Janet’s appearance at the Annual Bookseller’s Conference, held that year in her native Scotland, was less dramatic although important for us, as she wowed the main buyers with a sparkling cabaret performance that ensured we had her book, Prime Mimicker, everywhere. The perfect author, and great fun.
* * *
The 100 Club in Oxford Street was where I’d cut my jiving teeth, and as far as I was concerned Humphrey Lyttelton was a legend. But in addition to his trumpet playing and his key role in British jazz history, he was also a natural writer and, having greatly admired a mock obituary he’d written of himself for Punch – in which he spelt his surname differently each time it occurred – I wrote to him. But I made a bad mistake. After an agreeable exchange of letters, I thought I would phone and invite him to lunch, having obtained his number from Alan’s unsuspecting secretary. ‘Where did you get this number from?’ he blazed at me like a not-so-muted trumpet before I could get through a sentence. Taken aback, I told him I thought it was on his letter, but he knew all too well that it wasn’t and I owned up. ‘Erase it,’ he said, ‘and never use it again.’ I didn’t!
Despite the bad start, Humph agreed to have lunch – in fact he invited me, as he was reviewing restaurants at the time for Harpers & Queen, and we ended up at a restaurant in Pimlico (I was doing rather well out of my jazz authors). Humph was all for publishing a collection of his witty and often autobiographical pieces, but he also came up with the idea of a series of informal jazz histories. Given the popularity of his long-running Best of Jazz programmes on Radio 2, that was an exciting prospect, especially as he wanted to use the title of his programme for the book. His approach was unusual, discussing the great jazz figures through their key recordings, and throwing in personal anecdotes along the way, Humph-style. The first of his Best of Jazz books was subtitled Basin Street to Harlem; the second, Enter the Giants; the third… Well, he never did get around to writing that, but brought us instead a book called Why No Beethoven?, based on the amusing diaries he’d kept during a tour of the Middle East with his band. At the end of their concluding concert, a man had come up to him wanting to know why their repertoire didn’t include Beethoven’s Fifth, hence the enigmatic title.
Humph’s last book for us was a free-wheeling memoir, It Just Occurred to Me… By that time he’d become the droll chairman of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and his fame extended way beyond the jazz world. We launched the book at a Mayfair jazz club and were treated to a couple of numbers from the exciting Elkie Brooks, a present for Humph, who’d done a great deal for her career at a point when she’d been weighed down by personal problems. ‘Trouble in Mind’ is what Elkie sang that night, and she was to sing it again even more poignantly at Humph’s funeral when, aged eighty-six, he failed to come through a major heart operation. The president of the Society for Italic Handwriting, Humph had been working on a book on handwriting for us at the time, and he would come to our house, spreading his books and papers over our dining room table. Even at that advanced age he was still playing with vigour, and every month or so we’d go to hear him and his band at the Bull’s Head in Barnes. Sadly, he died before finishing the handwriting book.
Humph’s book launches were always a special thrill for me, taking me back to my teenage years at the 100 Club.
I hadn’t at that stage met Humph’s son Stephen, but after the funeral he approached me suggesting a book based on the diaries his father had kept, written every day in his beautiful hand – even his tax returns had been completed in his fine script! Stephen and I worked together around the clock, choosing appropriate passages and pages, linking them, turning it all into a 450-page book we hoped Humph would have been proud of, with Susan da Costa, his partner, checking and vetting it before we went to press. We called it Last Chorus.
