My Mistake Read online

Page 18


  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.”

  This surprises me. I wonder what kind of transferential mechanism is operating inside this estimable man of letters to make him “really care” about this smart but mercurial boss. Her mind darts this way and that, like a pond skater, relying on surface tension to keep her afloat.

  Afloat. Tina and her husband, Harry Evans, have for some time now put me ever so slightly in mind of the duke and the king in Huckleberry Finn, floating down the Mississippi, affecting noble lineages, and fleecing townspeople right and left with their cons and impostures.

  Tina came into the magazine talking about people and subjects that were “hot,” wanting the “buzz,” the “chatter.” When somehow she and I got around to talking about this kind of thing, she said something like, “I know it all sounds awful, but we have to do something that will create more buzz, that will rise above all the chatter. I don’t always like it myself, but we have to do it.” So this was a chicken-and-egg problem, as she saw it, but as I see it now, she is the chicken and the egg.

  For all this professional skepticism about her, on a personal level Tina has always impressed me with her intelligence and charm, and there is a warm vulnerability about her, beneath the glittery trappings and despite all the Brownian motion, that makes her hard to resist. So I guess Roger’s concern about her does make sense after all. Also, a lot of my colleagues much later on will say that Tina’s CERN-like smashing of some of the magazine’s old-fashioned elements was a necessary step in its development. That The New Yorker needed the antithesis she represented to the theses of Shawn and to some exten
t Gottlieb, resulting finally in the magazine’s current Editor, David Remnick, as a kind of successful synthesis. Maybe that application of the Dialectic does have some merit. Maybe. But I can think of three or four other people who I believe could have done the same thing with less chaos. One in particular.

  Sixty-six

  Speaking again of leaving, Centrello takes me to lunch and lets me know that she would like me to step aside as Editor in Chief. Why? Numbers, evidently. Prizes—lack thereof. My high salary. It comes back to me that Harry Evans, when he hired me, said, “You have five years to fook oop, and I have barely finished four years. Centrello and I go back and forth about what role I might play if I do step aside—a prospect that doesn’t displease me as much as I would have expected it to, as you may understand if you look again at the age heading of this section and if you know that I was working ten to twelve hours a day and much of the weekends. Considering proposals, reading first novels, attending one meeting after another—art meetings, marketing meetings, acquisitions meetings, retreat meetings, advance meetings, meetings about meetings, meetings about canceling meetings—going to sales conferences, the London Book Fair, the Frankfurt Book Fair, and to lunches and lunches and lunches.

  At one point, I offer to help Centrello find a replacement for the job. But soon, the Era of Good Feeling ends, and I finally understand that leaving altogether might well prove more beneficial for me than staying under the conditions that Centrello is proposing. The ultimate straw descends when Centrello offers me a position as Editor at Large with no office. No office? Her financial guy tells me that this has to do with tax considerations, full-time employment versus a contractual arrangement, but that’s hard to believe. Centrello now seems to want me out, and I now want out. I’m out. What a shame that it has to end this way!

  She shuns me—except for formal politesse in all those meetings—where once she had stopped by my office every day. During this “transition” (as they say in business, spackling over fissures in the corporate plaster), a reporter quotes me as saying that publishing-job changes, including mine, remind me of speed chess. My mistake. I say to Gina, “But speed chess can be brilliant.” M.m. again.

  Centrello is a good publisher. She does know the numbers. She has now stayed in this position longer, and with more success, than anyone else in recent history, including Godoff, Evans, Jason Epstein, Joni Evans, and other publishing luminaries. My numbers, insofar as they are mine, have been mediocre at best, though the group has had some great successes. I keep wondering if there are other, more personal factors at work, but in the end, in such situations, it doesn’t matter, does it? When it comes to corporate life, especially at its higher altitudes, factors of all kinds tend to get tangled up with each other, and it’s impossible to untangle them, and pointless, and fruitless, to try.

  Prizes. Later, I will have to reconsider my agnosticism, as the numerous prizes “my” authors win may well be the work of an ironic deity. Elizabeth Strout wins the Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge, Colum McCann wins the National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin, and Mukherjee wins the Pulitzer in nonfiction for his book about cancer, and Reza Aslan, whom I brought to Random House, makes a huge hit with Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

  Part V

  The Great Temporariness; Crème Brûlée

  Sixty-six

  Cancer. A white shadow, about two and a half centimeters in width, in the upper lobe of my left lung, shows up on my routine chest X-ray. My GP says, “This could be very serious,” and tells me to consult with a pulmonologist. I do. The pulmonologist is a petite, confident woman. I ask her a few questions about herself, out of real curiosity but also to try to establish some kind of personal connection between us—a doctor strategy that I think usually results in closer medical attention. She mentions more than once that people have a hard time believing that she has children in their twenties.

  She asks me if I ever smoked.

  “Yes, from the age of twelve or so.”

  “A lot?”

