To Carole
And for our daughters, Deborah and Manuela
And our grandchildren, Lauren, Sam and Caitlin
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
1 A Fine and Private Place
2 A Law Unto Itself
3 Enter the Goons
4 Poly Bound
5 To Hull and Back
6 Poetry Returns to Hampstead
7 On the Road
8 Centre 42
9 To Aldus Then I Went
10 In the Hot Seat
11 Prophet in the Desert
12 September Cohen
13 Six Days in June
14 Moving Times
15 Walking on Water
16 Up and Running
17 Overture and Beginners
18 A Wrong Number
19 Reviewing the Situation
20 You’ve Got a What…!
21 Rumble in the City
22 Frankfurt Calls
23 Ted Hughes: A Family Affair
24 Publishing Matters
25 Some You Win…
26 In the Pink
27 Call Michael Winner!
28 The Worst of Times
29 Blues in the Park
30 Packing My Bags
Acknowledgements
Index
Plates
Copyright
1
A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE
It began with a warning, which I should perhaps have heeded. I must have been in my very early twenties at the time, earnestly writing what I thought were poems and vaguely contemplating going into publishing. Knowing this, an uncle of mine, Kenneth Snowman, whose books on Carl Fabergé were published by Faber, arranged for me to talk to one of the company’s founding directors with whom he was friendly.
Morley Kennerley, a tall and courteous American, received me warmly in Faber’s famous Russell Square offices, where I swore I could feel the breath of T. S. Eliot in the air. I don’t remember Mr Kennerley’s exact words as he delivered his cautionary message, but I still have the warning letter he sent me after our meeting. ‘Remember’, he wrote, ‘that to be a poet in publishing is rather like trying to be a virgin by night and a prostitute by day.’ It was many years before I was to fully appreciate the wisdom of his words, the poetry drying up as the publishing became all-consuming. I wonder now whether he ever gave the same advice to the great TSE.
Looking back, I realise that, ever the chameleon, I seem to have had several publishing lives (and two poetry ones), and if others are sometimes confused by the various names I’ve sheltered under, then I must confess I often am too: Robson Books, JR Books, the Robson Press… and who knows what’s yet to come? But what’s in a name!
Truth to say, as far as a life in publishing was concerned, nothing was ever really planned and nothing could have been further from my mind when I left school. A future in the law was on the cards then. The school I went to, Haberdashers’, now housed in lovely grounds in Elstree, was then in the rather less salubrious neighbourhood of Cricklewood (though it pretentiously called itself Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hampstead School). Many of the masters seemed to me to be relics of the war, and they were the ones who had to shout and whack to get attention. There was also a youngish master, a tall, gangly Australian we called Aussie Ostrich, who came in for a year to try to teach us maths and seemed to be cut from the same cloth.
Perhaps it was his first job, but he couldn’t for the life of him control the class, who would break into a riot of conversation the moment he entered, so not a lot of maths was learned. Clearly he’d complained about us to the head of the junior school, Mr Cooper, and as a result would suddenly round on this or that unfortunate boy, shouting, ‘Go down to Mr Cooper and get a hiding!’, as he must have been instructed to do. Now, a hiding from Mr Cooper would not be fun. I can vividly recall him walking through the door of the school’s indoor swimming pool and, on seeing a round mark on the recently painted white wall, asking in his dangerously quiet way who was responsible, all the while chewing menacingly on the transparent arms of his glasses. A boy gallantly owned up to throwing a tennis ball against the wall. He was sorry, he hadn’t meant to make a mark. But his protests were in vain, and the ice-cold Mr Cooper marched him out of the pool to his office. When the tearful boy returned five minutes later, he had six long, deep stripes on his behind. The mark of Cain, indeed. Perhaps appropriately, Mr Cooper used to take us for religious instruction and once, rather surprisingly, he decided we should discuss Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. Something made me ask him naively how a mistress could be coy. There was silence and much chewing on the spectacles, and only later did I realise how dangerously close to the flame I had flown. I shudder whenever that man’s face surfaces in my mind.
