A Bite of the Apple

by Lennie Goodings

  I am sure it’s an honour and a debt they are more than glad to pay.

  PART TWO

  The Books

  All that really matters is the authors and their writing

  Chapter Four

  The Virago Modern Classics

  Virago salaries were not exactly extravagant—in fact they were, necessarily, paltry. Before I bought a house with Cathy Porter I had been living with a boyfriend who owned his own flat, but when we split up I had to find another spot. I first paid expensive rent for a shoe box of a flat—two tiny bedrooms and an even tinier corner kitchen with a slot meter that took fifty-pence pieces for the electricity—until I was offered a room on the top floor in a semi-squat in Stoke Newington, north London. I look back now and see that it was a seriously dangerous choice: the electric wires had been rigged to avoid paying much, if anything, and there were faulty space heaters—one of which caught fire while we were at work and burned my friend’s bedroom, full of books. Unsurprisingly, it was very shabby, as was the street. However, most compellingly, overriding any common sense I should have possessed: it was virtually free. Ah, blissful, ignorant youth . . . From there, in the flowing skirts and dresses that I liked then, I would ride my bike the nearly six miles to the Virago offices which were by this time at the top of the Oxford University Press building on Dover Street in Mayfair.

  One morning I was collected from that house and graffiti-ed street by a black Mercedes. Inside was the stately, beautiful, and marvellous Rosamond Lehmann, in her eighties, once again famous thanks to Carmen’s revival of her novels as Virago Modern Classics. Invitation to the Waltz, a poignant story about a young girl’s coming of age, was followed by The Weather in the Streets, a brave novel about the same character, now a young woman, unlucky in love, who has a secret abortion. It caused a stir in 1936, when it was first published, but had been well forgotten only forty or so years later. That day we were off to Granada television in Manchester, where this wonderful writer was to be interviewed. As I quickly climbed into the car, slightly ashamed of my place, the graceful woman who’d lived a fascinating life looked out of the windows and asked approvingly, ‘Is this bohemia?’

  Rosamond Lehmann was read and adored once again because of her place in the Virago Modern Classics list. The famous green-spined series is, I think, the key to Virago’s high profile. It was an idea of genius that will ensure both Carmen and Virago go down in history.

  To mark the landmark anniversary of forty years of the Classics we held an event at Foyles on Charing Cross Road in spring 2018 with Carmen, Donna Coonan, today’s excellent Virago Modern Classics Editorial Director, and writers Tessa Hadley and Elizabeth Day. Rachel Cooke, herself a Virago author, of the ground-breaking Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties, chaired the event and asked Carmen to think back to when she first conceived of the idea.

  Said Carmen: ‘I wanted to celebrate women’s lives—not just anguish and suffering. And the Classics presented a history of women . . . I thought, I’ll do what Penguin did—we all loved Penguin Classics—but I’ll do it for women . . . No one talked about women—the canon was male. I wanted to reclaim literary history.’

  I think what the Classics achieved is even more than that. ‘It’s not too much to claim that Virago Modern Classics changed the course of English literary history,’ says Margaret Drabble; a view shared by Philip Hensher: ‘Virago changed English reading habits for ever.’

  The first of the Virago Modern Classics was Frost in May by Antonia White, a poignant novel about a convent girl whose spirit the nuns try to break. Given to Carmen by the writer Michael Holroyd, it spoke deeply to her and also took her on to other forgotten gems. ‘Antonia White, a novelist wonderful to know, courageous and wonderful, gave me other novelists for my list . . . others I found through the critic Elaine Showalter [author of A Literature of Their Own: Brontë to Lessing, which Virago published in 1978] and then the London Library . . . I would walk along the shelves looking for interesting things.’

