James Salter - All That Is

In the morning he sat in the garden with his coffee, the garden of reconciliation, as he called it. In his white shirt, at the round metal table he was like a wounded man on a hospital terrace. You could not be angry with him. He did not talk about the previous night but rather about Palermo, palla-irma , city with no signs.

“It’s absolutely true,” he said. “You can go anywhere and not a street is identified. Everything is in complete disrepair.”

He was straightening a cigarette taken from a crushed pack. Everything he did was in a way the act of a survivor and at the same time of someone who would survive. He seemed to have played the game already somehow.

“Filthy with crime, I imagine,” Edina said.

“Sicily? Yes, of course,” Aleksei conceded. “There’s some crime. But you don’t see it. Kidnapping. Stealing women—that’s why I didn’t want to take you.”

“For fear I’d be kidnapped?”

“Yes. We’ve already had our war over an abducted woman,” he said.

“What can you do?” she said helplessly to Baum.

“We’ll take a trip to America,” Aleksei promised, “get a car and drive across the country, go to St. Louis, Chicago, see the Great Plains.”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “I’ve been counting on it.”

She excused herself, in fact to do her yoga on the floor in her bedroom, to seek understanding, her arms and legs gently swimming in the quiet air, then later in the morning to read.

It was in London with its haughty shops on Jermyn and New Bond Street; the houses plaqued with the famous names of former occupants, Boswell, Browning, Mozart, Shelley, even Chaucer; the hidden luxury from imperial days with its guardians in the form of silver-trimmed doormen at the great hotels; the exclusive clubs; the bookshops, restaurants, and endless particular addresses on terraces, places, roads, courts, crescents, squares, avenues, rows, gardens, mansions, and mews; the many small, even shabby hotels with rooms without bath; the traffic; the secrets one would never know—in this London he formed his first idea of the geography of publishing, the network of people in various countries who knew one another, especially those who were interested in the same kind of books and possessed similar lists but, equally important, were friends, not intimate perhaps, but colleagues and rivals and through this and their common endeavors, friends.

They were, in the main, able and even superior men, some very principled, some less so. The most prominent or at least the most talked about British publisher was Bernard Wiberg, a stocky man in his late forties with an eighteenth-century face, not difficult to caricature, prominent nose and somewhat pointed chin together with arms that seemed a little short. He had been a German refugee and had come to England just before the war without a penny. In the first years he had shared a room, and his only extravagance was once a week having a coffee at the Dorchester surrounded by people having a meal that cost thirty shillings or more, one day he was determined to be among them.

He began by publishing books that were in the public domain, but doing them handsomely and marketing them with style. He had great success with racy memoirs of women who made their way up, preferably from a young age, man by man in Regency London, and he published, ignoring general outrage, some books about the holocaust but from the other side, including a best-seller called Juliet of the Camps , based on various myths about a beautiful Jewish girl who for a time saved herself by working in a concentration camp brothel where a German officer fell in love with her. It was both an insult to the countless victims and a lie to the survivors. Wiberg took a lofty tone.

“History is the clothes in the closet,” he said. “Put them on and you will understand.”

He was referring in a way to his own life and his family, all of whom had perished in the terrifying nightmare that had been Eastern Europe. He had put that behind him. His fingernails were polished and his clothes expensive. He was fond of music and the opera. He was quoted as saying that his publishing house was based on the arrangement of a symphony orchestra: the bass fiddles and drums were in back, the foundation, so to speak, of major works, tapering forward to flutes, oboes, and clarinets, which were books of lesser weight but which made people happy and sold by the carload. His greater interest lay in the drums—he wanted to have Nobel winners inscribe books to him, to have a beautiful house and give parties.

He possessed the house, actually an apartment of two entire floors that overlooked Regent’s Park. It was luxurious, with high ceilings and walls enameled in deep, soothing colors and hung with drawings and pictures, one a large Bacon. The bookcases were filled with books, there was no noise from traffic or the street but instead patrician calm and a servant bringing tea.

Robert Baum and Wiberg had some innate understanding and over the years did a great deal of business together, each of them claiming the other had gotten the better of it.

Edina had a different view, not solely hers.

“There are wonderful German refugees named Jacob,” she agreed, “excellent doctors, bankers, drama critics. He’s not one of those. He came here and sought out the Achilles tendon, he took advantage of English Christian gentility. He did terrible things. The book about the Jewish girl who falls in love with the SS officer—you have to draw the line somewhere. And, of course, he climbed. He couldn’t get into society but he always hired girls from the best families. He gave them money. Well, that’s his real story. Robert knows my feelings.”

In Cologne, Wiberg’s counterpart, more or less, was Karl Maria Löhr, also a homely man, who had inherited the publishing house from his father, its founder, and who liked to sit on the floor of his office drinking whiskey and talking with writers. He had three secretaries, all of whom were or had been, at one time or another, available to him. One of them, Erna, often went with him on weekends, ostensibly to visit his mother who lived in Dortmund. Another, younger, was diligent and did not object to working late since she was unmarried. The night sometimes ended in a casual restaurant favored by artists and open late with a lot of talking and laughter, and then a drink in the paneled library of Löhr’s house where Katja, the second secretary, kept extra clothes and even had her own bathroom. Silvia, the third one—she was actually in promotion, having changed jobs—had accompanied him to book fairs in Frankfurt and London and one especially memorable time to Bologna where they dined in a restaurant called Diana, on the leafy terrace to one side, and stayed at the Baglioni. There was often a long interval when he would not have slept with her and her relative newness and the travel excited him. She always came to bed holding her forearm beneath her breasts, which were a little heavy. Silvia was spirited and amusing things happened with her. Once in a waterfront bar in Hamburg a sailor asked her to dance. Karl Maria did not mind but then the sailor had wanted to give her twenty-five marks to go upstairs with him. She said no, and he made it fifty and followed her back to the bar, where he offered her a hundred marks. Karl Maria leaned forward and said, “ Hör zu. Sie ist meine frau —she’s my wife. I don’t mind, but I think you may be getting too close to her price.”

The sailor was drunk, but they managed to leave him and go back to the hotel, where they had a last drink at the ornate, empty bar and laughed. Löhr could drink and drink.

The Swedish publisher was an urbane man who had brought Gide, Dreiser, and Anthony Powell to the house, as well as Proust and Genet. He published the Russians, Bunin and Babel, and later the great émigrés. He had been to Russia, it was a terrible place, he said, like a vast prison, a prison where all hope had to be abandoned, and yet the Russians themselves were the most wonderful people he had ever met.