Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [73]
I finished and sat back, waiting for Harold to decide which way he wanted to go.
He blew two plumes of smoke through his nostrils and glared at me through it. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re telling me that I fucked up? I got the names wrong in the second half of the book?”
I nodded. We could make the necessary changes, I hastened to add, since his impatience was unmistakable—nobody was asking him to do it. We just needed to know whether he wanted to go with the people in the first half of the book or the ones in the second half.
Robbins nodded. His expression was dark. “I don’t have to do a fucking thing, that’s what you’re telling me? You’ll do it all? You just want my decision?”
“Right.”
Robbins stubbed out his cigarette. “My decision is leave it alone.”
“Leave it alone?”
“You heard him,” Gitlin said.
“But readers will think it’s a mistake of some kind.”
Robbins was unmoved. “Fuck ’em,” he snarled.
I was so surprised that I didn’t know what to say for a moment. Robbins lit another cigarette and decided to explain himself. “I’ve been working my ass off to write these books for years, trying to figure out plots and characters,” he said. “Let the readers do some work for a change.”
“But—”
“You heard the man,” Gitlin said, in his deepest growl.
“We’ll get thousands of letters complaining about it—”
“Who gives a fuck?”
Robbins stood up and held out his hand. The audience was over. As I picked up my briefcase and left, I could see Robbins and Gitlin sitting side by side on the sofa. They looked remarkably like Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
CURIOUSER AND curiouser, we received, in the end, not a single letter of complaint about the errors. Was it because many of Robbins’s readers skipped over the parts between the sex scenes, or did they simply have faith in Robbins as a storyteller? Certainly they were loyal—and widespread. Years later, when I was traveling in India, I found myself running out of books to read—a catastrophe for me. I was then staying at a lakeside hotel in Srinagar, in Kashmir, and when I explained my predicament to the hotel concierge he gave me an encouraging smile. There was no problem, he promised me. He would have me guided to an English-language bookstore by one of his staff.
My guide was a tall, fiercely bearded Kashmiri of martial appearance and bearing, who wore a black lamb’s-wool hat like a cossack’s and carried a long stick with which to brush beggars out of my way. We set off for the Srinagar bazaar, a mazelike warren of tiny covered alleyways, dense with wood smoke, the sharp odor of cattle droppings, and the smell of spices. We walked for what seemed a very long time, up and down steep stairs, in and out of darkened hallways, until I was hopelessly lost. All around us was the deafening noise of India: animal cries, the shouting of store owners hawking their wares, prayers, the ringing of bells, and the wails and clanging that pass for music.
After what seemed like an eternity, we arrived at a tiny, dark hole in the wall in which lay a very old man, heavily bearded and wearing a turban and white robes. He was smoking a hookah, which was tended lovingly by a boy of about ten, dressed only in a loincloth.
“English book shop, please, sahib,” my guide said proudly.
I stared into the gloomy recesses of the hole, behind the old man. I could see no shelves or books. The old man rose to his feet and bowed. We bowed back, then sat on our haunches around the carpet solemnly, while the boy went off and came back with a brass teapot and poured us each a tiny cup of boiling hot tea. My guide cleared his throat, spat into the dust, and explained the purpose of our