Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [97]
“What’s your ambition?” I asked, as much to get him off the subject of me as out of curiosity.
He didn’t answer for a very long time. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him slouched against the door, one arm slung over the seat back. He was gazing ahead, at what? I was reminded of Gatsby’s green, orgiastic light at the end of Daisy’s dock, but in this case there were only the twinkling lights of the oil refineries and chemical plants on either side of the highway, blinking mysteriously in the dark. There was something of Gatsby in Dick, I thought, as there is in every American who wants to rise above his father’s station and dreams of gaining wealth, class, or both. Dick had already begun that process long ago, I guessed. His eagerness to learn was voracious, passionate, sometimes a little frightening. He was not just a fast learner but an instant one, soaking up what he wanted to know deftly. Already, in the few months since he had made his first appearance on the twenty-eighth floor, he had changed. The thick-soled shoes with blunt toes had given way to elegant English wing tips, his suits already showed signs of hand tailoring, the button-down shirts had been replaced by English ones with elegant, hand-sewn collars and showing just the right amount of cuff. Some time later, he admired one of my shirts and asked where it came from. I told him I had bought it at Pierce, Hilditch, and Key in London. A couple of weeks later, I noticed that he was wearing a similar shirt, having had his secretary call the London shirtmakers and give them his measurements. It was not just clothes—like Gatsby, he absorbed what he wanted to, adapted it effortlessly to himself, and soon knew more about it than you did. Even his Harvard accent had become more pronounced, now that he had one elegantly shod foot in the hardcover-book world, for it was clear that his immediate ambition was to become a hardcover publisher (Peter Schwed, watch out! I thought) though equally clear that his ambitions went beyond that, into some stratosphere that only he could see or imagine.
“I want it all,” he said.
“All? Money? Fame? Power? A limo? Beautiful women? That kind of thing?”
He laughed, but I could tell that he was being serious. “Something like that,” he said.
“Do you think book publishing is the right profession? It sounds to me as if the movie business might be a better choice.”
Dick shook his head emphatically. “Nah,” he said. “This is the one I’m in. Books have class. And look at the people who are running the goddamn book industry! Most of them don’t know what they’re doing. I mean, look at S&S. You and I could run it a hundred times better than it’s being run now. A thousand times better! We’d make a good team, too.”
If Dick wanted to team up with an editor, why hadn’t he picked Bob, who was already successful? I wondered. But then I realized Bob already had a partner of sorts in Tony Schulte. Also, Bob would always want to be the star, and Schulte was willing enough to let him have the limelight. Dick would never be comfortable in anybody’s shadow. He was picking a dark horse in me, certainly, but at the time he didn’t have much of a choice.
“You know what I’ve left out?” he asked. Answering the question himself before I could, he said: “We’re going to have a lot of fun, whatever happens.”
We shook hands on that.
* This is a loaded subject, even today—the work of some English writers travels perfectly well, while that of others, for no very discernible reason, doesn’t at all. Some English best-sellers—Dr. Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small, for example, or the novels of John le Carré—go on to become huge best-sellers in the United States, while others sink without a trace into the Atlantic. Much English literary fiction, and almost all French and European fiction, doesn’t travel at all, like certain kinds of cheese, but every once in a while there will be a startling exception, like Salman Rushdie or Martin Amis. The situation is complicated