A Bite of the Apple

by Lennie Goodings

  Yes, I thought. Yes. That is certainly what I experienced at Writers and Readers. So many great books and terrific goodwill from its authors but the lack of structure was incredibly time-consuming and ultimately, I think, part of its undoing.

  Curiously, the offices were only a step away from Virago, at 9–19 Rupert Street, also in Soho. The Writers and Readers office was on a large, sprawling warehouse-like floor where we also kept our stock, at the top of a rundown building with no heat and rumours of rats in the basement where the toilets were. I remember running over to the pub across the way to pee.

  I thought it was Dickensian, eccentric, and fascinating, and wore sweaters and long skirts, donning fingerless gloves in order to type, huddling over Calor gas canisters for heat.

  The chaos, the ideas, the people, and the politics were intense, confusing, exhausting—but often fun and always fascinating. Their manifesto quoted Balzac, ‘Debt is what our creditors do not have the imagination to understand’, and said, ‘As romantic socialists we thought it feasible to replace capital by being labour intensive . . . working at first for no wages, and now for very low ones; keeping overheads down; writers like John Berger and Chris Searle, waiving all advances and royalties as their temporary contribution for the co-op’s take-off.’

  I did get paid and I did get deeply involved with important ideals and ambitious projects, and I learned so much about making books.

  For one year that was four days of my life: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

  On Tuesdays I went to the contrasting, highly ordered Virago in Wardour Street.

  The main room was all tables: a large square surface had been created in the middle by pushing four tables together. Carmen had her own little table facing one of the walls below a pinboard with photos and cards and schedules—including a quote from the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai about a women’s right to love and work—and along the front, under the windows, ran a long black table which had come from Carmen’s dining room. Harriet, wonderful with order and process, sat at the end of it.

  Three large, noisy electric typewriters and three black telephones completed the equipment; on the walls were suffragette photos, loaned to Virago by Jill Craigie, the documentary film maker (and married to the Labour politician Michael Foot). The office was a little ship: a place for everything and everything in its place. It was supremely organized by Carmen who was, and remains, a person who can impressively quell and order vast reams of paper, plans, finances, detail, and ideas. There was nothing anarchic or chaotic about this office. We worked rigorously to schedules, publication and otherwise. The day began at 9.30 sharp, officially ended around 5.30 or 6 p.m. and we ate lunch at our desks. Because the pay was low (my yearly salary when I was hired full time in 1979 was £3,750) food was provided by Virago; we took turns shopping. On my first day, at 1 p.m. I made myself a sandwich, opened a copy of the listings magazine City Limits to read while eating, and heard, ‘Haven’t you got anything to do, darling?’ Ah, I thought—so we work at lunch too.

  I was given a corner on the main table space, shared with Ursula Owen and with Alexandra Pringle, who was the assistant to all things. Alexandra, who had arrived at Virago a few months before me, was also working part time. Her other job was with Art Monthly, the editor of which was a neighbour of Ursula’s, who had learned Virago was looking for an assistant. Alexandra remembers being interviewed by Carmen: ‘She hired me and I started as her slave . . . otherwise known as the shit-worker.’ It’s true, that was the language used. But Alexandra has also said that we felt these two towering characters, Ursula and Carmen, were like our mothers. Carmen says we ‘were family’. Of course that implies the full gamut of emotions: on both sides! Alexandra, who is English, and I are the same age and also like me, she had not come to publishing via Oxbridge. Her father was an English literature teacher and she was widely read in novels; she soon graduated naturally to assisting Carmen with the Classics, eventually becoming Editorial Director in charge of them. However, to begin with she was the general help, the ‘shit-worker’, though more decorously listed in the catalogue as Office Manager.

  Alexandra and I often raised eyebrows to each other, though we didn’t dare talk unless we were alone, which was very rare. Alexandra has a loud, infectious laugh, but it was a good few months before I knew that. Outside the office, when we dragged sacks of review copies down the five flights of stairs and over to the post box, we had a lot to say about it all. Though I had the title of Publicity Manager—manager of me—I too was really an assistant to Carmen and I soon realized I had much to learn. I remember her counselling me against telling reviewers what to think—not to send a book saying ‘I know you will love this’ but instead to explain why we thought it important or special; a subtle but effective and respectful difference, and a lesson in how to ‘position’ a writer and her work. She also stressed the benefits of working at least six months in advance of publication. There were plenty of magazine and newspaper literary pages then—from the mainstream to women’s liberation newsletters, all of whom we had contact with—and ‘if our books are there first that’s what they’ll feature’.

