A Bite of the Apple

by Lennie Goodings

  Not long ago I was in a well-known high street bookshop and gravitated to a table labelled Great American Novelists. When I pointed out that there was not a single woman among the twenty-five or so novels to the young man who’d made the selection, he was utterly surprised—and, to give him his due, though embarrassed, he admitted he just hadn’t noticed.

  The critic Bryan Appleyard thinks that men don’t see beyond themselves. He wrote in the Sunday Times in 2007: ‘Great-novel writing is regarded as a pursuit as male as heading out into the woods and shooting stuff . . . having bought into this view, I fell into a kind of literary-critical slumber. I have, over the past couple of years, been violently shaken awake. As a result, I can now announce with total confidence that the two greatest living novelists are women: Marilynne Robinson and Shirley Hazzard . . . Both Robinson and Hazzard have had their awards and successes, but both are quiet, unhyped and deadly serious. And they’re not men.’

  Unhyped. Do we need to do more hyping for ourselves?

  The indisputable thing that Virago does is claim space, immodestly, for writing by women. We are not defensive about that, nor should we be, as I have not noticed any other area of the art world, the reviewing world, or the reading world being defensive about shortlists of mainly men. When you get a lot of women on lists people do comment. I have yet to see a headline saying: ‘Five Men Shortlisted!’ or ‘Men Dominate Shortlist’ or ‘Men win all the Prizes this year!’ But I have certainly seen the reverse.

  Publishers are often as bad as toy manufacturers—pink for girls and blue for boys. Naomi Alderman wrote, long before she won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, ‘I want to work hard and know that my work has some chance of being considered important. That no one’s going to stick a flower on the front of it just because I have a vagina.’

  I noted her novel The Power has a great cover. Maybe it’s because she weighed in; maybe it’s because publishers are changing.

  When I published Linda Grant’s novel Upstairs at the Party, the first-draft cover image from the designer was a picture of young people at a party—very nice, but exactly what you’d expect for a female novelist: one showing people.

  I said, ‘Let’s imagine this book was by, say, Jonathan Franzen or George Saunders.’

  Back came a strong, graphic cover with bold colours and strokes: big and important. By a woman: looking universal.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Giving and Taking Courage

  There are, apparently, monstrous authors who can write humane and wonderful books, but I think the integrity of a writer’s soul cannot be hidden for long. Their writing reveals the truth about them.

  All fiction writers show exasperation when readers imply that their novels are autobiographical, but in my experience an author’s true nature is visible—even in fictional writing, their personality seeps through their prose. Personality, that is, not actual experiences. When we published Sarah Dunant’s novel Transgressions, which had some graphic sex scenes, I idly asked if her mother had read the novel and she was horrified. No! Sarah wouldn’t let her! Her mother, like many readers, believed if Sarah could write it—she must have lived it.

  What I admired about Carmen Callil’s book Bad Faith is that in this factual account of a Nazi collaborator and ‘Commissioner for Jewish Affairs’ who managed the Vichy government’s dirty work one keenly feels her sense of injustice. As you read, between the lines you feel the absolute rage on behalf of innocent people who died, and this tells you something about the author.

  As readers read a novel they know they are falling in love with certain characters and stories. But something subliminal is also going on, as the reader gives themselves over to an author. I think that by the end of the book a reader not only judges the novel, they judge the author too. We think the author must be as kind, or humane, or funny, or clever—or the opposite—as their creation.

  In her book Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love, Naomi Wolf talks about Walt Whitman: ‘It wasn’t just the language of Leaves of Grass that sparked . . . a response. Many readers also fell in love with the poet himself. Whitman was certainly complicit in this seduction. He made choices throughout his career that would continue to lead people not just to love his writing but to wish to touch, confess to, and even make love to the poet himself.’

