30 January 1950
Dear Albert
Best of the new year and new decade, and sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings. S&A must decline Louisa’s Apricot Olive Lemon. Please do tell her we’ll be happy to read anything else she cares to write, but these are difficult times, with paper hard to come by, and libraries not buying as they used to, and readers short of funds. In short, we publishers must make difficult choices and bite the proverbial bullet. Austerity rules the waves, I’m afraid.
Yrs etc, etc. Bernard
PS Ordinarily I would publish it just to keep dear Louisa in the S&A fold, but I cannot. Whatever was she thinking? Louisa Partridge, the Mrs Beeton of Our Time, embarking on a book like this? Where’s the beef and beer? The fish and chips? The bacon and eggs? Where’s the reassurance to British women that if a man’s home is his castle, the wife is queen? Please tell Louisa I would welcome a revised edition of her immortal 1935 classic, The Book of British Housekeeping. I’d be willing to pay her a lovely advance (though not, I’m afraid, up to our pre-war standard) but this book I cannot print. We have to think of our reading public and this is not what they want to read.
PPS When are you going to get Francis Carson back into harness to write another novel for us?
Sitting behind his desk, Albert called out, ‘Dangle the bit about the advance for revising her old book in front of Louisa. She’ll like that.’
‘Will she? I shouldn’t think she’d like anything about this letter.’
‘Don’t be daft! You won’t show her the letter! It’s too candid. You’ll rephrase it.’
‘Rephrase it? How?’
‘Think of something.’
‘You mean something that doesn’t ask if she’s basically barking mad?’ Quentin instantly wished he had not asked this question. ‘Mrs Partridge has been your client, or Miss Sherrill’s, for fifteen years. Why …’
‘You haven’t dealt with a difficult author yet, have you?’
‘They’re all difficult in one way or another, some more than others.’
‘Quite right. Louisa is one of the worst.’
Quentin thought it a strange remark. He actually suspected his dapper father might once have had a petite affaire de coeur with Louisa Partridge. She would not have been the first, nor the only. Discretion was the cardinal virtue in a literary agency. Discretion of every sort.
‘This will be good for you, my boy.’ Albert rose, took a pipe from his pipe stand, and walked to the grate where he began the elaborate process of filling it. First, a pinch of tobacco from the Chinese jar on the mantel. ‘You’ll learn from this.’
‘You know as well as I that means it will be disagreeable.’
‘Part of the trade. Any trade. You’re the junior partner here, after all. But, think of it, one day you’ll be the senior man here, and you too can take Francis Carson to lunch, and listen to genius in its cups.’ Albert often took these long, jovial lunches with the impressive and expensive authors, often not returning to the firm till nearly four. His mood could be judged from which of the Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire he sang on his way up the three flights. The ladies in the office always remarked on how well he sang; however, after these lunches, an invisible coalition of Miss Marr and Enid Sherrill kept him from signing anything important, or taking phone calls with clients until the next morning.
‘In the meantime,’ his father continued confidentially, ‘let me offer up a little professional guidance. Authors are like children. Like children, authors are meant to be read, and not seen and not heard. Like children, they can be ill-mannered savages, and your job is to keep ’em in line, keep ’em happy and satisfied with themselves. People always think authors must be such a deep lot, suffering and all that. But they’re not. They’re simple creatures, really. They’re not interested in power, only praise, and a little honey for their bread. A real writer can live for years on a small advance and the mere repeated words that you loved their book, you cried, you laughed; whatever you were supposed to do, you did. They will love you.’
‘I don’t want them to love me.’
‘You are unkind, sir! Who else will love them if not the agent? Their spouse? Ha. The spouse is the last to love an author. The spouse is always suspecting the worst, and quite right too. The parents? All that nasty stuff coming out about the past? What parent will love that?’
‘They don’t all write nasty stuff, Father. Mrs Partridge is a cookery writer,’ he said, trying to bring the conversation back round to the topic at hand.
‘Bernard thought it was nasty.’
‘He did?’
‘He declined, didn’t he? That’s nasty in my book. What about yours, Quentin?’
‘I don’t have a book. I’m not a writer.’
‘God, you are so literal sometimes! Just like your mother!’
