Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [91]
It was some time before I finally collided with this new phenomenon myself. Schwed had returned recently from one of his London trips, and, as was his habit, he called a large meeting to go over all the books he had mentioned in his many missives to S&S. We assembled in Schwed’s office, each of us carrying a yellow legal pad, as if we were about to be examined—which was literally the case for most of us, as Schwed would not end the meeting until he knew exactly what had happened to every book and outline he had mentioned from London. Under the circumstances, it was no easy task to have to report that a book had been unreadable or, as was very often the case, simply wouldn’t travel across the Atlantic, usually because the subject was simply too English to survive the journey.*
The room was crowded enough so that I did not at first realize that there was a stranger among us, sitting comfortably on the brown leather sofa facing Schwed’s desk. Schwed himself, busy with his lists and his pipe, had perhaps not noticed the newcomer himself. I noted that the young man, who appeared to be about my age and height, was not carrying a yellow legal pad and looked so at ease that one might have thought it was his office. He was slender but with a solid build that suggested strength, and the rather protuberant eyes behind his glasses had a boldly purposeful, steely glint to them, as did the firm, dimpled chin. His complexion was on the reddish side, and his brownish hair was cut short. He wore the standard American businessman’s uniform of the time: a gray suit, a white shirt, a neat tie, and shiny shoes with blunt toes and thick soles. There was nothing particularly elegant about his clothes, but they clearly identified him as a businessperson of some kind, not an editor, for even in those days editors were somewhat bohemian in their dress. Even those few who wore suits did so with a certain donnish flair or eccentricity, as if their ideal was to resemble a Harvard professor rather than a successful banker or advertising executive. Schwed, for example, usually wore a sports coat and favored a French beret on rainy days, while Bob wore corduroy trousers and open-necked shirts.
Not having noticed the interloper, Schwed plunged into his list. He began with the books that he had actually bought while he was in England. I sketched on my yellow legal pad. These books were no concern of mine at this point. I would read them later, if I had to draft the flap copy or do any editing to Americanize them or to compensate for the fact that English editors seldom do any editing at all and in general tend to regard the whole process as one of those odd American obsessions, like putting ice in whiskey or going to the dentist regularly.
Lost in my own thoughts—mostly having to do with prospective fatherhood, about which role I didn’t have as yet a useful clue—I only half heard Schwed enthuse over an English novel about two tramps who tried to rescue small animals, rodents, pets, birds, and so on that had been hit by cars. It occurred to me vaguely that this very slight work of fiction might be difficult to sell to the mass of American fiction readers. Of course, it’s hard to guess what will appeal to more intellectual American readers, who have hailed many a foreign oddity as a masterpiece; still, sentimentality about animals, while a more or less universal emotion in England (Graham Greene once said that while you could probably get away with beating a child in Trafalgar Square at high noon, you would be lynched for hitting an animal), didn’t seem to me likely to win praise from the more serious literary critics here. All the same, I didn’t feel it was my place to argue about something that Schwed was already