Georgette Heyer

by Jennifer Kloester

  It is possible that her unpublished essays earned Georgette her first rejection slips, for after this sudden burst of nonfiction writing she wrote no more articles.

  Aunt Cicely died in April. At seventy-eight Sylvia was the last of the Watkins siblings left alive. For Georgette Cicely’s death was another break with the past and a reminder of her own mortality at a time when it actually seemed possible that she might yet achieve a shred of immortality through her books. They were selling in ever-increasing numbers and Heinemann were doing their utmost to promote her. Publication of The Toll-Gate in July coincided with “Georgette Heyer Week” in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and other overseas territories. It was a great success with Georgette Heyer displays arranged in hundreds of bookshops and libraries. The jacket for The Toll-Gate was the work of a new artist and Georgette was delighted with Arthur Barbosa’s take on her stories. Barbosa went on to design her book jackets for the next fifteen years and his elegant, distinctive style became a much-admired hallmark for her novels.

  A month later Frere wrote that The Toll-Gate was selling a thousand copies a week and in September Pat Wallace reported that in “the Antipodes sales of THE TOLL-GATE have already exceeded any previous work of yours in its original edition.” Heinemann was moved to issue a statement in the Bookseller which read: “no less than 3½ million copies of Georgette Heyer’s books have been sold.” It was a remarkable figure and it is not surprising that Foyle’s chose The Toll-Gate as their premier book for 1955.

  Immersed in a new Regency novel, Georgette paid little heed to the figures. She had promised to show Dorothy Sutherland her new novel by the end of July and a request for details had elicited a peremptory letter to Louisa Callender: “You must fob the S.B. off for a week or two, please! Not only does it put me right off the stroke to know a part of my book is in her hands before I see my way clear to the end, but—as usual—the first chapters are in a mess, and must be altered.” She managed to send an outline of Bath Tangle with an assurance that “My heroine has a lively sense of humor, and I can see some nice scenes blowing up. And—you’d never guess!—it all Ends Happily.” Halfway through Bath Tangle Georgette experienced a momentary doubt on realizing that “this is unlike my other romances in so far as it is a ‘Love-story’ and not an ‘Adventure-story.’” She wondered if “The S.B. may not like that.” But Dorothy Sutherland was enthusiastic enough to write to her directly to say: “This one’s going with a wonderful swing! Alas, poor Rockingham.”

  Georgette had called her “Heyer-Hero the Marquis of Rockingham, quite forgetting that very dim Prime Minister” who had been the last Marquis of Rockingham. She felt she could not use his title for her hero and spent hours thinking of another name. It was vital to her to get it right: “I don’t choose names lightly, and once named I can’t see a character under any other name…I’ve at last changed the gentleman’s title to Rotherham. I suppose I shall get used to it in time. He looks like a stranger to me at the moment.” It was an annoying delay for she was desperate to get Bath Tangle finished before she and Ronald left for Scotland on 20 August. She wrote at top speed through the month, helped along by “a certain Powerful Dope, given me once by my doctor, with instructions not to take a dose later than midday. But if one takes it at dinner-time one is still full of energy and inspiration at 5.0 next morning!” While there may have been side effects, the formula seemed to work for she delivered the manuscript on schedule. Woman’s Journal paid £2,000 for Bath Tangle and the following year Georgette had another hit on her hands.

  They went to Greywalls as usual in the summer of 1954, and Richard joined them there before returning to Cambridge for the Michaelmas term. He was enjoying university life and had met several young men and women who would become lifelong friends. Years later, a close female friend remembered him as he was in that first year at Cambridge:

  He was 22 when we met and a true Heyer hero—born out of his century, slim, dark, debonair, devastatingly attractive with those piercing blue eyes and with an air of cool sophistication—but also with an ability to wither you with a cold look and a cutting phrase. I realized very early on that these sprang out of a vulnerability deeply hidden but there all his life. And how could he not be vulnerable, brought up by an adored mother totally preoccupied by her writing.

