Stet

by Diana Athill

  We had at our disposal a large front room, once the house’s dining-room, with two tall windows and a pompous marble chimneypiece; a smaller back room – perhaps once the owner’s study? – looking out into a well; a wide passage along the side of the well accommodating Mr Brown and his packing-bench; and at the end of the passage a lavatory and a small one-storey extension in which Mr Kaufmann lurked, which looked back across the well to the ‘study’.

  Although at the BBC I had shared an office with several other people, I was dismayed by the front room when I first saw it. Andé had his desk at one of the windows, Audrey hers at the other end of the room, and against the wall opposite the fireplace there was a rather handsome dining-room table almost hidden under piles of manuscripts, paper samples, reference books and so on – we had as yet no shelves, cupboards or filing cabinets. A corner of this table was to be mine, and Sheila was to use another corner on the two or three days a week when she would be in. It seemed likely that the work would need more concentration than anything I had done before, and here I would be, sandwiched in the exiguous space between the intense working lives of other people, with their animated telephone conversations and frequent visitors . . . would I be able to endure it?

  The discomfort I went through to begin with – there must have been some – has faded from my mind, but I remember clearly a moment which occurred after three or four weeks. It was lunchtime; I pushed aside my work and looked round the room. There was André arguing for better terms with a printer’s representative, Audrey talking to one of her authors who had two children in tow, Sheila going through a portfolio of drawings with an artist. ‘How amazingly adaptable people are,’ I thought. ‘Until I happened to look round this room, I might have been alone in it.’

  My job was to read, edit, copy-edit, proof-read, and also to look after the advertising, which meant copy-writing and designing as well as booking space after André had told me which books he wanted advertised in which newspapers, and had given me a budget. Although reading and editing were by far the most interesting of my tasks, they did not at first seem the most important. This was because I could do them easily: I had read a lot and I was developing confidence in my own judgement. Against which I had never before even speculated as to how advertisements got into newspapers, and as soon as I had learnt what the process was I saw that I would be no good at an important part of it. Booking space was no problem, but after that was done I had to persuade the advertising manager of the paper concerned that although our space was a small one (usually a six or eight inch single column) it should be given the kind of conspicuous position usually occupied by much larger ads. This, to André’s incredulous indignation, I hardly ever achieved, and almost every time I failed he would telephone the newspaper’s man and tell him that next time he must give us an even better position to make up for his disgraceful failure this time – which the wretched man would usually do. But not without imploring me to keep André off his back because he couldn’t go on inviting trouble for himself by granting such favours. I was soon feeling sick at the mere sound of the word ‘advertising’, and the fact that I continued to carry this albatross round my neck for several years is evidence of the power André could exercise by the simple means of being utterly convinced that what he wanted was right.

  Over the advertising he was aided by my own guilt at evading so many other disagreeable things: it was ample expiation. But his power was extraordinary. Watching him use it I often thought I was witnessing the secret of the successful pathological liar: the one who persuades businessmen and politicians to back crackpot ventures. The liar is, of course, helped by the greed and gullibility of his victims, but he could not succeed on a grand scale without the ‘magical’ persuasiveness which comes from utter self-persuasion. How lucky, I used to think, that André is by nature an honest man, or where would we all be?

  Another of his characteristics which I learnt at this time was less useful – indeed, it was to be his great weakness as a manager of people. He saw everything not done exactly as he himself would have done it as being done wrong – enragingly wrong – and anything that was done right as not worth comment. Things often were done wrong to begin with, and his vigilance taught us a lot, but the apparent indifference which took the place of carping when all was well was discouraging. Sheila and I often pointed out that praise and kindness made people work better as well as feel happier, and he would promise to mend his ways, but he never did.

  For a while my experience of this in connection with the advertising was painful. I think I was brave in the way I plunged into the unfamiliar task, and showed fortitude in overcoming my nature and going on with it for years in spite of loathing it (except for the bits which involved messing about with pencil, ruler and eraser, which I quite liked).

  True to form, André was always sharply critical, not only of my feebleness with the papers’ advertising managers, but also of the wording and spacing within each ad. For some time this was helpful, then the implication that I was bad at this boring task into which he had shoved me began to get at me, so though I could soon see for myself that my ads didn’t look too bad, a muted drone of guilt was gradually induced, to underlie this side of my work.