‘I’m a literary agent. Like you.’
‘Quite right.’ Albert regained his jovial stance, and smoothed his hair, quite grey by now, but distinguished. He had always been florid, and the veins across his nose testified to indulgence, but like everyone else, even the solid Albert Castle had thinned, diminished in the last decade. Still, his fundamental bonhomie remained unimpugned; he could have passed for an eighteenth-century country squire (which is what his forebears had been). Albert differed from them perhaps in that he had an underlying shrewdness, and a finely tuned instinct that passed for literary taste, the sort of gift that makes a great hostess, knowing intuitively who will go well with whom. On this he had built a distinguished literary agency, one of the earliest, its reputation now somewhat diminished in a crowded field.
‘What can I possibly tell Mrs Partridge?’
‘Treat writers like children, Quentin. Praise them, pat them on the head, but if they sulk, give them a good rap on the palms now and then, and send them back to their desks.’
‘Do you ever cane them?’ Quentin asked, irony intended.
‘I’d often like to,’ Albert replied with a straight face.
‘Am I the nanny, then, standing in for you and Miss Sherrill, the parents?’
‘Good analogy. But mind you, be the firm nanny, not the old pillowy bosom little children cry on.’ He stuck the pipe between his teeth, and then tamped it down.
‘My nanny, as I recall, was a complete witch who believed in purgatives.’
‘We got rid of her, Quentin, as soon as we found out. You know we did.’
Quentin paused briefly. ‘Mrs Partridge will be insulted to hear such dire news coming from me. The junior partner.’
‘Believe me, if I had the choice of Louisa Partridge or that …’ He pointed vaguely towards his desk where a thick stack of paper was held down by a brass paperweight ‘… I’d take Louisa.’
‘You do have the choice, Father. Please take Mrs P. and give me whatever that is.’
‘Oh no. That …’ He laid regal emphasis on the word ‘… requires the hand of experience, the superlative blend of tact, decorum and firmness.’
‘What, or who is that?’ asked Quentin, genuinely curious.
‘Francis’s American wife in Oxfordshire. Francis calls her the BEB, the Blue-Eyed Beauty. She may be a beauty but she’s certainly foul-mouthed, presumptuous and demanding. Well, I haven’t actually met her, but she writes a mean letter. I personally think of her as the FMB. The Foul-Mouthed Beauty, or perhaps another word beginning with B. She is, without doubt, a harridan wife.’
Quentin suppressed a chuckle. His father had an ingrained animus against the spouses of the authors Castle Literary Ltd represented. Wives, especially, were meddlesome; they inevitably got in the way of production. ‘He ought to provide for her, Father. She’s his wife.’
‘She’s an American. I loathe Americans. Always expecting to be entertained and looked after, everything made jolly for them just because they’re Yanks. Here she is, American nobody, an orphan, I believe, married to the most brilliant British novelist of his day, and now she’s writing to me – to me! – demanding, complaining that she’s stuck in a run-
down half-timbered rotting ruin in Oxfordshire with half a dozen brats. She just kept pumping them out! There are some women who know no restraint.’
Quentin wondered if his mother had restrained his father. Quentin was ten years younger than his brother, Robert. Sometimes Quentin thought of Robert more like a father than a brother. In his own marriage to Florence, restraint seemed to be Quentin’s burden, though he was not the one with the calendar under the bed. He brought himself back to his father, who was still ranting against the FMB.
‘She seems to think I am her banker, or her husband, or that I ought to send her money. She writes me these dire notes; begging, demanding letters which I send on to Francis. It’s not up to me to support his family.’
‘His royalties come through our firm.’
‘Yes, and she should know that the last book, Hay Days, failed outright, commercially and critically.’
‘The reviews weren’t all bad.’
‘No, and that’s because it was dedicated to Lady Sybil Dane. All of the papers her husband owns, they were respectful, but not more than that. All the other critics savaged the book, low-minded dogs. They poisoned the public against him.’
