Mr Toppit

by Charles Elton

  Most importantly, Lila’s call alerted Graham to possibilities he had not even considered. As chance would have it, he had planned a trip to the States later that month, partly to see his father, Wally Carter, in Los Angeles, and persuade him to invest further in the business to prevent the Carter Press’s chronic cash-flow problems becoming terminal, and partly for meetings with publishers in New York to try to sell US rights in his books. His list included some fiction, a series of guides to the great philosophers, a little sociology and psychology, a bit of travel writing, and the five Hayseed Chronicles. Under normal circumstances, and indeed on any of his earlier sales trips to New York, it would not have occurred to him to try to sell the US rights in Arthur’s books—not mainstream enough, too English, too niche, without even the attraction of any significant sales in their home territory.

  Now, away from Meard Street and the grind of keeping his company on the rails, emboldened by Wally’s agreement to stump up more cash, and enthused by the heat and buzz of New York, he talked about Arthur’s books to the publishers he saw, dropping in the names Lewis and Tolkien, using the word “franchise,” and talking about the Darkwood as the new Middle Earth. It was not a bad pitch, but he had no takers. The “phenomenon”—as Graham ambitiously described it—of Laurie’s readings in Modesto did not carry as much weight as he had hoped.

  However, Laurie’s subterranean trickle began to break through the earth. The editor-in-chief at Segal-Klein, the largest and most prestigious of the publishers Graham saw, was called David Sloane, and after Graham’s visit something was left lodged in his brain, nothing to be acted on then and there but a cell that would slowly multiply. He had more connection with Modesto than anyone else Graham saw: his aunt, Bea Brooks, was in a retirement home there. Six months later, when she died, he happened to be in San Francisco on business and drove to Modesto for the funeral. Afterwards, as he always did in any town he passed through, he paid a visit to the local bookstore. There, he noticed the display of Arthur’s books imported from England and the photograph of Laurie beside it. He had seen her picture before: he remembered reading an article about her success in daytime television. She had been plucked from a local TV station in San Francisco and had moved to Los Angeles to front a chat show that was one of the hits of the season.

  We got to know David Sloane well. Whenever he was in England he always took us and Graham out to dinner at this fancy hotel called the Connaught and he would often retell his story, which made Graham squirm: the implication was that David was the real magician in the Hayseed saga, the one who knew with unerring certainty which card was the Queen of Hearts.

  When David returned from his trip west, he read the books and found, to his surprise, that he was intrigued by them. They resonated in his head, particularly the larger-than-life figure of Mr. Toppit. He assigned a junior editor the task of doing some research on them and it was she who turned up Hayseed Reflections.

  It was more of a pamphlet than a book, staple-bound, some forty pages long. Although it was nominally published by a local Modesto press, who did maps and guidebooks to the area, Laurie and Borden Masters had essentially paid for it themselves. They’d had a thousand copies printed, most of which sat in a pile in Laurie’s garage. It had come out of the discussions they had had at their Tuesday-evening book group, when Borden, after too much wine, would become expansive and lecture them as if he was still a professor of English.

  With no fuss, for almost no money, David secured the US rights to the five books from the Carter Press, then went to work on Hayseed Reflections. He flew to Los Angeles to see Laurie. Although the little book had really been put together by Borden Masters, he needed Laurie on the cover and he needed her behind him—hers was now one of the fastest-growing shows in syndication. He retitled it Hayseed Karma by Dr. Borden Masters, PhD, Introduction by Laurie Clow, changed the format to make it pocket-sized, and edited Borden’s text into bite-sized pieces, while retaining the essential thesis, which was that almost everything that happened in The Hayseed Chronicles was capable of religious or philosophic interpretation. For example, the death of the crows in Garden Growing was the eleventh plague of Egypt, the tasks that Mr. Toppit set Luke were variations on the myth of Sisyphus, and so on. A lot of it, of course, centered round Mr. Toppit, who was taken to symbolize not only the unforgiving God in the Christian faith, the Jewish Yahweh, the Hindu Vishnu, the shaman in Native American culture, various deities in Chinese religion, but also Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, and assorted variations on the plain old Boogeyman.

  David Sloane revamped the little book so that it worked on a number of levels. Borden Masters’s rich prose—“Our texts are ones of profound depth and almost infinitely extended meaning; texts that richly repay examination by the most varied and often the most contradictory techniques that modern criticism and theory can provide. These approaches, wide-ranging though they are, could still leave the Hayseed corpus open—quite wrongly—to the charge of ethnocentrism”—could be read as a kind of po-faced academic spoof, but it could also be taken seriously. Interspersed through the book were contributions that David Sloane had coerced from celebrities, who had written about incidents in their lives that appeared to mirror incidents in the books—Bob Woodward’s piece “And out of the Whitehouse, Mr. President comes” became the best known.

  Nearly eighteen months after his death, Segal-Klein published Hayseed Karma and Arthur’s first three books. In the week before publication, Laurie interviewed on her show people who had contributed to the book. Segal-Klein’s marketing thrust was towards Hayseed Karma, which, David Sloane guessed rightly, would lead people to the books themselves. They became word-of-mouth best sellers, and when the last two were published nine months later, Hayseed was already a publishing phenomenon.

