by Diana Athill
Not until she had left us did we discover that she had been hiding book-proofs behind a radiator instead of sending them out, as she had said that she had done, to distinguished persons in the hope that they would provide glowing quotes to go on book-jackets; but we did realize quite soon that when Louise said she had done something it didn’t necessarily mean that she had, and it was only a matter of weeks before André was muttering and rumbling – though not to her. He was rarely able to sack a square peg. His method was to complain about them angrily to everyone from Nick and me to our switchboard operator (never, of course, admitting that he had brought the offender in) until he had created such a thick miasma of discomfort in the office that even the most obtuse peg would sense that something was amiss, and would eventually leave. (On one appalling, and unforgiven, occasion, much later, when a peg had failed to do this, André broke down, gulping: ‘I can’t – I can’t – You do it!’ And I had to.)
Luckily Louise had sensitive feelers and soon became aware that thin ice was melting under her feet. So when one evening she found herself next to Tom Maschler of Cape’s at a dinner party, she switched on her act. And a few days later Tom called André to apologize for having done a wicked thing: he had poached our Louise! ‘I hope to God,’ said André, ‘that I wasn’t too gracious about it.’ Luckily Tom suspected nothing, and that was that. I went on seeing Louise from time to time, but thought it better not to ask her about her new job – it was her love-life that I was following. She finally accepted rejection by Tynan, embarked on a therapeutic flutter with a man who didn’t interest her at all, became pregnant by him, and had an excuse to flee back to New York just in time – or so I suspected – to avoid being sacked.
I didn’t say to André ‘I told you so’ because I knew so well, by then, that it would have no effect whatsoever.
The love which most disturbed the office – this was both surprising and gratifying – was that which afflicted men, not women. Among people of my grandparents’ generation and, to a slightly lesser extent, my parents’ it was taken for granted that men were to be preferred to women in responsible jobs because they were in better control of their emotional lives. A woman might be as intelligent as a man, but her intelligence could not be relied on because if, for instance, she was crossed in love she would go to pieces. Menstrual moodiness was not actually mentioned, but the idea of it lurked: women, poor things, were so designed that they couldn’t be expected to overcome their bodies’ vagaries. To my generation this was not true, but it was still present as something which needed to be disproved. I was therefore delighted to find that while I and my woman colleagues at work sometimes endured gruelling emotional experiences in our private lives, we none of us ever allowed them to impinge on our work in anything like the shameless way that Nick and André did.
Nick, usually a pattern of gentlemanly reticence with an upper lip so stiff that it almost creaked, fell violently in love with a young woman who was working for us, and by the time he had left his wife, forced her into divorcing him, been dumped by his mistress, and returned to his wife, the amount of hysteria that had been unleashed left the onlookers prostrate with exhaustion. At the stage when Nick was alone in a dreary rented flat soon after his woman had decided that she didn’t want him after all, I felt truly sorry for him: a man so dignified having been reduced to making such a pathetic exhibition of himself, and all for nothing – it was tragic. But his dignity and my sympathy were a good deal reduced when, less than a week later, André reported that Nick was back with his wife and that we were all being asked to behave as though nothing had happened. I couldn’t see any explanation for such a rapid anticlimax other than an inability to imagine life without being cooked, cleaned and shopped for.
André’s love trials, less severe than Nick’s but no less hard on the audience, were incidental to a story which turned out to be life-long and – with ups and downs – happy.
Earlier, at the time when I first became his confidante, he used to get through women very quickly. There would be an earnest report of falling in love (it was always love, never liking, that he fell into), soon followed by the news that it was over. On one occasion only three days passed between the falling and the revelation that the woman was impossible because ‘she keeps on telephoning’. ‘But isn’t that rather nice?’ I asked. ‘No, she wants to talk about her troubles.’ Another time he invited someone he had just met to share a short holiday in Cornwall, only to see next day that this was a mistake; whereupon he bullied Sheila Dunn to go with them and she in turn had to bully him not to lock the girl out of his bedroom – a situation I remembered on reading in Liane de Pougy’s My Blue Notebooks how an ex-lover of hers summoned her to his rescue because a new flame had trundled into his bedroom equipped with her pillow, obviously expecting (quel horreur!) to stay in his bed all night.
This flightiness was soon to change. In 1949 André went on the first of the skiing holidays in Davos which he was to take every winter for the rest of his active life, asking me before he left to look after his latest girl. I spent an evening with her – and it seemed to me that she showed no sign of infatuation, which was lucky. As soon as André got home he called me, to announce: ‘I’m in love!’
‘I’ know you are – you left me in charge of her.’
‘Not with her. This is the real thing.’
And it was. Staying at the same hotel in Davos was the woman who would put an end to his days of philandering.
Her dark-haired brown-eyed beauty was of the slightly sharp-featured kind which most excited him, so it was not surprising that she had appealed to him on sight, but why she was the one who caught him for keeps – and it was obvious from the start that this had happened – is more mysterious.
I thought about it a lot, and came to the conclusion that four things had combined to give her the unshakeable authority she was to hold over his imagination: she was ten years older than he was, she was married, she was shy and reserved by nature and she was seriously rich.