  “Never. Never more than half a pack a day, and usually more like four or five cigarettes.”

  “When did you quit?”

  “Twenty-five years ago.”

  “Well, that means you have no greater statistical chance of developing lung cancer, if that’s what this is, than someone who has never smoked.”

  “Do you believe that?” I ask.

  She leans forward, as if about to impart a Mafia-grade secret, and says, “Statistically? Yes. Actually? No.”

  She asks me to come back the next week, after she has consulted with some colleagues.

  I visit Readie in her nursing home on Fifth Avenue. She is in her mid-nineties now. She says, “Oh, Lord, Danny, where we lived when you were little was so different. Bleecker Street had all them little stores owned by the Italians. Once when I was wheeling Mike up there in his baby carriage, one of the men came out of that store where all the vegetables were, and he said to me, ‘Hey! How come you iss-a so black and you baby iss-a so white?’ Things has changed a lot since then, but still not enough. Maybe that black man will be President.”

  When she dies, Readie is buried in a vast cemetery out in Queens, next to her husband, Joe Rogowski, the veteran of the Second World War who met Readie when they were both working for Uncle Enge in the summertime. Her son, Raymond, asks me to speak about her at the graveside. Those attending the memorial are mainly black. I start to talk about Readie’s loving nature, her care for me and my brother and Raymond, her good sense, her generosity, and I hear “That’s right” and “Uh-huh!” and “Talk about it!” coming from those seated before me. And instead of just meeting Raymond’s request as best I can, I get caught up and get outside myself and mean what I’m saying—there’s no distance between me and my words. No hint of irony—that addiction.

  The next appointment with the petite pulmonologist who has two sons in their twenties:

  “Well, what do you want to do about this situation?”

  “Get that thing out of there.”

  “Me too. When?”

  “Now! I’ll go over and lie naked on the street until they take me into the operating room.”

  “I would recommend one of two surgeons. One is fabulous but doesn’t have such a great manner. The other is just as good and I would send my mother to him.”

  “I’ll take Mom’s.”

  My wife and I go to meet the surgeon. He tells me that they will put me under and biopsy the lesion and nearby lymph nodes, and if only the lesion is malignant, they’ll take the whole lobe out laparoscopically, but if there’s any spread, they’ll sew me back up and give me chemotherapy and then do surgery.

  Near the end of the consultation, in an effort to appear casual, I say to the surgeon, “Did anyone ever tell you that you look a lot like Jeff Daniels?” He smiles in a pained way and leaves the examination room. The resident who has been with us the whole time says, “He gets that all the time. He really doesn’t like it.”

  Sixty-seven

  “What surgery are you having today?” a nurse in what seems like a sort of pre-operative holding pen asks me before I’m wheeled into the operating room.

  “An amputation,” I say.

  “What?” she asks. She looks worried.

  “I’m kidding. A lobectomy of the upper lobe of my left lung.”

  She laughs. “Right,” she says.

  “No, left,” I say.

  “Hah-hah,” she says.

  In the operating room, someone takes my pulse. It’s something like 115. “What—are you nervous?” the surgeon asks.

  “Of course,” I say.

  “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Yeah, right.

  To start an IV, a young man who must be an intern jabs at my left wrist, which is laid out to my side, Jesus-on-the-Cross style. “No, look,” a nurse says. She rotates my wrist, so as to make the vein stand out more, I am guessing, and that’s the last thing I remember, except for the reve
rse golden-swastika hallucination that spins faster and faster as I go under.

  I come out of the anesthesia in the recovery room at Mount Sinai Hospital after the surgery. For all I know, I might be waking up to find out that the surgery was not completed. My wife, Katherine, and a nurse are standing by the gurney. I am said to have said, “Did they do everything?” The answer was yes. I do remember a great flood of relief washing through me, as if my blood were resuming its normal, warm circulation instead of feeling like the cold soup it instantly became when I first saw the white shadow on the X-ray. I am said to have said next, “Did Obama win in South Carolina?”

  A few weeks later, the pulmonologist, after managing to inform me again that people are amazed to learn she has kids in their twenties, says, “You have large lymph nodes, so Dr. Williams thought there probably was some spread of the cancer. That’s why he wanted the biopsy.” She leans forward confidentially and says, “I didn’t think there was, and I am always right!”

  After my recovery from surgery, I am at a big literary gala at the American Museum of Natural History, standing on the steps outside the museum, talking to Michael Cunningham, whose first New Yorker published story, “White Angel,” I edited many years earlier. It caused a small literary sensation at the time—a time when short stories could cause literary sensations of any size at all. We are standing outside so that Cunningham can smoke. I’ve liked him ever since we worked together; he is warm and genial and gives the impression of happy self-indulgence. And even though he is ten years younger than I am, he always calls me “My boy!” when we meet. (Harry Evans always calls me “yoong mahn,” but he is older, and for some reason it doesn’t sit well with me.)