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very seldom read one, but I did not know this at the time.
    There were, at the time, a lot of new and unfamiliar pressures on me. I was anxious to prove to my father that I could exist on my own inNew York (or anywhere else) and even more anxious to get out of the no-man’s-land of freelance work into something more secure. Moreover, I was now living with Casey, whom I had started to date when I was working for Sidney and who seemed likely to lose her job fairly soon, since Sidney had a feudal sense of property about her and apparently felt that he should have been consulted. When we decided, shortly afterward, to marry, he took even greater offense, and no wedding gifts were forthcoming from him or Madge.
    At this time of my life, I was still haunted by my experience in Hungary, which was becoming harder to deal with the more it receded into the past. Apparently, the Hungarian Revolution had seeped down to my unconscious, along some hidden, Freudian pathway, emerging at night in my dreams. I slept restlessly—my head full of violent scenes and hidden dangers, not vague or fantastic ones but horribly realistic and familiar—with a sense of dread that wouldn’t go away. Often I kept a loaded pistol under my pillow, as if I expected the AVO (the Hungarian secret police) or the Soviet military police to kick in the door at any moment. It was not a good frame of mind in which to begin a relationship, nor for job hunting, but I felt that regular employment at something I enjoyed might help get rid of the nightmares.
    I began to make a few tentative calls.

CHAPTER 3
    B ook publishing, it turned out, was not by any means easy to enter. The first difficulty was that it appeared to be rather like one of those English institutions—certain clubs and regiments, the Life Guards, the Grid or the Bullingdon at Oxford, Lloyd’s of London—that you couldn’t join unless you not only knew the right people but also understood all the unwritten rules. The second difficulty was that starting salaries were appallingly low. It seemed likely that I would actually be earning less money as a full-time editorial assistant than I was making freelancing for CBS, which hardly seemed possible.
    Nor did book publishers seem like a particularly friendly lot. After responding to an advertisement in the help-wanted section of The New York Times , I was interviewed by the publisher of Henry Holt, an impressivelysuited and aggressive executive type who read my résumé with deep mistrust. “It says here you went to Oxford,” he said.
    I nodded.
    “Can you prove that?”
    The question startled me. I suppose Oxford does hand out diplomas of some kind, but I had certainly never bothered to collect mine, nor had anybody else I knew. It had never occurred to me that anybody would lie about things like that—or, perhaps more important, that anybody would suspect me of doing so. Besides, in England, one’s accent, one’s tailoring, one’s haircut, not to speak of a thousand other small and subtle class distinctions, make it almost impossible to fake things like that successfully.
    With some embarrassment, I conceded that I couldn’t prove it. Could I prove the other stuff? he asked accusingly, thrusting a firm chin in my direction. School in Switzerland? Service in the RAF? I shook my head, feeling like an impostor. At any moment, I thought, he is going to ask me if I can prove that I’m Michael Korda. He stared at me darkly. “It says here you can speak French and Russian. That true?”
    I said it was, a little defensively.
    He looked at me with deep suspicion, and for a moment I wondered if speaking Russian might have made me seem like a subversive or a fellow traveler to him. Those were the days of the John Birch Society, the height of the cold war, with Ike and Nixon in the White House and Khrushchev in the Kremlin, perhaps not the ideal time to claim a knowledge of Russian. Even the English seemed subversive to many right-wing Republicans, on