My Mistake (23 page)

He puts his hand on my arm again, and with that warm and loving smile says, “I knew you'd be all right.”

 

My fourth father leaves me. If I am ever to be father to myself, it will be now.

 

Sixty-one

 

Gina Centrello, who has replaced Ann Godoff as Publisher of Random House, calls me and asks me to return to the division as Editor in Chief, a position that Godoff held, in addition to being publisher. Centrello and I have lunch. It's my impression that since Godoff's departure some time ago, naming an editor in chief has become an urgent matter. I know, through publishing's chronic gossip affliction, that Centrello has offered the job to one or two others, who turned the offer down.

I don't. I do a little bargaining and we reach an agreement. I leave HarperCollins on good terms.

When I enter the Random House building once again, and then the conference room for the Random House division, I get warm applause from the forty or so people gathered there, most of them former colleagues. Finally! Something a little like the gang I tried and failed to organize at the Little Red School House, and like the “army” of kids at the Guest Camp who pretty quickly went
AWOL.

 

Sixty-two

 

I run into Pete Seeger in the lobby of the apartment building where I live. He's going to visit the Weavers' producer of long ago, Harold Leventhal, who lives on the top floor. We get in the elevator together—he is with his wife, Toshi—and I say, “Mr. Seeger, my name is Dan Menaker and I've listened to your music all my life, and I just wanted to thank you for it.” He says, “Why, that's very kind and you're certainly welcome. Now wait a minute—‘Menaker,' you say? Are you any relation to Enge Menaker, the square-dance caller many years ago?”

Maybe Enge is listening to this final rectification in his Marxist Heaven, where there proceeds from each angel according to his ability and to each according to his need. Maybe he and Readie will soon be arguing with each other over who should do the celestial laundry.

 

Sixty-three

 

Because I come to know that Diane Sawyer, the ABC newsperson, likes poetry, and I publish some poets at Random House—Billy Collins, Virginia Hamilton Adair, Deborah Garrison—we find ourselves in touch. I ask her to lunch, hoping to get her to agree to write a book. I offer her five million dollars, without any prior approval. She laughs and says, “So you want me to write about who Richard Nixon slept with.” (She worked in the Nixon White House.) I say, “You bet.” She says she can't write a book at this time because, as she puts it, “ABC owns my face”—a very modern kind of sentence, it occurs to me. She gets up after a cordial twenty minutes, and I finish the lunch with her producer.

People do read serious and worthwhile books. They don't have to be professors or editors or reviewers or the husbands or wives of people like that, or students or researchers. It's interesting to talk to Sawyer about Virginia Hamilton Adair, the blind poet who has published her first, very good book,
Ants on the Melon,
in her eighties. Sawyer is transformed from star to fan instantly, with no huge erudition but with a good reader's intuitive grasp of the meaning and feeling of what she has read. As a publisher and editor, you can sometimes forget that intelligent and sensitive people in all places and occupations and personal situations make books part of their lives. Not most of their lives, as you may do, but an important part of them.

 

Will Murphy, a colleague of mine at Random House, and I are meeting with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the fierce Lebanese-born author of a cult philosophical/financial book called
Fooled by Randomness.
He wants to publish another, to be called
The Black Swan,
about the impact of “outliers”—powerful but unpredictable events—on our lives, and our tendency to fail to see events as randomnesses in favor of our brain's preference for retroactive narrativization and future forecasting. That is, we are evolutionarily programmed to try to make “sense” of past events, so that we can anticipate the future. When to plant the beans for the best harvest, etc. This programming does make sense until we try to apply it to highly complicated past and future occurrences that depend in large measure on happenstance and that proliferate as technology and the information it produces grow ever more complicated. That's what Taleb's book is going to be about, and given my preoccupation with such matters, I want to acquire it.

Will and I meet with Taleb at his hedge-fund office, or whatever it is, where his employees—I am guessing they are his employees—are constantly consummating their marriages to their computers. Taleb is an intense, black-bearded firebrand of certainty—about uncertainty, and many other topics. He rambles on, fascinatingly, about his book and his ideas, and parenthetically says, “I am of course an epiphenomenalist about consciousness. Sorry, it's probably not a term you are familiar with.”