  It threatened for a time to underlie everything, because once André’s nagging focused on someone it did so with increasing intensity. I was sometimes slapdash about detail which struck me as unimportant. I might, for example, forget (not when dealing with a book’s text, but perhaps when typing out an ad or the blurb for a jacket) that it was our house style to use single quotation marks, reserving double ones for quotations within quotations. When something like this happened André’s shock would be extreme. ‘How can I go to Paris next week if I can’t trust you over something as simple as this? Don’t you realize what it would cost to correct that if it got through to proof stage?’ . . . and there would be a slight crescendo in guilt’s drone. And a creepy result was that one began to make more and worse mistakes. I was to see this happening over and over again to other people after the nagging had swivelled away from me (I came to envisage it as a wicked little searchlight always seeking out a victim). It could escalate with mystifying speed until you began to dread going into the office. You knew that justice was really on your side in that he was making an absurd and sometimes cruel fuss over small matters, but you had been manoeuvred into a position where you couldn’t claim this without appearing to be indifferent to the ideals of perfection to which we were all devoted. I can still recall the sensation of tattered nerves which came from the mixture of indignation and guilt which ensued.

  To polish off this disagreeable subject, I must skip forward a few months to a time when he returned from one of those trips to Paris (they were book-hunting trips) and asked me for the key of his car. ‘What do you mean? I haven’t got it’ – and he exploded. ‘Oh my God – you’re impossible! I gave it to you just before I left. What have you done with it?’ I was stunned: how, in six short days, could I have forgotten something so important? I struggled to recall taking the key from him and was unable to summon up the least shadow of it, but his conviction was absolute and my own awareness of my shortcomings was inflamed: I had to believe that he had given me that key, and I truly feared that I might be losing my mind. I went home in misery, worried all night over this sudden softening of my brain, and next morning it was all I could do to crawl back to the office.

  André’s car was parked outside it, and he was at his desk looking cheerful. How, I asked tremulously, had he got it started? ‘Oh that . . .’ he said. ‘I didn’t leave the key with you after all, I left it with the man at the garage.’

  That silenced the guilt drone for ever, and soon afterwards I learnt to disregard unnecessary fusses when what he was complaining of was something being done in way B instead of way A, and how to forestall his rage when I had genuinely erred. It was simple: a quick resort to mea culpa. ‘Oh André – I’ve done such a dreadful thing. They’ve spelt Stephens with a v on the back fla
p of the jacket and I didn’t notice!’ – ‘Is it too late to correct?’ – ‘Yes, that’s what’s so frightful; – ‘Oh well, worse things have happened. You’ll have to apologize to Stephens – and do remember to get someone to give your jacket proofs a second reading.’ End of scene. Once I had twigged that confession always took the wind out of his sails I had no more trouble from the ‘searchlight’. But there would rarely be a time during the next fifty years when it was not making life a misery for someone, and working first in Allan Wingate, then in André Deutsch, would have been a great deal more pleasant if this had not been so.

  One feels the lack of counterpoint when using words. Anyone reading the above account of André’s nagging might wonder why I continued to work for him; but that was only one thread in many. I was doing and enjoying other parts of the job in addition to the advertising, while as for André . . .

  It was not easy to summarize his activities. He read books; he hunted books; he thought books up; for several years he did all the selling of books, and the buying and selling of book rights; he bought paper; he dealt with printers, binders and blockmakers; he made all the decisions about the promotion of our books; he checked every detail of their design; he checked copy-writing, proof-reading, important letters; he soothed and cajoled the bank; he persuaded suppliers to give us unprecedented credit; he raised capital out of the blue when we could no longer pay our bills; he delivered books in Aggie, his Baby Austin named after its AGY registration number (I did that, too); if we were sending out leaflets he sat on the floor stuffing them into envelopes until after midnight and always did more to the minute than anyone else; and his own pulse was no more part of him than his awareness of our turnover and overheads. He also did all the firm’s remembering – the car-key incident was unique. Usually his memory for detail was so good as to be almost frightening. He had learnt his way about his trade so rapidly and so thoroughly, and had committed himself to it so whole-heartedly, that it is not fanciful to describe him as someone who had discovered his vocation. One never doubted that the firm, having been created by him, was now being kept going by him: if he had withdrawn from it, it would have ceased to exist.

  Dictatorships work: that is why they are so readily accepted, and if they are demonstrably more or less just, as they can be to start with, they are accepted with a gratitude more personal than can be inspired by other kinds of regime. In its miniature way André’s dictatorship was strong for the following reasons: he had already learnt so much about publishing while those working for him still knew nothing; it was his nature to turn ideas into action without delay, which is a rare gift; while he paid us mingy salaries he also paid himself a mingy salary, and the company was so small that we could all see with our own eyes that there was no money available for anything else; when he was mean, chiselling down payments, scrounging discounts, running after us to switch off lights and so on, even though he was certainly not offending against his nature, yet he was still always and evidently doing it for the company’s sake; and when he nagged and raged, even when it was maddeningly out of proportion with the offence, that too was always and evidently for the company’s sake. Reasonable explanation of errors and amiable encouragement to avoid them would have been more effective as well as pleasanter, but if such behaviour didn’t come naturally to him, too bad: we would have to put up with him as he was which, on the whole, we were glad to do. Sheila and I, in particular, who were the people closest to him, had such a habit of fondness for him that it never occurred to us to do anything else.