For some reason, a doctor would appear every so often to examine us and we’d have to line up and drop our trousers in turn while he made a grab for our no-longer-private parts. If it was to test our reactions, I must have passed with honours, given the record speed with which I pulled away. Or perhaps he was just preparing us for life. Now and again I certainly had the impression that there were some masters who would have willingly stood in for the doctor.
I remember my terror on my first day in the senior school, when the French master, Mr Barling, greeted us by warning that if anyone was late for his lessons he would wind the offender in and out of the radiators. Far too anxious then to appreciate that he was a man of humour, I stared at those radiators, wondering how he would do it. Nothing in my five relatively carefree years at Haberdashers’ Prep School had prepared me for this. Needless to say, none of us was ever late. Despite the introduction, I came to rather like and admire Taffy Barling, a superb teacher whose French was far superior to the others in his department, who all spoke a version that often sounded more like Franglais than the real thing. When they gave us a dictée, it was a matter of guessing what the words were in the text they were reading out and hoping you’d guessed right. Just as valuable to the school, Mr Barling was a first-class rugby coach who’d played for Wasps, and he’d race up and down the touchline as we played, screaming instructions. Rugby was never really my game, and I missed the football I’d played enthusiastically in earlier years.
It’s said that one inspiring teacher can change your life, and Mr W. A. Nicholas, who taught English to the senior forms, did mine. If not publishing, he certainly put poetry, and the magic and importance of it, into my mind. Not only was he suave and handsome in his black velvet jacket, with a caustic wit no one wanted to be on the receiving end of, he had that rare gift of making literature seem both vital and exciting. Everyone tried to live up to the standards he set.
For his part, Mr Nicholas was lucky to have a batch of exceptional boys to work with – most, I have to say, in the class above me, in all senses of the word. Among these was Leon Brittan, already then passionate about politics and a keen debater. Leon, of course, was to become Home Secretary under Margaret Thatcher, the youngest Home Secretary since Winston Churchill. I can’t claim great friendship with Leon, but we did play fives together on what was for him a rather painful occasion, since he smashed his hand against the fives court wall, and I remember him dancing up and down and rubbing his hands together. I always found him a gentleman in all respects, and it was shameful that he had to end his life under a shadow that should never have been there.
Brittan was one of a group of brilliant sixth-form boys who would often eat at lunchtime in a deli of sorts on nearby Cricklewood Broadway, where the food was rather more palatable than that on offer in the school canteen. I often joined them, hovering on the edge of their enlightening conversation. I kept in touch with Leon spasmodically after leaving school and from time to time he�
�d invite me to send a recent poem, always responding in a generous and not too critical way, whatever reservations he may have had. We met again some years later in Jerusalem at a small party given by another ex-Haberdasher and regular at those lunchtime forays, Leslie Sebba, now a professor of law at Jerusalem University. At the time, Leon, not yet an MP, was staying in Leslie’s flat and since the party was taking place in what was to be his bedroom, he had little option but to join in, spending part of the evening dancing with my wife, Carole. Dancing, apparently, like fives, was not his strongest suit!