Glamour requires a certain distance, and this beauty’s seniority, her married status and her reserve endowed her with it: André would never be able to feel in complete possession of her. And her – or rather her husband’s – money, which I am convinced André never thought of as something from which he might profit, enhanced this slightly out-of-reach glamour a good deal – and did so all the more effectively because she herself made very little of having money. She was gloriously special in André’s eyes less for her amazing richness than because she was above her amazing richness.
At first he longed to marry her and felt, when her husband made this impossible, that they were in a tragic plight. But they were able to go on seeing each other, and finally he seemed to become resigned to the situation. He was in fact far too single-minded in his self-absorption to be good at marriage, however sincerely he would have adored his wife, and no one could have spent many years of meeting him almost every day without seeing as much.
In almost fifty years I met his beloved no more than a couple of dozen times, because André insisted that she was fiercely jealous of me. To begin with that was not inconceivable – I was ten years younger than she was, shared his interests and was with him every weekday – but as the years passed it seemed less and less likely; and by the time he said it (as he did) to an eighty-year-old me of a ninety-year-old her, it had become no more than an automatic twitch of an ossified male vanity. The truth was more likely to be that she had no intention of being lumbered with her lover’s hangers-on. I believe she never once met his mother (for which no one who knew Maria Deutsch would dream of blaming her).
In any relationship as long as theirs there are ups and downs, and twice during our Carlisle Street days André was overtaken by fits of jealousy. Neither time, as far as I could see, did he have good reason for it, though that was not from want of trying to find one. Because both times, in addition to collapsing into a melting jelly of woe, unable to think or talk for days on end about anything else (�
�How can you expect me to think about print-runs when this is going on?’ – which was hard to take given the degree of commitment he demanded from everyone else), he devoted evening after evening to what he called ‘driving round’, which meant spying, and for ‘driving round’ he insisted on a companion. He would endlessly circle whatever restaurant he thought she might be dining at; and having failed to catch her coming or going would then drive up and down the street where his suspected rival lived, hoping (or dreading) to see her car parked on it. Which he never did. If he had I would have known, because although I soon went on strike about ‘driving round’ with him, finding it as disgusting as it was boring, and was succeeded by other reluctant attendants, I still had to hear a blow-by-blow account of every evening, together with all the other moaning.
Why did I feel that I must go on listening? Nowadays, of course, I would soon find a way of escaping from such a desperately boring ordeal, but at the time it seemed to me that listening was what friends are for . . . which is, I suppose, true enough up to a point, and it is not easy to draw a line between a genuine need for sympathy and greedy self-indulgence. I could and did draw it, but still I felt that André couldn’t help crossing that line so that I must bear with him. I remember a particularly violent spasm of impatience, and thinking ‘Hang on, don’t let it rip, if he knew what I’m really feeling how could our friendship survive?’.
And in fact it was to be given a rude shock – though by André’s impatience, not mine.
At about the time when he was going through his paroxysms of jealousy, and just before Nick’s debacle, I fell in love with a man who had the courage, when he realized what had happened, to tell me that he was unable to fall in love with me. Even then I was grateful for his honesty because experience had already taught me a good deal about broken-heartedness, and I knew that the quickest cure is lack of hope. If mistaken kindness allows you the least glimmer of hope you snatch at it and your misery is prolonged: but this man (this dear man whom I continued to like very much after I was cured) made it impossible for me to fool myself, so I was able to set about getting better without delay and in the end was left without a scar. But although the process was steady it was not quick, and for about a year I had nothing to take my mind off sadness but my work, so that my evenings were often desolate.
Those enjoyed by André, his beloved, Nick and his wife Barbara seemed, on the other hand, to be all that evenings should be. They made a foursome and went to theatres, concerts, exhibitions and movies together two or three times a week. ‘I wish that they would sometimes ask me to go with them,’ I thought on one particularly dreary evening; and went on to wonder if it would be importunate to suggest as much to André. It would go against the grain to do so because I had fallen into the habit of keeping my love troubles to myself – and perhaps that was why it had not occurred to him that I could do with cheering up. If he knew . . . and we were, after all, friends: think of all the listening I’d done to his love troubles; think of all that ‘driving round’ for heaven’s sake! Surely after all that I could bring myself to confess that I was going through a bad time and that an occasional evening at the cinema with him and the others would be very welcome.
So I did – probably, after all the screwing up to it which had gone on, in a tiresomely self-conscious voice. And what he said, very crossly, was: ‘Oh for God’s sake! Don’t be so sorry for yourself.’