“I'm one too,” I say. (I am.)

Taleb asks me to explain—to prove my claim—and essentially I do, thanks once again to that deep Swarthmore education.

He looks at me differently—that is to say, looks at me—and says he wants to meet my boss right away. So we go back across town to Random House and hastily convene a larger meeting. Gina Centrello, my boss, skeptical of this philosophical zealot, says, “What happened to you in the big crash in 1987?”

“That is when I could have retired,” Taleb says. Centrello smiles and looks at Taleb differently.

We acquire the book.

 

Sixty-four

 

Manuscripts and proposals and file folders cover the floor of my office. When Chip McGrath or David McCormick complains about the work he has to do, I always say, “I wish you could sit in my chair for ten minutes if you want to know what real hard work is like.” Or it seems that I always say that, because one day when I'm having dinner with Chip after we see a junky movie, as we do once a month or so, he says, “I wish you could sit my chair for ten or fifteen minutes, and then you'd know what real hard work is.” Then he laughs, and I realize he's mimicking me, though I hadn't been aware of the frequency of my resort to this rhetoric. (One day at lunch, I say to McCormick, “That's a good idea,” and he says, “It is and it isn't,” and laughs the same way Chip laughed about sitting in my chair. I realize for the first time that I use this equivocal device very often. Well, I do and I don't.)

But the work
is
hard. In fact, I think it's impossible to do an Editor in Chief's job very well—or at least fully conscientiously—for any length of time, and at that only a little harder than doing the job of a non-executive acquiring editor, especially in publishing as it stands—maybe I should say stumbles—right now. Electronic-book sales have begun in earnest, making acquisition and prediction of success, to say nothing of the idea of copyright, all the more complex, if not chaotic. Add that to the traditional and tectonically opposing demands on publishing—that it simultaneously make money and serve the cause of literature—and you have a fine stew of what corporations and politicians call “challenges.” I call it a mess.

If I belong anywhere, it probably isn't in publishing. But, then, I felt I didn't belong in academia, or, at the beginning and near the end, at
The New Yorker.
Or grading high-school essays. I keep forgetting that this sense of dissatisfaction explains why work is called “work.” I keep forgetting the good insights I gained from psychoanalysis and from simple but hard reflection—that my problems with authority are as much problems with myself as they are problems with authority, that like the teenager I was and in some ways still am, I grouse about and make fun of what I have to do and the people who tell me I have to do it, even when those people are me. For all kinds of reasons—illness, family imbalance, spoiling and its consequent narcissism, tragedy—I simply have not grown all the way up. Period. And never will.

But then again, I know very few people who have grown all the way up. The best most of us can do is manage intermittent maturity. For me it generally means forcing myself to take things seriously; this was especially important in the raising of my children and in my work as Editor in Chief.

The subject puts me in mind of a friend's son who took group Yamaha piano lessons when he was seven, and who, at the end of every exercise, would tap out the little tune of “Shave and a haircut—two bits.” This is the kind of ironic stunt it's always hard for me to resist.

 

A colleague at Random House asks me to go over a letter he has written—in response to a popular-science book proposal—in which he refers to an evolutionary biologist whom the proposal identifies as Dobzhinsky. I say, digging up a datum out of my recollection of Dr. Enders's excellent Introduction to Biology course at Swarthmore, “I think that should be ‘Dobzhansky.'” My colleague goes to his office and looks it up and then comes back into my office and says, “How do you
know
this shit?”

I'm largely able to put aside my iconoclasm and irony. Or put them in the closet, anyway. The people who report to me seem to like and respect me. I don't think I've ever been on this side of group admiration before, for all those childhood efforts. At HarperCollins it was beginning, maybe as a long-term after-effect of analysis, or maybe it was just accrued experience. It amazes me now. It doesn't really seem to be
me
calming feuds, gently reprimanding, giving praise sincerely but also motivationally, managing not to be a wise guy to my boss. Being judicious. Not spray-painting my high-school-class numerals on the walls, not sending prank gay-Valentine's cards to my colleagues, as I once did to McGrath at
The New Yorker.
Not fomenting union drives. Not seeking acknowledgment for things done well but finding satisfaction in doing them well. It's as if I were playing a joke on my true self, but it's a serious joke, and it is becoming part of my true self.