  ‘If one novel could tell the story of my life, there were hundreds more, and thousands of readers who would feel as I did . . . The Virago Modern Classics list was meant to be . . . ebullient, a library of women’s fiction with Boadicea . . . waving the flag. I chose green because it was neither blue for a boy nor pink for a girl. I saw in my mind rows of green paperbacks with luscious covers on all the bookshelves of the world . . . It was common to think of the literary tradition that runs from Jane Austen through Ivy Compton-Burnett to Barbara Pym as a clever and witty women’s view of a small domestic world. This was not a ghetto we accepted. The female tradition included writers of vast ambition and great achievement: mistresses of comedy, drama, storytelling, of the domestic world we knew and loved. I saw a large world, not a small canvas, with all of human life on display, a great library of women’s fiction.’

  They altered the way women’s novels were perceived. They ‘would unseat some of my deepest assumptions as a reader’, remembers the writer Jonathan Coe.

  The Virago Modern Classics as symbol, era-changing, and catching the mood of the time, ensured that Virago entered the public consciousness—and stayed. They have been effective on every front.

  It’s not that they have guaranteed a vast amount of money—though some of the titles, such as Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop, and authors Elizabeth Taylor and Zora Neale Hurston have been hugely profitable; some have inspired films and certainly Margaret Atwood’s novels, first appearing in paperback in the UK as Virago Modern Classics, became one of the foundations and an enduring part of Virago’s success, financially and otherwise. The Classics have been a solid part of our backlist income for years but the series is so, so much more important than its mere monetary value.

  The Classics were a Trojan horse, taking Virago into areas where people were frightened of a women-only list; they were a critical success with literati and reviewers, and a popular success with readers who loved the novels and sought out the next in the series; a scholarly success in challenging the hitherto mainly male canon; they were a feminist success in giving readers a female literary tradition. I think they have gone beyond the Penguin Classics, the series that inspired them, because no matter how apolitical or even anti-feminist the reader is, there is a clear understanding that this series is about the changing status of women. It is about the march of women. As Rachel Cooke said, ‘It reminds you that we connect to the women on whose shoulders we stand.’ It shows, as Carmen—and I too—believe: that fiction can change lives.

  What was particularly fascinating about the series, even in the early years, was its staggering reach. In the mid-1980s I went to Belfast with one of our sales reps and was told by a bookseller that they didn’t want Virago titles because ‘there are no feminists here’. But, wait, they would happily take the Classics. Women’s Institutes would ask us to speak—about the Classics. Libraries and teachers wanted posters and postcards—of the Classics. Readers wrote to us in droves—when was the next Classic? Bookshops grouped them together, making a vibrant section of green spines, and told us that readers came in asking for the next Classic. It was a high-class club; a guaranteed good gift; a signal. Tessa Hadley said that, as a young woman, she would look at people’s bookshelves to see if they had the green spines, ‘like looking through someone’s LPs to see if they were okay’. I know men who say they kept a VMC by their bed to show women how intelligent, enlightened, and thoughtful they were. They were a guide to an important, formerly hidden world. Rachel Cooke remembered herself at university: ‘It was the ’80s, the heyday of dreadful literary theory, and because of the Classics I had an alternative view of English literature.’ Donna, from a younger generation: ‘I realised that many of the titles I loved bore the apple icon . . . and my teachers championed many of the authors: Angela Carter, Willa Cather, Stevie Smith . . . Virago has influenced my reading tastes—after all, we’ve grown up to
gether.’ Elizabeth Day said of them, ‘I was reading for female experience’ for ‘a female narrative voice’ and ‘the right of a female to write angry and complicated women’.

  Virago borrowed the idea of using paintings on the covers from Penguin and Alexandra, Carmen, and Lynn would spend hours poring over auction and gallery catalogues and visiting galleries to find the right image to match the novel. Women’s faces, landscapes, details of famous and little-known paintings were chosen for mood, for colour, not to match the characters or even the location of the story necessarily, but the emotion of the novel. Alexandra, in the Virago documentary, smiles with pleasure at the memory of searching for the right image: ‘To find the jacket was enthralling.’

  They were all paperbacks, not just because most of the novels had appeared in hardback years before but also because it signalled a modern approach. The slightly larger trade paperback also had more gravitas than the small, cheaper, mass market paperbacks.

