by Tom Sharpe
‘It can’t be as bad as all that. After all, it’s the first time it’s happened and everyone knows that James is a souse who can’t remember where he’s been or who he’s done.’
‘Can’t they just. Pulteneys can. Hubert rang up last night to say that we needn’t send them any more novels. Once that word gets round we are going to have what is euphemistically called a cash flow problem.’
‘We’re certainly going to have to find someone to replace James,’ said Sonia. ‘Bestsellers like that don’t grow on trees.’
‘Nor lupins,’ said Frensic and retired to his office.
*
All in all it was a bad day. The phone rang almost incessantly. Authors demanded to know if they were likely to end up in the High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division, because they had used the names of people they were at school with, and publishers turned down novels they would previously have accepted. Frensic sat and took snuff and tried to remain civil. By five o’clock he was finding it increasingly difficult and when the Literary Editor of the Sunday Graphic phoned to ask if Frensic would contribute an article on the iniquities of the British libel laws he was downright rude.
‘What do you want me to do?’ he shouted. ‘Stick my head in a bloody noose and get hauled up for contempt of court? For all I know that blithering idiot Jamesforth is going to appeal against the verdict.’
‘On the grounds that you inserted the passage which libelled Mrs Humberson?’ the editor asked. ‘After all, it was suggested by the defence counsel—’
‘By God, I’ll have you for slander,’ shouted Frensic. ‘Galbanum had the gall to say that in court where he’s protected, but if you repeat that in public I’ll institute proceedings myself.’
‘You’d have a hard time,’ said the editor. ‘Jamesforth wouldn’t make a good witness. He swears you advised him to jack Mrs Humberson up sexwise and when he wouldn’t you altered the proofs.’
‘That’s a downright lie,’ yelled Frensic. ‘Anyone would think I wrote my authors’ novels for them!’
‘As a matter of fact a great many people do believe just that,’ said the editor. Frensic hurled imprecations and went home with a headache.
*
If Wednesday was bad, Thursday was no better. Collins rejected William Lonroy’s fifth novel Seventh Heaven as being too explicit sexually. Triad Press turned down Mary Gold’s Final Fling for the opposite reason and Cassells even refused Sammy The Squirrel on the grounds that it was preoccupied with individual acquisition and lacked community concern. Cape rejected this, Secker rejected that. There were no acceptances. Finally there was a moment of high drama when an elderly clergyman whose autobiography Frensic had repeatedly refused to handle, explaining each time there wasn’t a large reading public for a book that dealt exclusively with parish life in South Croydon, smashed a vase with his umbrella and only consented to leave with his manuscript when Sonia threatened to call the police. By lunchtime Frensic was bordering on hysteria.
‘I can’t stand it,’ he whimpered. The phone rang and Frensic shied. ‘If it’s for me, tell them I’m not in. I’m having a breakdown. Tell them—’
It was for him. Sonia put her hand over the mouthpiece.
‘It’s Margot Joseph. She says she’s dried up and doesn’t think she can finish—’
Frensic fled to the safety of his own office and took his phone off the hook.
‘For the rest of the day I’m not in,’ he told Sonia when she came through a few minutes later. ‘I shall sit here and think.’
‘In that case you can read this,’ said Sonia, and put a parcel on his desk. ‘It came this morning. I haven’t had time to open it.’
‘It’s probably a bomb,’ said Frensic gloomily, and undid the string. But the package contained nothing more threatening than a neatly typed manuscript and an envelope addressed to Mr F. A. Frensic. Frensic glanced at the manuscript and noted with satisfaction that its pages were pristine and its corners unthumbed, a healthy sign which indicated that he was the first recipient and that it hadn’t gone the rounds of other agents. Then he looked at the title page. It said simply PAUSE O MEN FOR THE VIRGIN, A Novel. There was no author’s name and no return address. Odd. Frensic opened the envelope and read the letter inside. It was brief and impersonal and mystifying.
