• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 698 0

by the immense hunger for American books of all kinds in England, and, for that matter, in the rest of the world. Like Big Macs and blue jeans, American writing is by and large welcome everywhere, which tends to make the transatlantic traffic more or less one way. Thus, the novels of Mary Higgins Clark invariably top the French best-seller lists, whereas it is hard to remember the last time that any French novel, literary or otherwise, even appeared at the bottom of The New York Times’s best-seller list. The French complain bitterly about American cultural hegemony, while the British, who experience it much more severely, don’t seem to care.

* He was playing the role of an African chieftain in my Uncle Zoli’s film Sanders of the River at the time, and that remains for me the stump puller of all voices.

* Years later, on our first trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair, before Snyder had graduated to chauffeur-driven limousines, I remember our renting a car at Frankfurt airport and driving in circles through the pouring rain and early morning rush-hour traffic of a strange city. Snyder read the map in a state of growing dismay as I got into the wrong lane or missed a crucial exit. We could actually see our hotel as we sped past it in the wrong direction again and again, apparently unable to approach it. “You are never going to do the fucking driving again,” he growled in a deep voice, and I never did.

CHAPTER 14

Having fun has always been an integral part of the book-publishing business—indeed, one of its main attractions. Bennett Cerf, whose enjoyment of life was so well known that it actually became one of Random House’s main assets, boasted frequently about how much fun he was having. This caused a good deal of puzzlement and anxiety among Wall Street types, since most of them took a more conventional, Puritan view of business; they assumed that anybody who claimed to be having fun during office hours wasn’t working hard enough. Even in such relatively unconventional businesses as television and the movie industry, few people would admit to having fun. On the contrary, people such as Jim Aubrey, who ran the CBS television network, worked hard to be seen as deadly serious, and so did his competitors and the men who ran the major movie studios. Aubrey was, in fact, known as “the Smiling Cobra,” not because he had a sense of humor but because his thin, narrow-lipped smile always portended the dismissal of some major executive who had failed to please him. Motion-picture executives strove to present more serious appearances than bankers. It is hard to imagine any one of them being carried out of his office in his own chair, a broad grin on his face, as Cerf did the day Random House moved to its new building, or telling an audience of Wall Street analysts that publishing was the most fun you could have with your clothes on.

There was something about many of the new, predominantly Jewish book publishers that made them want to combine business and pleasure and enabled them for the most part to eat their cake and have it too. Dick Simon and Max Schuster, too, had always stressed the importance of having fun—and for the most part, they did have fun, each in his own way, as did the Knopfs, with rather more dignity. Alfred Knopf, an enthusiastic amateur photographer, took the portraits of many of Knopf’s authors for the jackets of their books.

Although Dick Snyder came out of the Doubleday farm team—nobody at Doubleday had any fun except Nelson Doubleday, who had too much—and the circle around Leon Shimkin (who was no fun at all), he instinctively understood the relationship between personal pleasure and publishing that made it a different business from most. In no other area of the media is it possible to take a flier on something you like with as small a risk. Movies cost millions to make, television pilots are not only expensive but seldom lead anywhere, the content of most magazines is predetermined by editorial policy, but the investment in any one book, provided it’s not by a big, best-selling author, can be measured in