Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [57]
I HAD my own unhappy authors to deal with. The Durants, who had hitherto remained in Los Angeles, communicating by letter, were descending on New York, and Max was working overtime to ensure that they got star treatment from everybody at S&S. The party to greet the Durants was held at the Schusters’ New York apartment. The lone Chagall that constituted Max and Ray’s claim to be art collectors and connoisseurs hung above the fireplace, but for the most part the walls were covered by handsome bookcases, filled with stately S&S books, all of them arranged neatly in some order of Max’s devising. Among the many sources of frustration for S&S’s art director was the fact that the first thing Max did with a book was to take its dust jacket off and dispose of it. All the books in Max’s shelves showed only their bindings.
During the course of editing The Age of Reason Begins, volume seven of The Story of Civilization, I had corresponded a lot with the Durants and spoken to them often enough on the telephone to feel that I knew them, though they appeared to treat the telephone with suspicion. As a rule, neither of them took telephone calls alone. They spoke on separate extensions, Will’s voice ghostly, polite, and distant, Ariel’s louder and more aggressive. She often disagreed with her husband, and he often deferred to her. When he did not, she was in the habit of calling later, surreptitiously, as if afraid that he might overhear her, to instruct me to ignore his wishes. “Pay no attention to what Will told you,” she would whisper urgently. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Their persons matched their telephone voices. Although both of them were diminutive, Ariel was clearly the more dominating presence and therefore seemed to loom larger than Will. Durant wore a well-worn, professorial blue suit. He had a good head of silver hair, a pink complexion, a neat little mustache, and a rather nervous expression, his eyes constantly darting toward Ariel as if in fear. He rather resembled a ferret. Mrs. Durant had the broad cheekbones of a Russian peasant woman, a fierce, prominent nose, dark, penetrating eyes, and large, mannish, ink-stained hands. She wore her gray hair in a kind of pageboy that looked as if she had done it herself at home with nail scissors, and her clothing seemed to have been made from woolens woven at home by a not particularly gifted weaver—they were basically shapeless and made up of many very heavy layers. Since it was warm in the apartment, I found it hard to imagine how she could bear to be so heavily dressed, but she never took a layer off. Both of them wore health-faddist “space shoes” that were molded to their feet, giving them ungainly duck-footed appearances.
Will’s handshake was warm but a little tentative. The Durants and I had clashed mildly from time to time during the editing of The Age of Reason Begins. Will saw history as the story of humanity’s constant struggle against ignorance and barbarism and preferred to write about art, philosophy, architecture, and poetry—i.e., “civilization”—than about warfare, battles, and diplomacy. I conceived it to be my duty to balance this and was constantly urging him to add more about the military and political side of history and correcting him on the subject of battles and armaments. He looked me up and down. “I was expecting somebody quite different,” he said. “More like the elder von Moltke.”
I apologized for not wearing my monocle, and we both laughed. Mrs. Durant did not. Her handshake was fierce, and her expression bellicose enough to satisfy Field-Marshal von Moltke himself. “Isn’t it disgusting?” she said in a gravelly stage whisper, audible, I felt sure, to Ray Schuster, who was standing a few feet