Cadwalladine & Dimkins
Solicitors
596 St Andrew’s Street
Oxford
Dear Sir,
All communications concerning the possible sale, publication and copyright of the enclosed manuscript should be addressed to this office marked for the Personal Attention of P. Cadwalladine. The author, who wishes to remain strictly anonymous, leaves the matter of terms of sale and choice of a suitable nom de plume and related matters entirely in your hands.
Yours faithfully,
Percy Cadwalladine.
Frensic read the letter through several times before turning his attention to the manuscript. It was a very odd letter. An author who wished to remain strictly anonymous? Left everything concerning sale and choice of nom de plume and related matters entirely in his hands? Considering that all the authors he had ever dealt with were notoriously egotistical and interfering there was a lot to be said for one who was so self-effacing. Positively endearing, in fact. With the silent wish that Mr Jamesforth had left everything in his hands, Frensic turned the title page of Pause O Men for the Virgin and began to read.
He was still reading an hour later, his snuff box open on the desk and his waistcoat and the creases of his trousers powdered with snuff. Frensic reached unthinkingly for the box and took another large pinch and wiped his nose with his third handkerchief. In the next office the phone rang. People climbed the stairs and knocked on Sonia’s door. Traffic rumbled outside in the street. Frensic was oblivious to these extraneous sounds. He turned another page and read on.
*
It was half past six when Sonia Futtle finished for the day and prepared to leave. The door of Frensic’s office was shut and she hadn’t heard him go. She opened it and peered inside. Frensic was sitting at his desk staring fixedly through the window over the dark roofs of Covent Garden with a slight smile on his face. It was an attitude she recognized, the posture of triumphant discovery.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said, standing in the doorway.
‘Read it,’ said Frensic. ‘Don’t believe me. Read it for yourself.’ His hand flicked dismissively towards the manuscript.
‘A good one?’
‘A bestseller.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive.’
‘And of course it’s a novel?’
‘One hopes so,’ said Frensic, ‘fervently.’
‘A dirty book,’ said Sonia, who recognized the symptoms.
‘Dirty,’ said Frensic, ‘is hardly adequate. The mind that penned – if minds can pen – this odyssey of lust is of a prurience indescribable.’ He got up and handed her the manuscript.
‘I will value your opinion,’ he said, with the air of a man who had regained his authority.
*
But if it was a jaunty Frensic who went home to his flat in Hampstead that night, it was a wary one who came back next morning and wrote a note on Sonia’s scratch pad. ‘Will discuss the novel with you over lunch. Not to be disturbed.’ He went into his office and shut the door.
For the rest of the morning there was little to indicate that Frensic had anything more important on his mind than a vague interest in the antics of the pigeons on the roof opposite. He sat at his desk staring out of the window, occasionally reaching for the phone or jotting something on a piece of paper. For the most part he just sat. But external appearances were misleading. Frensic’s mind was on the move, journeying across the internal landscape which he knew so well and in which each publishing house in London was a halt for bargaining, a crossroads where commercial advantages were exchanged, favours given and little debts repaid. And Frensic’s route was a devious one. It was not enough to sell a b
ook. Any fool could do that, given the right book. The important thing was to place it in precisely the right spot so that the consequences of its sale would have maximum effect and ramify out to advance his reputation and promote some future advantage. And not his alone but that of his authors. Time entered into these calculations, time and his intuitive assessment of books that had yet to be written, books by established authors which he knew would be unsuccessful and books by new writers whose success would be jeopardized by their lack of reputation. Frensic juggled with intangibles. It was his profession and he was good at it.
Sometimes he sold books for small advances to small firms when the very same book offered to one of the big publishing houses would have earned its author a large advance. On these occasions the present was sacrificed to the future in the knowledge that help given now would be repaid later by the publication of some novel that would never sell more than five hundred copies but which Frensic, for reasons of his own, wished to see in print. Only Frensic knew his own intentions, just as only Frensic knew the identities of those well-reputed novelists who actually earned their living by writing detective stories or soft porn under pseudonyms. It was all a mystery and even Frensic, whose head was filled with abstruse equations involving personalities and tastes, who bought what and why, and all the details of the debts he owed or was owed, knew that he was not privy to every corner of the mystery. There was always luck and of late Frensic’s luck had changed. When that happened it paid to walk warily. This morning Frensic walked very warily indeed.
