FOUR

At Play

If you want to know someone well, watch how she walks, talks, stands, sits, and speaks. This will reveal exactly how her mind operates. Just observing fellow travelers in the subway tells you a great deal about them without your ever being introduced. If you want to know even more about the person, watch what she does in her leisure time. Knowing that will help you understand what makes another person tick.

Take me, for example. What have I ever done in my spare time but work? Yes, occasionally, I have taken time off, but I have had to force myself to do it. I was brought up (how on earth did this begin?) to finish my work before I began to play. Of course, there is always more work and so I rarely, if ever, got around to playing.

I remember an occasion many years ago when an author and I had been working very hard for months on his book. One afternoon everything was finally done, and I said, “The work is over. Now we can play.” And then we realized that neither of us even knew where or how to begin. Most of the time I still feel that way, but I am determined to make up for all the time I have lost.

I don’t know whether my son is typical of the current generation, but we have always had a difference of opinion about work. I believe that you do your chores first and, if there is time left over, then you are free to play. He believes the opposite, probably because he has observed me slaving away for the last twenty-three years. All he has ever seen me do is work; perhaps he has come to the conclusion that this is no way to spend a life, so (as far as I can tell) he gets in as much play as possible first and manages to squeeze in a little work at the end.

When I consider the implications of how I have spent my life so far, I am appalled. Somehow, I have completely overlooked the importance of playing and what its significance is. Many of the sacred teachings I have studied (particularly Vedanta) go out of their way to point out that creation is one great play and that whatever or whoever produced this play did so for the sake of enjoyment—his/hers/its and ours. We came into this world, the current production, as players not workers. We have roles that may shift from moment to moment, depending on the director, but we don’t have to write the script, paint the scenery, or sell the tickets. We just have to play our parts. Why is this something that I fail to remember over and over again? Most of the time I, and probably you too, labor under the delusion that I am responsible for all aspects of the play when the truth is that I just have to be there for the performance. And if I’m not, neither I nor the audience will enjoy it.

Perhaps this can be most clearly seen on stage. Once you have experienced it there, it is easier to put it into practice in your daily life. The most memorable performances I have witnessed were those of Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing at the New York City Ballet when he first came to the West, and Douglas Perry who sang the part of Gandhi in Philip Glass’s Sanskrit opera Satyagraha, which I saw at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In each case, the performer was having such a good time, he positively glowed. The light was flooding out of him irrepressibly. He was enjoying himself in every sense of the word. And so we, the audience, shared his enjoyment. This is the way to go through life. And if you are wondering what all this has to do with not living to excess, here’s the answer: There was an article in Reader’s Digest umpteen years ago in which I learned that far fewer muscles are required in smiling than looking sad. Less tension is involved.

So, whether it is someone else you want to know about or yourself, have a look at what this person does when not working and also see if he or she is enjoying it. Are you spending all your time watching television (whatever the excuse)? If so, what does this say about you? Do you seem to do nothing but cook? Does he devote himself to music?

I wonder how I got to this ripe age feeling so driven by my work? Although it is not uncommon in the United States, remember that I grew up in England where to talk of how you earn a living (or religion, politics, or sex) is just not done. In this country, almost the first thing you say to someone when you meet is “What do you do?” This is not a question that would ever be asked in the United Kingdom. Here in New York I love to talk about my work with and for authors. But when I go home, no one wants to know about it. No one asks, and so I don’t tell.

My first job was in a public library. The salary was so small that by the time I got my paycheck at the end of the month, it wasn’t even enough to cover my expenses although I was living at home. I cycled to work and took a sandwich for my lunch, but even these economies didn’t seem to help. My time was spent stamping books and putting the volumes that had been returned back on the shelves. The high point of my day would be when someone asked me, “Can you recommend me a good book, miss?” (I would hastily scan the first and last pages of whatever I was holding at the time so that I could describe the kind of book it was) or once, “Do you have books on learning foreign languages? I’m going to Switzerland for my holidays, and I want to learn Swiss.” After three months of this, I had managed to reimburse my parents for the money they had had to lend me during my time at the library. Then I quit, having discovered that the only way for advancement as a librarian was to study for the equivalent of a university degree in my spare time. This would then qualify me to choose purchases for the library from lists of books that circulated once a week and also, presumably, rule the roost over the other bluestockings who worked at the branch. The prospects were not thrilling. Surely there was more to life than that?

