A Bite of the Apple

by Lennie Goodings

  I was not poaching, I was merely making my passion known. Swooping in and poaching an author by offering a huge amount of money, sometimes even before there is a book ready, is a not uncommon fact of publishing but I just don’t think it’s fair. Of course, if a publisher does a bad job, or even if they don’t but the author still wants to leave an editor and a publishing house, that’s absolutely fine—it might well be a good career move. Authors’ decisions like this have happened, and more than once, for me, as one would expect in a long career such as mine. No good comes of publishing a writer against their will. When an author does come free from a long-term relationship with a publishing house, I would think everyone who is interested would jump in and take part in an auction for their work.

  With Marilynne I was breathtakingly lucky. As twenty-eight years had passed between Housekeeping and the time when she began writing a new novel, her UK editor, Robert McCrum, had moved on and so eventually pages of the new novel came to me. It was such a delicate fragment that I really could not predict what it would become but as I said to the meeting that decided on acquisitions, anyone who could write Housekeeping must be able to produce something special. That fragment turned into the first of three novels: Gilead, Home, and Lila, masterpieces all and, respectively, winner of the Pulitzer, the Orange Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Marilynne was awarded a National Humanities Medal for ‘grace and intelligence in writing’ by President Obama, who has proclaimed himself a fan and made himself a pen-pal of hers. She has gone on to become one of the most respected thinkers in America today, looked to for the wisdom that is demonstrated in the essays that we also publish. She too believes in the enlarging and enlivening power of the written word, that ‘culture and education are basically, at their best, meant to make us aware’. Her fiction does not conform to the usual plot-driven or character-led novel; I think of it as akin to stepping into a river that sometimes roils and sometimes meanders, one to which you give over, knowing she will hold you and take you places you’ve not been before. Marilynne has told me that when she taught creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop she tried to get her students to unlearn what they knew, to start afresh, in the belief that ‘we have learned what looks like learning’, not what is real thinking and real knowledge. How lucky are we to have this thoughtful—and surprisingly funny—writer on our list. A writer in whose great works we meet awe, each time anew.

  ‘She stimulates the mind and satisfies the heart’ is praise I would apply to all of the storytellers I have mentioned here, but that particular quote belongs to a review of a Linda Grant novel by Scotland on Sunday. There are certain novelists who I think of as writing from the headlines; that is, taking a measure of what’s going on in our world and helping us make sense of it all. Linda is such a writer. She first came to Virago in 2002 with Still Here, a story about architecture, cities, families—and unbridled lust in a forty-nine-year-old woman and I have published all seven books of hers since. She writes exhilarating, intelligent, humorous, and deeply humane novels that, even when they are telling bleak or sad stories, restore the reader. Her themes are the big important ones that define our lives: identity and immigration, love and loss, family and clothes, generosity and connection, and her people are deftly drawn, intelligent, and satisfying character sketches. Linda is like one of those street artists who cleverly and accurately pounce immediately on the characteristic that makes us the individual we are, she picks up on nuances and foibles to create real and memorable people. Readers and reviewers recognize her ability and reward her with praise, and prizes too. What I especially like about her novels is her understanding that, despite all, we mostly try to do our best, that even if today was awful and disappointing, tomorrow we’ll put on our new dress, paint our face, lift our chin, and try again because that’s what it is to be human. That is what a story can do for us.

  Linda’s novels are very speech-driven, and dialogue moves the plot along. That is a feat that few writers pull off.

  I have had long and fascinating talks with Sarah Waters about dialogue and I often send new writers to study her books to see how she does it. Sarah’s first, rollicking, sensuous novel, Tipping the Velvet, a Victorian lesbian story, was acquired by Sally Abbey for the Virago V list in 1998, and since Sally left I have been Sarah’s editor. Sarah says she has increasingly realized that dialogue—the way her people speak, and what they say—is where she can reveal the truth about her characters. Of course dialogue in books does not reproduce how people speak in real life; creating the illusion that it is real is her genius.

