by Gully Wells
“Darling, you’re just in time. I’m desperate for beer and fags.” Immobilized by a sturdy child with matted black hair, in boots and corduroy trousers, whose head was buried in her bosom—“Don’t bite or kick, you naughty boy!”—Anna handed me an earthenware jug, a crumpled pound note, and I headed off to the Good Mixer, a pub of unmitigated squalor around the corner on Inverness Street. On the way out I narrowly missed tripping over some baskets on the floor; one contained a sleeping baby, the other a pile of potatoes. Anna gently pushed the baby one to safety under the kitchen table with her foot, and went on feeding her booted appendage.
“Good God, I’m not drinking any of that swill.” Colin had arrived home from work and needed a real drink. “Beer may be good enough for women and children and servants, but a man needs a stiff whiskey or better still, a champagne cocktail. In fact several champagne cocktails, after the bloody awful day I’ve had.”
Colin’s publishing company, Duckworth, occupied an old piano factory at the top of Gloucester Crescent, where he ruled over his empire from a windowless office, not much bigger than a closet, that was embedded like a hubcap at the center of the huge circular building. Some days were indeed bloody awful. “How the hell can a man be expected to make any money in the book business when all people want to read is rubbish and more rubbish? I’m not fucking George Weidenfeld, you know.”
Certainly not. Absolutely no danger of confusing those two.
George was a smooth operator who wore perfectly tailored double-breasted suits, smoked cigars that smelled of money, knew everyone worth knowing in the world, had had the good sense to marry two satisfyingly rich wives, lived in a palazzo in Chelsea, and published books that people apparently wanted to buy. Colin, on the other hand, looked like a scarecrow, had a penniless wife, wore whatever he could find dangling from the ceiling in the laundry room (complemented by a bow tie covered in ducks), screamed with laughter, drank too much, lived in a shoe in Camden Town, and published whatever he damn well pleased.
That particular evening, while George was entertaining the prime minister of Israel along with Saul Bellow, Edna O’Brien, Jimmy Goldsmith, and the foreign secretary (I knew because I worked for him), Colin was standing in his saggy underpants (his soup-encrusted trousers had been thrown on the floor for Anna to deal with later) in the pantry, hunting for sugar cubes, Angostura bitters, and a bottle of brandy he knew he’d hidden in the bread bin. Oh no, don’t think that George was the only publisher in London who had important authors to wine and dine that night. In Colin’s case the wining always played a rather more central role than the dining.
“Oh Christ, I suppose these buggers are going to expect something to eat.”
“And which particular buggers would they be, my darling?”
Colin did this all the time. You might have thought it would have driven Anna to madness or murder, but instead it just amused her. Not much interested in eating herself, she couldn’t imagine why hostesses fretted and fussed and flapped about what to feed their guests. As long as the people sitting around her table weren’t boring (they rarely were) and there was plenty to drink (there always was), she didn’t care who showed up, how long they stayed, or what they said or did. A wry observer of the human race and its foibles, endlessly sympathetic to the Sturm und Drang of other people’s lives, Anna was oddly immune to these psychic dramas and messes herself. Wise and funny, she took a detached, quizzical view of the world, refusing to be sucked into its lunacy, and was quite content to watch its strange ways, and to comfort its troubled occupants, from the sanctuary of her murky kitchen.
Professor Screech was the first of Colin’s guests to arrive. An energetic beetle of a man with darting eyes and a delicate flurry of dandruff decorating his collar, he was a fellow of All Souls and widely regarded as the world’s foremost Montaigne scholar. His new book was the sparkling star at the epicenter of Duckworth’s spring list and, carried away by its brilliance, and quite possibly by his fourth champagne cocktail, Colin announced to the author that the print run was going to be increased to an astonishing five hundred copies. Before the professor could respond to this surprising but entirely welcome news, a naked child, still slippery from its bath, raced into the room, grabbed a bowl of peanuts and a bottle of tonic water, and disappeared behind the sofa, shrieking in triumph. Professor Screech looked appalled, Colin shouted at the child to get the hell out, then beat it about the head with a pillow, and having failed to drive the terrified creature out of its lair, roared up the stairs, “Alfie!”