  Carmen was exacting, brisk, cajoling. One of my first press releases was returned to me marked throughout with corrections and comments in red ink. To this day, I remember that ‘upcoming’ was scrawled through with ‘ugly Americanism’ and replaced with ‘forthcoming’. The difference between these two words was mystifying to me, but I quickly learned that there was a correct, Carmen way to do things. Maybe the people who work for me say the same about me now!

  Carmen sometimes sported funny jumpers with koala bears on them; Ursula often wore a green turtleneck over a long tartan kilt; Harriet wore jeans and stripy tops. Alexandra, meanwhile, was all exotic earrings and perilously high heels. I can’t think I was very distinguished in those days, though I did like vintage clothes and I credit my penchant for heels and a little black dress to Alexandra, in whom I observed that you could be feminist and dress up in fabulous clothes. Kate Griffin, a Kiwi who joined as our very impressive Sales Manager, wore fabulous bright red and yellow, and Lynn Knight, an office assistant who eventually graduated to become a Virago Modern Classics Editorial Director, I remember, came for her interview in a perfect 1930s suit. We were not flashy women but neither were we feminists who wore dungarees; that was not our style.

  As well as sharing cleaning, food rotas, and all the work—including packing the review copies and licking the stamps (a swift assembly line that had to be seen to be believed)—we also made tea for one another. Making tea for Carmen, I discovered, was an art. ‘It’s because you are Canadian that you don’t know. Look, this is how you do it,’ she teased me. I was taught to warm the pot then spoon in an exact amount of tea leaves—a smoky blend of Lapsang souchong and English breakfast tea that Carmen mixed at home and put in old Fortnum & Mason tins—then wait the required brewing time before pouring and distributing the cups. Carmen regularly washed all the tea towels and the hand towels from the little bathroom/butler sink area. We had one loo with a door that didn’t reach the floor or ceiling. That’s where we went to have a cry when it was all too much. And, frankly, it often was.

  Of course, everything was done by phone or letter. I began my work arranging promotion for Jane Cousin’s Make it Happy: What Sex is All About, a provocative handbook which Ursula had commissioned. It was a new look at sex education for girls and boys, and I sat at my corner of the table with a telephone and plan, and within the hearing of the others pitched the radical book: talking about masturbation, orgasms, sexually transmitted diseases to everyone from The Times to BBC Radio Solent. I don’t remember it being embarrassing or revealing—it was a good thing that I was young and new to the country. For Jane I arranged a publicity tour on which she had to embark by herself, which was most unlike my previous experience of author publicity. On Robert Lacey’s Rolls-Royce book tour we had been joined at times by not one but two women from his publis
her’s office. Virago obviously couldn’t afford that so off went Jane by herself to travel by train up and down the country for several weeks, as in those days a tour was very thorough and covered press and radio and bookshops in all major, and some smaller, cities. I rang her at her hotel in the evenings to see how she was faring. Jane’s objective was to answer the questions bothering teenagers, so everything was explained: incest, paedophilia, masturbation, bestiality—the lot, and with photos. Her critics claimed the book had ‘no moral context’ and was ‘putting ideas into children’s heads’. One religious magazine said it was yet ‘another example of twentieth-century arrogance’, and had only two references to marriage; and in the House of Commons an MP asked whether its content should rightly be considered obscene. But most applauded her honesty and the book sold well, and won a Times Educational Supplement book award. For me this was exciting—and real: ruffling feathers, speaking out, making a difference.

