Stet

by Diana Athill

  Since starting this chapter about our long and mostly happy time in Great Russell Street I have spent hours remembering colleagues, remembering authors, remembering books . . . colleagues, especially. I suppose people who choose to work with books and are good at their jobs are not inevitably likeable, but they very often are; and if you see them every day over long periods of time, collaborating with them in various ways as you do so, they become more than likeable. They become a pleasing part of your life. Esther Whitby, Ilsa Yardley, Pamela Royds, Penny Buckland, June Bird, Piers Burnett, Geoff Sains, Philip Tammer . . . : I can’t write about them in the sense of making them come alive and interesting to people who know nothing about them, without embarking on a different kind of book, and one which is, I fear, beyond my range, so I will just have to go on carrying them, and others, in my head for my own pleasure. And it’s for my own satisfaction that I now say how glad I am to have them there.

  The authors: well, about a few of them I shall write in Part Two. And the books: there were too many of them, and anyway nothing is more boring than brief descriptions of books which one has not read. But two of them have floated to the surface as being of great value to me. Neither of them was part of a literary career; neither of them sold well; neither of them will be remembered by many readers. What is remarkable about both of them is the person who speaks.

  Over and over again one sees lives which appear to have been shaped almost entirely by circumstances: by a cruel childhood, perhaps, or (like Franz Stangl’s) by a corrupt society. These two stories are told by a man and a woman who, if shaping by circumstances were an immutable law, would have been hopeless wrecks. They did not just survive what would have finished off a great many people: they survived it triumphantly.

  The first of these books is Parents Unknown: A Ukrainian Childhood, by Morris Stock. He was found as a newborn baby on the steps of a synagogue in a small Ukrainian town; was shunted around the Jewish community to various foster parents, ending with a brutal couple who almost killed him. If an interfering peasant woman hadn’t made a fuss when she noticed a little boy almost dead with cold, waiting on a wagon outside an inn, they would quite have done so. The community stepped in again, and he was passed on to a grain-merchant who was eventually to work him very hard, but who treated him well. Almost at once he began to be liked and trusted, learning how to read and write and mastering his trade: it seems that as soon as he was free to be himself he revealed intelligence, resilience and generosity. Before he was twenty he had set up business on his own, married a girl he was to love for the rest of her life, and decided to move to London, where he spent the next fifty years prospering, and raising a family remarkable for talent and ability. He was an old man when his daughter persuaded him to write his story, which he did with vigour and precision – a very charming old man. Some quality at the centre of Morris Stock had been able to triumph over formidable odds.

  And the same was true of Daphne Anderson, who wrote The Toe-Rags. By the time I met her Daphne was the beautiful wife of a retired general, living in Norfolk, better-read and more amusing in a gentle way than I expected a general’s wife to be. It was astounding to learn that this woman had once been a barefoot, scabby-legged little girl whose only dress was made from a sugar-sack, knowing nothing beyond the Rhodesian bush and speaking an African language – Shona – better than she spoke English. Her parents were the poorest of poor whites, victims of her father’s uselessness: he was stupid, bad-tempered, utterly self-centred, incompetent and irresponsible. He dumped her wretched mother, with three children, in the bush and left them there for months on end, sending no money. She scraped by, by allowing occasional favours to such men as were about, and the children were looked after by Jim, their Shona servant (no white could be so poor as not to have a servant: it was like Charles Dickens’s family taking their little maid into debtors’ prison with them). Jim saved not only Daphne’s life, but also her spirit, being a rock of kindness and good sense for the children to cling to.

  Not surprisingly, when a decent man asked the mother to go off with him she did, taking her new baby but leaving the three other children in the belief that their father would be arriving next day. She thought that if no one else was there he would have to cope. He did not turn up. Three days later Jim, having run out of food, walked them to the nearest police station. They never saw their mother again, and had the misfortune to be delivered into the hands of their father’s sister. She was like him in every way except in being (although unable to read) ruthlessly competent, so that she had become rich by running a brick kiln. She took the children in because of ‘What would the neighbours say?’, then took it out on them by consigning them to the kitchen: where, once again, they were saved by an African man – her cook. He provided kindness, common sense about good behaviour, and a comforting sense of irony. Their aunt it was who dubbed them the Toe-Rags.

