Stet

by Diana Athill

  At Wingate I was André’s employee, not his partner. My opinion of a book might or might not influence his decision, but if he took something on without asking my opinion I accepted without question that it was my job to work on it whether I liked it or not. Usually my attitude was ‘No doubt he knows best’. Partly this was a hangover from my original feeling that working with books was something for people cleverer and more serious than I was; partly it was a realistic assessment of my own inexperience; and partly – something which shocks me now that I recognize it – it was that old inherited idleness: it didn’t really matter enough to me what he brought in, provided a large enough proportion of our books struck me as good enough.

  The first of these to appear on our list were of a sober – almost stately – kind, a result of the post-war book famine which meant that the reissue of classics was felt as a need. Villon and Heine, for example. André had met a man called Bill Stirling who considered himself capable of translating all the major poets of Europe. Although in this he was aiming too high, he did produce translations of those two which were up to appearing in good-looking bilingual volumes with which we could justly be pleased. We also produced a good edition of the novels and poems of the Brontë sisters edited by Phyllis Bentley, whose introduction stands up well against modern Brontë scholarship, and who included examples of their important juvenilia – the first time that had been done in a British edition.

  Our first two money-spinners could hardly have been less like the above, or each other. The first was How to be an Alien by George Mikes. André had been at school in Budapest with George’s younger brother, when he had glimpsed George enviously as a dashing grown-up. Meeting again in London, as exiles, they found that the years between them had concertinaed, and became friends. George’s little squib on being a foreigner in England had an extraordinary success. Its foreign rights seemed to sell themselves, it is still in print today, and it was the foundation stone of a career as a humorous writer that kept George going comfortably until his death in 1990. It also brought in Nicolas Bentley, who would become our partner when André Deutsch Limited was founded. A book so short needed to be given a little more bulk by illustrations, and an author so foreign and unknown could do with a familiar British name beside his own on the title-page. André persuaded Nick with some difficulty to do twelve drawings for Alien – and was never to let him forget that he had been dubious enough about an alliance with these two flighty central Europeans to fight for an outright fee of £100 rather than a cut of the royalties. When André refused to give way over this, Nick almost backed out. I don’t know exactly what he eventually made out of those twelve drawings, but it was certainly well over £10,000. Nick and his wife Barbara were soon close friends of André and the woman who became André’s great love soon after he had launched Wingate, to whom he would remain loyal for the rest of his life.

  Our second money-spinner was The Reader’s Digest Omnibus: the first important chunk of loot brought home by André from New York. He had seen at once how important an annual shopping trip to the United States would be, and built up a network of good relationships there with amazing speed. Knowing that he would have trouble persuading Audrey and me that he was not disgracing us all for life by taking on this project, he made no attempt to do so but simply announced the fait accompli and told us we must lump it. We did indeed wince and moan – I more than Audrey, because I had to proof-read the thing and write its blurb. The Reader’s Digest may have changed by now – I have never looked at it again since that intensive experience of it – but at the end of the forties its central message could fairly be represented by the following little story. A man is faced with the choice between doing something rather dishonest and making a fortune, or refusing to do something rather dishonest and staying poor. Virtuously, he chooses to stay poor – whereupon an unexpected turn of events connected with this choice makes him a much bigger fortune than he would have gained by the dishonest act. Looking back, I think that having started off so prune-faced about it, the least I should have done for dignity’s sake was keep up the disapproval; but in fact the book’s success was so great, and so many people seemed to think that we had been clever to get hold of it, that I ended by feeling quite pleased with it.

  Two other books from those distant days were important to my apprenticeship. One was a serious technical account of developments in modern architecture which revealed an incidental pleasure to be found in editing: the way it can teach you a lot about a subject unfamiliar to you, which you might not otherwise have approached. The other was about the discovery of Tahiti, which taught me once and for all the true nature of my job.

  The latter book was by a man who could not write. He had clumsily and laboriously put a great many words on paper because he happened to be obsessed by his subject. No one but a hungry young publisher building a list would have waded through his typescript, but having done so I realized that he knew everything it was possible to know about a significant and extraordinary event, and that his book would be a thoroughly respectable addition to our list if only it could be made readable.

  André had recently met an urbane and cultivated old man who had just retired from governing a British outpost in the Pacific, and who had said that he hoped to find the occasional literary task with which to fill his time. We brought the two men together, the author agreed to pay Sir Whatsit a reasonable fee for editing his book, and the latter carried it off, sat on it for three months, then returned it to its author with his bill which the poor man paid at once before forwarding his ‘finished’ book to us. To my dismay I found that lazy old Sir Whatsit had become bored after about six pages, and from then on had done almost nothing: the book was still unreadable. Either we had to return it to its author with a cheque to cover the expense we had let him in for, or I would have to edit it myself. We were short of non-fiction. I did it myself.