10
IN 1961 WE BOUGHT 105 Great Russell Street, where the firm was to spend the rest of its days. André pounced on it less because we needed a bigger house, although we did, than because it came with Grafton Books, a small firm specializing in books on librarianship, which he felt would contribute a ballast of bread and butter to our list in the future. In our early days we used to look respectfully at Faber & Faber because, as André often pointed out, their distinguished list of literary books was supported by others less glamorous – I think there were references to books about nursing – and we all felt slightly worried by our own lack of such reliable ‘back-list’ material. The cookery list was an attempt to remedy this, and so was the Language Library, a series of books on the nature and history of language which the lexicographer Eric Partridge thought up for us, and which he edited first entirely, then in an advisory capacity, until his death. Grafton seemed a timely expansion of this policy, and its house was splendid: a decent though often-adapted Georgian building, which bore a plaque announcing that the architect A. W. N. Pugin once lived in it, and which we saw at first as huge. The street on which it stood was drab, catering for the kind of tourist who, clad in anorak and trainers, is in pursuit of culture; but the British Museum still looks out on it through its noble gates and a screen of plane trees, bestowing enough dignity to make it a good address for a publisher.
Here we settled down to enjoy the sixties which were, indeed, good years for us; although they never seemed to me essentially different from any other decade. Perhaps they would have done if I had been younger and still fully responsive to the pull of fashion, but as it was I saw them as an invention of the media. Most of the people I knew had been bedding each other for years without calling it a sexual revolution. Jean Rhys agreed, saying that people were using drugs like crazy when she first came to London before the First World War, the only difference being that the papers didn’t go on about it. But of course the fact that we now felt that we had finished recovering from the Second World War did make for cheerfulness.
Because we had more space in which to accommodate more people we began to feel less like a family and more like a firm. For some time we stuck at twenty-four people, not counting packing and dispatch which was always under a separate roof and functioned efficiently and happily in the hands of an earnest Marxist and various members of his family (until the fatal day when André caught the suddenly-fashionable Management Consultant bug, after which they became less efficient, and unhappy). Then the production department grew from two to three to four; publicity and rights each managed to convince André that they needed a secretary of their own; Pamela Royds, our children’s books editor, forced herself to confess that she really did have to have an extra hand (long overdue, given the size and importance of her list) . . . By the time we reached full strength we were using windowless passages as rooms and every real room was subdivided to the limit. Because my little room looked out of a window on the house’s quiet side I felt guiltily privileged. Poor Esther Whitby and the other three of the editorial department were, for several years, entombed in the cellar.
I often wondered whether other businesses above the level of sweated labour imposed on their personnel the degree of discomfort we got away with. The country seemed to teem with people, most of them young women, so eager to work with books that they would endure poverty and pain to do so: a situation which we certainly exploited. The only people paid salaries commensurate with the value of their labour were our sales manager, our production manager and our accountant – all usually married men who would very properly not have taken the job for less. The rest of us, in spite of mopping and mowing fairly steadily about our pitiful lot . . . well, we could have left but we did not, and the atmosphere was usually cheerful.
Since I was always down among the common people as far as salary was concerned (several women who came to work for us after 1962 had the sense to insist on pay higher than mine), I felt like one of the employed rather than one of the employers. We were well into the nineteen-seventies before I reached £10,000 a year and I was never to be paid more than £15,000 – though some time in the late seventies I did get a company car (I remember André failing to convince me that a deux chevaux had a lot of throw-away chic). By the time we reached Great Russell Street I was no longer even noticing the extent to which the title ‘Director’, applied to me, meant next to nothing. When it came to buying property, increasing or not increasing staff, deciding where our books should be printed and what people should be paid, André made no pretence of preliminary discussion with anyone: which I acce
pted, so long as I was listened to – as I was – about books.
In only one respect do I now regret my attitude. If I had instinctively felt myself to be a senior officer rather than one of the crew I would have kept André in better order: would, for instance, have said ‘Nonsense, of course we must buy them proper chairs and desk lamps – and so what if they cost as much as the ones you have just bought for yourself. Instead of which I just, like everyone else, put up with the junk available, thinking “What a mean old bastard he is’ with the reluctant resignation of one complaining about bad weather.
Grafton Books was a good thing as far as it went, but it did not go very far: we were mistaken in thinking that it and the Language Library would keep us in bread and butter should we ever hit hard times. Grafton was run for us by Clive Bingley (who was to buy it from us in 1981) with the support of a small advisory committee, and he tended it through a growth as vigorous as a narrow field allowed; but few people had less interest in the technicalities of librarianship than André, Nick and me, so Clive must often have felt unsupported. When André sold it to him I think it was because of lack of interest in it rather than because it was losing us money, but it certainly was not bringing in a missable amount. And similarly, the Language Library would probably have done much better if one of us had cared about linguistics (for my part, having brushed the fringes of the subject at Oxford, I had moved rapidly through ignorance to abhorrence). It remained respectable, but it was unadventurous: we might, after all, have become the British publishers of Chomsky, but no one even thought about it. We hung on to the Language Library until 1984, and when we shunted it off onto Basil Blackwell Ltd of Oxford no one in the house noticed that it had gone. The truth is that a specialized list, if it is to succeed, must be published by a specialist: someone who will bring to it the energy and enthusiasm that we put into the rest of our list. Grafton and the Language Library made a modest but real contribution to the golden glow of our best years, but by the time when we began to see rough weather ahead both of them, for lack of love, had become the kind of cargo that can be jettisoned.