‘He was a conchie during the war, Father. Who can blame readers? It was hard to forgive in ’47. Impossible to forget. Perhaps if he’d done some kind of war work, like those conchies who went about digging up unexploded bombs, but he didn’t. He sat out the war at Sir Sanford Dane’s estate, living in a Georgian mansion while everyone else slept in the Tube stations, worked in munitions factories and slogged every day through rubble. And after all that he publishes Hay Days, a pastoral description of life with the Land Girls working the manor? Whose bad judgement was that? One can’t expect people who lost their sons and …’ He did not go on. Neither wished to speak of Robert, dead at the battle of El Alamein, enshrined in memory, handsome in his officer’s uniform in the photograph on the mantel. Robert had their father’s robust sparkle, his outgoing instincts, his good humour, a great smiling grin that women loved and men admired. Quentin admired it.
Albert struck his match but did not light the pipe. The carpet around them was pocked with little marks where matches and embers had fallen from Albert’s fingers. ‘Francis saved his hide during the war, and ruined his reputation, and it’s a shame, really, since he never had any politics. So many other writers gnashing themselves into mince over socialism or fascism or Trotsky or Stalin! Francis, all he cared about was being able to write, being able to drink, being able to … well, you know.’
‘Do I?’
‘Francis Carson, writer, drinker, lover, tenor.’ He lit his pipe. ‘And not always in that order.’
‘Father.’
‘What?’
‘He is a father too. You said he had half a dozen brats.’
‘More’s the pity.’
‘Well, perhaps his next book will do better,’ Quentin offered. ‘It is a new decade.’
‘Yes, if only he’d come back and write the bloody thing. Francis Carson is the jewel in the Castle Literary crown. At least among the living.’ Albert blew out the match and lowered his voice. ‘Don’t tell Francis I said that. His conceit is already intolerable.’
‘I’m not likely to tell Francis Carson anything, Father. You deal with him exclusively.’
‘Don’t tell Enid either.’
‘You said nothing of the sort,’ Quentin assured him. Like his mother, Margaret, Quentin Castle instinctually kept the peace. Like her, he was not given to outburst. He was a listener, never one of those crisp, demanding men so beloved of fiction and film, the sort who stride forth and take action, like Robert or his father.
‘I warned Carson against going to California,’ Albert grumbled. ‘If he wanted to write for films, why not stay right here, go down to Ealing and work for Arthur Rank?’
‘Passport to Pimlico doesn’t much seem like Carson’s cup of tea. I read The Moth and the Star, and Some of These Days and thought them lovely but …’ He thought perhaps Albert would finish the thought, but he did not. ‘Rather hyperbolic. All that sex and ecstasy, as though love had transcendent meaning that somehow imbued one’s character forever.’
‘You are a young man. What would you know?’
Quentin resented this as a slur on his masculinity. ‘Carson reminds me of Lawrence, all that lyricism and emotion, that poetic intensity.’
‘Your point?’ Whatever one might be obliged to say among one’s peers, Albert deemed it disloyal, within the confines of Number 11, to speak well of any authors Castle Ltd did not represent.
‘That was a very long time ago. People now aren’t … well, passion and intensity, all that’s passé now. People just want to get on with their lives as best they can. Mend and make do.’
‘The problem is—’ Albert’s voice was that of an irritated schoolmaster ‘—not what Francis is writing but that he isn’t writing at all. I’ve written to the FMB suggesting if she needs money, she ought to bring him home and have him writing books!’
‘Isn’t there a lot of money in films?’
‘Oh, Francis is rolling in American dollars, having a fine time! He lives in a place called The Garden of Allah. A brothel, I’m sure! He spends his days beside swimming pools, and his nights, hmmph.’ This sound was Albert Castle’s all-purpose evasion or dismissal, depending on the situation. He finally lit the pipe. ‘Castle Literary gets not so much as a sixpence for his writing films.’
Quentin felt obliged to soothe. ‘He’ll be back. He’s a novelist after all, Father. That’s what they do. Besides, you said his wife was here, in Oxfordshire.’
‘What makes you think he’d want to come back for his wife? He’s in Hollywood, after all!’ Miss Marr knocked on his door, entered without waiting and put in Albert’s hand a telex. He read it, rumpled it and tossed it across the room where it landed by the brandy decanter.
‘Bad news. John McVicar’s gone.’
