Stet

by Diana Athill

  That we had a poetry list was almost accidental. While we were still at Thayer Street André had met Laurie Lee and had fallen in love with his Cider with Rosie, which was published by Chatto & Windus. Laurie must already have been dabbling in the manipulative games with publishers that he was to play with increasing zest in the future, because André was given to understand that Chatto’s were in the dog-house for refusing to publish his poems, My Many-Coated Man, and who knew what might come the way, in the future, of the firm which took them on. So André snapped up the poems (and we did indeed get Laurie’s next-but-one prose book). Six months later the acquisition of Derek Verschoyle’s list landed us with five more books of verse. They were by Ronald Bottrall, Alan Ross, Roy Fuller, Diana Witherby and David Wright – Fuller was to continue with us for the next thirty years. Then Elizabeth Jennings came to us on Laurie’s recommendation, and Peter Levi on Elizabeth’s, and after that one poet led to another in a haphazard way, or sometimes an agent bobbed up with one, or sometimes one of our novelists was a poet as well (notably John Updike), and once there was a small infusion from another publisher, called Rapp & Whiting, whose list came our way . . .

  In the almost fifty years I spent in publishing, poetry was never easy to sell, and we were not among the houses that were best at it. I find it hard to understand why we stayed with it as long as we did. Certainly I loved some of the books on our poetry list, but given my prosaic nature I would not have minded if we had never developed such a list: I edited most of the books on it, but I was not its instigator. It was André who liked to have it there. He had been an enthusiastic reader of poetry in his youth (Hungarians treasure their poets very earnestly), and was still, when I first knew him, reading Eliot’s Four Quartets aloud to young women whenever they gave him the chance (and reading them well). Nor was Nick much interested in our poets – except for Ogden Nash who was a friend of his, and whom he edited. I suppose André simply thought that a proper publisher had a poetry list, rather as, in the past, an English country gentleman, even if he devoted all his leisure to shooting game birds or riding to hounds, thought that a proper house had a library. In retrospect I see it as interesting rather than praiseworthy, given the frugal habits insisted on by André. Poetry may not have lost us money (we paid poets minuscule advances and designed their books very economically), but it certainly didn’t make us any, and none of us minded: an attitude which fifty – forty – thirty years ago was not worthy of remark, and now has become almost unimaginable.

  To restore my balance after recalling the dutiful aspects of editing – the need to work conscientiously in spite of being bored, and to put oneself at the service of books that were not always within one’s range – I shall now describe what was certainly the most absorbing of all the tasks that came my way: working with Gitta Sereny on Into That Darkness, which we published in 1974.

  Gitta spent her childhood in Vienna, the daughter of a Hungarian father and an Austrian mother, neither of them Jewish. She was fifteen years old when Hitler took Austria over. She was sent to school in France and was caught there by the war. During the German occupation she looked after abandoned children in Paris and the Loire, then got out to America where, in 1945, she took a job in UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) as a child welfare officer in camps for displaced people in southern Germany. Although many of the children were eventually reunited with their families, many more had no one and nowhere to go to: all had experienced unspeakable horrors. How could anyone have chosen to make concentration-camp and labour-camp victims of thousands of children, all under fourteen, many under ten? To quote from the preface to the first paperback edition of Into That Darkness which we published in 1991: ‘Over the months of the Nuremberg trials and our own increasing work with survivors, including a few from the extermination camps in occupied Poland, about which almost nothing had been known until then, we learnt more and more about the horrors which had been committed, and I felt more and more that we needed to find someone capable of explaining to us how presumably normal human beings had been brought to do what had been done.’ Haunted by this question, she came to feel that ‘it was essential to penetrate the personality of at least one such person who had been intimately associated with this total evil. If it could be achieved, an evaluation of such a person’s background, his childhood, and eventually his adult motivation and reactions, as he saw them, rather than as we wished or prejudged them to be, might teach us to understand better to what extent evil in human beings is created by their genes, and to what extent by their society and environment.’

  People sometimes ask why Gitta Sereny habitually writes about evil, but I do not see it as surprising that someone plunged into such a scalding awareness of it so early in her life should be haunted by it. It is only because it frightens us too much that we don’t all think about it much more than we do. Everything that makes life worth living is the result of humankind’s impulse to fight the darkness in itself, and attempting to understand evil is part of that fight. It is true that such understanding as has been achieved has not made much – if any – headway against evil; and it is equally true that horror and dismay at dreadful things are often used as disguise for excitement; but if those facts are allowed to discourage us from trying to understand how corruption comes about, what hope have we? It seems to me that Gitta’s need to seek explanations has led her to do valuable work, none more so than when she seized the chance, some twenty-five years after her experiences in UNRRA, to penetrate one particular evil personality.

