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By Root 674 0

committed to and about which he waxed fervently, his face shining with enthusiasm. This, he would have us know, was the real thing, the most talked-about novel in London. Every American publisher in London had been after it, and when Simon Michael Bessie heard that Schwed had nabbed the book right from under his nose, he almost cried, right there in the bar at Brown’s Hotel. If he did say so himself, Schwed said, it was a coup, something to be really proud of, and proof that all his wining, dining, and tennis playing in London paid off in the end. Why, the biggest agent in London, Gerald Pollinger, though it wasn’t his book, had called him at the hotel to congratulate him on buying the novel of the season. Of course, we were going to have to get behind the book, that went without saying.

At some point during this peroration, Schwed must have noticed the stranger on his sofa, because he stopped and stared at him. The stranger stared right back, one leg crossed confidently over the other, his expression inscrutable but not, one would say, convinced. Schwed cleared his throat noisily, and said, “Ah, excuse me …”

He didn’t challenge the intruder, no doubt because the intruder’s eyes were fixed unwaveringly on his, and nothing on his face showed even the slightest trace of self-doubt.

“Dick Snyder,” the young man said pleasantly. His voice was a deep, husky, basso profundo growl, by far and away the deepest register I had ever heard in a white man’s voice (as a child, I had once heard Paul Robeson sing “Ol’ Man River” for my father at home).* Snyder’s voice was harsh, rather than melodious, the accent was curious and hard to place—a combination of Brooklyn Jewish and Harvard that hesitated, from syllable to syllable, between the two.

“Did I send you a copy of this memo?” Schwed asked, holding up a thick sheaf of paper.

“No,” Snyder said, pleasantly enough, but with the air of somebody who couldn’t be moved by a bulldozer and wasn’t about to explain his presence to anyone.

Schwed puzzled over this briefly, then decided to get on with his agenda. He continued to sing the praises of the novel he had bought in London, while Snyder doodled, lips slightly pursed as if he were tunelessly whistling. The more he thought of it, Schwed said, warming to his subject, the more sure he was that twenty thousand copies was the right number—maybe more.

Snyder waited for Schwed to pause, then spoke in a voice that dominated the room. “How do we know this novel is that good?” he asked.

“I just told you,” Schwed snapped.

“That’s all we have to go on, to set a first printing of twenty thousand? That you liked it?” Snyder smiled. He had big, square, even teeth, very white, and when he smiled they seemed to fill his mouth. At this moment, however, his smile conveyed no particular humor—it was more of a grimace, in fact. He did not look indignant, merely interested, as if his only reason for his presence was so he could learn more about the mysteries of hardcover-book publishing.

Schwed bit down hard on his pipe stem. “It’s all we had a lot of times before, and they’ve all worked out just fine, goddamn it. Now let’s move on.”

But Snyder had pulled out of his pocket a list of his own, which he unfolded slowly. “Not all of them,” he said agreeably, looking it over.

It was one of Schwed’s boasts that his books never lost money and that he had the facts and figures to prove it. Nobody had ever challenged him on this point, to my knowledge, if only because nobody cared enough to do it. Besides, it was a patently absurd claim. Every editor has failures, and it was unlikely that Schwed had been spared them. As in the movie business, anything better than a 50 percent rate of success made you a genius. In book publishing there is no such thing as R and D. The only way to find out if a book is going to sell is to publish it. Most editors (and almost all agents and authors) invariably base their estimate of how well a book has done on the gross sale, before returns (sometimes six months or a year after publication) have come in, thus ignoring the fact