Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [66]
To this day, I dread going over the “inventory” of my undelivered books, since it never fails to reveal projects I have forgotten about altogether or which were bought when the current managing editor was still in school. No matter how late an author is with a book, it’s my tendency to say, “Oh, don’t worry, he’s working on it,” rather than pull the plug and terminate the contract for lateness.
It’s not just a certain sympathy for writers, being one myself, or a degree of optimism, without which one would never become an editor in the first place—it’s also that in my first years as an editor I gravitated naturally toward “problem” books and authors, or they toward me. Having bought a book, I hadn’t the luxury of writing it off or letting it fail, as older, more successful editors can do. I felt myself responsible for getting it in and making it publishable, however late, off course, or unreadable it might have become over time.
This can be a positive, character-building experience, but it might also derive from a stubborn determination not to admit to a mistake. In either case, I became something of a specialist in the long-term resuscitation of doubtful projects that most editors would have left to die merciful deaths. I simply could not let them go and was willing to spend hours beyond counting to make them as readable as possible, only too often over the objections of the author—the worse somebody writes, the more they are likely to cling to their prose.
Early on in our friendship, I remember Bob Gottlieb handing me a badly written and unnumbered manuscript, heavily etched with laborious, inked revisions and second thoughts in an unreadable hand. “See if you can get this to the point where it’s not a shame before the neighbors,” he said—a shondeh, to use the Yiddish. It took almost twelve years before the novel saw the light of day, only to sink like the Titanic. By the time it was published, Bob was no longer at S&S, and during that long period the author’s own life became as melodramatic as the plot of his book. All the while, every six months or so, another package of badly typed manuscript would arrive on my desk from him, together with a long letter chronicling yet another round of disasters, and pleading for something, anything by express mail, even if only fifty or a hundred dollars, to keep his head above water. “My life is in your hands!” one letter ended dramatically. Each time, I faithfully trudged down to the office of Shimkin’s latest financial watchdog to beg for a check, despite the facts that the novel was equally out of control and nobody had read it but me.
In these circumstances, it is easy to persuade oneself that one is dealing with a work of genius, if only to justify the amount of time and energy spent on it or the endlessly growing file full of ill-spelled, single-spaced, stream-of-consciousness letters. Once a writer is far enough from shore, his or her editor invariably takes on something of the nature of a life buoy thrown to a drowning man—a relationship that is at once deeply flattering and profoundly wearisome for the editor, who can neither pry loose the kind of money that might help nor guarantee the eventual success of the book. This is not always an easy cross to bear. It is hard enough to be responsible for what happens to somebody’s work—very often their lifework at that, in every meaning of that word—but being responsible for their life is something else again.
With age and experience, one learns to avoid playing this role, but in 1961 it was still a heady challenge