  At the end of my year of living in two contrasting worlds, Virago offered me a full-time job. I weighed up the two options. Should I leave Writers and Readers? I dithered terribly. It was a question of such contrasts and I made a list of the pluses and minuses of each. For Virago: ‘good career step, good list, better pay and workers I respect and like, high morale, though sometimes alienating’. Against Virago: ‘very hard drudgery work, the commitment and energy required leaves little time for anything else’—and most surprising to me to read now: ‘politics hazy’. That must have been because Writers and Readers was all politics and I was much swept up by their radical co-operative intents. In their favour I listed: ‘high level of responsibility, fairly agreeable, good list’. Against was the terrible chaos and uncertainty, but ‘Should I stay for moral reasons?’ Oh the politics of the left, fuelled by idealism but also, frankly, by guilt.

  I left the co-operative—on good terms—and chose Virago.

  In October 1979 I moved to a full-time job at a salary of £3,500 with a promise of it going to £3,750 in three months, after which ‘salary to be reviewed from thence as and when we can, and as we mutually agree’. I wrote to my parents that I wouldn’t get home for Christmas that year because ‘though their contracts specify holidays, it is like pulling teeth to actually get them . . . they never take holidays themselves.’ (However, not much later on part of my salary was the cost of a flight home every other year: and I was encouraged to go, so I was absolutely wrong there.) I revealed nerves about full time at Virago: ‘I had a long chat with one of the women [it would have been Harriet] who work there—I told her that I was slightly nervous about coming in and she said she wasn’t surprised (great comfort!) and gave me some tips and supportive hints. I think it will be okay.’

  I plunged in. It was okay but it was challenging.

  Because I now have a fond relationship with Carmen, I find it difficult to remember just how despairing I felt at times but I can also see how she shaped me. I find an old letter that I wrote to my parents around this time: ‘Carmen doesn’t get to me like she used to. She’s still alternatively wonderful, inspiring, funny AND horrid, bullying and bitchy. But I really don’t care—I’m able to stand up to her now. One thing Virago has done for me is to make me a much tougher character—and although it has sometimes been hell getting here—I am glad for that.’

  I enclosed an article about Virago from the Guardian of 26 January 1981 by Polly Toynbee, who wrote of Carmen, ‘She is an ebullient energetic character, and, one suspects, a powerful dynamic force,’ and I put a large exclamation point beside that paragraph.

  It was a bit like being in a very strict school, with rules and systems that if not followed were rewarded by cold silence or reprimands. Throughout my life I have been a person who finds mornings and being on time difficult—I am a night owl and a time-defiant creature. These traits were not really acceptable: the Virago office worked on Carmen-time. She was an insomniac, so by the official opening time of 9.30 she’d already been up for hours, reading and then arriving at the office at the crack of dawn. Ursula would drop off her little girl at school so she, like me, sometimes got there after 9.30, by which time the ‘good mornings’ were over. Good morning was said to those who arrived on time; those who didn’t got a mere nod. But then, disconcertingly, Carmen could also be very kind, complimentary, and let you know how very pleased she was with your work. She has a marvellous laugh and was—and is—wickedly witty. I wanted to work well, I wanted her ‘blessing’, and even though I often did not approve of her behaviour I admired and respected her work: it was the same for all of us. For Carmen, the devil was in the detail and from her I learned meticulousness, high standards, and the rewards of hard graft. Though it was often tough going for me—literally nightmarish at times—I was absolutely determined not to be beaten by it. And there was just so much about it that I loved.

  In 1980 we published Dora Russell’s memoir The Tamarisk Tree: My School and the Years of War. It described the fascinating experiment in education at Beacon Hill School, which she ran with her husband, the philosopher Bertrand Russell—alongside the heart-breaking account of the end of her marriage. She came to London for publication.

  I was already well disposed to her because both Carmen and Ursula would approvingly quote Dora Russell’s daughter, Harriet Ward, on her mother: ‘She really believed in the value of women as women. She didn’t want them to be mere companions of men she wanted them to be in every way equal, in every way influential . . . for the very essence of what they represent to count in politics and in society.’