  And Lila: who knows what would have happened if she had not made that phone call to Graham, if Graham had not been suddenly propelled by an inchoate sense of possibility? Maybe those copies of Hayseed Reflections would have stayed in Laurie’s garage getting brown and faded with age in the dry California heat. Maybe Arthur’s books would never have been published in America and would have come to the end of their little life in Britain, the literary equivalent of the fruit fly’s abbreviated existence, to be found occasionally with scuffed covers in Oxfam shops and car-boot sales with “10p” written in pencil on the back.

  There was no doubting David Sloane’s publishing savvy. He had a hunch that the books could “cross over” in America—that is, if marketed properly, they could appeal to adults as well as children—and in order to achieve this he made one crucial change to the books: he simply cut out the illustrations. The books, as they were published in America by Segal-Klein, were Lila-less.

  Most people can find some way of hiding pain. For Lila it was impossible. She wore it, she breathed it, she reeked of it. And yet she fought back in her own way. She ordered fifty copies of each of the five books—negotiating with Graham to get a trade discount—and had them delivered to her tiny flat where they sat in piles in the hallway. She already had string, Jiffy Bags, stamps, air-mail stickers, and return labels with her name and address printed, and she methodically sent one copy of the English edition of each book to everyone she knew, and didn’t know, in America: friends, relations, acquaintances, relations of friends, friends of acquaintances with a covering letter explaining that these were the authorized editions of the books and were not to be confused with any inferior versions.

  Then she bought an expensive and bulky leather shoulder-bag large enough to contain the extensive contents of her older, smaller handbag and several copies of each book. Despite her bad hip, which had never fully recovered from her fall at Arthur’s funeral, and the walking-stick on which she leaned heavily, she carried the bag with her wherever she went “just in case.”

  Much of Lila’s life was led on the off-chance, not vicariously exactly, more with an opportunistic attention to detail—the toothbrush and nightdress always in her bag, the biscuits she
baked in case someone were to drop in. Now if she heard that a friend had an American relative visiting, she would arrive on their doorstep bearing the gift of an English edition. On the train, in the street, in a shop, her hearing as fine-tuned as any animal’s, she lay in wait for someone with an American accent, accosted them and thrust into their hands one or, if she liked the look of them, several English Hayseeds. Once, in what was possibly her finest hour, she saw a tourist reading the American edition on a bench outside Salisbury Cathedral and—a madwoman in a beaded hairnet—lurched towards them, waving her stick and shouting, “Echt, nicht ersatz!” like a battle cry as she grabbed the book out of their hand.

  By then, of course, the books were famous in Britain. Their success had seeped back over the Atlantic. There seemed to be endless news stories about how these obscure children’s books had become a sensation in America—“The Five Little Books That Could,” as the Daily Mail put it—and articles with titles like “Tragedy Behind the Best-seller List,” with the story of Arthur’s death and a photograph of me alongside one of Lila’s drawings.

  How quickly the books that had come from nowhere seemed to slot into a tradition, acquire precedents and imitators, passionate supporters and vehement detractors, correspondence in newspapers and mentions on television. The very elements that seemed so anchored to the story became detached and took on a life of their own, took flight and floated in the ether, ready to be plucked and used by people for their own ends. When Neil Kinnock, faced with Mrs. Thatcher’s intransigence over the miners’ strike, shouted, during Prime Minister’s Question Time, that she was “in danger of becoming known as Mrs. Toppit” and the headline of the next day’s Daily Mirror read “Thatcher Turns Toppit!” I knew we had entered a theme park from which we would never escape.

  Part Two

  Luke

  The week after my eighteenth birthday, I was in a big silver limo with Martha and Rachel heading to the set of the TV series that the BBC were making of The Hayseed Chronicles. I had never seen anything being filmed before. I wasn’t passionate about films, like Rachel and Claude, who spent their lives testing each other on old Hollywood movies, but who wouldn’t want to go and see something being made? It was also my last day before going away. I had finished exams, finished school, got into university, and saved up enough money to go to Los Angeles and stay with Laurie for the summer. Martha thought it was a terrible idea.

  After all this time, it seemed extraordinary that the books were going to be on the screen. In the five years since Arthur’s death, Martha had turned down many offers to turn them into a film. There was a pattern to the overtures: the American producers stayed in suites at expensive hotels and organized cars to take her to posh restaurants. The British ones were more low-key and expected her to get to less posh restaurants under her own steam. Wherever she was meeting them she tended to order a succession of vodkas and a large plate of smoked salmon, which she would leave untouched.

  The classic approaches could not always be relied on to find favor with Martha. Previous box-office successes, development deals with major studios, access to the big players, assertions that they were, in fact, the big players, guarantees that Steven always returned their calls no problemo, major stars who already seemed committed to the project, invitations to summer places in Santa Barbara or the Hamptons seemed to hover above the table at the restaurant without ever finding their way to Martha’s side, as if an invisible forcefield lay alongside the salt and pepper shakers.