So I enrolled in a secretarial college for young ladies in Mayfair. In those days that meant Pitman’s shorthand (I took rapid dictation in minuscule glyphs), typing at a speed of at least sixty words a minute on a manual typewriter, learning how to lay out a letter or document so that it was good enough to be framed, and commercial French, Spanish, and German. I managed to cram the year’s course into six months. Then I applied for a job at the Automobile Association, where I spent six months translating the descriptions of members’ cars into French for their carnets (passports for cars to travel in Europe). There turned out to be no future in that job, either, so I moved to the foreign franchise department of Schweppes, working for six roving managers, and from there to Pirelli (the footwear, not the tire division), and then on to a chemical company, and eventually a small engineering firm in Chelsea.

Each time that I found myself in a new situation, it took me about three months to understand the business and how it functioned, and then I would revamp all the office systems to make them work more efficiently. That would take me another three months, but then there would be no further challenge. All the executives were always men, and all the secretaries young women. Even if I thought I could do the job better than most of the men, no one would ever have considered asking me to. I didn’t have a degree, and I wasn’t a man.

So I consulted someone about what other possibilities there might be for an intelligent woman, and he told me that there were two avenues I could pursue without a degree: advertising and publishing. In both these spheres women had already made their way, and there was no reason why I might not do the same. I had no interest in advertising and I had started out with books in the first place, so I applied for a job at André Deutsch, a small independent publishing house (they were almost all independent in those days, but they weren’t all small).

Now that I think about it, I am amazed I took the job. I was interviewed and hired as André Deutsch’s assistant by a young American editor who herself had just started work there. My salary was to be £12 a week rather than the £15 I was then earning (it took me three years to get back to £15), and I would not meet André himself until the following week.

I suppose that it was there that I learned to work so hard and think of almost nothing else. I shared an office with another young woman. Perhaps office is too dignified a word for our space. We sat side by side at the end of a corridor. Beside us on the floor was a huge pile of unopened manuscripts that we attacked once a week, carefully saving the envelopes in which they had arrived so that we could reuse them later. On the other side was another pile of manuscripts waiting to be rejected. Shirley worked for the production manager and two editors (each of these jobs was a full-time occupation). I worked for André. And between us we coped with the manuscripts that ebbed and flowed around us, confiding in each other that we thought we might be able to get everything done if it were not for the authors. But, of course, without the authors there would be nothing to publish.

André was a short, charming, distinguished-looking man from Budapest. It was common knowledge that the three most important things in his life were his work. And it was also rumored that you could trust André as far as you could throw George Weidenfeld (in those days, this physically large and successful publisher had not yet been knighted). This was both unfair and unwarranted. I worked for André for more than three years, and I never caught him doing anything illegal or even unethical. He made sure that he always received whatever he was entitled to in full measure but that was as far as it went. When it was clear that paying a bill could no longer be avoided, he would instruct the business manager to send a check to the American publisher “by fast sea mail” (perhaps he thought that the post office used ships that traveled at two different speeds?).

He would appear at our end of the corridor just as we were about to leave for the day, with his shirtsleeves rolled up and a letter that had to be dictated immediately. And he would stand just behind one of us, almost touching but not quite, until the letter was finished. He had enormous animal magnetism, and he used it. He knew that there was no way we were strong enough to refuse to stay late if he flashed his smile. By the time each of us had taken the train home, it would be late and we would be so exhausted that we would often cry over our supper.

I wondered how to extricate myself from this situation, and then the young woman who handled the foreign rights decided to leave, so I asked if I could take on her job. André was willing for me to do so but insisted that I continue as his secretary as well. I asked to be paid more if I was going to take on the additional work, and he said no: If I wanted the job, I could have it. If not, that was fine too. In retrospect, I see that this was blackmail. He would have had to pay someone else to handle foreign rights if I had not shouldered the responsibility. But I suppose he reckoned that it was a good gamble, and he won. I agreed to do the extra work without remuneration so that I could learn a new skill and move to a better job elsewhere.

