Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [74]
The old man beamed. From deep within the folds of his robes he produced a massive, rusty iron key, secured to his person by a string. He put a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles on his nose, untied the key with trembling fingers and gave it to the boy, who plunged into the interior of the cave and dragged out a big, old, brass-bound wooden chest. The boy unlocked the chest, inside which was a bundle wrapped up in a brightly embroidered piece of cloth. He placed this on the carpet before us.
With careful, loving hands, the old man unwrapped the bundle and pulled the cloth to one side. “Behold!” he said grandly. “The most famous writer in English in all India.” There before us lay the complete works of Harold Robbins, in torn and battered paperback editions that had been passed from hand to hand, no doubt from continent to continent, and lovingly repaired with tape where necessary. The boy brushed flies off the books with a whisk, as if they were sacred objects.
After spirited bargaining, I bought The Carpetbaggers to see me through to Delhi and The Adventurers to read on the plane to London. They were pretty good, too. The famous bathtub sex scene in The Carpetbaggers still held up. I toyed with the idea of sending the books to Robbins when I got back to the States, but I decided he probably wouldn’t be surprised that he was the most famous author in the English language in India, or anywhere else, either.
Since then, I have found copies of his books in a remote game lodge in Kenya, on a Nile steamer, and at an oasis in Morocco. A friend found one in a yurt in deepest Mongolia.
And there’s still not been a single complaint about the one in which the characters are all mixed up. Maybe Robbins was right—his readers don’t mind doing the work for him!
LIKE ROBBINS, Irving Wallace, whose sizable oeuvre has survived rather less well than Robbins’s, was another novelist whose success was widely believed to be threatening Western civilization. Like Robbins and Sidney Sheldon, Wallace was a Hollywood screenwriter turned novelist. Screenwriting, however much it might be looked down on by the literati, was remarkably good training for writing fiction, particularly in the old days, when every script had to be approved by people like Irving Thalberg or David Selznick. Screenwriters knew exactly how to do all the things that puzzle many novelists: how to cut to the chase, how to maintain a consistent point of view, how to work out motivation for every action and to prepare the reader for sudden changes of plot, how to avoid flashbacks and, worse still, flash-forwards. A strong story line, divided into clear scenes, was what mattered in the movie business; it is also exactly what works for most readers of fiction.
Of course, there are plenty of writers who know this without having spent years on the old MGM lot. Tolstoy was a natural storyteller (if you don’t believe me, go read Anna Karenina again) and so was Dickens, and it is no accident that much of their work has been filmed. Still, the twentieth-century division of fiction into two artificial and opposing camps—“high culture” and “low culture”—left a lot of people who liked novels with a real story having to content themselves with “lowbrow” fiction, a trend that became institutionalized as the book clubs and mass-market paperbacks entered the picture. By and large, the novels that reviewers and the intellectual elite took seriously were ignored by people who read fiction for entertainment and vice versa, although a small number of writers—usually European—occasionally bridged the gap with books that were both entertaining (i.e., conventionally plotted) and critically acclaimed, perhaps because neither they nor their critics were in pursuit of that elusive leviathan of American letters, “The Great American Novel.”
Every successful fiction writer develops his or her own approach to the novel and always has, but in the increasingly merchandise-oriented world of popular fiction, the most successful ones needed, in the words of the showstopper from Gypsy, a gimmick. Following