  I doubt if there was a sentence – certainly there was not a paragraph – that I did not alter and often have to retype, sending it chapter by chapter to the author for his approval which – although he was naturally grouchy – he always gave. I enjoyed the work. It was like removing layers of crumpled brown paper from an awkwardly shaped parcel, and revealing the attractive present which it contained (a good deal more satisfying than the minor tinkering involved when editing a competent writer). Soon after the book’s publication it was reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement; an excellent book, said the reviewer, scholarly and full of fascinating detail, and beautifully written into the bargain. The author promptly sent me a clipping of this review, pinned to a short note. ‘How nice of him,’ I thought, ‘he’s going to say thank you!’ What he said in fact was: ‘You will observe the comment about the writing which confirms what I have thought all along, that none of that fuss about it was necessary.’ When I had stopped laughing I accepted the message: an editor must never expect thanks (sometimes they come, but they must always be seen as a bonus). We must always remember that we are only midwives – if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own.

  The most important book in the history of Allan Wingate was Norman Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead, which came to us from an agent desperate because six of London’s leading publishers had rejected it in spite of its crossing the Atlantic on a wave of excitement (it was one of those books, always American at that time, which are mysteriously preceded by a certainty that they will cause a stir). Our list had gained substance and our sales organization was seen to be good, but we were still too small to be any agent’s first choice for a big book – or indeed even their seventh choice, had they not concluded that none of the more firmly established houses was going to make an offer.

  The book was a war novel, all its characters soldiers going through hell in the Pacific, where Mailer himself had served. He was bent on conveying the nature of these soldiers and their experiences accurately, so naturally he wanted the men in his novel to speak like the men he had known, which meant using the word
s ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’, and using them often. His American publishers had told him that although they knew it to be a great book, they could not publish it, and nor would anyone else (which appeared to be true) with those words spelt out. I believe the use of ‘f—’ was suggested; but ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’ occurred so often that this would have made the dialogue look like fish-net, so ‘fug’ and ‘fugging’ were agreed as substitutes.

  It might be argued that the six English publishers who rejected the book because of the obscenity of its language were less ridiculous than the American publisher who accepted this solution. Given the premiss from which they were all working, that ‘fuck’ was unprintably obscene, how could another word which sounded so nearly the same, and which was loaded with the same meaning, not be equally obscene? There has never, I think, been a clearer demonstration of the idiocy of making words taboo.

  We, of course, pounced. It is many years since I reread the book and much of it is now hazy in my mind, but I still have a strong memory of a passage in which exhausted men are struggling to manhandle a gun out of deep mud, which makes me think that I was right in feeling that it was very good – a book which had genuinely expanded the range of my imagination. We wanted to restore the ‘fucks’ but dared not; and as it turned out we were right not to dare.

  Review copies went out to the press about three weeks before publication, and the literary editor of The Sunday Times left his lying about in his office. The newspaper’s editor, who was an old man nearing retirement, ambled in and chanced to pick it up and open it. The first thing to meet his eye was ‘fug’ . . . followed by ‘fug’ and ‘fug’ again. So that Sunday, on the paper’s front page, there appeared a short but furious protest, written by the editor himself, against the projected publication of a book so vile that (and he truly did use these words) ‘no decent man could leave it where his women or children might happen to see it’.

  As always on a Sunday I was sleeping late, so I was cross when I had to answer the front-door bell at eight-thirty. There stood André, unshaven, a pair of trousers and a macintosh pulled on over his pyjamas, and a copy of The Sunday Times in his hand.

  ‘Read this!’

  ‘Oh my God!’

  I was as alarmed as he was. The book was printed and bound – the first printing was large – it was a long book, expensive to manufacture . . . close to the wind as the firm was still having to sail, if this book was banned we would go down.

  ‘Hurry and get some clothes on,’ said André. ‘We must rush a copy to Desmond MacCarthy – I’ve got his address.’

  MacCarthy was the most influential reviewer then writing. We scribbled a note begging him to read the book at once and to say publicly that it was not obscene, then we set off in Aggie to push it through his letter-box. To insist on seeing him so early on a Sunday morning might, we felt, put him off. In retrospect, the chief value of our outing was that it was something to do in this nerve-racking situation: I don’t think that MacCarthy’s eventual response can have been more than civil, or I would not have forgotten it.

  Next morning orders started pouring into the office, and only then did it occur to us that if we were not heading for disaster, it might be a triumph. Meanwhile we were instantly served with an injunction against publishing The Naked and the Dead until the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, had considered the case and had given us permission to do so (if he did). Whether the injunction was handed over by the large and apparently amiable police detective who spent the morning questioning us all, or whether it came separately, I do not know.

  During the next two or three weeks the flood of orders nearly submerged us, the frustration of not being able to supply them became acute, and the encouragement we received from everyone we knew began to make triumph seem more likely than disaster. Finally André persuaded an MP of his acquaintance to ask a question in the House of Commons about the book’s fate: was the Attorney General going to ban it or not? The answer was no – a rather grudging one in that Shawcross said that he thought it was a bad book, but still no. So we were off – into, ironically, quite worrying financial problems, because we were hard put to it to pay for the several reprints we had to order.