Reading Humph’s diaries, I was surprised to see a number of (fortunately polite) references to us, as his publishers, but also stories about various people we’d published. But even though they were essentially private diaries, he was never bitchy, never self-indulgent, always displaying the wit, generosity and sharpness of observation for which he was known. There were things I’d forgotten, which I was glad to be reminded of, like the time I accompanied him to a literary lunch. The other speakers were the irrepressible Michael Bentine, Robin Day, and the ballerina Nadia Nerina. Humph’s vivid account brought it all back:
Drove to Jeremy Robson’s house, left the car there, went to St Pancras with him in a mini cab. 8.48 train to Sheffield where I am to be one of the speakers at a Yorkshire Post literary lunch… Petrified to see that it is a huge room with tables stretching way into the distance. Over 500 people there, most of them women in flowered hats. Sat between two businessmen’s wives, made conversation between bouts of nerves. Robin Day spoke well… Nadia N chatted amiably about the ballet and Michael B went stark raving mad… Returned on the train with Jeremy Robson and Bentine who talked without drawing breath from Sheffield to St Pancras.
Yes, that’s exactly how it was, how the extraordinary Michael Bentine was, and how those lunches were in those heady publishing days. It must have cost us a fortune to take our celebrity authors to these events, just to sell a few books, get a paragraph or two in the local press, but we never seemed to count the pennies.
Perhaps we should have done!
Given the continuing success of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, which Humph chaired for some thirty-five years, it was amusing to read his diary entry for 17 July 1975:
Final session of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. I’m not sure that this game hasn’t finally run its course… I shan’t be sorry if it expires. I’m rather tired of people coming up and saying, ‘I enjoyed your programme the other day’, and finding out they mean this bit of nonsense!
Since we published a Clue book based on that nonsense, with silly photos of the original team taken in our backyard and round our old upright, I’m glad that on this occasion Chairman Humph was wrong!
Ever since that early faux pas of mine, whenever I wanted to contact Humph, I would have to phone Susan, who would then phone Humph and ask him to phone me. But suddenly, as we worked on the handwriting book he was never to finish, he wrote down his mobile number and said I should use it. It was a touching final gesture of friendship and trust.
19
REVIEWING THE SITUATION
Dannie Abse and I continued our lunchtime strolls, but just as the wise Faber director had warned at the start of this saga, the poetry had indeed begun to dry up as the all-consuming demands and strains of publishing took over. My interest remained strong, but somehow the lines didn’t come. There was still the occasional reading to give, but since I was not writing I felt rather a fraud, finding poetry hard to talk about. I recall Dannie once saying that you were only a poet while you were writing a poem. I knew what he meant, and though I was well aware it didn’t matter to the world at large, it mattered a great deal to me. I’d never been able to look on poetry as a hobby. It had to be an all-or-nothing commitment, and for the moment it was nothing. Now I always seemed to have my head in the words of others, urging them on, editing their work, sharing their highs and lows. If I’d ever had a style or voice of my own, it was no more.
It was during one of our walks that we came up with the idea of producing a poetry annual. It seemed a worthwhile thing to do and a slightly compensatory activity for me. We published the annuals for seven years, with me editing the first one under the rather meaningless title of Poetry Dimension 1, and Dannie the other six under the more obvious title of The Best of the Poetry Year. The annuals contained what we thought were the most arresting poems, reviews, interviews and articles about poets or poetry published in the given year on both sides of the Atlantic, and they were well received. At around the same time, we took on a new book of poems by Vernon Scannell, The Loving Game, and were gratified when it was made the Poetry Book Society ‘Choice’. Apart from the personal satisfaction it gave me, it also meant the society purchased a decent number of cop
ies for its members. We continued to publish Vernon’s poetry over many years, which was balm for the soul even if it did not bring great riches to either of us. That said, he gave a good many readings where books were sold, and his poems were much in demand for school anthologies, the permission fees from these bringing in a steady trickle of income, of which, quite rightly, the lion’s share went to him. In modern parlance one could say that his books just about washed their faces, and that was good enough for me. Later, we published Vernon’s powerful sequence of autobiographical books.