  In some ways she picks up the thread of early feminist authors who took genres such as crime or science fiction and joyfully twisted them into new feminist stories. Sarah has borrowed from the sensation novel, the ghost story, the war novel, the crime novel—but she has done so much more than mere genre-busting: she has subverted those forms and made them her own. And what extraordinary, delicious novels she has created by revealing worlds most had only intuited before. Sarah explains: ‘The very patchiness of lesbian history, I was trying to say—the very leanness of the lesbian archive—invites or incites the lesbian historical novelist to pinch, to appropriate, to make stuff up. I wanted the novel not just to reflect that, but to reflect on it, to lay bare and revel in its own artificiality.’ She has made lesbian stories ‘ordinary’: ‘To me, lesbian stories are the norm, not the aberration’.

  From the glory of Victorian music halls to a quiet London home with a beguiling lodger; from women in Millbank Prison to hidden lesbian lives in the Second World War; from a sensational, breath-taking swindle to a haunting in a decaying country house—reading a Sarah Waters novel is a deep and intimate pleasure. She recognizes that reading, listening, telling, and being told stories is a basic need: ‘Storytelling makes us human.’

  On publication of Sarah’s second novel, Affinity, one of the reviews said, ‘Such a brilliant writer that her readers would believe anything she told them.’ It’s true. We will follow her anywhere because she understands the transforming power of a story.

  Part Three

  The Politics: Office and Otherwise

  ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’—Emily Dickinson

  Chapter Seven

  The Dramas

  Back to the office and the chronology of Virago. In 1982 Carmen was offered the prestigious Publisher’s job at Chatto & Windus, one of the companies that made up the consortium of Chatto, Bodley Head, and Cape. She decided she wanted it—and to take Virago too. The working shareholders of Virago were Carmen, Ursula, and Harriet, and the latter two did not want that move. Us younger women—Alexandra, working part-time, Ruthie, who had joined us that year from Spare Rib, Kate, Lynn, Katrina Webster, office assistant appointed the year before, and I—were not part of the conversation (though Kate and I were by then Sales Director and Publicity Director) but we were well aware of the battle.

  A company needs capital to publish and grow, and Carmen’s view was that Virago had reached its limit as an independent, and so selling Virago to the CBC group would be an essential and savvy business move. Carmen, Ursula, and Harriet had been working together for nearly ten years and though they had respect for each other there was real tension and this disagreement ratcheted up the divisions.

  Over the years people have always asked me about the rifts at Virago, which continued until 1995 when we shareholders (which by then included me) sold the company to Philippa Harrison at Little, Brown. The disagreements were a fact of Virago’s life for less than half the time that we have been publishing, but in media lore they are legendary. In the BBC 4 Virago documentary, Alexandra says of the passionate arguments and debates, ‘You have to realize we were like family.’ We felt strongly about the imprint we had created and in which we had invested our money, but even more importantly our lives. We identified deeply with Virago—all of us still do. Harriet Spicer once said that she felt there was a sort of blessing/curse of Virago that would never let you go, and tha
t we who have worked there, never want to let it go—‘Whatever happened, no one ever wishes they hadn’t worked there’—because to us there are no jobs like it. Even now, when Virago is part of Hachette, a major international corporation, it is unusual in publishing, and probably in most industries too, in the way it provides those who work for ‘her’ with meaning and purpose, at the same time as being high-profile, political, and creative. I think it could be described as a vocation.