Alfie had joined the Haycraft ménage after Colin and Anna had come home one night to find an undernourished teenager wandering around upstairs, looking for something to steal. You couldn’t say Alfie had broken into the house, since the door had been unlocked as usual, and you couldn’t say he was a burglar, since there was nothing he could be bothered to take. He didn’t want any of Colin’s five thousand books, he didn’t want a stuffed alligator, he didn’t want Anna’s painting of her children, he didn’t want the ceremonial sword presented to Colin’s father in India, shortly before he had been murdered by a deranged soldier in his regiment, he didn’t want a picture of a peacock composed of appliquéd feathers—in fact there was not a single thing in the entire Haystack that he wanted. But what he did want was to escape from his large family who lived in an unappealing house in what he quite aptly called Kuntish Town. Sometimes he worked in the Duckworth office, sometimes he did the Good Mixer beer-and-fags run, sometimes he looked after the children (he was godfather to the one in the basket on the floor), but mostly he told us astonishing stories about his far-from-sane relatives that made us cry with laughter and beg for more.
Alfie had removed the squealing creature, and Colin was now wrestling with the “placement” for his dinner. Not that there was any food in sight. I glanced at the paper in his hand—the alarming words FINAL NOTICE, printed in red at the top, still left plenty of space for a crude diagram of the crowded table below—and recognized my name.
“You, young lady, are in for a rare treat tonight. I’m putting you beside Professor Kenneth Dover. He’s written the definitive book on buggery and pederasty in ancient Greece, and has actually come up with a completely new word, ‘intercrural,’ from the Latin crus, cruris—‘leg,’ to describe what they got up to. Consummation apparently took the form of the lover inserting his penis between the boy’s thighs, so I suppose technically it wasn’t buggery at all. But it was certainly pederasty.”
Colin exploded into messy laughter, champagne and spittle flying, and I said I’d be sure to take this interesting point up with the professor just as soon as we sat down.
My host, who had gotten a first in classics at Oxford, had never lost his enthusiasm for the ancient world—which was why Anna called him Horace, and why the Duckworth list was studded with priceless gems like Professor Dover’s opus, cleverly set off against slim but perfectly proportioned novels by Anna and her close friend Beryl Bainbridge. “No point in long novels. Nobody wants to read them, they cost too much to produce, and far more to the point, you can charge just as much for something that’s only one hundred pages long.”
Plus your wife and her friend could crank them out quicker. Anna (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) and Beryl were so successful that other publishers were constantly trying to steal them away from Colin, but whether out of loyalty or laziness, they both seemed to prefer the bully they knew. I once walked into the kitchen and heard him shouting on the telephone at Tom Maschler, the head of Jonathan Cape, who was apparently trying to persuade Colin to sell him his wife: “Now look here, Tom. You don’t think I’ve spent all these years cultivating this wretched oyster just so you could come along and steal the pearls she’s finally producing, do you? So fuck off!” And then he slammed down the receiver so hard that he had a coughing fit, and I had to bring him a glass of water.
During the school holidays Anna would gather up her children and decamp to their cottage in Wales. (Colin didn’t see t
he point of the country and stayed in London, where he could finally have “some bloody peace and quiet.”) “Cottage” is probably a bit of a misnomer in that it suggests snapdragons and rambling roses, freshly laundered gingham curtains fluttering in the breeze, and bread baking in a cozy wood-beamed kitchen. The Welsh Haystack was not like that at all. Not remotely. Not in any shape or form. In fact it far more resembled a Lawrencian miner’s two-up-and-two-down that had somehow been uprooted from a back alley in Sunderland and dumped down beside a babbling brook, halfway up a mountain in Gwynedd.