He phoned several friends in the legal profession and assured himself that Cadwalladine & Dimkins, Solicitors, were an old, well-established and highly reputable firm who handled work of the most respectable kind. Only then did he phone Oxford and ask to speak to Mr Cadwalladine about the novel he had sent him. Mr Cadwalladine sounded old-fashioned. No, he was sorry to say, Mr Frensic could not meet the author. His instructions were that absolute anonymity was essential and all matters would have to be referred to Mr Cadwalladine personally. Of course the book was pure fiction. Yes, Mr Frensic could include an extra clause in any contract exonerating the publisher from the financial consequences of a libel action. In any case he had always assumed such a clause to be part of contracts between publishers and authors. Frensic said they were but that he had to be absolutely certain when dealing with an anonymous author. Mr Cadwalladine said he quite understood.
Frensic put the phone down with a new feeling of confidence, and returned less warily to his interior landscape where imaginary negotiations took place. There he retraced his route, stopped at several eminent publishing houses for consideration, and travelled on. What Pause O Men for the Virgin needed was a publisher with an excellent reputation to give it the imprimatur of respectability. Frensic narrowed them down and finally made up his mind. It would be a gamble but it would be a gamble that was worth taking. He would have to have Sonia Futtle’s opinion first.
*
She gave it to him over lunch in a little Italian restaurant where Frensic entertained his less important authors.
‘A weird book,’ she said.
‘Quite,’ said Frensic.
‘But it’s got something. Compassionate,’ said Sonia, warming to her task.
‘I agree.’
‘Deeply insightful.’
‘Definitely.’
‘Good story line.’
‘Excellent.’
‘Significant,’ said Sonia.
Frensic sighed. It was the word he had been waiting for. ‘You really think that?’
‘I do. I mean it. I think it’s really got something. It’s good. I really do.’
‘Well,’ said Frensic doubtfully, ‘I may be an anachronism but …’
‘You’re role-playing again. Be serious.’
‘My dear,’ said Frensic, ‘I am being serious. If you say that stuff is significant I am delighted. It’s what I thought you’d say. It means it will appeal to those intellectual flagellants who can’t enjoy a book unless it hurts. That I happen to know that, from a genuinely literary standpoint, it is an abomination is perhaps beside the point but I am entitled to protect my instincts.’
‘Instincts? No man had fewer.’
‘Literary instincts,’ said Frensic. ‘And they tell me that this is a bad, pretentious book and that it will sell. It combines a filthy story with an even filthier style.’
‘I didn’t see anything wrong with the style,’ said Sonia.
‘Of course you didn’t. You’re an American and Americans aren’t burdened by our classical inheritance. You can’t see that there is a world of difference between Dreiser and Mencken or Tom Wolfe and Bellow. That’s your prerogative. I find such lack of discrimination invaluable and most reassuring. If you accept sentences endlessly convoluted, spattered with commas and tied into knots with parentheses, unrelated verbs and qualifications of qualifications, and which, to parody, have, if they are to be at all comprehended, to be read at least four times with the aid of a dictionary, who am I to quarrel with you? Your fellow-countrymen, whose rage for self-improvement I have never appreciated, are going to love this book.’
‘They may not go such a ball on the story line. I mean it’s been done before you know. Harold and Maude.’
‘But never in such exquisitely nauseating detail,’ said Frensic, and sipped his wine. ‘And not with Lawrentian overtones. Besides, that’s our trump. Seventeen loves eighty. The liberation of the senile. What could be more significant than that? By the way, when is Hutchmeyer due in London?’
‘Hutchmeyer? You’ve got to be kidding,’ said Sonia. Frensic held up a piece of ravioli in protest.
