by Diana Athill
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 accepted, 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 ha
d 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 we began to see rough weather ahead both of them, for lack of love, had become the kind of cargo that can be jettisoned.
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 modern 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.