Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [68]
What they found to interest them in Literaturnaya Gazyeta I cannot imagine—it certainly produced slim pickings for me, though I did many years later pick up a novel called Faithful Ruslan, a very sad story about a guard dog in a Soviet prison camp who, after the camp is closed down, is retired and can’t adapt to freedom. It was clever, touching, and very convincingly told from Ruslan’s point of view—much more effective, I think, than Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs—but for all my enthusiasm, it sank into oblivion, despite the cold war theme. Other editors seemed to have an enviable facility—or was it just plain luck?—for plucking best-sellers out of foreign waters, but my Hungarian, German, Russian, Italian, and Japanese writers, however highly praised by those in the know, never won the Nobel Prize or became best-sellers. I did have slightly better luck from time to time with French books, but then I don’t really regard French as a foreign language, and many American readers and critics are, in any case, under the impression that they ought to take French writing seriously, even if they don’t like it much.
Fortunately for me, the idea of worrying about whether a junior editor’s books were making a profit had not yet occurred to anybody at S&S (or anywhere else), except perhaps Leon Shimkin. In book publishing, the motto for survival might have been that of academic life: publish or perish. The more books you bought, irrespective of any possible merit, the more seriously you were taken, and since there is very often a long gap between the signing of a contract and the delivery of a manuscript, it was possible for months or even years to go by before anybody knew whether one was buying best-sellers and works of genius or complete duds. Many a successful editorial career was launched by buying everything in sight, thus building up a long and impressive-looking list of acquisitions, then switching to a new job at another publisher before the manuscripts began to flood in. Some people did this several times in rapid succession, rising swiftly to positions of serious responsibility, while leaving behind them a flood tide of ghastly books and authors that would haunt other houses and editors for years.
Whatever Life might suppose, the truth was that book publishing at the beginning of the 1960s was still very much a business run by amateurs who took a certain pride in their fecklessness. Accountability was looked upon as an infringement upon an editor’s right to follow his or her instinct. Given the general inefficiency with which the business was run, it would have seemed pointless to subject the performance of the editors to intense scrutiny, even had the machinery for doing so existed. The system of accounting itself was so slipshod as to be risible, in those halcyon days before the computer made numbers king. Whole rooms full of white-haired old ladies labored with pencils and adding machines to produce royalty statements that hardly ever reflected any kind of financial reality, since the books, which were returnable, drifted back from the bookstores for years, like flotsam and jetsam on the tide. Royalty statements were regarded with deep suspicion by authors and agents, with some reason.
THE LAID-BACK inefficiency of publishing in New York paled when compared to publishing in London, where monstrous lunches accompanied by a variety of wines were the rule, followed shortly afterward by tea. The shipping room was very often to be found under the stairs in a kind of cupboard, as at the august premises of Jonathan Cape, where a few wizened old men in brown coveralls wrapped parcels when they were not boiling the water for tea. Many if not most American publishers looked toward London with envy. There, the Anglophiles (who ranged from such hearty philistines as Simon Michael Bessie and Peter Schwed to aesthetes like Bob Gottlieb) would say, is where publishing is done right, at a nice leisurely pace, with plenty of room on everybody