  So there we were, the strain and gloom of war gradually fading away behind us, starting on a delightful adventure supported and exhilarated by the energies and abilities of the man who had launched it. Even if the ride had its bumpy moments there was no question of wishing to climb down.

  5

  I REMEMBER ALLAN WINGATE’S first premises rather than its first books simply because the first books were so feeble that I blush for them. The firm kicked off with a list of four: Route to Potsdam, a piece of political journalism commenting on the Allies’ plans for Europe, by Bela Ivanyi, one of André’s Hungarian friends, the argument of which had no perceptible effect on anyone; Beds, a boring history of mankind’s sleeping habits by Reginald Reynolds, to whom André had been introduced by George Orwell; Fats and Figures, a little book on diet, sensible but hardly more than a pamphlet, by a prison governor who was to become Lord Taylor; and the fourth has vanished from my mind. To start with André simply snatched at any homeless manuscript that happened to float by, and the reading public just after the war was so starved of books and so short of alternative forms of entertainment that almost anything (in our case almost nothing) could be presented by a publisher without looking silly.

  A sad irony underlay this situation. While André was with Nicolson and Watson George Orwell submitted Animal Farm to them and John Roberts asked André to read it for him. André declared it wonderful, but Roberts, when he heard what it was about, said: ‘Nonsense, laddie – no one nowadays wants to make fun of Uncle Joe.’ André, who was determined to help the penniless and modest Orwell whom he saw as almost saint-like, decided that Jonathan Cape was the right publisher for him, and Orwell took his advice. Cape accepted the book, but shared Roberts’s doubts to the extent of making a condition: it must be checked by some sort of official authority to make sure that it was not considered damaging to the war effort. And it was so considered: His Majesty’s Government sincerely hoped that Mr Cape would refrain from publishing something so sharply critical of our Soviet Ally – and Mr Cape did refrain.

  Orwell, who by this time was getting pretty desperate and who knew that André was planning to start his own firm as soon as he could raise a little capital, then said to André: ‘Look, why don’t you do it? Why don’t you start off your firm with it?’ And André, strongly tempted to pounce but still far from sure that he would be able to start a firm however much he wanted to, felt that he must not let a man he liked and respected so deeply take such a risk. No, he said. And the essential resilience of his nature was later to be well illustrated by the fact that the more famous Animal Farm became, the prouder he was of his own early recognition of it and of his not letting Orwell take the risk of giving it to him, with never a moan at having lost this prize.

  The first book we took on because of me still sits on my shelves, and fills me with astonishment. André, through Hungarian friends in Paris, had come to know several people in the French literary world, among them Gerard Hopkins. Hopkins suggested that he should look at the work of a writer called Noël Devaulx, so André brought back from a visit to Paris The Tailor’s Cake, a tiny volume of seven stories which he dumped on my corner of the table: he couldn’t read French while I, though I had spent no time with French people so had no confidence in speaking it, had been taught it very well and could read it nearly as easily as English. So the decision was to be mine.

  There was a solemn awareness of responsibility. There was bafflement for a while, then an increasing fascination. These were surreal stories in which characters who assumed you knew more about them than you did moved through strange places, such as a busy sea-port which was nowhere near the sea, or a village in which everyone was old and silent except for foolish laughter, and which vanished the morning after the traveller had been benighted in it. Everything in these stories was described with a meticulous sobriety and precision, which gave them the concentrated reality of dreams. Perhaps they were allegories – but of what? The only thing I felt sure of was that the author was utterly convinced by them – he couldn’t have written them in any other way.

  I would soon begin to find such fantasies a waste of time – of my time, anyway – but then, in addition to liking the sobriety and precision of the style, I felt the pull of mystification: ‘I can’t understand this – probably, being beyond me, it is very special.’ This common response to not seeing the point of something has a rather touching humility, but that doesn’t save it – or so I now believe – fro
m being a betrayal of intelligence which has allowed a good deal of junk to masquerade as art. Whether that matters much is another question: throughout my publishing life I thought it did, so I am glad to say that the publication of The Tailor’s Cake in 1946, beautifully translated by Betty Askwith, was the only occasion on which I succumbed to the charm of mystification.

  A more amusing aspect of that publication is that even in those book-hungry days we would have had to go far to find a piece of fiction more obviously unsaleable than those stories, yet once I had pronounced them good we didn’t think twice about publishing them. And they cannot have been a hideous flop: given my sense of responsibility for them, and André’s tendency to attribute blame, I would surely remember if they had been. It is sad to think that we did not appreciate the luxury of not having to ask ourselves ‘Is it commercially viable?’ in those happy days before that question set in.