by Diana Athill
The books that did well for us in the next thirty years were the books we liked – not, of course, that they were all liked equally, or all by all of us, but all of them more or less ‘our sort of book’. Among the more conspicuous of our novelists (I put them in alphabetical order to disguise preference) were Margaret Atwood (her three earliest), Peter Benchley (all his novels, but Jaws was the one which struck gold), Marilyn French (two of her novels, but it was The Women’s Room which counted), Molly Keane (her three last, Good Behaviour supreme among them), Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer (up to and including An American Dream), Timothy Mo (his first two), V. S. Naipaul (eighteen of his books, including non-fiction), Jean Rhys (all), Philip Roth (his first two), and John Updike (up to and including the collection of essays, Odd Jobs).
There were a great many others, a few of which I have forgotten, many of which I enjoyed, some of which I loved – and I shall insert here a note to those readers who like to poke about in second-hand bookshops: if you come across any of the following, buy them:
Michael Anthony’s The Year in San Fernando. Michael came from a remote Trinidadian village. His mother was very poor, and when offered the chance to send her boy to work for an old woman in San Fernando, she couldn’t afford to turn it down. So the ten-year-old was dispatched to a small provincial town which seemed to him a thrilling and alarming metropolis; and Michael’s novel is based on this experience. It is a wonderfully true and touching child’s-eye view of life.
John Gardner’s Grendel. A surprising novel to come out of Tennessee, by the man Raymond Carver acknowledged gratefully as a major influence. It is the Beowulf story told from the monster’s point of view. Having to read Beowulf almost turned me against Oxford, so when a New York agent offered me this novel I could hardly bring myself to open it. If I hadn’t I would have missed a great pleasure – a really powerful feat of imagination.
Michael Irwin’s Working Orders and Striker. Two of the best novels of British working-class life I know – particularly Striker, which is about the making and breaking of a soccer star.
Chaman Nahal’s Azadi. A superb novel about a Hindu family’s experience of the partitioning of India, which ought to be recognized as a classic.
Merce Rodoreda’s The Pigeon Girl. An extremely moving love story translated from the Catalan, which reveals much about the Spanish civil war as ordinary, non-political people had to live it.
It must seem to many readers that if someone was lucky enough to publish Roth’s first books and almost all of Updike’s, those two writers ought to figure largely in her story, but they are not going to do so. We lost Roth early through lack of faith, although I still think it was excusable. He, even more than Mailer, was a writer whose fame preceded his work: when his very gifted little first novel, Goodbye, Columbus, crossed the Atlantic it was all but invisible for the haze of desirability surrounding it, so that no one doubted for a moment that we had made a valuable catch. Then came Letting Go which I thought wonderful, although I agreed with André that it was too long – not ‘by a third’, as he said, but still too long. So we asked each other whether we should raise the matter with Philip and agreed that it would be too dangerous; there was such a buzz going on about him, everyone was after him – annoy him and he would be gone in a flash. And anyway it would be difficult to cut because it was all so good – there was not a dead line in it. Much of that novel is dialogue and I got the impression that Philip’s brilliance with dialogue had gone to his head: he had enjoyed doing it so much that he couldn’t bring himself to stop. So we accepted the novel as it was and it didn’t earn its advance. (Imagine my feelings when he said to me, several years later: ‘The trouble with Letting Go is that it’s far too long.’) Then came a novel called When She Was Good, told from the point of view of a young woman from the Middle West, non-Jewish, who struck me as being pretty obviously Philip’s first wife. I never talked to him about this book, so what I say here is no more than my hunch, but I thought ‘This is an exercise – he is trying to prove to himself that he doesn’t have to write as a Jew and a man’. And as I read I kept telling myself ‘It must soon come alive – it must’. And it didn’t.
So we thought ‘No more silly money’ and decided to calculate the advance on precisely what we reckoned the book would sell – which I think was four thousand copies at the best – and that was not accepted. As far as I know When She Was Good was not a success – but the next novel Philip wrote was Portnoy’s Complaint.
This space represents a tactful silence.
John Updike, on the other hand, was never set up as a star and never disappointed. From a publisher’s point of view he was a perfect author: an extremely good writer who knows his own worth but is also well-informed about the realities of the publishing and bookselling trades. And from a personal point of view he is an exceptionally agreeable man, interesting, amusing and unpretentious, who knows how to guard his privacy without being unfriendly. I like John very much, always enjoyed meeting him, and never felt inclined to speculate about whatever he chose to keep to himself, so I have nothing to say about him except the obvious fact that we would have been a much less distinguished publishing house without him.
The strangest of my Great Russell Street experiences came in the mid-eighties, and did not result in a book. David Astor, the then retired editor of the Observer, and Mr Tims, a Methodist minister who had been a prison chaplain and had acted as counsellor to Myra Hindley, wanted her to write a truthful account of her part in the ‘Moors Murders’. Mr Tims’s motive was that of a Christian believing in redemption through penitence: he wanted, as a man in his position ought to want, to see this woman save her soul by plumbing the darkest depths of her guilt. Whether David Astor was at one with him about the soul-saving I am not sure, but he was convinced that if she could get to the bottom of her actions it would provide information valuable to sociologists and psychologists. Encouraged by these two men, she had written about her childhood and about meeting Ian Brady, falling in love with him and starting to live with him; but when she approached the murders, she stuck. She needed help. She needed an editor.
