So maybe I should be thankful that the book is a little slow to get into—so slow that I didn’t pick it up again until a reading drought this spring. It starts, despite its subtitle, as a memoir of Michael Korda. And this early Michael Korda is quite the name-dropper, thanks to his Hungarian-Hollywood-American upbringing. Until he gets an entry-level job at Simon & Schuster in the late 1950s, there’s a very real fear that he’s going to spend all five hundred pages talking about things like people he knew at Oxford, and which Hollywood washout hosted the best pool parties. But once he settles into New York book publishing, the dishy, informative parts start, and the references to “my father’s great friend, the movie producer X” become more sporadic and slightly less obnoxious.
After that, the book moves on two tracks, which wind up fused: practical information about how the industry functioned in the latter half of the 20th century, and anecdotes about particular authors/agents/publishing figures. The former bits make for an incredibly detailed look at the industry. A lot of things surprised me here. Like, it appears that book publishing has changed extremely little over the past fifty years. (For instance, publishing has to be one of the only industries with a business plan based on New Deal bailout policies.) Korda touches on the kind of patchy modernization when he muses that while the actual business of buying and selling books has stayed pretty much the same, it’s the world outside the bubble that’s changed. Crunchy corporate shell, smooth chocolate center. I also didn’t realize how recently publishing was the province of WASP-y males. Total non-kosher sausage fest until the late 60s. The gossipy anecdotes about literati are the best part of the book. Korda was apparently the Forrest Gump of book publishing: in addition to being there for a crazy amount of bestsellers and nascent trends, his list of authors includes Graham Greene, Larry McMurtry, Richard Nixon, Woodward and Bernstein, Kitty Kelley, Ronald Reagan (at the same time Kelley was writing her Nancy book, no less!), Tennessee Williams on the decline, Philip Roth, and others that I can’t even remember. Korda wasn’t necessarily the editor on all of their big-name books, but still…impressive list. Some of the longer author spotlights are apparently adapted from New Yorker profiles that Korda did; the strongest are the ones on former presidents Nixon and Reagan, a long bit about Jacqueline Susann (which I believe was made into that Bette Midler movie a few years ago), and a great account of working with a painfully delusional Joan Crawford. Just as good are the snapshots of people who work behind the scenes, like various agents and editors. There’s a surprising candidness—it’s possible that by 2000, most of the major players were retired, or lunching at that big Algonquin table in the sky. It probably also helps that Another Life is published by Random House, while Korda did all his editor-in-chiefing at Simon & Schuster (another fun tradition in publishing: or, “what constitutes a conflict of interest, anyway?”).
The vivid characters definitely make up for unevenness in narrative flow, structure, chronology, and even language. Korda’s voice fluctuates throughout: sometimes he’s the cool observer, other times he’s much more present. I guess that’s a product of morphing previously published articles with a bigger timeline.
Anyway, despite the dishy qualities and the insider baseball, this was a pretty good read. Not that my career path is likely to change at this point (given that I did spend the cash and time on that M.A. and all), but it made me more excited about becoming a part of this world—God and interviewers willing. At the same time, I’d recommend it for anyone who’s not really familiar with the book industry. It’s a fantastic crash course, if you ever wanted to know more about those wacky literati.
And now some of the more amusing bits:
On editing:
“It is possible to simultaneously overwork and underachieve—indeed, for an editor, nothing is easier. You can spend weeks—months, even—lovingly rewriting a manuscript that was never worth anything in the first place. You know it’s someone else’s mistake, even as you sit up late every night with half a dozen sharpened number-two pencils, long after your partner has gone to bed with a martyr’s sigh and a strong hint that he or she won’t be responsible for what happens if this kind of thing doesn’t stop so the two of you can have a normal marriage in which a person doesn’t get pushed aside in favor of a manuscript every night of the week and gets fucked like a normal person every once in a while, not to speak of getting taken to the movies every once in a blue moon.”
On Joan Crawford’s advice to women:
“She strongly advised having afternoon sex and making men talk about their work. To the question of how a woman could take an interest in her husband’s work if, for example, he was a cashier, Joan suggested asking him (presumably before or during afternoon sex): ‘Any holdups today?’”
On publishing presidents:
“The only reason any normal citizen wants to visit the White House on business, I told Anderson, is to get the cuff links, or whatever the equivalent is for women. After all, take away the cuff links, and who on earth would want to meet Jimmy Carter? Anderson was not amused—at the time, he took the view that Carter was leading a moral crusade and was going to be part of a great moment in American history—but he managed to persuade the president to send me a handwritten letter of thanks when the book was finally published. To my surprise, Carter misspelled the title of his own book (‘A Goverment as Good as it’s People’). I had it framed.”
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