Vernon would stay with us fairly regularly at around this time when he came down from Leeds for a reading or broadcast from the BBC. He was good enough to include me in a programme he presented about Thomas Hardy’s poetry. Nobody did that kind of programme better and his deep voice was perfect for radio, which made him a favourite with producers. It was while Vernon was staying with us that we were burgled. Carole and I were out and our twins were at school. Vernon was sleeping off a heavy night, so he heard nothing, which was the intruder’s luck, given Vernon’s boxing prowess. In fact, he was doubly lucky, since an American professor, Joseph Cohen, whose biography of the First World War poet Isaac Rosenberg we’d just published, was also staying with us, and he’d left the house early. Cohen’s Journey to the Trenches was the first biography of that fine poet-painter, so different from the other major poets of that cruel war in that Rosenberg wasn’t an officer, having come from a poor East End background. ‘Genius’ is what F. R. Leavis called him, and we were proud to play our part in bringing his work to the attention of a wider public.
I mentioned Vernon Scannell’s sequence of autobiographies, and Argument of Kings, which covers his war experiences, is a classic of its genre. When it appeared, we’d arranged for him to be interviewed live on the excellent John Dunn radio show. Vernon was tickled at the idea of being interviewed by someone of that name, even if it was spelt differently from that of the poet. I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair at the time, but Carole was in the office when the interview went out. So powerful was it that, instead of confining it to the normal twenty-minute author spot, the producer let the interview run on for nearly an hour as Vernon talked vividly and movingly to the captivated Dunn about his experiences. A little while later, Vernon phoned the office and asked Carole what time he had to be at the BBC for the interview. Seemingly traumatised by having revisited such deep and troubling experiences, he had no recollection of having done the programme, which was very alarming. Unusually for Vernon, he hadn’t touched a drink, and to everyone’s relief he wandered into the office a little later, stone-cold sober.
Another writer who came into our orbit at around this time was the Cornish poet Charles Causley, with whom we were to publish three books – one a verse play, The Gift of a Lamb, often performed at Christmas; the second a traditional children’s story about the lovely daughter of an ancient King of Colchester, Three Heads Made of Gold; and the third, Hands to Dance and Skylark, a rather more salty book of autobiographical stories which drew on Causley’s experiences in the navy. We’d met at the Queen Elizabeth Hall during a reading to launch a strange anthology of ‘poems for those who choose to care’ titled Doves for the Seventies, in which we both had poems. Charles was an extremely popular poet, one of our finest, his deceptively simple style making his poems both accessible and memorable, appealing to young and old, especially his ballads, which are much anthologised. One glorious summer, just after we’d taken on his third book, we rented a house in the picturesque fishing village of Port Isaac in Cornwall, and on discovering that we were going to be there, Charles invited himself to tea. I didn’t know him very well then, so Carole and I were both thrilled and apprehensive. But warm, modest, jolly and unassuming, he quickly made himself – and us – feel at home in our rented house, which happened to have a baby grand piano in the living room. His rapport with our young daughters (then about eight) was instant and as he chatted away to them I could see why he was so popular with schools. Then, sitting down at the piano, he led us all in a singsong. The scones may have got burnt, but that didn’t in any way spoil what was a memorable afternoon, and one which led him to dedicate Three Heads Made of Gold to Deborah and Manuela.
* * *
Knowing that we were keen to expand our music list, Nicholas Snowman suggested that we start a series on contemporary composers. Being at the heart of the contemporary music world, Nicholas was ideally placed to be the general editor of such a series and to draw in the composers whose involvement we felt to be important. Michael Tippett, Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle were the first to be featured. Later, outside the series, we were to publish a book of Maria Callas’s masterclasses, and biographies of a number of major performing artists. I also had several long discussions with the great pianist Claudio Arrau about a possible book, following in Alfred Brendel’s considerable footsteps, but while Brendel attached great importance to his writings, I sensed that for Arrau it was an occasional departure, and despite his manager’s encouragement the book never materialised. We were to have more luck with the celebrated Amadeus Quartet, enlisting the broadcaster, writer and historian Daniel Snowman to work with these remarkable musicians, three of whom, refugees from Nazi Germany, had met in a British internment camp during the war before linking up with the English cellist Martin Lovett to make a sensational debut in 1948. With his sensitive appreciation of the music and his understanding of the historical background, Daniel was able to get to the heart of the very special dynamics of this great string quartet, while at the same time skilfully drawing out the musicians’ own personal stories. Daniel had already edited an intriguing book for us, If I Had Been…, in which he’d invited ten distinguished historians to place themselves in the position of a major historical figure of their choice at a pivotal moment, and to suggest how, with hindsight, they might have acted differently, and with what result.
