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top brass. There was perhaps also some vestigial guilt feeling among the older television producers that the networks ought to consider original material, much as book publishers used to feel an obligation to read “the slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts, rather than mailing them back unopened, as is now usually the case. Then, too, in television as in the book business, senior executives were always promising to look at somebody’s novel or TV script, which then got sent down to the story department for a reading.
    The script readers were a mixed bunch, mostly young writers for whom this was the equivalent of waiting on tables for aspiring thespians. They were paid twenty-five dollars apiece for each report, so it wasn’t exactly a good way to get rich—still, neither was waiting on tables, and I’d already tried that.
    The good part about the job was that I discovered I had a natural talent for putting the gist of a book or a script into a couple of paragraphs—no report could be longer than one page, which presumably represented the maximum attention span of a television producer. The bad part about it was that nobody who mattered at CBS paid the slightest attention to any of the reports.
    The other bad part was that we weren’t really CBS employees at all. It was piecework, like an old-fashioned garment sweatshop. Work was handed out to us in a big, empty room at the CBS studio on West Fifty-seventh Street by means of a kind of daily shape-up. You never knew whether or not you were going to get a book or a script to read, so there was no way to guess how much money you were going to make a week. Some weeks I got lucky and was assigned five or six books; other weeksI got only one or two. Of course, there was no health coverage or employee benefits, and I worked at home.
    Nevertheless, being paid to read seemed like money for jam. It had simply never occurred to me that anybody would pay money, however little, for something that was as natural as breathing to me. The only problem was that I wasn’t being paid enough to live on and didn’t have any structure on which to build a life for myself.
    Freelancers are generally not a clubby lot, but I had made one friend, Leslie Davison, and we sometimes met for coffee or a sandwich after we had picked up our work for the day. Her brother, Peter, she told me, was the editor of the Atlantic Monthly Press in Boston, a fact that did not deeply impress me, since I knew nothing about book publishing. Books appeared somehow, but the process by which they did so was a mystery to me.
    The only writer I knew well was Graham Greene, and his relationship with his publisher seemed distant, to put it mildly. Once he had finished writing a book, his secretary typed it, sent it off to Max Reinhardt, the beaming and affable chairman and managing director of the Bodley Head, in London, and that was that. Apart from Reinhardt, the only book publisher I knew was George Weidenfeld. Just as the British film industry seemed to be run by Hungarian Jews, the British book-publishing business seemed to be run by German Jews.
    Leslie Davison made it her task to persuade me that I should be working in book publishing. She had no wish to work for a publisher herself, but she thought I was ideally suited to be in the same business as her brother. I was not so much resistant as baffled—in all the fantasies I had had about my future, the one business I had never considered was book publishing. Still, I had to admit that there was something in what she said. I was a fast reader in three languages who liked books, after all.
    Of course, I was too innocent at the time to realize the fatuousness of this reasoning. The fact that one likes good food does not carry with it any promise that one would make a good chef or be a competent restaurateur. A taste for wearing good suits does not make one a tailor. As it happens, many of the most successful people in book publishing hardly like books at all and