Anna had been brought up in a place called Penmaenmawr and always thought of herself as Welsh, which for her was an entirely different, and wholly superior, proposition to being English. Many years after we first met she wrote a book about Wales and in it confessed, “I have never felt truly at ease or at home anywhere but in Wales. I fell in love with the land, as I believe people are supposed to fall in love with other people. I wanted to be one flesh with it.” Wales was indeed her lover, and as time went by and the children got older, she contrived to spend more and more of her life there, often blissfully alone with the object of her desire. Luckily Colin was not the jealous type.
WORKING FOR GEORGE WEIDENFELD allowed me to indulge in three of my favorite activities—gorging on books, going to parties, and yacking with some of the most interesting people around—while getting paid, admittedly not terribly well, for these undeniable pleasures. Coincidentally these were some of the same things that George loved to do, and did with extraordinary finesse. Long ago, before independent publishing houses had been gobbled up by corporations, publishers’ lists used to be a reflection of the taste, character, and foibles of the boss. Colin had his crazy classicists as well as Beryl’s and Anna’s novels, while George’s interests veered off in disparate and altogether more worldly directions. His magpie mind flitted about in search of the shiniest and most alluring people and manuscripts he could find to enliven his publishing house and his drawing room. The list fed the parties, the parties fed the list, and both fed George.
Bona fide intellectuals (John Berger), heavyweight historians (Hugh Trevor-Roper), delightful historians (Antonia Fraser), controversial historians (David Irving), and true literary geniuses (Nabokov and Bellow) found themselves in the company of politicians (Harold Wilson, Golda Meir, Charles de Gaulle) and assorted elderly social butterflies of the ancien régime like the Duke of Verdura and Prince Clary. George also had a touching faith in the literary talents of just about any beautiful, well-connected, and preferably titled woman who could spell her own name. These ravishing creatures, who added so much to the merriment of his parties, were always assumed to have a book lurking somewhere in their fragrant bosoms, just waiting to be coaxed out by one of his hardworking editors. I recall one particular Italian contessa (flashing eyes and emeralds, glossy hair and sable, all enveloped in an impenetrable fog of Mitsouko) who was put to “work” “writing” a “book” called The Private Gardens of Italy, most of which, rather serendipitously, seemed to belong to her relatives. But to be fair to George, that spring he published another, altogether more serious “Italian gardening book,” the first English edition of Giorgio Bassani’s masterpiece The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. In the same manner the supreme frivolity of Cecil Beaton’s diaries, a poisonous cocktail of snobbery and maliciousness, was balanced by the supreme humanity of Victor Klemperer’s, which bore dignified witness to the depredations and destruction endured by the Jews of Nazi Dresden.
AS AN AUSTRIAN JEW who had escaped from Vienna after the Anschluss in 1938, had spent the war in London working for the BBC, and then had gone to Israel as Chaim Weizmann’s chef de cabinet in 1949, George never could resist the twin sirens of Nazism and Zionism. (And he wasn’t crazy, because there cannot be two more fascinating subjects in the entire twentieth century. Well, I suppose there is the “rumble and the rethink”—as Martin Amis used to call it—in Russia in 1917, and then there’s China, but we can’t get into that now.) George had to publish Albert Speer, he had to acquire Joachim Fest’s biography of Hitler at the Frankfurt Book Fair, but it was Israel that remained his true weakness. However, whereas the Nazis could always be relied upon to shift a respectable—and occasionally spectacular—number of books, the same, alas, could not be said of the Israelis. When George set off on his annual pilgrimage/shopping spree to Jerusalem, the managing director, who had the unenviable task of trying to keep his boss’s spending under some kind of control, would get especially nervous. He knew perfectly well what a week in the presidential suite at the King David cost, because God knows he’d been signing that bill for years, but what he lived in terror of were the contracts that were conceived there in wild moments of patriotic passion. Abba Eban, Ezer Weizman, a few ex-presidents, an ex–prime minister, a Mossad agent who had foiled a plot to assassinate Golda—these men were heroes of the state, and was George about to insult them? He was not. They were certified superstars, and it was only natural that as their publisher he would wish to give them advances in keeping with their stature, and it was equally natural that when they arrived in London for the publication of their eagerly awaited memoirs, they would expect lengthy interviews on BBC television and in The Times. Which was where my nightmare began.
