by Diana Athill
Sheila and I, who both loved Audrey and liked Ron, tried to make a stand, arguing and persuading as best we could, but in vain. I remember when Ron’s sin was paying a bill on demand, as I would have done in his place. ‘That blockhead! Doesn’t he know what credit means?’ – ‘But you can’t yell at a man like that – have you ever explained to him that their bills don’t have to be paid for thirty days? Why should he know that? He’s never done this sort of thing before.’ – ‘I didn’t have to have it explained to me.’
Ron was the wrong person for the job, but by the time he and Audrey decided that there was nothing for it but to pick up their money and go, what we would have to put up with for the sake of what we liked and admired in André had become uncomfortably evident.
Then the five timely miracles began, and brought us together again. They were all so astonishingly useless that it was impossible not to gang up against them. (Though none of them was quite so bad as one that got away because – by God’s grace – he approached me not André. He was a charmingly camp old friend of my childhood who had married a very rich woman and wrote out of the blue to say that if we had a niche for him he would gladly put a lot of money into the firm. André quivered like a pointer, but it was I who was asked to lunch so it was I to whom my old friend said: ‘Well, my dear, the chief object of this exercise is to give me something to do before lunch instead of getting drunk.’ I often wondered how André would have managed to blank that sentence out if he had been sitting in my chair.)
Of the five, numbers one, two and three soon became discouraged, whereupon numbers four and five bought them out, thus ending up owning more of the firm than André did – and he with no scrap of paper to give him any rights at all. Neither of them was a crook; both of them to start with were ready to admit that André had created Wingate and that he was the person who put most into running it. With a lot of tolerance and tact it might have been possible for them and him to rub along together, but tolerance and tact were not at André’s command.
Number four I shall call Bertie, because he looked and sounded exactly like P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster would have looked and sounded had he been in his forties. He was the son of a well-known middle-brow man of letters and had himself written several novels in which expensive sports cars figured more prominently than any human character (André used to say that the only thing that had ever given Bertie an erection was a Lagonda). He lacked business sense and common sense – indeed a nonsense was what he usually made of any of our daily tasks unless someone was breathing down his neck. I would take things away and quietly do them again, which naturally riled him, while André would attack him in an appallingly humiliating way.
Number five, whom I shall call Roger, had worked in publishing for years, but in an old-fashioned firm specializing in books on architecture and the British countryside, which had not demanded the expenditure of much energy. He knew the language of the trade, which was something, but he did not care to put himself out, and was often drunk (after, rather than before lunch, unlike my old friend). Occasionally he came in with a black eye, having been roughed up by an ill-chosen boyfriend, and he spent many of his afternoons in tears. (Roger was to end by killing himself – but at that time, on an acquaintance that was very superficial, I saw him only as foolish without understanding that he was also sad.) Perhaps he had thought he would work gently, between hangovers, on elegant books about eighteenth-century chinoiserie or Strawberry-Hill Gothick, but he never got round to signing up any such work and made no contribution to what we had on the stocks; so Roger, too, received short shrift from André. And, like Bertie, the more he was treated as an incompetent booby, the more he remembered that the two of them, not André, were now in financial control of Allan Wingate.
For a year or two this disastrous set-up bubbled and seethed, at first without the intervention of any outsider, then in the offices of lawyers. We had moved to more commodious offices near Harrods, and now had a sales department and a production department (but still no one in charge of publicity except me with my hateful ads). In spite of our problems we were producing about fifty books a year, most of them profitable, and we would have been exuberantly happy if we could have enjoyed Bertie’s and Roger’s money without their presence. It seemed impossible, with everything going so well, that André would be ousted from his own firm by these two fools . . . but the more expert advice he took, the clearer it became that this would happen. He hadn’t a legal leg to stand on and the best his lawyer could do was to wangle a ‘generous’ gesture out of Bertie and Roger which allowed him, when he finally left, to take a few cookery books and three or four very unimportant others (he and I had agreed, once we had brought ourselves to face the facts, that there was nothing for it but to start another publishing house).
There was, however, one book due to be delivered quite soon, about which a decision was still to be reached. This was the memoirs f Franz von Papen. To quote my own catalogue description of it:
Franz von Papen’s life has faithfully reflected the fortunes of his country for over half a century. As a boy, when he was a court page in the Kaiser’s entourage, he witnessed the traditional pomp of imperialism. In his seventies, though cleared of war guilt by the Nuremberg Tribunal, he experienced defeat to the full when his own countrymen sentenced him to imprisonment. Between these extremes he was always at the centre of affairs in Germany, and whether the balance he maintained was the result of a clear or an ambivalent conscience is still a matter of conjecture.
His own interpretation of his career and the events with which it was so closely connected is of the greatest importance. He describes his activities as military attaché in the United States from 1913 to 1915; he gives an account of Allenby’s campaign in the Middle East, as seen from ‘the other side’; he analyses the decline of the Weimar Republic, which he knew both as a member of the Reichstag and as Reich Chancellor. On the subject of his collaboration with Hitler as Vice-Chancellor, his mission to Austria before the Anschluss, and his appointment as Ambassador in Ankara during the last war he is exhaustive. He does not shirk the central enigma of his career: his acceptance of further high office under the Nazis after his open criticism of their methods in his Marburg speech, the murder of his colleagues during the Roehm Putsch, and his own house arrest.