  Ursula was extremely articulate and loudly passionate, not afraid of expressing anger. Carmen’s feminism was instinctive; Ursula’s was too, but hers also grew from the politics of socialist feminism and academia. Initially, these forces had been complementary: their vision for Virago—to be a mainstream feminist publishing house—was in accord, as was their respect for authors and their ability to bring writers, readers, press, et al. along with the Virago mission. But even by the time I got to Virago there was tension between them. Jealousy, opposing personalities, widely differing styles, money—I wasn’t around when it started and I cannot say what initiated it, but curt words, silences, and angry memos became a not exactly unusual part of everyday office life. Harriet, an important shareholder, sat somewhere between the two women: clever, calm, committed to justice and the cause; when she decided to be mediator, she was highly effective.

  By the time Carmen was offered the plum job at Chatto & Windus our offices were at the back of the Oxford University Press building in Dover Street, Mayfair. With a staff of eight we had outgrown the Wardour Street room. In our new spot we had four small rooms off a central space, an attic floor reached by an old metal-gated lift.

  Even though we weren’t quite open-plan any more, and Carmen had her own little office, the walls were paper-thin and the space was small. Negotiations with lawyers began to be part of the background noise. The heated conversations were about whether or not Virago should be part of Chatto in the group, something Harriet and Ursula strongly opposed, and finally it was agreed by all that Virago would remain a separate company. The three women sold the company and all their shares, as did, of course, the other shareholders. Carmen, Harriet, and Ursula honourably gave Kate Griffin and me (as directors) some of their redeemed share money. On 19 February 1982 Virago, with a turnover of well over half a million pounds and more than 160 titles, became part of Chatto, Bodley Head, and Jonathan Cape Ltd. We had a farewell lunch for Carmen in our offices and gave her a wine decanter etched with ‘Thank you for setting the world on fire’. Soon after that we left Mayfair and took up residence above Chatto & Windus at 41 William IV Street, near Trafalgar Square, as part of the newly named Chatto, Virago, Bodley Head, and Cape (CVBC). Sadly Kate left at this point, as our sales would now be handled by a central ‘service’ part of the company, as it was rather demeaningly called.

  Our new offices were terrific and light, and again at the top of the building, this time in what had been a flat above Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. I got my first solo, though extremely tiny, office, which had formerly been a loo; I had to slide in sideways between the wall and my desk, and my chair was where the toilet had been. The bathroom down the hall had a large white bathtub, which was handy for keeping the wine cool when we had parties—of which there were a fair few. Carmen continued to work with Alexandra and Lynn on the Virago Modern Classics, though Alexandra, as Editorial Director, was now in charge of that part of the list, and in February 1983 we celebrated the publication of the hundredth Classic. Carmen became our Chair and met us monthly for board meetings, but she was no longer our Publisher and no longer a daily presence in our office. Harriet and Ursula became joint Managing Directors and though the rift between Carmen and Ursula only slightly abated and we never lost the anxiety of survival, daily office life did take on a different, slightly calmer tenor.

  But those battles, particularly between Ursula and Carmen, who have barely spoken for decades, but also between us all, remain part of our history. The media love a so-called cat fight. Clashing personalities and stressful times produce friction, and sometimes for a productive, creative good; disagreements are part of any organization, particularly small owner-operated ones, but they are of especial interest when the combatants are women. It’s far from the only example of sexist opinions and interest in us but it is a very telling one that feels prurient and almost sexualized. There are boardroom bust-ups all the time but the demeaning coverage of women’s disputes has an extra edge—an almost gleeful joy at what is portrayed as women failing. It is enraging.