  She had become a journalist. In 1967 she was commissioned by the Daily Telegraph to write a series of pieces about West Germany, including the Nazi crime trials then taking place. She was present at the trial of Franz Stangl who had been Kommandant of Treblinka, one of the four extermination (as opposed to concentration) camps in German-occupied Poland, and who was sentenced to life imprisonment for co-responsibility in the murder of 900,000 people in that camp. There had been only four such men: one of the others was dead, the other two had escaped. Stangl, too, had escaped (to Brazil), but had been tracked down. Gitta realized that he was the object for study that she had hoped for, and that by now she herself felt capable of undertaking the task.

  She was allowed to visit Stangl in prison and talked with him for many hours over six weeks, at the end of which – the very end – he reached the bottom of his guilt and admitted that he ought not still to be alive. There was still a detail which he wished to confirm about something he had said, so she agreed to return to the prison in three days’ time to collect the information. When she did so she was told that he was dead. It had been heart failure, not suicide. When the Telegraph Magazine published the interviews they refused to include this fact, saying that no one would believe it.

  Having read these interviews, we asked Gitta to come to the office and discuss the possibility of a book, whereupon she told us that she was already deep in the work for it, and would be glad to let us see it. I can’t remember how long it was before she brought it in – or rather, brought in the raw material out of which it was to be shaped, but I shall never forget the sight of that mountain of script.

  When I got it home that evening (it was far too unwieldy to deal with in the office) it covered the whole of my table. In addition to the central Stangl interviews there were interviews, many of them long, with at least twenty-four other people, and there was also much – though not all – of the material for the linking passages of description and explanation essential to welding the material into a whole.

  No reading I have ever done has shaken me as much as the reading I did that night. Having seen the film of Belsen made when the Allies got there I thought I knew the nature of what had been done; but of course I didn’t. Groping my way into the history of this ordinary, efficient, ambitious, uxorious Austrian policeman, through the astonishing material about Hitler’s euthanasia programme to which he was transferred – all the men employed in the extermination camps, except for
the Ukrainians, worked for that programme – was intensely interesting, but frightening because I knew where it was going. And then it got there. And then the voices began to tell me what it had really been like . . . I remember walking round and round the room as though I were trying to escape what was in that pile of paper, and I didn’t sleep that night. But one editorial decision I was able to make then and there: we must use no adjectives – or very few. Words such as ‘horrifying’, ‘atrocious’, ‘tragic’, ‘terrifying’ – they shrivelled like scraps of paper thrown into a blazing fire.

  After the enormous amount of source material she had dug into, and all those interviews which had taken her to Brazil and Canada and the United States as well as to Germany and Austria, and had plunged her ever deeper into the darkness that I had just glimpsed, Gitta was near the end of her tether. She liked to have the support of an editor at the best of times, simply because, fluent though her English was, it was not her first language: she couldn’t be absolutely confident in it – and did, in fact, sometimes slip into slightly Germanic rhythms and over-elaboration of syntax. But chiefly it was exhaustion, and being too close to the material, which made it essential for her to have help. Often it amounted to no more than me saying ‘Let’s put that bit here’ so that she could say at once ‘No no – it must go there’; but she was also enabled to reshape passages when she had seen them afresh through a new pair of eyes. I could point out where clarification, condensation, expansion were needed. I could say ‘But you’ve said that already when you were describing such-and-such’, or ‘But wait a minute – I need reminding about that because it was so long ago that it first came up’.

  It was clear enough that the Stangl interviews were the thread on which the rest must hang, but it was not easy to decide where to break them and introduce other voices: his wife’s or his sister-in-law’s, those of the men who worked under him, those of the five survivors, and many more. I have forgotten how long it took us, working usually in my flat (I had to take many days away from the office for this book); but I know it was months – Gitta often had to go back to her typewriter to provide links or expansions. From time to time we got stuck: there would be a chunk of material, fascinating in itself but seemingly impossible to fit in. ‘Oh God, we’ll just have to sacrifice it’, I would say; and then, a little later, there would be some slight shift in the mass of the book, and click! in would go the problem piece, fitting exactly. This happened with almost uncanny regularity. Gitta thought she had just been collecting everything she could find, but the extent to which she had unconsciously been structuring her book became clearer and clearer. An interviewer does, after all, control the direction of an interview, and the further she had delved into Stangl’s background, the more sure her touch had become at discovering what was relevant. We shortened a good deal, but we did not, in the end, have to leave anything out.

  That was the most impressive thing about her work on this book: the way she knew, even when she felt as though she didn’t, exactly what, in this most complicated operation, she was after. That, and her astonishing power as an interviewer which enabled her to draw out of people all that they had to give. And another thing which won my admiration was her lack of author’s vanity. She would sometimes say ‘no’ to an alteration I suggested, on the grounds that it sounded too unlike her; but usually if a point were made more concisely or emphatically she appeared not to mind if I altered her original words. What she was committed to was getting things said rather than to making an impression as a wordsmith.