This book is of outstanding interest, both as a commentary on recent history from the German viewpoint, and as a personal record.
To which I would add, now, that no one who hadn’t just lived through the Second World War can imagine how fascinating it was, so soon after it, to hear one of them speaking.
This book the old man had been persuaded to write by André, who had visited him in connection with Operation Cicero, the story of the valet to the British Ambassador in Ankara, who towards the end of the war had cheekily supplied the Germans with copies of the contents of the ambassadorial safe. Von Papen, having been our man’s opposite number at the time, was in a position to confirm ‘Cicero’s’ story (which at first sight seemed too good to be true), which he did. André might, of course, have written to him about it, but characteristically saw greater possibilities in a meeting. Capturing the Cicero story was already one of his more striking achievements, involving a lightning dash to Ankara, but the way he used that book as a lead into another and more important project was an even better example of his energy.
Technically the memoirs he had secured would, when completed, belong to Allan Wingate, but even the lawyers felt that André had a moral right to them; something which Bertie and Roger were reluctant to acknowledge. The wrangling was bitter, but they did finally accept a suggestion made by the lawyers on the Friday which was André’s and my last day at Allan Wingate: that there should be a ‘moratorium’ on the subject of von Papen until the following Tuesday, during which everyone should calm down in preparation for a decisive meeting about it.
On the intervening Sunday I went to André’s house at lunchtime, to discuss our next move. While I was there the
telephone rang, and hearing André switch to talking German it dawned on me that von Papen was on the line. Who, he asked, was this person who had just called him to say that André had been sacked from Allan Wingate? How could he have been sacked? What on earth was happening?
André, always quick on his feet, was never quicker than at that moment. The call had come as a complete surprise, the situation he had to get across was not a simple one, and he was trembling with rage at this sudden revelation of Bertie and Roger’s sneaky manoeuvre; nevertheless in little more than ten minutes he had explained what was up with perfect lucidity and in exactly the right tone, and by the time he hung up he had von Papen’s assurance that in no circumstances would Allan Wingate ever set eyes on his manuscript, which would be André’s just as soon as he had launched his new firm. Seeing that silly pair of English Gentlemen being hoisted so neatly by their own petard remains one of the choicest satisfactions of my career.
This event also provided a solid foundation for André’s new firm, of which I was to become a director. Within a very short time he had sold the serial rights of von Papen’s book to a Sunday paper called the People for the sum (peanuts now, but awe-inspiring then) of £30,000.
7
1952: TWO THINGS ABOUT the new firm were certain from the start: it would be called André Deutsch, and André would be its absolute boss. There would be other shareholders – eight of them including Nicolas Bentley and me, who would be working directors – but the value of each holder’s shares would be limited so that even if one of them bought out all the others, he would not gain control. A loan, soon to be repaid, enabled André to ensure this satisfactory state of affairs, and the von Papen serial deal lifted the firm at once into profitability.
My own investment, the minimum necessary to qualify me for a directorship, was £350 given me by my godmother. Like Nick, I was in it for the job. The other shareholders were in it as a friendly gesture to André, not as a business venture, although all would end by making a modest but respectable profit. It was a sensible and pleasant arrangement, and a profound relief after Allan Wingate – which, gratifyingly, died a natural death about five years after André’s departure.
From the five Wingate years we brought friends on both the manufacturing and retailing sides of the book trade, a good reputation with agents, and much useful experience. It hardly felt like starting a new firm, more like carrying on the old one in improved conditions: we now had the equivalent of Bertie’s and Roger’s money without Bertie and Roger – just what we had longed for. This was so delightful that it might have relaxed some people’s moral fibre, but not ours. Perhaps the most useful thing gained from Wingate was a disposition shaped by poverty. It had always been natural to André to be careful, and those who had worked with him at Wingate, seeing that his attitude was strictly necessary for survival, had fallen into it themselves – even those like me, whose natural tendency was towards extravagance. Since then I have often noticed that it is not good for people to start a venture with enough – not to mention too much – money: it is hard for them to learn to structure it properly, simply because they are never forced to.
Even if we had been eager to relax we would not have been allowed to. André felt it to be a danger. He countered it by putting up a blood-chilling front of gloom about our prospects for the next forty years. However well we were doing, the slightest hint that expenditure of some sort would not come amiss (the redecoration of the reception area, perhaps, or thirty-two pages of illustrations in a book instead of sixteen, or – God forbid – a rise for someone) would bring on a fit of shocked incredulity at such frivolous heedlessness the face of imminent disaster. Much though the rest of us used to complain about this frugality, it is a fact that our firm continued to make a profit every year until he sold it in 1985, in spite of the last five years of that time being hard ones for small independent publishing houses; and this might not have been – towards the end certainly would not have been – possible had his control of our overheads been less fierce.
