from Toni Morrison to Rushdie-Corriere.it

Without him, without his intervention invisible to us readers, postwar American literature (and, at least for some books, English literature) would have been very different. Robert Gottlieb, who died on Wednesday June 14 in his New York at 92, former managing director of Simon & Schuster and Knopf and the New Yorkerwas the editor of a very long list of giants:among them Toni Morrison, VS Naipaul, John Cheever, Joseph Heller, John le Carr, Doris Lessing, Jessica Mitford, Salman Rushdie, Bob Dylan, Chaim Potok.

And we also owe to his magical and ruthless pencil the beauty – unusual, they weren’t professional writers – of the autobiographies of Bill Clinton, Paul Simon, Sidney Poitier, Elia Kazan, Katharine Hepburn, Irene Selznick. Book lover without snobbery (he was the opposite of a snob: incredibly, he collected cheap plastic dolls to the horror of his wife Maria Tucci, a very good stage actress), he also worked successfully on popular fiction by Michael Crichton and Anne Rice.

Here, Gottlieb’s pencil. A man of dry manners – not to say brusque – with his pencil he corrected, cut, filed, protected in his clashes with writers not so much by his fame and by his power but by his intelligence, by being hopelessly on the side of reason. Lots of compliments – the close friend of a lifetime, the great historian Robert Caro, explained that he hadn’t received any encouragement from him for decades, until a dry not bad, not bad, which moved him – Gottlieb defended for his authors with ferocity, inside and outside the publishing house. Everyone mentions his most famous choice, change the title of Paragraph-22 which was originally called Paragraph-18 and which contributed to making the twentieth century masterpiece that . But Gottlieb — he found time to be a great ballet critic and biographer of the highest class — worked behind the scenes beyond text corrections: his friend Toni Morrison, who when she published the first two novels was still working in a publishing house, asked him for a hand while drafting the third. Why don’t you try to let yourself go, he suggested, synthetic as always, almost gnomic (like a Zen master, he often walked around barefoot). Morrison felt empowered to unleash all of her creativity, so it was born Song of Solomon and a new phase of his extraordinary bibliography – and of his life – began.

There was time, in extremis, for a documentary, shot with skill and infinite love by his daughter Lizzie: Turn Every Page, page turn, story of his work with Robert Caro, biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. We always see them separated, one talking about the other, the only condition imposed by the two, otherwise nothing would have come of it. But, in the end, they agree to be filmed together, in the office, working on their next book, with their pencils. But in that scene there is no sound, silent: to protect the very close, almost mystical relationship between the writer and his editor from prying eyes.