  Georgette’s writing inevitably affected her relationships. There is no doubt that Richard suffered from it, especially as a child. While her determination to remain out of the public eye was undoubtedly better for her family as regards their privacy, it also had the effect of keeping their world small and insular. This affected her son. She loved him, but her own repressed emotions had made it difficult for her to engage with him as a child on a childish level. To some extent Georgette lacked the kind of emotional intelligence necessary to understand him. She had no real concept of adapting her life to his so that by the time Richard became an adult he had spent twenty years learning to adapt his life to hers.

  And it was not only with Richard that Georgette could be emotionally unaware. Earlier that year, Frere, Heinemann, and one of their authors, Walter Baxter, had been charged with publishing an obscene libel. Baxter’s second book, The Image and the Search, had become a cause célèbre when the Director of Public Prosecutions issued proceedings and the case went to the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court. Frere could have had the case dismissed by paying a small fine and withdrawing the book, but he did not consider The Image and the Search obscene. As a matter of principle he chose to fight against what he (and many others) saw as outdated censorship laws. The case dragged on through the year and Frere found it an unpleasant and, at times, distressing affair. With each court appearance he was required to spend hours as a prisoner in the cells beneath the Old Bailey before entering the dock and to suffer the indignity and humiliation of being treated like a criminal. The law did not allow the accused to call expert witnesses, testify on their own behalf, or even to argue the merits of the book in question.

  Many people wrote to the papers to protest against this and other trials held that year, among them Somerset Maugham, J.B. Priestley, H.E. Bates, Bertrand Russell, and Graham Greene. On 18 October 1954 the case ended with a split jury and a plan for a retrial by the prosecution. On hearing the outcome, Georgette immediately wrote Frere one of her forthright letters. She intended to be helpful but it is doubtful whether her rallying tone brought much comfort to her friend:

  I can well imagine that you are by this time, after waiting three hours for the jury to disagree, spiritually & nervously exhausted, & have probably lost all sight of the utter triviality of the whole thing—to the extent of almost seeing yourself as a Murderer. It is unpleasant, rather degrading, & altogether distasteful, but intrinsically it doesn’t matter a tinker’s curse. I do hope you’ve managed to bear this in mind, & have not allowed an excess of sensibility to get you down.

  Twelve years earlier in Penhallow Georgette had written a description of her fictitious family: “They were all of them imperceptive, and insensitive enough to make it impossible for them to understand why anyone should be hurt by their cheerful brutality.” It was an apt description of her letter to Frere. She meant to be kind and bracing; instead she was tactless and insensitive. Her response to her friend’s anguish prompted even Ronald and Richard to tell her that she had “a callous disposition.” For all her imaginative powers and ability to depict human foibles with such sympathetic insight in her novels, in real life there were times when Georgette could be remarkably lacking in empathy and emotional understanding.

  After a second trial again returned a split verdict, a third in early December 1954 brought the Baxter case to an end. “The whole miserable business folded up on Thursday when a fresh Judge instructed a new jury to return a verdict of “Not Guilty,” Frere reported after his eighth appearance in the dock. Tired and disillusioned he told a friend:

  The lawyers say that this may end the witch hunt for a period and that they will stop wasting public money fo
r a while. The monstrous thing is that any common informer can start proceedings of this sort, and put an author and a publisher into the position of having to defend themselves at enormous cost with no hope of getting costs against the Crown in any circumstances. The lawyers also say that this may be the case which will change the law. The lawyers are nearly always wrong.

  But in this instance the lawyers were right, for the Baxter trial, along with several others heard that year, proved to be the catalyst for change. After representations from authors, citizens, publishers, printers, literary agents, and others in the industry, the 1959 Obscene Publications Act was passed amending the laws governing such cases. In 1960, the legal suit against D.H. Lawrence’s book Lady Chatterley’s Lover would be the first to be tested under the new legislation. It would be a victory for authors and publishers. But the impetus for change had come at a high cost for Frere—and for Baxter, who never wrote another book.