  Marilynne Robinson’s novels are a perfect example of personality shining through the work. I have seen her wave her hand, dismissing the very idea of writing about characters she doesn’t care about, love even. And her novels bear this out: even Jack, the weak-willed, destructive son in her Gilead novels is obviously someone she cares about deeply. There are no out-and-out bad guys in a Marilynne Robinson novel. The result of this compassion is that readers fall equally for the novels and their creator.

  The late Shirley Hazzard, author of most exquisite novels including Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, understood that when we read deeply we give ourselves over to a novel. She called it ‘in part an act of submission, akin to generosity or love’. Shirley was with us in June 2004 when The Great Fire was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. While she was in London she received the marvellous news that she’d won the prestigious Miles Franklin Award in Australia. She couldn’t be there, but she wrote an acceptance speech to be read out, which I typed and sent by email. I remember the care with which she pored over the speech, rewriting and carefully choosing her words to capture the exactness of her feelings:

  ‘Our world that seems charged with war is also the world in which the frail filament of expression miraculously persists, and the phenomenon of the accurate word . . . Thanks to this mystery of art and diverse beauty, we can meet in affinity across oceans and continents and centuries, and celebrate books.’

  ‘A frail filament of expression miraculously persisting’ is a beautiful mirroring of Shirley and her writing. Carefully dressed in high-necked blouses, a pretty brooch at her throat, hair pinned in a loose, elegant bun, and with lovely, long expressive hands; I see her now as she rode with me in the back of taxis marvelling at London, quoting strands of poetry, both of us delighting in our friendship. Her novels and her book about Graham Greene are robust beauties, deceptively delicate. Like her.

  An agent, Jonny Geller, once said to me that a successful novel must have an aura, a sort of ‘charge’ about it. I agree. Readers pick up a feeling about a book—from reviews, from how it looks, how it’s talked about—and respond accordingly. It’s almost another way of saying word of mouth, but I think it’s more inchoate, more subtle than that: it’s a feeling. (And the book that generates no aura is silent—and silenced too.) It’s that same feeling about the author. Readers can pick up a sense of the author from interviews and features, but even when a reader has little or no access to an author they generate their own feeling about them—just from their prose. We feel we know—almost intimately—the writers we admire, who write books we love. We transfer our feelings about their writing to them. I say ‘we’ because I do it too, even though I have met authors I admire and discovered some are not quite as lovely as their prose.

  I think about these things because as a publisher I want to give an author the very best chance in the marketplace. I think about why readers absolutely adore certain authors and how we can encourage that, about how we can create an aura for authors and their books. The simple conclusion is that, just like any kind of love, you can’t force it. We can market intelligently and demonstrate the thrill and pleasures of a particular novel, and indeed do well by it and the author, but the truth cannot be manufactured. It’s in the very prose. The honesty is there, and the reader feels it. I think of J. M. Coetzee, for example, and feel in his work, his watchful, guarded prose, that he is a private, distant person—which I understand to be true of him.

  And it’s not always all about adoration; some writers such as Rachel Cusk and the late Jenny Diski—bracing writers—reveal an unlikeable side of themselves that readers enthusiastically resp
ond to. That too is about honesty.

  Margaret Atwood has a party trick: she can read palms. I was once with her and Beryl Bainbridge in a pub after they had both done their turns at a literary festival. Margaret took Beryl’s hand (to Beryl’s mild consternation) and after studying it for a while she looked her fellow writer in the eye and laughed: ‘You’re not as scatty as you make out.’ Here is a storyteller not afraid to go beneath the obvious—even in real life! And to tell the truth.

  The power of good and truthful writing is important to Margaret Atwood. She says: ‘I happen to believe that at its best writing is considerably more and other than mere self-expression . . . Good writing is not “expressing yourself”. It is opening yourself, discarding yourself, so that the language and the world may be evoked through you. Evocation is quite different from expression . . . Evocation, calling up, is what writing does for the reader. Writing is also a kind of sooth-saying, a truth telling. It is naming of the world, a reverse incarnation: the flesh becoming word. It is also a witnessing. Come with me, the writer is saying to the reader. There is a story I have to tell you, there is something you need to know. The writer is both an eye-witness and an I-witness . . . The writer bears witness. Bearing witness is not the same as self-expression.’