  There followed, until Daphne was in her twenties, a long chain of deprivation and disturbing events, with one blessing in their midst: Daphne was sent to a convent school. Right from the beginning the child had fallen on every tiny scrap of good that came her way – every kindness, every chance to learn, every opportunity to discriminate between coarse and fine, stupid and wise, ugly and beautiful, mean and generous. School came to her – in spite of agonizing embarrassment over unpaid bills and having no clothes – as a feast of pleasure. She does not, of course, tell her story as that of an astonishing person. She tells it for what happened, and out of delighted amazement at her own good luck. It is the reader who sees that this person who should have been a wreck had somewhere within her a centre so strong that all she needed were the smallest openings in order to be good and happy.

  I loved that book even more than I loved Morris Stock’s; and both of them I loved not for being well-written (though both were written well enough for their purposes), but because of what those two people were like. They brought home to me the central reason why books have meant so much to me. It is not because of my pleasure in the art of writing, though that has been very great. It is because they have taken me so far beyond the narrow limits of my own experience and have so greatly enlarged my sense of the complexity of life: of its consuming darkness, and also – thank God – of the light which continues to struggle through.

  11

  ALTHOUGH ANDRE’S CHIEF instrument for office management was always, from 1946 to 1984, the threatening of Doom, he was slow to recognize its actual coming. For a long time he preferred to interpret its symptoms as temporary blips.

  The demise of our house, a slow process, was caused by a combination of two things: the diminishing number of people who wanted to read the kind of book we mostly published, and the recession.

  Ever since we started in business books had been becoming steadily more expensive to produce: the eight and sixpenny novel became the ten and sixpenny novel, then the twelve and sixpenny, then the fifteen shilling (that seemed a particularly alarming jump) – after which the crossing of the hitherto unthinkable one pound barrier came swiftly. (What would we have thought if some Cassandra had told us that soon eight, ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty would be enumerating pounds, not shillings?) After each rise people continued to buy books – though not quite so many people. André was impatient of the idea that the falling-off was caused by anything other than the rise in price . . . But everything was costing more – that was life, people were used to it: it seemed to me that something else was at work. Which was proved true by several attempts, made by ourselves and others, to bring out cheap editions of first novels of a kind categorized as ‘literary’: making them cheaper did not make them sell better.

  People who buy books, not counting useful how-to-do-it books, are of two kinds. There are those who buy because they love books and what they can get from them, and those to whom books are one form of entertainment among several. The first group, which is by far the smaller, will go on reading, if not for ever, then for as long as one can foresee. The second group has to be c
ourted. It is the second which makes the best-seller, impelled thereto by the buzz that a particular book is really something special; and it also makes publishers’ headaches, because it has become more and more resistant to courting.

  The Booker Prize was instigated in 1969 with the second group in mind: make the quality of a book news by awarding it an impressive amount of money, and hoi polloi will prick up their ears. It worked in relation to the books named; but it had been hoped that after buying the winner and/or the runners-up, people would be ‘converted’ to books in general, and there was no sign of that. Another attempt to stir the wider public’s consciousness resulted in the slogan ‘Books are Best’ which still chirps its message from booksellers’ carrier bags – and is surely the kind of advertising that is not even seen by those who do not want the advertised object.

  What has been happening is that slowly – very slowly, so that often the movement was imperceptible – group number two has been floating away into another world. Whole generations have grown up to find images more entertaining than words, and the roaming of space via a computer more exciting than turning a page. Of course a lot of them still read; but progressively a smaller lot, and fewer and fewer can be bothered to dig into a book that offers any resistance. Although these people may seem stupid to us, they are no stupider than we are: they just enjoy different things. And although publishers like André Deutsch Limited went on having a happy relationship with group number one, and still, throughout the seventies, hit it off quite often with group number two, the distance between what the publisher thought interesting and what the wider public thought interesting was widening all the time.