André was a hard taskmaster, but I learned a lot from him. He knew how to sell anything. Anything. It just so happened that he had ended up as a publisher, but he would probably have been equally successful in another business. I noticed that he hardly ever named a price himself. If he was selling the translation rights to a book, he invited the other publisher to make an offer and then insisted that the figure was too low, no matter how much money was involved. This was a very neat trick. I suppose that occasionally he must have been put in a situation where he needed to name a sum himself but, if I remember rightly, he would then ask for something preposterous so that the other publisher would be forced to offer more than he had originally anticipated.

A year or so after I had taken on the second job I went to the United States for a month’s vacation. It wasn’t that this was somewhere I had yearned to visit, but a Pakistani friend from high school (the one who threw a party for me many years later in Washington, D.C.) was now living in upstate New York and had sent me a Christmas card asking when I was coming to visit. My mother said, “Why not?” and so that spring I went.

The following year I spotted on André’s calendar that Bob Gottlieb, then managing editor at Simon and Schuster, was coming to see him. About ten minutes into the appointment, André’s phone rang, he picked it up, and then stayed on the phone for an unconscionably long time. I had grown used to this behavior, and I knew how much New York editors fretted at being kept waiting when they had half a dozen more appointments to get to later in the day. I stopped what I was doing, slipped into the room, sat down next to the visitor, and said, “You must be Bob Gottlieb. My name is Toinette Rees. We met last year when I went to New York. How is Jean?”

Jean Jollett was Bob’s assistant, and I had had an introduction to her from an editor at Deutsch who had recently returned from an eighteen-month stint working for Bob. I had really enjoyed the time I had spent with Jean, and so I asked Bob whether there was a chance of her coming to London on some kind of working vacation.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Actually, my editorial assistant has just left, and I’m promoting Jean to this position. If you want to see Jean, you’ll have to come to New York.”

“In publishing it takes a lifetime to save enough to go to America,” I replied. “I did save and I went, but now I would have to save for another lifetime. I couldn’t come unless I had a job.” I was just chatting idly in the hope that André would be courteous enough to get off the phone soon and let me get back to what I had been doing.

“Well,” said Bob. “Why don’t you come and work for me? I need a new assistant.”

I was dumbfounded. “But you don’t even know me,” I said. I’d spoken to him for about three minutes one day after I had had lunch with Jean in New York. I don’t think I would have recognized him in the street. He looked like a tall Woody Allen, but at that time I had never heard of Woody Allen. This was, after all, September 1964.

“No, but Jean knows you and likes you and that’s good enough for me,” he responded. “Can you type?”

“Of course, I can type,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I want to make sure that you are a good typist.”

“If I come, may I come just for a year?” I asked. I had recently explored the possibilities of getting a job selling rights in other London publishing houses. There were only three houses that I really wanted to work for, and none of them had a vacancy at that time. It occurred to me that if I went away for a year and got more experience, I could come back and perhaps command a better position. After all, the chief editor at Deutsch had got her job after working as Bob’s assistant. Bob, who had achieved fame as the editor of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, had the reputation of being the best young editor in the English-speaking world.

“I want someone forever,” he replied.

“But you might not live that long,” I pointed out.

“No, I might crash on the way home on Sunday and then you wouldn’t even get the job.” It transpired that he was terrified of flying and always crossed the Atlantic by boat. This would be the first time he had boarded a plane.

“Well, if you don’t crash and I do come, may I come just for a year? And how much would you pay?”

“I believe we pay new assistants ninety dollars a week, but I would need to check with my colleagues,” he said.

“I’m not a beginner. I have been working for seven years and have been working for André for more than three. When I was in New York, I was told that a British secretary could earn one hundred and twenty dollars a week.”

“Not in publishing,” Bob replied.

