• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 722 0

to which I responded only too eagerly. I became involved in the rescue of a would-be novelist who had descended from job to job until he was living in a tar-paper shack in Northern California, reduced to the point where we had to send him typing paper so he could continue an interminable novel that we eventually published with one of the lowest net sales in S&S’s history. Then I became entangled in the darkly comic life of a self-taught historian and respected businessman whose apparently prim and proper suburban marriage went adrift when his white churchgoing wife, the mother of his two children, ran off with a black dope dealer from Newark. A pioneering student of animal psychology persuaded me to buy a book he proposed to write about his attempt to make wolves in Alaska bring up his infant son as one of their pack. This was not exactly an original idea, but having spent a part of my own childhood watching my Uncle Zoltan and my father on the set of The Jungle Book, I was interested enough to persuade S&S to put up $2,500 to send him on his way to Alaska, where he promptly disappeared into the tundra with the boy, never to be heard from again, leaving me to many years of difficult correspondence with the boy’s mother. Another of my authors, an old friend from Oxford, fled to a Tibetan monastery with his advance; another, apparently driven to a suicide attempt by writer’s block, wound up in a padded cell at Payne-Whitney, where I visited him almost daily in the hope of rekindling his interest in his book.

I seemed to have a magical attraction for writers with ambitious, crackpot plans and foundering personal lives. Of course, some of this is inevitable when starting out—the big, easy books by established authors are unlikely to come one’s way, and it would be a poor editor indeed who failed to be moved by a challenge while still earning his spurs. Besides, just about the only things a young editor has going for him- or herself are enthusiasm, a willingness to work harder than anyone else, and a certain naïveté. Book publishing, like most businesses, provides ample opportunities for cynicism over the long haul of a career, but it pays no dividends to start out a cynic.

I made any number of mistakes in those days—not the simple kind, which I still make, such as suppressing one’s doubts about a book or persuading oneself that what is patently second-rate is really first-rate, or might be made so with the right kind of editing. I made the kind of mistake that involves the heart: buying a book because the author is so desperately needy, sincere, or wistfully appealing—the literary equivalent of a mercy fuck, in short. Learning to say no is the first, hardest, and most important lesson for a fledgling editor. The only thing harder to learn is when to say yes.

In any event, no was a word that I seldom used then, both because I found it hard to say and because I desperately needed books. This had its downside, of course—a lot of them were unsuccessful and took up an inordinate amount of time—but there was also an upside: I gained broad and unspecialized experience. Most editors stay with a well-defined area of interest and for good reason: It’s usually easier to do what you know and what you want to do than to venture into uncharted waters. Thus, literary editors stick with what they conceive to be literature, nonfiction editors with nonfiction, and so on. I was willing to do pretty much anything. It wasn’t that I didn’t have preferences or tastes of my own, but I was determined not to be fussy until I could afford to be. I found myself editing books on mathematics and philosophy, memoirs, fiction, translations from the French, politics, anthropology, science history, even an illustrated encyclopedia of technology translated from the German. In my determination to cast my net as wide as possible, I subscribed to numerous French literary journals as well as the Russian Literaturnaya Gazyeta, which the FBI came to inquire about. In those days, a letter or a package with a Soviet postmark was held up mysteriously by the post office