  Surely, I used to think as we moved into the eighties, we ought to be able to do something about this? Look at Allen Lane, in the thirties, thinking up Penguin Books: that had been a revolution in publishing to meet a need . . . couldn’t we do something like it in a different way? Piers and I discussed it occasionally (André couldn’t be bothered with such idle speculation), but we never got anywhere. Piers thought we should cut down on fiction and look for serious non-fiction of a necessary kind, and he was right; but it was easier said than done. I just went blank. I was too stuck in my ways to want to change, that was my trouble. We had been publishing books we liked for so long that the thought of publishing any other kind was horrible. So let’s talk about something else . . . Which must have been more or less what André was feeling under his irritability.

  Meanwhile recession was approaching. The first time it sent a shiver down my spine was when Edward Heath ordained a three-day week. Down we go, I thought, and how could anyone expect anything else when a country which was once the centre of a vast empire had become a little island off the shores of Europe? Gone are the days when we could buy cheap and sell dear – other people are going to pinch our markets . . . Perhaps this crisis will pass, but it would be foolish to suppose that it is going, in any permanent way, to get better.

  The feeling was so similar to those moments before the Second World War when one suddenly saw that it was going to happen, that all I could do was react as I had reacted then: shut my eyes tight and think of something else. André, after all, said that I was exaggerating, and he was much better at economic matters than I was . . . I managed to avert my mind from the depressing prospect so successfully that the rest of the seventies and the early eighties passed quite cheerfully; but I was not in the least surprised when recession was declared.

  André talked very little about selling the firm. I knew, quite early in the eighties, that he was half-heartedly sniffing around for an offer, and he had stated his reason as clearly as he would ever do: ‘It’s not any fun any more,’ is what he said.

  And it was not. He could no longer make those exciting swoops on ‘big’ books because the firms which had combined into conglomerates could always outbid us; and the ‘literary’ books at which we had been good . . . well, I was beginning to hope, when a type-script arrived on my desk, that it would be bad. If it was bad, out it went and no hassle. If it was good – then ahead loomed the editorial conference at which we would have to ask ourselves ‘How many do you reckon it will sell?’, and the honest answer would probably be ‘About eight hundred copies’. Whereupon we would either have to turn down something good, which was painful, or else fool ourselves into publishing something that lost money. We still brought out some good things – quite a number of them – during those years, and by careful cheese-paring André kept the firm profitable (just) until at last he did sell it; but there are some embarrassing books on our eighties lists: obvious (though never, I am glad to say, shameful) attempts to hit on something ‘commercial’ which only proved that we were not much good at it. And André was already starting to fall asleep during editorial conferences.

  He never surprised me more than when he announced, on returning from the annual book-trade jamboree in the United States, that he had found the right person to buy the firm.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Tom Rosenthal.’

  ‘Are you mad?’

  This reaction was not dictated by my own feelings: I had glimpsed Tom only occasionally at parties. It was because André had always seemed to dislike him. Tom began his career in 1959 with Thames and Hudson, which specialized in art books, and why he left them in 1970 I don’t know. Probably it was because he felt drawn to a more literary kind of publishing, since his next job, starting in 1971, was managing director of Seeker & Warburg, and in the short interval between the two he had played with the idea of launching his own list, and had visited André to discuss the possibility of doing it under our wing. It was then that André had been rude – not to him, but about him. It seemed to be simply the dissimilarity of their natures that put him off.

  André was small and dapper; Tom was large, with the slightly rumpled look of many bearded men, though he was far from being among the seriously shaggy. André was a precise and dashing driver; Tom was too careless and clumsy to trust himself to drive at all. André, without being prissy, was nearer to being fastidious in his speech than he was to being coarse; Tom evidently liked to shock. And above all, André abhorred extravagance, while Tom enjoyed it. They were also very different in their pleasures. André had no important pleasures outside his work except for going to the theatre (he never missed a well-reviewed West End play, and adventured into the fringe quite often), and skiing, which he adored; Tom took no exercise except for a daily swim for his health (his back had been badly damaged in a traffic accident), preferred opera to plays, gave much time and thought to his collection of first editions, and had also built up an impressive collection of paintings – many of which André thought were ugly. They were not designed to be friends.