“You begin to sound like André already,” I retorted. “Why don’t you go back and find out how much you could pay me, then write me a letter offering me a job in your editorial department reading French and German novels. I promise you I won’t take you up on that, since I don’t like French and German novels even though I speak both languages. It wouldn’t be worth your while to ask me to read them because I would always write negative reports. But there’s currently an embargo on British secretaries in New York City (where on earth could I have picked up this snippet of information?), so if I am going to get a visa, I’ll need evidence that I have a job offer for something else. It takes six weeks to get an American visa (again, I wonder how I knew this) and five days to cross the Atlantic in a boat. If I am bringing my belongings for a year, I won’t be able to fly. So I could be with you about seven weeks after I got your offer.”

On reflection, this was a very saucy way of responding to a prospective employer, but at the time I believed that I was just doing my best to distract a visiting American editor. I wasn’t taking the conversation seriously in any way. But suddenly everything shifted.

Before Bob could respond to my proposition, André finally hung up the phone. What I haven’t yet mentioned is why he had remained on this call for so long. He was inordinately proud of the fact that he had published The Magic Christian and Flash and Filigree by the American novelist Terry Southern before they had appeared in the United States. Then Terry had written Candy, which had been published pseudonymously as Lollipop in Paris by Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press. André had just heard that the book was being published in America by Putnam’s, and he wanted to publish it in the U.K. But André was a Hungarian Jew who had come to England at the beginning of World War II, and he didn’t want to risk going to prison. Much as he hated to give up any potential profit, he was trying to persuade two other editors to copublish the book with him. He believed that, although the director of public prosecutions might send one publisher to prison for obscenity, it was unlikely that he would send three. André had already got the relatively new young publisher, Anthony Blond, to come in with him, and he had spent the last twenty minutes trying to persuade the much older and very distinguished Fred Warburg of Secker & Warburg to do the same. Fred had been arguing that he didn’t believe that Candy was a satire on pornography. As far as he was concerned, it was simply pornography. And he didn’t think it was particularly well written. He was not willing to publish the book at all. André never achieved his goal. In the end it was published in London many years later by another publisher.

“Can this girl type?” Bob asked.

“Of course she can type. Why do you ask?” André replied.

“Because she is going to come and be my secretary,” Bob announced. This was news to me, but I didn’t say anything. I thought I had just been distracting a nice American editor while my employer was being rude.

“What about me?” asked André.

“You are welcome to come and be my secretary if you like, but you probably wouldn’t want to for a hundred dollars a week,” said Bob.

“So what would I get in return?”

“What would you like?” responded Bob. (I began to feel like merchandise being haggled over. For the moment, both men seemed to have forgotten that I was still in the room.)

“Well, I will want a lot of titles,” said André, always having the profit motive in mind. What he meant was that he expected Bob to give him an exclusive look at a large number of Simon and Schuster books that he might purchase for publication in the U.K.

“You mean after all these years all you want in exchange for Toinette is some books?” Bob and I looked directly at each other (only at that moment did all this suddenly become real for me) and then at André.

André saw that he had made a grave error. “Oh, I didn’t mean that,” he said, but, of course, he did.

The next thing I remember was boarding the SS France for an exceedingly tempestuous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. I was twenty-five years old when I arrived in New York on November 10, 1964, and I started work at Simon and Schuster the next day.

I was so accustomed to having far more to do than was physically possible that each day I soon finished everything that Bob gave me. I don’t think he was used to someone who worked with such intensity. He found my empty desk a reproach, and when I asked for more to do, his response was, “We don’t pay you to work here. We pay you to be here.” It is interesting that he put it like this. I have told this story many times in my life, but only now do I grasp the full significance of what he was saying. Being present (and knowing it) is one of the most important things that one can do in life, while work can be achieved without complete presence. (Perhaps the work itself will not be perfect but most people won’t spot the difference.)

Shortly after I arrived in New York, I went to live in an apartment on the Upper West Side with two young women who also worked in publishing and one and a half Siamese cats (one was only half-Siamese). I had thought that I would be better off sharing with others in a strange city where I had no friends, but the cats were always trying to climb the net curtains and they were very vocal. I soon realized that what I really wanted was to be on my own.