‘Hasn’t he been in Nepal for a while?’
‘Yes, Quentin,’ Albert growled, ‘he has been in Nepal, but now he’s dead! He fell. Oh, God! Can you imagine? The premier mountaineer and adventure writer of his day, and he fell! Fell to his death!’
‘Perhaps that’s how he might have wished to go,’ Quentin volunteered, wondering at his father’s vehemence. McVicar was a longtime client, and friend, though when the author had remarried, relations had cooled. Mr and (the new) Mrs McVicar had not been invited to Quentin’s wedding last June.
‘It will be a bloody mess.’ Albert gave the pipe a few puffs, and then it went out. ‘Authors are more trouble dead than they are alive. No sooner does the poor sod croak, than all the family swims in like eels, fangs bared.’
‘Eels don’t have fangs.’
‘Don’t be literal.’
‘Sorry.’
‘And who do they go after first? The agent,’ Albert spluttered.
‘Why would they come after you, Father? You always treated him fairly. You treat all your clients fairly.’
‘Do you truly not see? The agent is the only one devoted to protecting the author. Their families, survivors, whoever they are, they are out for themselves. They tear each other to pieces in the courts and everywhere else. They don’t give a damn about the author! Or his reputation! They want the rights to his work! They want to get rich off work they didn’t do! Books they didn’t write! They are stoats and weasels! Bloodsucking parasites! And the agent must keep on the good side of all of them! They’re not obliged to stick with us, you see.’ Albert plopped down in a leather chair that squealed in protest, ‘If we don’t keep on everyone’s good side, then whoever wins – and in McVicar’s case, there’s the new wife, the ex-wife, the children, the sister, oh, and the mistress, don’t forget her! – they can say, they will say, “Fie on you, Castle Literary! I’ll take dear old McVicar’s estate, and his royalties, to another agency.” At least Sydney Thaxton had no children, and the only party to be placated is his widow, dear uncomplaining Constance.’
‘Hasn’t she remarried? A much younger man?’
‘She has, and she lives in Nice.’ Albert sighed, and puffed, but the pipe had gone out. ‘Give me a living author any day. Give them a lovely lunch in London once a year, and they’ll go back to their little corner of Cornwall, or wherever they hide, and write their hearts out if only you feed them a nice steady diet of praise and quarterly cheques. Everyone’s happy. Once they die, the estate becomes like a great, gaseous bag that can float off at any minute.’ His father took the pipe from his mouth and regarded it sadly. ‘To hell with the past! I want to move forward with the new!’
‘The brave new world?’ Quentin ventured.
‘Good title. Silly book.’ Huxley was not their author.
‘Well, Father, by that measure, then, you should be happy to be dealing with the FMB. At least Francis Carson is alive. ‘
‘Yes.’ Albert turned to a nearby bookshelf that held Carson’s three novels, The Moth and the Star, Some of These Days and Hay Days, and smiled fondly at a signed studio photograph made to look casual. Francis Carson wore an expensive double-breasted suit, but the tie was loose, as though he might at any moment undress. He was tall, with big shoulders, suggesting strength, a round-faced young man with a shock of dark hair rakishly adrift across his forehead, a cigarette in hand, half-hooded pale eyes brooding, an enigmatic smile, as though some lively secret beckoned that only he could see. ‘Now, if only he’d come home and write another novel like Some of These Days.’
‘Yes,’ Quentin offered in sympathy, ‘and if everyone would forget he was a conchie.’
‘Some of These Days is a brilliant book!’ his father shot back.
‘Is that the one they’re making a film of?’ asked Quentin, placating.
‘Yes. The main character, Elsie Rose, is played by none other than Linda St John herself!’
‘The name means nothing to me.’
‘Then you, my son, must be living on a rock in Scotland. Linda St John is the most famous American film star since Vivien Leigh.’
‘Vivien Leigh is British.’
‘Why must you be so literal!’ Albert rose and wandered back to his broad desk. He eased his bulk into the chair, his back to the window. He sifted idly through the stack of papers from the FMB, then pushed them aside. ‘You and Florence and Rosamund are coming to Sunday lunch, I hope. Your mother expects you.’
Three Strange Angels Page 2