  Virago has had many owners, and after this period with Chatto, Virago, Bodley Head, and Cape we had three more. Many times I would feel that we were at the perfect size, with the right turnover and appropriate number of titles, but sadly it’s not long before a static company is one in decline. Growth—even incremental—is essential for publishers, idealistically powered or otherwise, if we want to pay our staff, printers, and, of course, our authors. And once an author has broken through to success, naturally they will expect their advances to rise. A publishing house needs money to draw on to pay advances on books and authors: money that will not be recovered until the book is published, often many years after the initial advance is paid, and even then we may not get that money back. The finance of a publishing house, as with most creative industries, is dependent on a small part of the output to make the profits: in most houses, approximately 20 per cent of titles make serious money; most of the other 80 per cent will break even or lose money. The trick—and one that is only ever a practised guess—is to know which ones will make up the 20 per cent. Many small independent publishers can’t survive once they run into the problem of lack of proper capital underpinning and of cash flow—which can, ironically, come as a result of success, such as one of their books winning a big prize. Bob Gavron, one of Virago’s original guarantors, had a favourite mantra: ‘Cash is king’—it was one we all learned too. I used to travel to work with a neighbour, an economist fascinated by the quirks and flukes of the publishing industry. When I explained the finances and how arbitrary was success, he would wave me off at my Tube stop with ‘Hope you hit an oil well today.’ Sometimes it does feel as serendipitous as that.

  Our initial years with CVBC were good; our sales rose—from a turnover of £600,000 to £2 million—we were more visible, we were financially secure, and this was the period when we published some of our most successful books, including those by Margaret Atwood and Maya Angelou. We were publishing about sixty titles a year and we took on new editors, but then things began to sour. Whereas before we had controlled our own overheads and could adjust accordingly, we were now tied to a percentage of the overall costs of CVBC, over which we had no control, and it began to hurt us. Ursula wrote, ‘By the end of 1986 the group situation was grave and affecting Virago’s financial situation; the end of year accounts registered our first loss.’

  Cash flow began to be a problem and CVBC shut down part of the Bodley Head as a cost-saving measure. We began to feel anxious: though we were high-profile, we were also the smallest of the group. Might they try to fold us into another company—Chatto?—to help reduce overheads?

  In the summer of 1986, barely four years after joining the group, we began to talk about a management buy-out.

  Though this period of Virago must rank as one of the most anxious in many ways, it was also exciting, and because we five—Carmen, Ursula, Harriet, Alexandra, and I—were all united in our desire to save Virago it was also a relatively tranquil time between us. We met often to discuss and to galvanize ourselves: we believed ourselves to be planning secretly, only to discover that several times we had talked so loudly in restaurants that the news of our plans were known before we were ready to spring. Bob Gavron, who once again agreed to invest, lined us up with the venture capital arm of the bankers he used for his printing business. Rothschild Ventures agreed to back us with the proviso that each of us put in money of our own. I had no capital at all, a small mortgage, and a modest salary, but my bank manager agreed to loan
me £10,000, which I was to pay back in monthly instalments of £224. We produced business plans: working out staffing, number of titles, overheads, premises, and cash flow. We learned the language of the City, such as ‘it’s important who you are in bed with’, and conversations with Tom Maschler and Graham C. Greene, the two major shareholders of CVBC, were looking positive.

  And then on 7 May 1987 Tom and Graham solved the cash flow problem by selling us all, the whole of CVBC, to Random House US. The New York Times reported the sale, writing that our company had been losing money since 1982—the year we joined. They also relayed some hitherto unknown battles that now left the boardroom and hit the press: ‘The author Graham Greene—who is on the board of Bodley Head, with whom he has been associated for 30 years—wrote a letter to The Times suggesting that his nephew [Graham C. Greene] “is living in a fantasy world”.’

  Overnight the picture changed. Not only were we suddenly under our fourth ownership, but now we were up against an American giant. New personnel were appointed: Simon Master, long-time publisher at Pan, was brought in and to him fell the job of ‘handling Virago’. He tried to persuade us to stay—things were all different now, properly capitalized, and we would have a happy home with the new company—but for us, the die was cast and, if anything, the urgency now seemed greater: we desperately wanted to go. Simon relented and the deal was struck. In July 1987 we and Rothschild Ventures bought ourselves out from CVBC/Random House. There were two riders: they would retain 10 per cent of Virago, and we would stay with them for sales and distribution. Rothschild had some serious stipulations too: ratchet clauses that would kick in and escalate if we didn’t pay back their money and dividends as agreed.