Among the other outstanding Haberdashers of that time were Steven Rose, now an eminent professor of biology and neurology, and Michael Lipton, also a professor, specialising in rural poverty in developing countries. Their paths never directly crossed mine, but those of the Oxford economist Peter Oppenheimer and the iconoclastic theatre director Michael Kustow did to some extent. Peter, who had taken up Russian at school (unusual in those days), married one of Boris Pasternak’s nieces, and coincidently one of Pasternak’s sisters, Lydia Pasternak Slater, took part in the first of the poetry and jazz events I arranged in the early ’60s. It was the vivacious Peter who, when Carole and I visited him in Oxford, played us the ‘Reading of the Will’ sketch from a 1965 American comedy LP called You Don’t Have to Be Jewish… Samuel B. Cohen has died and the family are assembled to hear his lawyer read out (amidst gasps, sobs and applause) details of his lavish bequests: ‘To my son Sheldon, one million dollars, tax-free; to my daughter Jayne (with a ‘y’), the same; to my wife Miriam, two million dollars, tax-free, and everything that is not already in her name, including the Picasso at the back of the store.’ Finally the lawyer comes to the last named person, solemnly intoning: ‘And to my brother-in-law Louis, who lived with us all his life, always smoked the finest cigars – mine – never did a day’s work, who always said I’d never mention him in my will… Hello, Louis!’ It still makes me laugh.
Mike Kustow and I were both to become involved in Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 arts festivals, for which I directed the poetry events, but more of that later. Among other things, Kustow became an associate director of both the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where we gave a concert.
All these boys were very much at the centre of the school’s intellectual life, dominating the debating society and also a literary society called the Christmas Islanders. Looking back through the school magazine, Skylark, I was amused to see that in 1952 Leon Brittan actually spoke for the socialists in a mock election (what would Lady T have said about that!), while a few years later Steven Rose was calling Nye Bevan, Minister of Health in the post-war Attlee government, a ‘playboy Welsh crooner’. The other of the famous five, Michael Lipton also seemed to be hyperactive in the debating society and in 1952 he was selected by the BBC ‘in a competitive audition’ to speak in a special broadcast to America on foreign affairs.
They were also all bastions of the school dramatic society. On a lighter level, Kustow and Oppenheimer devised a school revue called Prank for which they wrote witty sketches, Peter and Mike starring along with two very attractive and talented girls, Jeannette Weitz and Pamela Walker. We didn’t appreciate it then, but our headmaster, Dr T. W. Taylor (known as ‘Spud’), must have been quite liberal for those times, in that he allowed the girls to take part in the revue, which created quite a stir among the tittering boys in the audience.
The fact that Dr Taylor had five daughters may well have had something to do with his relative broadmindedness, which seems also to have extended to religion: apart from the morning prayers in the large school hall, where the names of those ex-Haberdashers who had ‘given their lives for their country’ were displayed in gold on wooden panels along the walls, he arranged for Jewish prayers to be held at the same time. In fact, he attended these so frequently that some began to call him ‘our Jewish headmaster’, which he certainly was not. He seemed an aloof and shy man, but later I learned that his first name was Tom, which made him seem much more human. Distant as he was, rumour had it that he knew the names of so few boys that he would write ‘Persevere’ on reports at random.
Years later I was reminded of that old, cold school hall where the external O and A level exams were held when I happened to hear an episode of Desert Island Discs with the contentious art critic Brian Sewell, who recalled sitting in that very hall himself, taking art A level, which he said was rather frowned upon. Sewell described how a particularly philistine science teacher who was overseeing the proceedings paced up and down, his shoes loudly tapping the floor as if in disapproval and disturbing Sewell’s concentration. As he spoke, I could see the hall before my eyes and recalled the exams I had anxiously sat there myself, and I also knew exactly who the master was, although he was not named. Sewell was someone I would have loved to publish, and I did come very close to signing up his outrageously frank autobiography, having a number of long and friendly conversations with him on the phone in which I gave him the assurance he asked for that we would not cut or censor it. That was the book in which he revealed that he’d had well over a thousand male lovers, giving much juicy detail… Then, just a couple of years ago, when he was already quite ill, Sewell took up my offer to write a short, controversial book on the art world for a series we had started, but alas his strength began to wane before he had got very far, and he had to abandon it. He had seemed to relish the idea of going out with a provocative bang.
