Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [96]
“Cheer up,” I said. “Tomorrow may be better.”
He looked pensive. “Do you think anybody would miss us if we left?” he asked.
I didn’t think so, but it seemed like deserting one’s post under fire. On the other hand, anything seemed better than staying. What if somebody at S&S found out that we hadn’t stayed? I wondered. What would happen to us?
Dick shrugged. “Nobody will care. Anybody asks, we’ll tell them it was a great learning experience.” He spoke, as he always would over the coming decades, with absolute confidence.
Quietly, as if stealth was called for, we sneaked downstairs, checked out, and got back into our rented Rambler. Dick’s spirits rose as we hit the highway and put some distance between ourselves and the librarians. Through the mist, we could see the glow from the lights of New York. “Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?” he asked solemnly. “What’s your ambition?”
I was silent for a few moments. I didn’t have a clue about where I wanted to be next year, let alone in ten years’ time. The truth was that I didn’t really have a specific ambition. Fatherhood or not, my mind was still full of unrealistic or mutually contradictory ideas about the future, a well-stuffed cloud-cuckoo-land: I dreamed vaguely of going back to England, or taking up photography, or even of going into the movie business, the very thing I had run away from in the first place. To have a lot of different ambitions, I realized, was to have no ambition at all.
At S&S, where ambition might have made some sense and even done me some good, I really had none. Above me there were layers of people more senior than myself, who showed every sign of staying there for the rest of their lives (or mine)—starting with Bob Gottlieb, Henry Simon, and Peter Schwed—although it did occasionally occur to me that I might be able to leapfrog over one or two of the lesser ones without great difficulty and perhaps had already done so. With the appropriate modesty, I suggested to Dick that my ambition was to go on doing pretty much what I’d been doing but at a higher rate of pay.
“Bullshit,” he said firmly. He lit a cigarette. “You’re as ambitious as I am.”
I denied it. “You’re full of shit,” he went on in a cordial tone, his deep voice rumbling. He sounded sincere and well intentioned rather than argumentative.
He pointed his cigarette at me in the dark. “Look at the facts,” he said. “You joined the company as Henry’s goddamn assistant. Then what happens? You look around, you see that Henry’s not going anywhere, so you start editing manuscripts for Bob, who is going somewhere. As if that isn’t enough, you jump ship from working for Henry to Peter—who, by the way, is going to eat Henry alive. You even get to work with Max and go to editorial board meetings.” He chuckled knowingly. “Somebody looking at your career at S&S so far just might think you were pretty ambitious for a goddamn Oxford man, that’s all I’m saying.”
Seen from Dick’s point of view, perhaps Schwed had been right to see me as Machiavellian after all. I laughed. “It’s nothing I planned. It all just happened.”
Dick snorted. “Nothing just happens, my friend.” He puffed on his cigarette contentedly. “Listen, if all this comes naturally to you, you’re way ahead. The best way to get ahead is not to be obvious about it, believe me.” He was silent for a moment. Dick’s ambition, it must be said, was unconcealed—far from being bashful on the subject, he was proud of it. This was one of his more appealing traits.