Through Gyles Brandreth, and on a lighter note, we also acquired a book of musical anecdotes, Musical Bumps, by the multi-talented Dudley Moore, then at the height of his Hollywood fame, which was an entertaining diversion. Given his classical background (he’d won an organ scholarship to Oxford) and his brilliance as a jazz pianist, it’s not surprising that his stories ranged widely. I’d become a Dudley Moore fan from the day I first saw him in the ground-breaking satirical review Beyond the Fringe, with Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and Alan Bennett, and had later spent many late evenings listening to him playing with his trio at the Establishment club in Greek Street. I enjoyed the transatlantic phone calls in which he tested out stories for the book, though he never seemed to be there at the times he asked me to call. Still, my admiration for him was boundless, and the cost of a few extra phone calls seemed a small price to pay.
* * *
Towards the end of 1973, Dannie Abse took up the post of writer in residence at Princeton University, but we kept in close touch and visited him and Joan there the following February. From Princeton, Dannie wrote:
We arrived eventually at 40 Pine Street only to find it occupied. By fleas and fleas and fleas … We retreated – that is the correct word – to an hotel, arranged for an exterminator of fleas to call at our future abode and thought of William Blake and John Donne. (Do you know his poems called Fleas?) We also thought of blue murder.
To raise Dannie’s spirits, I sent him a copy of the first poetry annual, hot off the press, which cheered him greatly. ‘It really is a first-class anthology and will be hard to beat,’ he wrote. He began to seek out books on our behalf, putting me in touch with Professor Joseph Frank, who’d just completed the first in a projected five-volume biography of Dostoevsky which Princeton University Press was publishing. It was magnificent, and we jumped at the opportunity of producing a British edition, all commercial considerations swept to one side. We were to be rewarded by lead reviews and a long feature article in The Times by Bernard Levin in which he called it ‘one of the outstanding biographical achievements of modern times’. Where, he asked, co
ngratulating us, were all the large publishers? We were to publish all the Dostoevsky volumes, but Joseph Frank moved at a slow pace and it took many years – too long for an impatient Bernard Levin, who would write to me from time to time asking how long he’d have to wait for the next volume. I recently found a letter from him dated 6 March 1995 – I’d just sent him the fourth volume. He wrote, ‘I’m already devouring it – if anything it is even better. But how long will I have to wait for the fifth and final volume? Anyway, it is a magnificent achievement, for him and for you.’ Others concurred with his judgement, the Observer critic writing, ‘It is difficult to conceive terms of praise too high for this masterly achievement.’ Just occasionally, publishing brings rewards quite unrelated to money, and this was one such occasion.
In a convoluted way, it was through Bernard that we met the actor Ron Moody, whose masterly portrayal of Fagin in the musical Oliver! we enjoyed watching on TV every Christmas with our young daughters. The meeting came about through a series of books we’d commissioned in which famous graduates from different eras wrote about their university years – My Oxford and My Cambridge were the first two titles, and My LSE, which Joan Abse was editing, was the third. The editors of those first in the series had produced a formidable and varied cast of contributors, and one of the LSE graduates Joan wanted for her book was Bernard Levin.
Ron Moody catches up with his old LSE mate Bernard Levin at the party for Joan Abse’s My LSE. He never really forgave Bernard for stealing his girlfriend!
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