  Frere bore no grudge against Georgette for her bracing counsel. Genuinely liking and admiring her, he understood her better than most people. She was, furthermore, one of his top-selling authors. They lunched at Quaglino’s in November and it was here that Georgette finally met Dorothy Sutherland in the flesh. A director of Amalgamated Press had come in with the editor and on seeing Georgette had “begged permission to ‘present’ someone who was ‘very anxious to meet me.’ And the next instant, there was the S.B., looking rather like Cassius, only hungrier, bowing from the waist, and murmuring disjointed inaudibilities.” Georgette found the encounter highly entertaining but it did not lessen her dislike of Dorothy Sutherland.

  Bath Tangle came out in March 1955, but Georgette barely lifted her head from Book I, “Richard the Redeless,” of her medieval novel. By April, she had made encouraging progress and completed Book II, “The Unquiet Time.” To her dismay she had been forced to alter its original time frame of 1399–1413 to 1399–1406, having been unable to compress Henry IV’s reign into one book. Undeterred by the manuscript’s exponential growth, she had started Book III “Prince Excellent,” and told Pat Wallace: “I have now executed an Archbishop, and burnt a Lollard, so you will find me a bit above myself. It is a tremendous book—tremendously long, tremendously erudite, and tremendously dull.”

  But she was doomed to interruptions, for Dorothy Sutherland was already asking about a new Regency for serialization. “It is a hellish nuisance,” Georgette told Frere, “just as I’m getting on nicely with the Tome, but it can’t be helped. If I can turn out another bleeding romance by mid-July, I can get back to John without—I hope to God!—losing the thread.” Louisa Callender had retired the previous December and Georgette now asked Frere about the future handling of her contracts with Woman’s Journal: “Is Louisa’s successor going to handle the serial, or not? It is only a matter of arranging terms, of course, but I think someone had better do this for me, for that vulture-like creature would probably do me down if she could.” The “someone” turned out to be Frere himself, but not before his formidable author had enjoyed an epistolary tussle with her archenemy.

  Encouraged by their encounter at Quaglino’s and by a suggestion from Kipper Landon (who had been at school with Georgette’s brother Frank and had recently taken Georgette’s advice on his first manuscript) that he might be able to interview Georgette, Dorothy Sutherland had written to ask if she would consent to having her photograph taken for the magazine. Unfortunately her letter was exactly the kind of missive to rouse Georgette’s ire:

  Dear, dear Georgette Heyer:

  Have a heart! How could we publish an interview without a photograph? What would it look like? What would the readers think? Do please let Tom Blau come and take some with lots of background with his Leica and you shall tear them all up if you want to—but do please try! Please!

  Georgette’s reply was blunt:

  I detest being photographed, and have surely reached the time of life when I can please myself. As for being photographed At Work or In My Old World Garden, that is the type of publicity which I find nauseating, and quite unnecessary. My private life concerns no one but myself and my family; and if, on the printed page, I am Miss Heyer, everywhere else I am Mrs. Rougier, who makes no public appearances, and dislikes few things as much as being confronted by Fans…The facts of my life you can have, but not How I write My Books, or what my valueless views are on this or that question, and certainly no intimate glimpses of the author at home…Meanwhile, I’m trying to write a book, and, believe me it is quite fatal to badger me at such moments: it puts me in the wrong mood.

  Dorothy Sutherland could mistake neither the tone nor the message and a few weeks later Georgette triumphantly told Frere that she had “at last broken the S.B. of her repulsive habit of addressing me as ‘Dear Georgette Heyer.’ Today’s post brings me the briefest note I’ve ever received from her—the note of one in a dudgeon: ‘Dear Miss Heyer: I am asking Christopher Landon to write to you to arrange a meeting. Sincerely—’ That’ll larn me, won’t it?”