  This is obviously particular in some ways to Margaret Atwood and her own version of sooth-saying, but I think her point is larger and applicable to other writers. She tells us that writing is a truth-telling and my view is that the truth it tells is also about the writer.

  In a packed hall in north London a white, middle-aged man stands up; be-suited, he stands out in the casually dressed group. He waits for a microphone to be handed to him, then turns to Marilynne Robinson: ‘Your books changed my life.’

  In Ledbury, at a library event, part of a literary festival, Donna Coonan and I give a talk about Virago and then afterwards, while we are packing up our books, a small, dark-haired, late-middle-aged woman quietly comes up to me. ‘The Virago Modern Classics saved my life.’

  ‘Your novels give me steely courage.’ People have often written like this to Sarah Waters, to tell them how deeply she has affected them.

  Reading takes you outward. Reading gives us entertainment, education, information, escapism, fun, wisdom; its nourishment gives us strength, from humour or from recognition, or fellow feeling, and it gives us knowledge, but so often it’s also much more than that: it gives us the bravery to allow ourselves to be inspired.

  Is it surprising to hear how people have gained strength, companionship, or a deeper knowledge of themselves through reading? I don’t think so: I think part of the courage a reader draws is from a perception that the writers themselves had the bravery to write openly and honestly—even in fiction. As Sarah Waters says, ‘We write best when we write about what is closest to our hearts.’ Readers feel that.

  Sonali Deraniyagala wrote one of the most devastating books I have ever published, or indeed read, after she lost her entire family in Sri Lanka—two sons, husband, mother, and father—to the 2004 tsunami. She was the sole survivor, and found that the only way she could remotely recover was to hold her family in her heart by writing her memories of their lives together in her beautiful book Wave. It was devastatingly hard, but she says it would have been harder to turn away from them. Her courage in writing she gives to us.

  Sometimes it’s a matter of books reaching into lonely lives, and sometimes, aside from giving great pleasure, books are also a validation. Marilynne Robinson has talked many times of the wonder of each of us—‘To be human is a very high and complicated privilege’—which implies not only that we are to be valued individually but also, importantly, that we have obligations: that we’re part of a community.

  I ask Marilynne what response she gives when readers tell her she changed their lives. She said she wishes she had a worthy answer, something she supposes she might have if she knew more of what the readers mean; however, she feels that their reaction is a deeply private one, not to be pried at, opened, examined. She lets people know of her grateful appreciation, though. Indeed, I have seen at signings how she takes her time, looks readers in the eye, and listens carefully. She feels it is a blessing, not to be taken for granted, to be able to reach such an audience.

  Sometimes courage is unwitting. When I was editing the politician Shirley Williams’s autobiography Climbing the Bookshelves I often remarked on her bravery and she laughed at that, saying no, she wasn’t brave at all, but she knew herself to have a fearlessness, claiming it came from a desire to throw herself into things without the impediment or worry of consequence. She said it was quite another thing from courage, but I am not sure I see the distinction. To me she is brave and I do know that she gets it honestly too: in her mother, Vera Brittain, she had a role model, a woman not afraid to stand up against the popular military spirit of her time and speak the truth, as she saw it, about pacifism.

  I saw another kind of courage in Rachel Seiffert. I had wanted desperately to publish her first book, The Dark Room, which was an astonishing novel in three parts; remarkable in both its form and its story about the Nazis’ rise to power, told from differing points of view. I didn’t win the chance to publish that novel, which went on to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, but I kept myself on the agent’s radar and when I met Rachel at events made sure she knew how keen I was. In the end, her original editor changed jobs and I became the lucky publisher of two novels, The Long Walk Home and A Boy in Winter. The latter told the story of Nazi devastation in a small town in the Ukraine and Rachel wrote a Guardian piece to explain something about her German family—that her grandparents were active in the Nazi Party. It’s brave to stand up and be counted with others, in street demonstrations or marches, but to stand alone, to reveal something of pain, hurt, and shame in one’s own family, to be on the wrong side of history and to tell that truth: that takes remarkable courage.