  Just like the Penguin Modern Classics, each VMC had a new introduction by a current novelist or journalist who gave the novel its context and, just as important, gave the novel a champion who could talk about the book in the media. This was crucial for me when I was doing publicity as, except for some of the very early authors in the series—Antonia White, Rebecca West, Barbara Comyns, Molly Keane, Storm Jameson, and Rosamond Lehmann—the rest of the authors in the list at that time were dead, which meant I had to search for a way to publicize a book, beyond reviews, without a living author. As the series grew, we produced posters that highlighted certain groups such as Irish Virago Modern Classics. We also made Virago Modern Classics postcards. Carmen had a vast store of old postcards, one of which we copied to make Collector’s Cards for many of the authors. We used them for correspondence and gave them away to readers. Alexandra and I wrote most of the copy for them; I should say sweated the copy: I remember us weeping in laughter and triumph as we tried to jam a whole life into about 200 words—with style and heavy use of the semicolon. Poor Charlotte Mew. I remember us finishing her little biography off dramatically—as she did herself—with a great dose from a bottle of Lysol.

  Virago Collector’s Card Number 11, Violet Trefusis, is a marvel:

  One of the most exotic women of her day, was born in London in 1894, daughter of Alice Keppel, the mistress of Edward VII. At the age of 10 she met Vita Sackville-West; their friendship later grew into a passionate affair; perhaps the great love of Violet’s life, and certainly one from which she never completely recovered. On its traumatic end in 1921 Violet fled with her husband to France where she was swept up by the Princess de Polignac and began to write her 7 novels—acutely observed comedies of manners. Famous as hostess and mistress of La Tour de St Loup near Paris and L’Ombrellino in the Florentine hills, she entertained all of society—Colette (who cried ‘Violette? Ah non, plutot Geranium!’), Lady Diana Cooper, Nancy Mitford, Jean Cocteau, Rebecca West, Christian Dior, Osbert Sitwell, Poulenc . . . She died in 1971 and is buried in Florence under the epitaph ‘She Withdrew’.

  After Frost in May, also in 1978, came Mr Fortune’s Maggot and The True Heart by Sylvia Townsend Warner; Christina Stead’s Letty Fox: Her Luck and For Love Alone; soon followed by Stevie Smith’s The Holiday and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing.

  The series was an almost immediate success and the novels followed hot and fast as Carmen read feverishly to find the next book, helped mainly by Alexandra, and later by Lynn, but also by Ursula and Harriet—and by legions of suggestions from authors, readers, booksellers, academics, librarians, and the Advisory Group. It was a uniquely collaborative enterprise.

  ‘The biggest contribution came from writers,’ wrote Carmen. ‘Each of them seemed to choose a writer they loved best to write about in introductions to our reissues and elsewhere: A. S. Byatt twinned herself with Willa Cather; Victoria Glendinning with Rebecca West and Vita Sackville-West; Polly Devlin with Molly Keane; Janet Watts with Rosamond Lehmann; Sally Beauman with E. H. Young; Anita Brookner with Margaret Kennedy. Germaine Greer wrote about Henry Handel Richardson. Jenny Uglow and Hermione Lee would turn their hands to any of them, though I always thought of Hermione as the champion of Edith Wharton. Margaret Drabble wrote about her friend Nell Dunn . . . Paul Foot advocated Olive Schreiner, Penelope Fitzgerald Mrs Oliphant. Susannah Clapp and Paul Bailey were attached to perhaps my favourite Virago Modern Classic author, Elizabeth Taylor . . . Rosamond Lehmann, my friend for a decade, who knew or recommended every writer of her time: May Sinclair, F. M. Mayor, Sybille Bedford, Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Jenkins.’