David Astor invited André and me to his house to meet Mr Tims and discuss the matter. It was soon after Tom Rosenthal had joined us, in the first stage of his buying the firm when he and André were to go through a period of joint management, so he too knew about the proposal. Our reactions to it had been characteristic: Tom’s was instant and uncomplicated – he wouldn’t touch anything to do with that monstrous woman with a bargepole; André’s was uncomfortable but respectful, because he greatly admired David Astor and felt that any suggestion of his must be taken seriously; mine was a mixture of dismay and a curiosity too strong to be withstood. As we talked it over with the two men I became more and more sure that I wouldn’t do it; but, having read the material they had persuaded her to write, I was ready to postpone my decision until after I had met her. She wrote simply and intelligently, making it clear how an ambitious nineteen-year-old with very little education, feeling herself to be more interesting than the rest of her family but frustratingly cut off from ways of proving it, could not fail to respond to the man she met at her work-place: the reserved austere man who quite obviously despised nearly everyone, but who chose her; who then went on to introduce her to frightening but fascinating books unknown to anyone else of her acquaintance; and who believed that it was necessary to be above the petty considerations which governed most people’s despicable little lives. It was easy enough to see how that particular girl, falling in love with that particular man, would soon start to feel privileged, and to enjoy the sense of superiority gained by flouting ordinary people’s timid limitations on behaviour. It was certainly not surprising that when she tried to confront the appalling results of following this line to its end, she couldn’t. And I didn’t see how anyone could help her do it – nor was I convinced that anyone ought to try. But given the chance to meet her, I was going to take it.
Mr Tims took me to the prison, a mod
ern one, surrounded not by a wall but by a very high mesh fence. Its windows were of a normal size, out of which people could see grass and trees. Its only strangeness was that none of its inhabitants was visible: nobody was walking across those lawns or leaning out of those windows. No one but David Astor, André and Tom knew I was there – but I had not been in that prison fifteen minutes before a representative of a newspaper – I think the Mail, though I’m not sure – was on the telephone to the office asking if we were signing Myra Hindley up for a book. This, I was told later, always happened: wherever Hindley has been held, it seems there has been someone ready to keep the press informed of what is going on. To the British press, even after twenty-two years, Myra Hindley was firmly established as a kind of sacred monster, the least twitch of whose tail had to cause a ritual frenzy.
I spent about an hour with Myra Hindley, in a small room outside the open door of which sat a bored-looking wardress. If I had not known who the woman opposite me was, what would I have thought of her? I would have liked her. She was intelligent, responsive, humorous, dignified. And if someone had then informed me that this unknown woman had been in prison for twenty-two years I would have been amazed: how could a person of whom that was true appear to be so little institutionalized?
We talked about writing, of course – she had just taken a degree in English from the Open University – and about her conversion to Catholicism. She described how nightmarish it was to have the press breathing down the back of her neck all the time, and how boring to be short of intelligent talk. She was flippant rather than grateful about what she called ‘my old men’ – Lord Longford, David Astor, and Tims. To begin with her speech was very slightly slower than normal, so that I wondered if she was on tranquillizers – and Mr Tims was to say yes, she would have been: she had had to use them a lot since she had agreed to visit the moors with the police in an attempt to find the place where Brady had buried a victim whose remains had never been recovered. By the end of the hour she was speaking quite normally, and we could easily have gone on talking. I still liked her – and I had become quite sure that I was not going to become her editor.
The reason for this was two-fold: I could not believe that such a book would in fact teach anyone anything that could not already be inferred from the events, and I was also unable to believe that forcing herself to write it would help Myra Hindley. I was not a believer like Mr Tims, so about her soul I did not know: I was capable of envisaging the healing of guilt only in terms of tout comprendre c’ est tout pardonner, and I did not think that this woman, if she compelled herself fully to acknowledge what she had done, would be able to grant herself pardon. When she did what she did, she was not mad – as Ian Brady was – and, although she was young, she was an adult, and an intelligent one. It seems to me that there are extremes of moral deformity which cannot be pardoned: that Stangl was right when, having faced the truth about himself, he said ‘I ought to be dead’. He then had the luck to die, but that is not a conclusion that can be counted on. By the law of our land Myra Hindley had been condemned to live with what she had done, and she had contrived for herself a probably precarious way of doing so: admitting guilt, but blurring it by exaggerating her youth at the time and keeping the extent to which she had been influenced by, and eventually frightened by, Brady to the fore. What would society gain if she were made to live through those murders again as the sane adult she had in fact been, and ended by saying ‘I ought to be dead’, or by breaking down completely, which seemed to me the likely conclusion? Nothing. So if I enabled her to write the proposed book, and André Deutsch Limited published it, we would simply be trading in the pornography of evil, like the gutter press we despised. No, it could not be done.