  At best her responses could be construed as elliptical, a perverse concentration not on the thrust of the producer’s argument but on the minutiae that hovered at the edges. Seemingly oblivious to the list of stars who had attended some producer’s son’s bar mitzvah, Martha wanted to know what fish, exactly, was gefilte. When a producer talked of how quickly he could move, how guaranteed this project was to happen, should she grant him the rights, Martha quizzed him on whether the phrase “fast track” had originated during the construction of the Union Pacific railroad in the 1860s or whether it had to do with the layout of metropolitan tram lines.

  In her willful obliqueness the erroneous presumption was that she must be playing a uniquely British form of hardball, a careful game designed to give her more control or to improve the terms of the deal, but whatever it was, as the expensive flowers delivered the day after the lunch wilted in the vase, so did the hopes of any number of film producers.

  There were those who believed that Martha was reluctant to sell the film rights because, under the original book contract, the Carter Press were in for an unfairly large cut of the proceeds, but that was fundamentally to misunderstand what drove her. It was never about money. When she decided she was going to start litigation against the Carter Press, she ignored conventional wisdom, which was that cases like hers were unlikely to succeed. Martha’s view was that the original contract had been simply “unfair,” not a term that carries much legal weight.

  The nub of the case was that it went against industry “custom and practice.” By any standards the contract was a bad one: the royalty rates were unusually low but, more than that, with the Carter Press effectively acting as both publisher and agent, they took a much higher percentage of other rights—film rights in particular—than an agent would, rights that they had no real experience in handling. On top of that, the Carter Press were technically in breach because they had not even adhered to the regular accounting procedures they themselves had proposed. If Arthur had chosen to employ a literary agent, the terms would have been much more favorable to him. The problem was that he had not.

  Martha was on the line. Although a lot of money had already come in, she would have been liable, if she lost, not only for her own court costs but most likely for those of the Carter Press, not to speak of the embarrassment of losing the case if things went against her. But, luckily, embarrassment had never been a blip on Martha’s radar. Rachel, in particular, had begged her not to go ahead with it, although it was unclear whether that had come from her or whether she had been prompted by Graham. At that time Rachel was working at the Carter Press, in what capacity nobody seemed sure, although whether it was “designing the stand for Frankfurt,” “managing the slush pile,” or “a sort of PR thing,” her job description clearly did not involve early starts or following conventional office hours: she seemed, as usual, to spend most of her time knocking around with Claude.

  For Martha, none of it was personal. She always spoke warmly of Graham, behaved, indeed, as if it had nothing to do with him. Despite the lawyers’ letters, they still had almost daily contact, dealing with various aspects of the Hayseed industry, and if he attempted to talk about the impending court case, she would simply deflect him.

  Of course, there was publicity about the case and this, in the end, worked in Martha’s favor. As our circumstances had changed, so had Graham’s. Before Hayseed, the Carter Press was scarcely on the publishing map. Notorious for their nonexistent advances and their late, inaccurate payments, they were at the bottom of any author’s wish list—even Wally Carter’s autobiography Hooray for Hollywood had been published elsewhere. Now they were written up in the City pages as an extraordinary success story with little graphs showing their exponential growth. They had bought a warehouse building in Clerkenwell and had it expensively converted—“supervising the redecoration” had been another of Rachel’s nebulous tasks—and now employed forty people. Even though their list had expanded and they had found a niche as the home of the quirky and offbeat, they were always defined as the publishing house that had “picked up” Hayseed and “masterminded” one of the great publishing success stories of the 1980s.

  “Squabble in the Publishing Playground” was the kind of piece written in the run-up to the court case, and it was far more embarrassing for Graham than for Martha. She, after all, did not have a business to run. Cleverly, the hearing had been timed to take place soon after the Carter Press’s end-of-year results were published, which showed that the children’
s division was responsible for almost two-thirds of the firm’s turnover. It didn’t need a code-breaker to divine that there was, really, no children’s division at the Carter Press—it was just the Hayseed books.

  Graham might have won the case, but the price in bad publicity would have been too high. If Martha had appeared in court—the widow-lady with her fatherless children—with her elegant but shabby clothes, her glasses falling off the end of her nose, her hair in disarray, and her peculiar way of answering a direct question, she would come out of it better than him in every way other than, maybe, financially. He backed down the week before the case was due to come to court.

  In the papers it was described as an “amicable settlement”—as amicable as lawyers fighting round a boardroom table can be—but by then Martha had grown bored with it. In the two or three days it took to hammer out the settlement, when decisions had to be made quickly, when each incremental advantage had to be signed off, she consistently forgot to return her lawyers’ phone calls, ignored the faxes that spewed out of the machine, then called Graham, insisting he be dragged out of the fevered negotiation, to tell him that she didn’t like the typeface used on the new jackets for the Swedish paperback edition. There was a gag clause so neither side could reveal the settlement, and a succession of photographs were taken of Martha and Graham with their arms round each other to prove there were no hard feelings.