  When an author was suggested, Carmen, Alexandra, and Lynn would read almost everything she had written and then decide what was good enough for the Classics. For some writers, such as Antonia White, the deft and acute Elizabeth Taylor, and the great American writer Willa Cather—all of their books became Classics. All—or as many as we could publish, as in some cases other houses, mainly Penguin, had their most famous book in print. Sometimes an author was deemed to have written only one great book—Ada Leverson’s The Little Ottleys, Elizabeth Jenkins’s The Tortoise and the Hare, Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding, Olivia by Olivia, for example—and that’s what was published. The process of listing the ideas for authors, reading their works, reporting on them in great detail, and then choosing the titles to be published filled lever-arch file after huge lever-arch file.

  People often say, dismissively, that these books were a cheap and easy option for Virago, but this is not true. Most of the novels were in copyright (and often huge efforts had to be gone to to find the estate) so advances (admittedly very small) and royalties were paid. Virago did save money, however, on not typesetting each book, but rather offsetting them from the original hardback, which gave the books’ pages a period charm. We also paid the introducers a fee.

  And then there was sometimes the problem of convincing estates and publishers who held the head contracts that Virago was the right paperback home for these writers. A. S. Byatt, writing about her beloved Willa Cather, remembers that ‘Carmen Callil persuaded Alfred Knopf, who held the copyrights, that Virago was a respectable and honourable enough house to publish her.’

  Initially, Rosamond Lehmann had been highly sceptical of a publishing house with a shrewish name. Her relationship to feminism was certainly a little bemused. I have a note from her thanking us for a pretty cushion we gave her and she writes, teasingly, in December 1984: ‘Dearest Lennie . . . I hardly know how to thank you and all the wonderful Virago girls for my lovely present. The essence of all that is feminine (not feminist!!) . . . Blessings and warmest love and thanks all around from your grateful Rosamond’ with eight kisses. Rosamond was thrilled with her revival, claiming that with Virago she was ‘reincarnated’. She told us that, over the years, she’d had so many letters which said ‘Oh, Miss Lehmann, you understand my story.’ She was deeply empathetic on the page and in person.

  On that long drive to and from the television studio in Manchester she discovered that I had recently met someone new—John Annette, who was to become the father of my children and my husband—and when she and I were next together a few months later, at a talk she gave at the ICA, she leaned towards me at the lunch afterwards and, whispering in my ear, asked how things were. When I answered positively she said, ‘Oh good, an on-going situation, then!’

  Carmen and Rosamond became huge friends: ‘Anita Brookner and I would go for dinner with her and we talked for hours about love. She loved food, people, writing. They were two of the greatest friends of my life.’

  The curation of the Classics list obsessed Carmen who, though she listened to others’ views, particularly Alexandra’s and later Lynn’s, was largely of the belief that it should be a reflection of one person’s taste—hers. And with these choices she intended to challenge the notion of great. In an article for the Times Literary Supplement in September 1980 Carmen wrote: ‘Afflicted as I was with three years’ study in English Literature in th
e passionate Leavisite English department of Melbourne University, I longed to put a bomb under Leavis’s agonizingly narrow selection of “great” novelists. [F. R. Leavis wrote The Great Tradition, in which he created a canon of great novelists] Many of his chosen masters remain favourites of mine . . . but the tendency to claim “greatness” for the few obscures the rich enjoyment to be found in the many. Leavis though has also exerted a positive influence, happily lacking that ovarian view of literature which dismisses so many women novelists; at least he claimed that novels matter, that they tell us truths about civilization, that they are forces for change.’

  She had high standards, but they weren’t always high literary ones—though they often were. She also loved and chose novels for their comic quality or for the way they revealed something about a woman’s life—I’m Not Complaining by Ruth Adams, is a seriously good novel about teaching in a working-class area in the 1930s.

  Carmen had a memorable cri de cœur: ‘Below the Whipple line I will not go.’ Poor old Dorothy Whipple was a popular novelist of the 1930s and 40s, and her prose was thought by Carmen to be dreadful. Many a novel fell into this category and did not make the grade—or the list. ‘A considerable body of women novelists, who wrote like the very devil, bit the Virago dust when Alexandra, Lynn and I exchanged books and reports, on which I would scrawl a brief rejection: “Below the Whipple line.” ’