Much of our non-fiction came in as a result of André’s visits to New York: for example, John Kenneth Galbraith’s books about economics, Arthur Schlesinger’s about the Kennedy presidency, Joseph P. Lash’s two about the Roosevelts. He also harvested many unexpected books such as Eric Berne’s account of transactional analysis, Games People Play, very modish in its day, George Plimpton’s funny stories about taking on professional sportsmen at their own games, and Helene Hanff’s almost absurdly successful little collection of letters to a London bookseller, 84 Charing Cross Road. Quickies by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Bernadette Devlin resulted from his rapid response to whatever happened to be going on in the world; books by Gitta Sereny from his inability to read a newspaper without asking ‘Is there a book in it?’. Simone de Beauvoir’s books came from his flirtation with his old friend George Weidenfeld, with whom he had almost yearly meetings at which they discussed collaboration (sharing a warehouse, perhaps?), always to no avail except (mysteriously) in the case of joint publication of de Beauvoir. And it was André who launched us into our lively and profitable series of ‘Insight Books’ from The Sunday Times.
In the sixties Harold Evans made his name as the inspiring young editor of that paper, piloting it to the forefront of investigative journalism. His literary editor Leonard Russell, an old friend of Nick’s and newer friend of André’s, called André one day in 1967 to consult him about an offer the paper had just received. The Insight Team was doing an investigation of the Philby affair, it had occurred to them that there might be a book in it, and George Weidenfeld had offered £10,000: did André think this was about right? ‘No,’ said André. ‘I will give you £20,000.’ And that was that.
We had a slightly proprietorial feeling about Philby, because he had been introduced to us during his curious limbo-years between the defection of Burgess and Maclean to the Soviet Union and his own uncovering as a spy. Since 1949 Philby had been the top British Secret Intelligence Service man in Washington, liaising with the FBI and the CIA, and he and Burgess were colleagues both in their above-ground roles in the British secret service and in their underground roles as spies for Russia – he had even had Burgess to stay with him in Washington. He was therefore recalled to London for investigation and, although nothing could be proved against him, left his masters so uneasy that he was asked to resign. Soon afterwards a friend of Nick’s, a rich picture dealer called Tommy Harris who had also been in the British Secret Service, came to us and suggested that we should commission Philby’s life story: the poor man was now short of an occupation and of money, and of course there was nothing in the very unjust rumours which had followed his resignation. Tommy Harris brought him to meet Nick and André, who found him impressive and congenial, as did most of the people who met him, and who signed him up, agreeing to let him have his advance in instalments to keep him going during the writing. None of which was done, of course – I think Tommy Harris repaid the advance. Philby’s failure to deliver was attributed to his finding, when he came to it, that he was not a writer. Another five years were to pass before the true reason emerged, on his disappearance to Russia. While it is possible for a dedicated professional spy to live a life of deceit – an effort constantly rewarded by the achievement of specific ends, and probably by the feeling that you are being cleverer than the enemy – it would be unutterably boring to write it: to slog away at a story completely lacking in the one element which gave it, from your point of view, meaning. Once Philby had ‘come out’ he was able to write what he felt to be the true story of his life very well.
There were to be five more ‘Insight Books’: a detailed analysis of a presidential election in America (Nixon’s); a hair-raising account of how a financial colossus (Bernard Cornfeld) rose and fell; an over-view of the Middle Eastern war of 1973; the inside story of the Thalidomide disaster; and (the tail-end of the series, lacking the zing of its predecessors) Strike, the story of Thatcher, Scargill and the miners. All of them were team books produced by a group of exceptionally brilliant journalists in different combinations, chief among them Bruce Page, David Leitch, Phillip Knightley, Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson and Charles Raw. The books emerged from a room at The Sunday Times so throbbing with activity that it was hard to imagine how a single paragraph of lucid prose could
be written in it. It was Piers Burnett who edited them all for us, and he tells me that no experience in his long and varied publishing career was more entertaining.
In spite of André’s record as a collector of square pegs, he did, of course, hit on many more round ones, and Piers was probably the roundest of them all. I think he was taken on as another attempt to impose on the editorial department that illusory orderliness and method of which André still spasmodically dreamt, and Piers did continue to function as an editor all the time he was with us; but quite soon his practicality, good sense and astonishing appetite for hard work got through to André. He had long nursed another dream in addition to that of the Editorial Manager; the dream of a Right Hand Man who would relieve the weight on his own shoulders by taking on at least some of the planning, negotiating and calculating with which he was burdened. He had recently made two attempts to bring this dream person in from outside, neither of which had worked – and very few of his onlookers would have been prepared to bet so much as a penny on any such attempt working. But now it dawned on him that perhaps what he needed was already in the house. He hesitated; he seemed for a while to be almost disgruntled at the prospect of anything so easy; and then the decision was made and Piers moved downstairs to the little room next to André’s, and there, at last, was the Right Hand Man who suited possibly the most difficult man in London.