  And even when you are on the right side of history, to tell your story, to decide to reveal your heartache and pain in the name of a larger cause, is heroic. Nadia Murad’s peaceful village existence was ripped apart in August 2014 when the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) attacked Kocho, her village, beginning its savage campaign—its genocide—against the Yazidis. Nadia lost six of her nine brothers, along with hundreds of other men from her village in the Kocho massacre. Her mother was killed after being deemed ‘too old’ to be enslaved, while Nadia and her two sisters were taken by ISIS to be sexual slaves.

  After enduring unimaginable violence and brutality, Nadia escaped.

  She told her story with Jenna Krajeski in The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and My Fight against the Islamic State because she wanted to be the last girl to whom this happened. Nadia’s testimony is not just one of violence, but of love and family life, and a story of her innate determination and strength. I think of Atwood, who wrote that the writer retains three attributes that power-mad regimes cannot tolerate: a human imagination, the power to communicate, and hope.

  Nadia shared the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize with Denis Mukwege for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

  But there is another kind of courage a writer needs: that of self-belief, the courage to claim the importance, the space, and the time for writing. This is getting better for women who write, but I think it is still not easy for many women, particularly mothers, to combine life and writing. Tillie Olsen’s Silences, which we published in 1980, revealed a list of women writers without children, and sometimes without a husband or partner, who wrote and published books. Her list of some such women from the twentieth century alone is eye-opening: Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Katharine Mansfield, Isak Dinesen, Katherine Anne Porter, Dorothy Richardson, Henry Handel Richardson, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Eudora Welty, Djuna Barnes, Anaïs Nin, Zora Neale Hurston, Christina Stead, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Jean Stafford, Janet Frame, Iris Murdoch, Lorraine Hansberry.

/>   And it is certainly true that many women, again especially those with children, do not start writing until they are in their thirties.

  Tillie Olsen wrote about the conviction one needs to wrte: ‘Conviction as to the importance of what one has to say, one’s right to say it. And the will, the measureless store of belief in oneself to be able to come to, cleave to, find the form for one’s own life comprehensions.’

  The strength to write bolder, bigger, better often comes from other writers. Hilary Mantel said: ‘The question is not who influences you, but which people give you courage. When I began, the female writer who gave me courage . . . was Beryl Bainbridge . . . her books were so off the wall, they were so screamingly funny in a black way, and so oblique, that I thought, If she can get away with this, so can I.’

  In recent years I have been interviewing writers at literary festivals and I have adopted Hilary Mantel’s question. I ask which writers gave them courage. It takes authors a few moments to think—it’s a momentous question—but they always have an answer; they know their writing is emboldened, liberated, inspired even, by others.

  In 2006 I published a book of Patti Smith’s poetry. Every author cares about their cover images, and one would expect a poet to mind how their poems are placed on the page, but Patti Smith cared not just about all of that, but also about the quality of the paper. She wanted to know what weight of paper we were using. As a self-confessed neurotic about book production details, I just loved it. Auguries of Innocence was inspired by William Blake, and when she came over from America as part of a music tour she gave us a few days of her time, which culminated in her giving the Blake Society Annual Lecture at the impressive St James’s Church in Piccadilly. Patti Smith, of course, does not ‘give a lecture’: she read, she sang, she played the guitar, she made mistakes and laughingly confessed that she could play only in A minor, and was backed on the acoustic guitar by a friend she had bumped into in a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road earlier that day. It was a life-enhancing evening. I had seen her the year before, when her agent, Betsy Lerner, also a Virago author, invited me to a performance at the Meltdown festival in London. Seeing Patti Smith sing and speak passionately, laugh out loud, strum her guitar, and jump wildly across the stage at the age of nearly sixty was utterly surprising and inspirational.