  The Christopher Landon interview never did take place and Georgette refrained from pitching her “existing manuscript (what there is of it) into the fire (which would be a good place for it),” and telling Dorothy Sutherland “to forget my very name.” She justified her sharp response to the editor by telling Frere that she was feeling peevish after being unwell and having to look after her mother who was also ill, and being difficult. Georgette felt beset by woe. She was struggling with the new Regency and told Frere that she had “never felt less like writing a gay romance, and am churning out heavy pastry in a slow and laborious fashion, and am quite likely to go into strong hysterics if anyone speaks a harsh word to me.” The reality was that she had been thwarted from working on her medieval novel. Having “once again laid John of Lancaster up in lavender, I felt as I did when I saw Richard off to his prep. school for the first time,” and so had taken the opportunity to vent her spleen at Dorothy Sutherland.

  Although Georgette knew John of Lancaster could not possibly be finished in a matter of months like her other novels, she found it frustrating to be constantly distracted from the book. She had convinced herself that it was the one thing she wanted to be doing. Whether she truly believed in John as a salable book and actually wanted to see it in print is debatable. Although she enjoyed her regular excursions into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the research made her feel like a serious writer, she had already told Frere that the novel would not sell “in huge quantities” and that admirers of “unhistorical fiction” would “not at all relish my book.” Her desire to succeed with her medieval tome may in part have been influenced by Carola Oman’s successful transition from historical romances to more serious books. Two years previously Carola’s Sir John Moore had won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography (just as Richard Aldington’s Wellington had in 1946). Georgette felt a direct connection to these books and their authors. Although she felt sure she would never win an award as a writer of historical fiction, there were still times when she yearned for that kind of recognition.

  Meanwhile, Ronald’s career was prospering nicely. He had developed a solid practice at the Parliamentary Bar and in August 1955 was elected a member of the Garrick Club (proposed by High Court judge, Sir Seymour Karminski, and seconded by Frere). Established in 1831, the Garrick’s members included many of the leading lights of the theater and literary worlds as well as lawyers, judges, and journalists. The club did not admit women as members, but they could dine there in the evening as members’ guests. The Garrick was home to a unique collection of paintings and theatrical memorabilia. In every room there were portraits of the theater’s most famous actors and actresses. Georgette enjoyed dining there beneath magnificent paintings by Zoffany, Samuel de Wilde, and Thomas Lawrence.

  Having put John of Lancaster away, she finally got on with her new book, Sprig Muslin. This would prove to be one of her most amusing, witty comedies, with an intriguing subplot and an older heroine whose gradual metamorphosis remains an ab
iding delight to Heyer readers. Soon after its publication the following spring Georgette was in the London bookstore, Truslove & Hanson, and overheard the kind of exchange guaranteed to infuriate her:

  “Have you got Georgette Heyer’s new book?”

  “Oh yes, indeed we have!—A Sprig of Muslin, you mean: it’s ever so pretty!”

  Autumn brought disappointing news about her American book sales. Georgette wrote to Frere to tell him that she was thinking “seriously about severing connections” with Putnam’s, her American publisher. Since 1946 they had published nine of her novels and at best she had only ever earned a bit over the advance—itself considerably smaller than her English advances. It was frustrating for she got “good notices, and enthusiastic fan letters; and when Doubleday handled my stuff there was never any question of not selling up to the advance.” Ted Purdy, Putnam’s Managing Director, had waxed lyrical about the potential of her medieval book to sell in the States, but Georgette was convinced that “when American publishers say that they want books about the Middle Ages they have in mind a welter of flesh, blood, sadism, and general violence. Breast-sellers, in fact.” While she had no intention of giving them John of Lancaster she let them have Sprig Muslin about which one American critic wrote: “As a plotter she has no superior.” Georgette remained unhappy with Putnam’s, however, and six years later finally severed connections with the firm.

  Early December found her working on a new short story for Everybody’s magazine. For once she had not found the writing easy and had spent ten days “churning out 8,000 words of SNOWBOUND” before deciding in the middle of the night that it would not do. Fortunately, she had “instantly succumbed to a fit of Brilliance, during which I evolved THE NECKLACE, which is so exactly what the Fans like that I’ve been feeling queasy ever since.” The story never did appear in Everybody’s and Georgette used the plot for her next Regency novel instead.