  To save Virago money I offered Dora an overnight stay in the Victorian house I now co-owned in north London, between Archway and Tufnell Park. (The days when you could buy cheaply, even on paltry wages.) It was a very Virago household that night because my co-owner was Cathy Porter, author of our biography of Alexandra Kollontai, the only woman in Lenin’s government. Cathy and I sat in my embarrassingly shabby spare room and talked with Dora, who reached back to another fascinating era, recalling for example the writer and publisher Leonard Woolf who, she said, ‘put up with a lot’ in regard to his wife. We sat nodding, until we remembered who his wife was: Virginia! The school Dora and Bertrand Russell had run was an experiment in different ways of educating children, different ways of living; a school set up between the wars; it was an optimistic period. We were in such different times now, but Dora’s openness to the possibilities of living a life that shunned convention and took risks felt relevant. I remember too that she wanted to see Doris Lessing, and Carmen and Ursula arranged a publication lunch upstairs in the famous Soho publishing hangout, the Gay Hussar, so she could do so.

  Mentioning only a few of the many publications from the first few years of independence demonstrates that Virago was covering the classics, history, sex, memoir, education, and biography. I remember when I joined Virago friends asked if I would feel restricted publishing only women!

  Ursula used to tell the story of talking to the press about Virago’s first list of books and a reporter asking if Virago would find enough to publish the following year. As if.

  Beyond my phone calls to the press and calls to authors and agents—Ursula and Carmen made most of those—Harriet rang typesetters and printers, but otherwise the room was disturbed only by the loud typewriters (by now my skill in that department was not great but a bit more respectable).

  Once a month we had a meeting for which Carmen would set the agenda and it would include print runs, deliveries, cost of stamps, reports on publicity, subsidiary rights, and sales. (After Quartet, Writers and Readers had been Virago’s sales reps, but by this time Wildwood House who had five UK reps were employed; export sales were arranged from the office.) And then there was the shopping and cleaning rota. Once or twice we had meetings at Carmen’s house. Carmen has always had animals—cats and latterly dogs—and at that point she had a tabby cat named Mary, after Mary Wollstonecraft, and two grey cats named after her friends William Miller and John Boothe, the latter an adviser to Carmen from her
days at Granada. One of the cats immediately jumped onto my shoulder and curled around my frightened neck. I protested, weakly, until it was removed by Carmen, who declared that not liking cats ‘showed a defect in your personality’.

  When the office was Carmen’s house, Harriet enjoyed that ‘there were cats galore, which became a feature of working life—you had to be able to type with a cat around your neck or you wouldn’t get anywhere’. Thankfully I arrived when Virago was in offices—without cats.

  It was a quiet, focused office, though Carmen, smoking rollups, emitted a sucking sound as she held the cigarette-holder in her teeth between smokes. Most surprisingly, and rather delightfully, she would often suddenly burst forth with a line from ‘I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire’, a song she loved from the 1930s. Carmen adores singing and I have often seen her and her friends crowded around a piano, laughing and bellowing out old songs. Ursula too is a music lover; she plays the piano, though her taste runs more to classical.

  We were a highly effective outfit and we all took great pleasure in that despite our differing individual temperaments. However, the ideas we were trying to disseminate through bookshops, media, and the Women’s Liberation Movement were in many ways disruptive: because of course the point of the movement was to upset what had been seen as the ‘natural’ order of things. I love the fact that Virago has always been an interesting paradox: a well-run business with its own status quo set up to change the status quo of the world.

  The Virago Advisory Group beautifully illustrates one of the ways Virago went about feminism. Soon after they became independent from Quartet, Ursula and Carmen invited thirty-four women to be in this group. They ranged from agents and fellow publishers such as Jane Gregory and Liz Calder to academics such as Rosalind Delmar, Elaine Showalter, and Sally Alexander. The writers included Angela Carter and Germaine Greer, and there were journalists including the Spare Rib Collective and Beatrix Campbell. The idea was to gather experts and helpers, advisers, and women who might suggest books for the press to publish or to give advice on publishing practice. But after a few meetings it quickly became apparent that these advisers had a different idea about their role—that is, some of them thought they were being brought in to the fold rather like a co-operative, but no, that was not what was intended. Meetings were abandoned and by the time I arrived only a few years later, the Advisory Group had become advisory individuals who did indeed make themselves and their expertise available to us. Their names were printed inside every Virago title for many years and they truly were a fabulous group of women to whom we often turned for help.