisted of perhaps a dozen men, most of them grizzled veterans of weeks on the road touting the list to skeptical smalltown bookstore owners who mostly wanted new editions of the Bible.
PROGRESS IN book publishing sometimes seems erratic and accidental, perhaps because book publishers are almost always surprised by their own successes. None of us could have guessed that one of the biggest books in S&S’s history would come from one of our fellow editors, Joseph Barnes. Once a speechwriter for Wendell Willkie, editor of P.M., and former foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune, Barnes was editing a long and much-delayed history of Nazi Germany. Barnes himself was something of an exercise in deliberate obscurity. In the days of his association with Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate nominee who was referred to in the Democratic press as “the barefoot boy from Wall Street,” Barnes had been in the limelight, but his leftist views, mild as they had been, eventually made him unemployable, except in book publishing, which had not seemed like an important enough industry to merit the attention of the witch-hunters during the McCarthy era. Since Shimkin had been Marshall Field’s éminence grise during the period when Field was launching P.M., it is possible that Barnes’s job as an S&S editor represented the payment of an old debt, or perhaps some residual guilt on Shimkin’s part at the abrupt closing of P.M., but whatever the reason, Barnes sat in his small office every day, chain-smoking as he went over galleys with a skeptical eye. He was a tall, well-dressed, debonair, and deeply dignified figure, full of old-fashioned but rather remote courtesy and richly cynical in the manner of newspapermen the world over. Every day he sauntered off to lunch at the Overseas Press Club, a dashing brown fedora cocked over one eye, and a well-worn foreign correspondent’s trench coat draped over his arm. He returned at three, his cheeks slightly rosier from the two martinis he invariably drank before lunch, for another afternoon of silent absorption in his galleys. He did not attend meetings or join in the noisy commotions that exploded from time to time in the hallway, nor join the group of Young Turks in Bob’s office. He was like a man who carried some dark tragedy on his shoulders that separated him from ordinary mortals, which was, in fact, not very far from the case, for Barnes had been close to power until Willkie’s defeat and the rising tide of McCarthyism washed him up in a small office at S&S, with a part-time secretary he shared with another editor.
The book that Joe Barnes was working on with such monastic devotion—and which was growing larger and larger every day—was being written by his old friend and colleague William L. Shirer, who had been a noted foreign correspondent for CBS until his leftist ideas and connections made him as unemployable as Barnes. From time to time, Emil Staral would bring Shimkin’s attention to how late the manuscript was, and Shimkin would order Staral to cancel the contract and get the company’s $25,000 back, but every time this happened, Barnes put on his jacket, went downstairs to see Shimkin, and returned with a reprieve