  But now André needed someone to buy the firm, so when Tom, who had become a director of the Heinemann group in 1972, told him that he was fed up with administration and longed to get back into hands-on book producing, he suddenly saw that he had been wrong about this brilliant publisher who was a much nicer man than anyone realized, and who – best of all – was our kind of person, so would not want to turn our firm into something else . . . As it would turn out, that ‘best of all’ summed up precisely why Tom was the wrong man, but the fact escaped us all: I can’t think why, given that most of us were well aware that the firm needed to change.

  The negotiations, which took place under the guidance of Arnold (Lord) Goodman, the ubiquitous fixer and smoother, lasted a long time. André never told anyone how much Tom paid for the firm, but we all knew that he was to pay in two stages. On putting down the first half of the money he would come in as joint managing director with André, and two years later (or perhaps it was three), when he put down the rest, he would become the sole managing director and André would be awarded the title of President and continue to have a room in the office if he wanted it, but would cease to have any say in its affairs. I remember André telling me: ‘Last week Arnold said I must remember that now the agreement has been signed the firm is no longer mine. He must
think I’m dotty – of course I know that.’

  But alas, alas! Of course he didn’t.

  Tom made the sensible suggestion that they should divide our authors between them and each be responsible for his own group without interfering in the other’s. André agreed, but he was unable to keep to it. Over and over again he would pick up the intercom, or (worse) amble into Tom’s room, to say something on the lines of ‘If you are thinking of selling the German rights of such and such a book to Fischer Verlag, would you like me to drop a line to so-and-so?’. To start with Tom was civil: ‘That’s very kind, but I’ve done it already’ But he is a man with a short fuse and it was not long before he was snapping . . . and not long again before he was yelling. Whereupon André would come into my room and report querulously ‘Tom yelled at me!’. And when I had extracted the details of the incident, and told him that it was his own fault for sticking his nose in when he knew how much it maddened Tom, in an even more querulous, almost tearful voice: ‘But I was only trying to help!’

  ‘Well, for God’s sake stop trying to help. You know it doesn’t do any good . . . and he doesn’t do it to you.’ And a few days later it would happen all over again.

  Then André’s pain began to turn into anger. He began to see almost everything that Tom did as wrong, and to complain endlessly – first to me, then to those other people in the office who were concerned with whatever he was complaining about, then to everyone in the office, putting out feelers for Tom’s sins in the accounts department, the production department, even to the switchboard. Nearly everyone in the place was fond of André, and felt for him now that he was losing the firm that had so obviously meant so much to him for so long; but people began to be embarrassed by his behaviour and to lose sympathy with him. Burly, bluff, bearded Tom was not a man of delicate sensibility (was even inclined to boast of that fact, as he boasted about many things), and he was extravagant, so people had reservations about him; but they didn’t feel he deserved this campaign against him. In fact, for quite a while after his arrival he cheered us up. If someone says loudly ‘Though I say it myself, I’m a bloody good businessman’, you tend to believe him simply because you can’t believe anyone would be so crass as to say that, if he wasn’t. Or at least I tended to believe it, and I think others did too. Tom liked to think big and generously, so if you said, for instance, that a book would be better with sixteen pages of illustrations – or even thirty-two – instead of the eight pages which André would have grudgingly allowed if he absolutely had to, Tom would say ‘My dear girl, let it have as many as it needs’, and that sort of response was invigorating. He brought in some interesting books, too – notably the first volume of David Cairns’s magnificent biography of Berlioz – and a few big names including Elias Canetti and Gore Vidal; so for a year or so it was possible to believe that, given his flair as a businessman, he was going to revitalize the firm. You did not have to be particularly drawn to him to be pleased about that – or to be shocked when André began to extend his campaign outside the office. For some time I hoped it was only old friends to whom he was confiding his grievances, but gradually it became clear that he was going on and on and on to everyone he met.