Then, after three months, a dear little apartment fell into my lap, but not in a way that made me happy. I had come to New York to work for a brilliant editor and to improve my chances of getting the job I wanted on my return to London, but I had also come because I wanted to spend time with Jean, whom I had really enjoyed meeting on my earlier visit. When I arrived back in New York, I found that Jean was in the throes of a romance. She had little time for me and soon decided to get married and leave Simon and Schuster. She bequeathed to me her sixth-floor walkup apartment on East Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues, a few steps from Cooper Union. For $300 key money I inherited the contents of the apartment. (It included everything I could possibly need, plus a large library of paperback books. All she took with her was her coffee pot.) And the rent was only $37.24 a month—a steal even in those days.

From my kitchen window I had a view of the green-blue onion domes of the Ukrainian Orthodox church next door (alas, this lovely little church was pulled down to make way for the large new brick edifice for which the congregation was saving in the early sixties). This was a time of flux in the East Village. For years it had been the Ukrainian section of the city, but during the three years I lived there the face of the neighborhood changed almost unrecognizably. There had always been old bums drifting over from the Bowery in a drunken stupor, but now young panhandlers appeared asking for money to support their drug habits. I felt sorry for the old-timers, even though I didn’t give them any donations for liquor. I would smile and shake my head and they would generally say, “God bless you anyway, lady.” But I saw absolutely no reason why the nineteen-year-olds should expect the world to help them out.

When I moved in, friends advised me to take a taxi home if I was ever out alone after dark, so that no one would follow me into the tenement building. But time and again I would huff and puff my way up the six flights of stairs and collapse onto the bed, only to realize that I had once more forgotten to take a cab.

As the year wore on, people would ask me whether I really planned to return to London in November. I would look at Bob, he would look at me, and neither of us would say anything. The more I considered it, the more ridiculous it seemed for me to go back to England at the end of my year simply because I had said I would. I had no job offer, no place to live, and no pressing relationship to return to. I stayed. Bob never said anything, but several years passed and I thoroughly enjoyed my work with him. There was always something new to learn—manuscripts to read, authors to meet, books to edit, jacket copy to write. We all used to joke that working at S&S was like having an extra family you didn’t need. If you were out sick one day, three or four people would call to find out what had happened and what they could do to help. I had never been part of a community like that before.

We all have different experiences at work, whether we are employed in a large organization or a small company or whether we work on our own. But the one thing that we share is the belief that the results of the work belong to us. It goes further than taking pride in our work. We put a claim on it. We are convinced that what we have produced bears our mark, that we deserve recognition, remuneration, advancement, whatever. But here is the truth about the situation:

All that lives is full of the Lord. Claim nothing; enjoy. Do not covet His property. Then hope for a hundred years of life doing your duty. No other way can prevent deeds from clinging, proud as you are of your human life.

For me, this quotation from the beginning of the three-thousand-year-old Isha Upanishad is one of the most powerful teachings I have ever encountered. It goes so much further than Jesus’ teaching “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.” It tells us that everything, no matter what it is, belongs to God, that it is all His property, that we cannot claim any of it. It also instructs us to enjoy the creation. This is a commandment, one that we fail to keep most of the time. The text doesn’t say: “Try to enjoy things.” It just says, “Enjoy.” This view of work is similar to that taken in the Bhagavad Gita, where a great deal is said about actions, who does them, and who is entitled to the results. There Krishna declares to Arjuna that we have “only the right to work but none to the fruit thereof,” and he urges him not to let the fruit be the motive for work, as it is for so many of us.

Some people may find this view difficult to accept. Surely, if we work hard and do a good job, we should be entitled to something? As Eartha Kitt used to sing, “If I can’t take it with me when I go, I just ain’t gonna go.” But even she had no choice. Better to admit that we don’t really own anything, that none of it—possessions, cash, reputation, know-how—is going with us on our journey into the beyond. We can have fun doing things, but the experience is fleeting. We can take delight in the results, but we can’t say that we own them in any way. Once we admit this, a huge burden is lifted from our shoulders.