  What we gained from this adventure was more than a good and best-selling novel; more, even, than the presence of Norman Mailer on our list from then on. Overnight we began to be seen as a brave and dashing little firm, worth serious attention from agents handling interesting new writers, and André’s welcome when he visited New York became even more richly rewarding.

  6

  ALLAN WINGATE’S PERFORMANCE looked quite impressive from the outside. Our books soon became more interesting and we produced them well – even elegantly – within the limits imposed by continuing paper rationing. (The quality of paper was poor, and there were regulations controlling the use of white space in a layout and so on, which made good typography a challenge for several years after the war.) And we were good, by the cottage-industry standards of the day, at selling. André’s work as a rep for Nicolson and Watson had taught him a lot about booksellers and librarians (the latter our chief customers for fiction), and he never under-estimated the importance of good relations with them: again and again we were told how rare and pleasing it was for the head of a publishing house to visit and listen to booksellers, as he often did, and to be ready to negotiate directly with them about, for example, returning copies if they had over-ordered, instead of leaving such matters to a rep. To begin with he did this because we had no reps – no sales department, for that matter – but it was an attitude which stayed with him for all his career. He would always be liked by the people to whom we sold our wares – vital to a firm like ours, which remained short of books which the trade had to stock such as works of reference, how-to-do-its, and the cosier and flashier sorts of entertainment book.

  From the inside, however, we looked wobbly. This was because the experienced people who said it was impossible to start a publishing firm on £3,000 were right. We were always running out of money.

  Not being able to pay our bills used to give me horrible sensations of hollowness mixed with nausea, and I think that poor Mr Kaufmann, the man who actually had to do the desperate juggling which was supposed to stave off disaster, felt much the same. To André, on the other hand, these crises appeared to be invigorating, chiefly because he didn’t feel ‘I have run up bills I can’t pay’, but ‘These idiotic printers and binders are trying to prevent me from publishing truly essential books which the world needs and which will end by making enough money to pay them all and to spare’. So although he recognized that he would have to raise some more money somehow, he was never debilitated. Instead he was inspired. Never, at the time when a crisis struck, did we know anyone who wanted to invest in a struggling new publishing house; but always, in a matter of days, André found such a person. My own way of weathering a panic was by thrusting it aside and concentrating grimly on what was under my nose – reading a manuscript, designing an advertisement or whatever – so instead of following his manoeuvres with the intelligent interest which would have made this account so much more valuable, I kept my eyes tight shut; and when I next opened them, there would be André, cock-a-hoop, with a new director in tow. This happened five times.

  There was, however, an inconvenient, though endearing, weak spot in André’s otherwise impressive life-saving equipment. He had come to England because he loved the idea of it. In the Budapest of his schooldays the language you studied, in addition to Latin, was either German or English, and he, influenced by a beloved and admired uncle, had chosen English without a moment’s hesitation, and had found it greatly to his taste. The books he read as a result must have been an odd selection, because they left him with a romantic picture of a country remarkable for honesty and reliability, largely inhabited by comic but rather attractive beings known as English Gentlemen. I am sure that if, when he was trawling for someone to invest money in his firm, his net had caught a fellow-Hungarian, he would have
insisted on their agreeing a thoroughly businesslike contract; but each time what came up was an Englishman – an Englishman radiant with the glow which shines from the answer to a prayer, and coloured a becoming pink by his viewer’s preconceptions. So – it is still hard to believe, but it is true – what existed between André and these five timely miracles was, in each case, nothing but a Gentleman’s Agreement. You couldn’t even say that it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, because there wasn’t any paper.

  Before this process began we lost Audrey, because André was unable to tolerate her husband Ronald. Her investment had been made largely to provide Ron with a job to come home to when he was demobilized from the Army, and within a few months of our opening he joined us as sales manager. He was a gentle, serene-looking person, a listener rather than a talker, and what his previous occupation had been I never knew. After he left us he trained as an osteopath, at which he was successful. There was nothing about him of the businessman – and certainly not of the salesman.

  Because none of us had met him earlier, Ron was not strictly an example of André’s inability to see what people were like. This weakness related to his impatient and clumsy handling of staff, both of them stemming from an absolute failure to be interested in any viewpoint but his own. It was quickly to become apparent that if he wanted a particular kind of person for his firm – a fireball of a sales manager, for example, or a scrupulously careful copy editor – then he would see the next man or woman who approached him as that person, and would impatiently dismiss any dissenting opinion. Before he was done he would cram innumerable square pegs into round holes, and it is exhausting to remember the emotional wear and tear involved when, to his furious indignation (against the poor pegs) he began to see them for what they were and they had to be wrenched or eased out. But in Ron’s case it was bad luck rather than bad judgement – bad luck, especially, for Ron, who was not with us three weeks before he was pinned helplessly in the eye of that alarming little searchlight, was seen to be doing nothing right, and as a consequence began doing more and more things wrong.