‘Don’t use that expression. I am not a goat.’
‘And Hutchmeyer’s not the Olympia Press. He’s strictly middle-brow. He wouldn’t touch this book.’
‘He would if we baited the trap right,’ said Frensic.
‘Trap?’ said Sonia suspiciously. ‘What trap?’
‘I was thinking of a very distinguished London publisher to take the book first,’ said Frensic, ‘and then you sell the American rights to Hutchmeyer.’
‘Who?’
‘Corkadales,’ said Frensic.
Sonia shook her head. ‘Corkadales are far too old and stodgy.’
‘Precisely,’ said Frensic. ‘They are prestigious. They are also broke.’
‘They should have dropped half their list years ago,’ said Sonia.
‘They should have dropped Sir Clarence years ago. You read his obituary?’ But Sonia hadn’t.
‘Most entertaining. And instructive. Tributes galore to his services to Literature, by which they meant he had subsidized more unread poets and novelists than any other publisher in London. The result: they are now broke.’
‘In which case they can hardly afford to buy Pause O Men for the Virgin.’
‘They can hardly afford not to,’ said Frensic. ‘I had a word with Geoffrey Corkadale at the funeral. He is not following in his father’s footsteps. Corkadales are about to emerge from the eighteenth century. Geoffrey is looking for a bestseller. Corkadales will take Pause and we will take Hutchmeyer.’
‘You think Hutchmeyer is going to be impressed?’ said Sonia. ‘What the hell have Corkadales got to offer?’
‘Distinction,’ said Frensic, ‘a most distinguished past. The mantelpiece against which Shelley leant, the chair Mrs Gaskell was pregnant in, the carpet Tennyson was sick on. The incunabula of, if not The Great Tradition, at least a very important strand of literary history. By accepting this novel for free Corkadales will confer cultural sanctity on it.’
‘And you think the author will be satisfied with that? You don’t think he’ll want money too?’
‘He’ll get the money from Hutchmeyer. We’re going to sting Mr Hutchmeyer for a fortune. Anyhow, this author is unique.’
‘I got that from the book,’ said Sonia. ‘How else is he unique?’
‘He doesn’t have a name, for one thing,’ said Frensic, and explained
his instructions from Mr Cadwalladine. ‘Which leaves us with an entirely free hand,’ he said, when he finished.
‘And the little matter of a pseudonym,’ said Sonia. ‘I suppose we could kill two birds with one stone and say it was by Peter Piper. That way he’d see his name on the cover of a novel.’
‘True,’ said Frensic sadly, ‘I’m afraid poor Piper is never going to make it any other way.’
‘Besides, it would save the expense of his annual lunch and you wouldn’t have to go through yet another version of his Search for a Lost Childhood. By the way, who is the model this year?’
‘Thomas Mann,’ said Frensic. ‘One dreads the thought of sentences two pages long. You really think it would put an end to his illusions of literary grandeur?’
‘Who knows?’ said Sonia. ‘The very fact of seeing his name on the cover of a novel and being taken for the author …’
‘It’s the only way he’s ever going to get into print, I’ll stake my reputation on that,’ said Frensic.
‘So we’ll be doing him a favour.’
That afternoon Frensic took the manuscript to Corkadales. On the front under the title Sonia had added ‘by Peter Piper’. Frensic spoke long and persuasively to Geoffrey Corkadale and left the office that night well pleased with himself.
*
A week later the editorial board of Corkadales considered Pause O Men for the Virgin in the presence of that past upon which the vestige of their reputation depended. Portraits of dead authors lined the panelled walls of the editorial room. Shelley was not there, nor Mrs Gaskell, but there were lesser notables to take their place. Ranged in glass-covered bookshelves there were first editions, and in some exhibition cases relics of the trade. Quills, Waverley pens, pocket-knives, an inkbottle Trollope was said to have left in a train, a sandbox used by Southey, and even a scrap of blotting paper which, held up to a mirror, revealed that Henry James had once inexplicably written ‘darling’.