Soon after I started working for George, one of these glittering stars in the Israeli firmament came to town and was given an especially festive dinner at his publisher’s apartment in Chelsea. Sinuous, elegantly pornographic Schieles adorned the front hall, one of Bacon’s screaming popes (after Velázquez) dominated the library, and an eighteenth-century French tapestry hung above a tobacco-colored suede sofa in the drawing room where the grizzled hero (tieless in Gaza—the collar of his crisp blue shirt arranged outside the jacket lapels, in the Israeli style) was being feted by le tout Londres. Politicians were eager to discuss the long-range implications of taking the Golan Heights, while silken ladies in backless dresses leaned closer to his rugged features to hear what it really felt like to command an army of tanks as they rumbled across the Sinai. Unfazed and implacable, the hero made light of his desert romp, the ladies shivered and melted (what is it with girls and soldiers?), while I was left to fret about how the hell I was going to persuade the producer of the BBC Today show to interview some Israeli he’d probably never heard of. Another glass of champagne was needed to concentrate my mind on this conundrum, and when that didn’t work, I found myself indulging in a bit of light flirtation with the hero’s handsome bodyguard (what is it with girls and guns?) just to cheer myself up and calm myself down.
Despite—or quite possibly because of—the delightful extravagance of George’s apartment and private life, the Weidenfeld office was refreshingly modest. A ramshackle arrangement of drafty corridors and boxy rooms, approached by a staircase as long and steep as Jacob’s proverbial ladder, it crouched above a dilapidated movie theater across from the railway station in Clapham Junction. Not a part of London that most visiting publishers or authors were familiar with, so George usually contrived to meet his grander foreign friends in the library at home. But occasionally I would run into a snappily dressed New York editor wheezing unsteadily at the top of the stairs, clearly wondering what he, and indeed George, was doing in such an unlikely part of town.
One sunny day, although it was hard to tell since the window was tinted with years of Clapham grime, I was sitting quietly at my desk minding my own business, as distinct from Weidenfeld business, when I was called into George’s office. Christ—not another one of those bloody Israelis expecting to go on national television. Oh, but it was. Apparently this one had written a book about Jews killing Nazis, which I had to admit was an entirely welcome reversal of roles, and might even help a bit, since the jaded hacks I was forced to deal were constantly in search of something fresh and unexpected.
“Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant,” George was sitting behind his desk puffing excitedly on a Montecristo.
“It’s been at the top of the best-seller list in Israel for six
months. Taken the country by storm. Snapped up by Random House, the movie rights are already sold, and I am confident it is going to have an even bigger success here.”
Oh please don’t say that. George was bouncing around in his chair, unable to contain his enthusiasm for this astounding book, but then quite suddenly he bounced right out of it and, heading for the door, turned to the beaming author. “David, how I wish I could stay, but alas I am already late for a terribly dull lunch. So I leave you with Gully, who will be masterminding your publicity campaign.”
What else could I do but invite David to a terribly dull lunch to discuss the publicity blitzkrieg that would shortly be coming his way? Where we went I don’t recall, but I do remember thinking that he reminded me of a somewhat younger (he must have been in his late thirties) version of the grizzled hero (David too had been part of that busy crossing of the Sinai), and that he bore a quite alarming physical resemblance to the fascist hairdresser who had relieved me of my troublesome virginity (except that as a Labor member of the Knesset, his politics were more acceptable and his wife, as far as I could gather, wasn’t pregnant). By the time I finally got back to the office dusk was settling in, and it seemed that we had agreed to meet for dinner the next day. As commander in chief of the blitzkrieg, I was well aware that there were many more details of this complicated campaign to be finalized before he returned to Tel Aviv. In fact it was so complicated that it became necessary for us to continue our discussions over dinner on the following night as well.