The advice I give to others generally takes the form of a question, one that I finally am asking myself: Do you want justice—do you want to
show them—
or do you want to achieve your goal? The two sometimes—frequently—don't go together. I stop being angry, or, anyway, I plug up the deep well my anger so often spouts from. In business, for people who want to and have the skill to “get ahead,” seeking justice in tough situations leads to failure time and time again.

It also seems to work to try to put myself in the psychological shoes of the person who comes to me with a complaint or a problem and to ask that person to see the problem from the point of view of whoever else is involved. A brilliant young man asks me for help getting a jacket image changed—for the eighteenth time, or something like that. I tell him I'm not sure I can help; the art department is under terrific pressure. We talk for a while and he leaves content to let the matter rest. He says, “I don't know why it is, but every time I come in here, even when you say no, I feel better.”

All well and good, and a very nice compliment. The trouble is, the jacket should definitely be changed, and whatever I may have gained in maturity, I've lost in youthful idealism.

 

But this new control is not quite complete. Jonathan Karp, the Editor in Chief of Random House, leaves to run his own imprint, Twelve, at Hachette. As Executive Editor in Chief, I travel to Washington, D.C., to visit Laura Hillenbrand, author of the hugely successful
Seabiscuit,
to try to persuade her not to follow Karp but stay at Random House for her next book, and to offer myself as her editor.

There is a flag on her lawn. I say how I admire her patriotism, especially given who the President is at the moment. George W. Bush. We have a nice talk, and I leave with the certainty that she will remain a Random House author. When I get back to the office the next day, Gina Centrello comes into my office with an annoyed look on her face. “You said something negative about George Bush to Laura Hillenbrand,” she says.

“Well, just barely,” I say.

“You're lucky,” Centrello says. “She's going to stay with us, but she doesn't want to work with you.”

“Why not?”

“Because she's a good friend of Laura Bush.”

 

Sixty-five

 

Recommended by a mutual friend, Siddhartha Mukherjee, a hematology oncologist at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, in New York, comes to see me at Random House about a book project. He looks like a handsome young villain in a Bollywood movie. He tells me about the first written reference to cancer, in the third century
B.C.
, in a papyrus attributed to the great Egyptian physician Imhotep, who refers to “bulging masses” in a person's breast. I get goosebumps. Premonitory goosebumps, perhaps. In any case,
this
is what makes publishing, even if only occasionally, so exciting. We talk about his idea for more than an hour, and I get extremely enthusiastic about it—it seems to me the perfect time for a grand book about cancer. I've always felt that if it weren't for making shaving cream in chemistry class in high school and being “taught” biology by Mr. Z., of the forsythia-homosexual incident—and my over-fond attachment to words, my mother's line of work—I would and could have been a doctor.

 

When I mention the project to Centrello, she expresses reservations about a book on cancer. But I want to acquire it anyway, and I do. It goes on to win the Pulitzer Prize, but from another publisher, because Mukherjee leaves Random House when, a year or so later, I do.

Speaking of leaving, shortly before Tina Brown leaves
The New Yorker,
Roger Angell invites me to lunch at the Century Association, a literary/artistic/business club on 43rd Street, across the street from
The New Yorker
's offices. It's just a social conversation, just to see how things are going. But the morning before the lunch, there have been Tina Developments at the magazine, and it's clear after we sit down in the quiet, wood-paneled dining room of the club that Roger is distracted and more fidgety than he ordinarily is. After less than an hour, he begins to look at his watch. He doesn't seem to hear the question I ask him and doesn't respond to my attempts to engage him in something that might pass for real conversation. Finally I say, “Roger, it looks like you're really upset about what's happening at the office. Maybe we should just get together another day and you can go back and attend to what's going on.” He says, “Yes, I'm sorry, Dan, but that would probably be a good idea.” He signals our waiter for the check, signs it quickly, pushes back his chair, gets up, and says, “I apologize. But I like Tina and I'm worried about this situation. You know, I really care about her.”