For three years we rented the top two-thirds of a doctor’s house in Thayer Street. They were happy years, but still a touch amateurish: did proper publishers have to put a board over a bath in order to make a packing-bench? Did proper editors and proper sales managers work together in the same small room? Our performance, nevertheless, was good enough to let us buy up Derek Verschoyle’s firm in 1956, and move into its premises at 14 Carlisle Street in Soho.
Derek Verschoyle was a raffish figure, vaguely well-connected and vaguely literary, about whom I had first heard from my father who had encountered him as an agreeably picturesque feature of the Spectator. Verschoyle was its literary editor for a while. His room looked out over the mews behind that periodical’s offices in Gower Street, and he, lolling with his feet up on his desk, used to take pot-shots at the local cats out of his window with a .22 which he kept on his desk for the purpose. He must have been able to raise a fair amount of money in order to set up his own publishing firm (its assets included the freehold of the house, which was very well placed) but it didn’t take him long to get through it. We gained only two really valuable authors from him – Roy Fuller, whose novels and poetry added lustre to our list for a long time, and Ludwig Bemelmans, whose ‘Madeline books’ for young children did very well for us. One of the more burdensome books we inherited from him was a pointless compilation called Memorable Balls, a title so much tittered over that we thought of leaving it out when we were arranging our stand at The Sunday Times’s first book fair. Finally one copy was shoved into an inconspicuous corner – where the Queen Mother, who had opened the fair, instantly noticed it. Picking it up, she exclaimed with delight: ‘Oh, what a tempting title!’ André insisted that it was his confusion over this that made him drop her a deep curtsey instead of a bow.
Verschoyle was the kind of English Gentleman André seemed fated to meet, but although undeclared liabilities went on leaking out of crannies for a long time, and the bills which came in with despairing regularity from his tailor and his wine merchant used to make our eyes pop, he did us no harm and much good. Settled into his house, we ceased being promising and became pros.
There were two large and well-proportioned rooms, and the rest of the house rambled back from its narrow frontage in a haphazard but convenient jumble of partitioned spaces. André, as was only right, had the better of the two good rooms, and Nick Bentley had the other. I moved fast to secure the smallest room there was, knowing that only the physical impossibility of inserting a second desk would save me from having to share. If I had put up a fight for Nick’s room I would have got it, because Nick was far too well-mannered to fight back; but André would quite certainly have seen it as a chance to squeeze two other people into it with me, neither of whom would have been my secretary because I didn’t have one. It never entered his head to ask Nick to share it with anyone other than his secretary.
Nick edited our non-fiction – not all of it, and not fast. He was such a stickler for correctness that he often had to be mopped-up after, when his treatment of someone’s prose had been over-pedantic, or when his shock at a split infinitive had diverted his attention from some error of fact. I don’t think I am flattering myself in believing that I was busier and more useful than he was (though there was nothing to choose between us in uselessness when it came to exercising business sense – a fact often bewailed by André, although he enjoyed the jokes he could make about it). I certainly noticed the privileges enjoyed by Nick as a result of his gender, just as I noticed that his salary was a good deal larger than mine; but what I felt about it was less resentment than a sort of amused resignation. All publishing was run by many badly-paid women and a few much better-paid men: an imbalance that women were, of course, aware of, but which they seemed to take for granted.
I have been asked by younger women how I brought myself to accept this situation so calmly, and I suppose that part of the answer must be conditioning: to a large extent I had been shaped by my background t
o please men, and many women of my age must remember how, as a result, you actually saw yourself – or part of you did – as men saw you, so you knew what would happen if you became assertive and behaved in a way which men thought tiresome and ridiculous. Grotesquely, you would start to look tiresome and ridiculous in your own eyes. Even now I would rather turn and walk away than risk my voice going shrill and my face going red as I slither into the sickening humiliation of undercutting my own justified anger by my own idiotic ineptitude.
But one can, of course, always walk away. That I could easily have done, and never thought of doing; so I doubt that it was only the mixed vanity and lack of confidence of the brainwashed female which held me there in acceptance of something which I knew to be unjust and which other women, whom I admired, were beginning actively to confront.
Some time in January 1998 I read in the Independent an article about recent ‘research’ (it sounded small-scale and superficial) into the differences between the attitudes of men and those of women towards their jobs. Men had been found more likely to aim for promotion and increased pay, women to aim for work they would enjoy and the satisfaction of doing it well. As so often when industrious people ‘discover’ something obvious, my first reaction was ‘You don’t say!’; but this was followed by an oddly satisfying sense of agreement, because the article did so exactly sum up my own experience. I hadn’t just loved being an editor, I had also positively liked not being treated as the director I was supposed to be. This was because, as I have explained, I loathed and still loathe responsibility, am intensely reluctant to exert myself in any way that I don’t enjoy, and am bored by thinking about money (in spite of liking to spend it). So while it is true that André took advantage of my nature in getting me cheap and having to bother so little about my feelings, it cannot be said that in relation to the job he did any violence to those feelings.