Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [61]
Now, with publishers getting rich overnight by selling their companies or going public with them, the sense of embarrassment about money that people in publishing circles had always affected vanished just as quickly. Contrary to what had always been believed, it appeared there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and everybody wanted a share of it.
MY OWN regular salary review was invariably an occasion very similar to that of asking a headmaster a question about sex, and it produced a similar combination of embarrassment and evasion, along with a long and self-pitying account of how disappointing the results of the previous year had been and the sad state of the book business in general. I was lucky, Henry Simon (or later, Peter Schwed) would tell me sorrowfully, to be getting a raise at all, and small as it might seem to me in financial terms, it represented a real vote of confidence in my future at S&S. Max Schuster, it goes without saying, was protected from having to talk about money at all, and Leon Shimkin, to whom this distasteful task was usually delegated, had been known to cry real tears when describing the firm’s financial affairs and the state of the industry to those who came to him seeking a raise.
At about the same time as the Random House/Knopf merger made the headlines, however, Paul Gitlin made his appearance at S&S and changed the hitherto even course of my life.
Previously, literary agents had played a fairly small role in the publishing business, as they were resented deeply by the older generation of publishers. Even the more powerful agents, such as Harold Matson or Paul Reynolds, were reasonable enough when it came time to negotiate a contract for one of their authors and more likely to counsel their clients toward patience and compromise than greed and threats. Far from attacking the publishing establishment, they felt themselves to be part of it and behaved with a certain self-conscious dignity, as if to make it clear that literary agenting was a respectable profession, like being a lawyer or a clergyman. Theirs, too, was a WASP profession, apart from a few newcomers such as Scott Meredith, and they looked down with undisguised contempt on the kind of vulgar “10 percenters” who proliferated in Hollywood. Even so, there remained among publishers of a certain age a certain suspicion of agents, however Ivy League their origins, rather resembling that which has surrounded snakes ever since Eve’s unfortunate slip in the Garden of Eden. Besides, a good many authors, Hemingway and the Durants among them, managed to do without one.
Into this cozy world swept Gitlin, a partner in a firm of literary-minded lawyers, Ernst, Cane, and Gitlin. Short, rotund, stocky, Gitlin tended to lean forward on the balls of his feet, like a man walking into a powerful wind, and somehow gave the impression that he was on a collision course with you, and possibly the rest of the world as well. His voice was an aggressive growl, usually sharpened with impatience and, when opposed, a large measure of rasping, scalding contempt. Gitlin was tough and smart and made no effort to hide it, nor was he a man to mince words or take fools lightly.
He had approached the world of book publishing indirectly. The founder of his law firm, the late, great Morris Ernst, had been a formidable advocate of free speech, and his partner, Melville Cane, a man of great learning and refined literary taste. Gitlin’s personality was more that of a street fighter than a civil libertarian or an aesthete