Remarkably, four other Haberdashers’ boys were later to play important parts in my publishing life. At just under seven feet tall, Michael Rivkin loomed largest. Always in trouble, he was too big for the school in every sense and on one memorable occasion he lost his rag with a teacher he’d accused of picking on him, rising to his full height and smashing his fist down in anger on a wooden desk, splitting it into flying pieces. Even the master had to laugh. I have another vivid memory of Michael standing a girl on a table at a party so he could dance cheek to cheek with her. We were close friends, and it was Michael, by then a high-flying property tycoon, who later proposed that I start my own publishing company and guaranteed the necessary finance. At Michael’s prompting also, Jeremy Morris, my valiant tennis partner in many school matches, who’d qualified as an accountant after studying law at Cambridge, came on board to look after the finances for our first few years, which was invaluable. (I remember Jeremy being an extremely fast runner at school – not a bad thing for an accountant to be.) Third up was the quick-minded and outspoken Jeffrey Pike, who, like Michael, had become very successful. Jeffrey was to prove himself a real friend when, sensing the personal strain Carole and I were under after some twenty-five years of independent publishing, he made it his generous business to help find a publishing partner for us. Lastly there was Laurence Orbach, son of Maurice Orbach, then a Labour MP, and brother of Susie Orbach, the psychotherapist and writer. Laurence founded the Quarto publishing group I was eventually to join (as JR Books) for some three years.
But back to the two girls who appeared in the school revue and really brought it to life, both of whom went on to greater things. Under the stage name of Fiona Walker, Pamela has appeared in numerous theatre and TV roles and in a number of films including Far from the Madding Crowd with Julie Christie. Despite her obvious talent, Jeannette (now Kupfermann) never really wanted to pursue an acting career, though she did land a few small film roles before going to LSE to study anthropology, and later making her mark as a writer and feature journalist. At LSE she did return briefly to the boards, playing Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, and at one point she even became Miss Air France, appearing bikini-clad on posters. Jeannette married the American painter Jacques Kupfermann about a month after Carole and I married, and the four of us spent many Sunday evenings together eating pasta and watching movies. Jacques died too young, and Jeannette wrote a sensitive and helpful book about widowhood, When the Crying’s Done, which we published.
In the heady and innocent days
of the school revue and after, Jeannette appeared rather bohemian for a north-west London girl, and I sensed that the popular French novelist Françoise Sagan and the Left Bank singer Juliette Gréco were more her role models than the academics she was later to follow. (Did the firebrand Sagan really say, ‘A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to take it off you’?) It was through Jeannette, who sometimes came jiving at the 100 Club with me, that I became friendly with the Beat poet Pete Brown. Come Saturday night, Pete always knew of a party somewhere, and the fact that he hadn’t been invited rarely stopped him. My chums and I would readily follow in his wake, and Jeannette and her attractive friend Jackie were often already there. At those parties there was always a lot of bold talk as the booze went down, but talk it generally remained, though it was often highly amusing, for even then Pete, who liked to hold court, was something of a comedian. Passionate about the great jazz saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, and modelling himself on the American Beat poets, he seemed to talk in riffs, bouncing his inventive verbal improvisations onto the heads of his inebriated listeners, whose critical senses were by then more than a little inhibited.
I remember driving him home in my battered little old car one night from God-knows-where to his parents’ house on the Hendon Way, spilling a very drunk Pete into the arms of his mother, who more or less accused me of poisoning her collapsing son, exclaiming, ‘Drink couldn’t do this to my Pete!’ But it could, Mrs Brown, it could! That car, a cramped black Morris, cost £40, and whenever you put your foot on the brake you had to pray at the same time for the car to stop. Fortunately, I was the one driving that night, not Pete.
With the poet and songwriter Pete Brown, who always knew where the parties were.
As well as continuing to write his special brand of often very funny performance poetry, the talented Pete went on to become a highly successful songwriter, co-writing with Jack Bruce the lyrics to some of Cream’s biggest hits. He’s also had various bands of his own over the years, including the Battered Ornaments, with whom he sang, and he continues to perform.
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