  I could write at length about Into That Darkness, but it would make more sense for those of my readers who don’t know it to get hold of a copy. The reason why working on it was so important to me was that its subject engaged me so completely. I still think – and often – of how that unremarkable man became a monster as the result of a chain of choices between right and wrong – some of the early ones quite trivial – and the way in which no one he respected intervened in favour of the right, while a number of people he respected (senior officers, a priest, a doctor – his idea of respectability was conventional) behaved as though the wrong were right. Chief among them, of course, the Führer. Stangl did not have a strong centre – had probably been deprived of it by a dreary childhood – so he became a creature of the regime. Other people without much centre didn’t – or not to the same extent – so some quality inherent in him (perhaps lack of imagination combined with ambition) must have been evident to those who picked him for his appalling jobs. But it was surely environment rather than genes which made him what he became.

  One good thing about being old is that one no longer minds so much about what people think of one. Boasting is disapproved of, but still I am going to quote the words with which Gitta acknowledged my help, because they gave me so much pleasure: ‘Diana Athill edited Into That Darkness. She has lent it – and me – her warmth, her intelligence, her literary fluency, and a quality of involvement I had little right to expect. I am grateful that she has become my friend.’ Which makes us quits, because I was and am grateful to my friend Gitta for allowing me that involvement.

  Soon after the book was finished Gitta became ill: a cancer, discovered – thank God – early enough for complete extirpation. I know, of course, that there can be no proof of this, but I have always been convinced that it was a consequence of the strain she underwent when she had the courage to follow that man so closely into his dreadful night.

  9

  DOMESTIC LIFE AT Carlisle Street (and later) was as full of incident as professional life, and this was for two reasons: the first, André’s weakness for the square peg; the second, love.

  The square pegs were many, often harmless and soon remedied, sometimes dramatic. Two were actually deranged, one of them a sales manager, the other put in charge of publicity (I was at last allowed to hand over the advertising to a publicity department, such an overpowering relief that it was some time before I could believe it, and rejoice). The sales manager, who had been imported from Australia, was living in a hotel, and I remember going there with André, hoping to find out why he hadn’t appeared at the office for three days, and being told by the receptionist in a hushed voice, as if he were divulging the movements of a celebrity: ‘The Colonel left for Berlin two days ago.’ The Colonel?? We were never to find out more about his attack of military rank, nor about his disappearance. The publicity lady simply suffered from folie de grandeur, which provided its own solution when she realized that the job was beneath her.

  The square peg I remember most fondly I shall call Louise. André found her in New York, writing copy for Tiffany’s catalogue, and saw in a flash that she was just the person to manage the editorial department: not to do editing, but to organize the editors. He had long nursed a dream of programming and wall-charts which would somehow overcome the hazards which beset a book’s progress from typewriter to printing press: authors having second thoughts, indexers going down with ‘flu, holders of copyright not answering letters and so on. Louise was going to cure him of this dream, but we were unable to foresee the happy outcome, and awaited her arrival with dread. He had announced her thus: ‘You are all going to have to obey her absolutely. Even I am going to obey her.’

  She did at first sight seem a little alarming – but only because she was so chic. She was willowy and fine-boned, and her clothes were almost painfully enviable: the sort of casual clothes at which classy New Yorkers excel, so simple that you can’t pinpoint why you know they are very expensive, you just do know it. But her striking poise and confidence did not prevent her manner from being engaging, so I took her to lunch on her first day feeling warmer towards her than I had expected; and indeed, we had not finished the first course before every trace of alarm had been dispersed.

  Louise couldn’t wait to tell me why she had accepted André’s offer. She had met Ken Tynan in New York (Tynan was even more famous there, both as theatre critic and as personality, than he was in London); she had fallen madly in love with him; when he had
left for London she had been flat broke (how did she get those clothes?) so that she couldn’t possibly follow him, and had been in despair . . . and then, out of the blue, came this God-sent chance. Did I think Ken would mind? She was almost sure he wouldn’t, he had said this, that and the other, done this, that and the other . . . Surely that must mean that their affair was about to go from strength to strength . . . Or did I think, perhaps, that she had been unwise? I had never been nearer Tynan than the far side of a room at a drinks party, but it was impossible not to hear a great deal about him, and what I had heard made me pretty sure that she had been very unwise. I could already envisage mopping-up operations ahead, but what chiefly occupied my mind on that first day was the cheerful certainty that this charming but daft girl was never going to manage anything, not even her doomed love-life.

  What still remained to be discovered was the extent of her curiously vulnerable recklessness – her almost heroic compulsion to plunge into disaster – and her total uselessness in an office. She was a brilliant con-artist as far as the first moves went – that first impression of exceptional poise and confidence never failed – but she couldn’t follow through. I don’t think she even tried to. I came to know her quite well, even had her to stay in my flat when her need to be rescued became acute, and often wondered how well she knew herself. Did she wake at night and start sweating at the thought of being found out, or did she simply blank out awkward facts such as that she had conned her way into a job she couldn’t do and was now lying in her teeth to hide the fact that she wasn’t doing it? Blank them out, and then switch on some kind of instinctive escape mechanism by which she would wriggle out of this situation and into another?