Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  But not quite… I still wasn’t home and dry, as the administrative editor wanted to vet me, and I found myself facing an alarming lady called Frame-Smith, who peered at me in Dame Edna fashion though oversize lenses, asked me some awkward questions about my experience, paused, as if wondering what I was doing there, called me ‘honey’ several times, then offered me a salary of £1,000 a year and two weeks’ paid holiday, with my agreement to being called in on Saturdays if needs be. I was to start on 16 April 1963 on a three-month trial basis, working with Douglas Hill as an assistant editor. I couldn’t have been more terrified, or more excited.

  To call Aldus Books just a packaging company, creating illustrated books and marketing international editions, would be to sell it very short. In a way it was that, but it was also the creation of Wolfgang Foges, an Orson Wellesian figure who is generally regarded as the pioneer of book packaging. Indeed, the publisher Anthony Blond called him ‘the father of them all’. Everything Foges touched had class and extravagance all over it, and if I dwell on him for a moment it is because so much of what followed in my own career stemmed from those larger-than-life Aldus days.

  The son of a Viennese obstetrician and gynaecologist, Foges was born into a family which, though Jewish, was not in the least bit observant (it seems Christmas was the only festival they celebrated). Indeed, he loved to challenge prominent Jews he met with the age-old question ‘What is a Jew?’, proudly declaring that he’d neither been circumcised nor had a bar mitzvah, and never waiting for an answer. On at least one occasion I heard him gleefully throwing the question at David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s legendary first Prime Minister, from whom he’d commissioned a book, though I’m not sure B-G understood what he was talking about (especially as Foges would muddle things by muttering something about there having been a famous rabbi in his family). But back to his story: just after the First World War, when Foges was nine and money was tight, he’d been sent to foster parents in Sweden for a year, returning to find his father had died. Then he was shipped off to a boarding school (quite possibly at the suggestion of Freud, a family friend). Is it any wonder he was to become such a contrary personality? Later he studied for three years in Weimar, sharing a room with the future rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. He set up his first publishing imprint shortly after, taking over a glossy magazine and learning to publish in the contemporary Continental style, with striking illustrations sourced by researchers and a carefully integrated text.

  In 1937, when things became too dangerous – even for one who was both uncircumcised and unbarmitzvahed (Hitler clearly having his own criteria as to who was a Jew) – Foges decamped to London, starting a small production company called Adprint, and then another called Rathbone. At that time, British publishers had scant experience of this kind of publishing, so when he arrived in England he found a ready market for his visually orientated books and he quickly made his mark, producing the innovative King Penguin series and books for Collins, Hamlyn, Pitman and the Ministry of Information. It’s salutary now, in this austere, computerised age, to look back at the books and series and authors he published. There was, for instance, a fifteen-volume World of Music series, followed by a seven-volume poetry series (all now collector’s items) with coloured lithography by such contemporary artists as Michael Ayrton and John Piper. A book on butterflies kicked off a natural history series with over a hundred titles; then there was a bestselling history of mathematics by Lancelot Hogben; The Story of Music by Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst; British Dramatists by Graham Greene; English Women by Edith Sitwell; British Birds by James Fisher; and so on.

  In 1960, Foges resigned from his other companies and started Aldus Books, backed by the American publishing giant Doubleday. His editorial board included Jacob Bronowski and Julian Huxley and his authors were generally intellectually distinguished, often famous – Carl Jung, Bertrand Russell, Louis MacNeice, J. B. Priestley and Compton Mackenzie are just a few of the names in the Aldus Who’s Who. In a way, Foges can be measured by the extraordinary people who worked for him. In earlier times he had employed Walter Neurath (founder of Thames & Hudson), George Rainbird and Max Parrish, all of whom followed where he had led. When I joined Aldus, there was a staff of some seventy people – editors, designers, picture and text researchers – all talented, some eccentric, most with outsize personalities. The researcher on the first book I worked on was the future award-winning biographer and novelist Diana Souhami, and among the researchers and designers, past and present, were the avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew; Edwin Taylor, who was to revolutionise the typography of the Sunday Times; and Germano Facetti, who directed the redesign of Penguin Books. Some of the editors were or became successful writers – Malcolm Ross Macdonald, a bestselling novelist; Douglas Hill, a major science fiction writer; David Lambert, a much-published author – while several others went on to found their own publishing companies.

  Where Foges was concerned, everything had to be of the highest quality: writing, production, editorial and pictorial content – and no expense was to be spared. No wonder his companies never made money. I can just imagine how his Doubleday overlords must have raged with frustration when they came on one of their regular visits to the London office. Figures? What had figures to do with it? A powerful man both physically and intellectually, with a large, leonine head, Foges was quite impossible to pin down or control. The fact that he could never quite get his tongue around the English language was in some ways endearing, but in others rather frightening. When he wanted to see someone, his summoning cry ‘Come!’ would reverberate around the building. It was some time before I came into his orbit, but once I did I scarcely left it.

  To my surprise, I discovered that Laurie Lee had crossed swords with Foges in the past, for when I wrote to tell him I was joining Aldus Books, he responded in true Laurie style: ‘I used to know Wolfie quite well. Astonish him and confuse him with your intelligence and I think you’ll find him an excellent boss. But beware if he gives you a cigar.’ I had been warned.

  * * *

  Douglas Hill was a sharply intelligent, sensitive, highly cultivated man and a good poet to boot. He was also generous, and on my first day he took me to lunch at the Etoile in Charlotte Street to welcome me to the fold. It seemed extravagant, but I soon learned that Foges lunched there or at the White Tower most days, puffing at one of his expensive cigars as he launched himself down Charlotte Street. Shortly after, Douglas invited Carole and me to dinner at his flat in Holborn so we could meet his wife Gaila (the writer and broadcaster Gail Robinson) and their baby son Michael. The dinner did not get off to the best of starts when we discovered there was a strictly non-kosher rabbit on the menu: I might have succumbed to that steak in Paris, but rabbit was a hop too far. I thought we’d best come clean straight away, and after embarrassed apologies all round we ended up with a welcome omelette. The dessert too posed a hiccup for Carole since pumpkin pie (a Canadian delicacy) was not something her Middle Eastern taste buds could cope with, though she tried valiantly. The Hills didn’t seem to mind, and we survived the occasion to eat together many another day.

  Douglas was a great editor; working with him was an apprenticeship like no other. From him I learned that with application you could make almost any text work if the will to do so was there. In the case of the first book I worked on, a history of gambling, it was not so much a question of rewriting a sloppy text but of getting the author to expand it, adding colour and detail and making sure it wasn’t too English – for, as I quickly learned, everything had to be not just international, but in the Aldus style, which meant American spelling and punctuation, and, because of the pictures, the text had to be written to an exact length. Later, when I left Aldus, I found it hard to revert to British spelling and usage. Should I use ‘s’ or ‘z’? I was never quite sure, and the Webster’s dictionary that had become my bible wasn’t really much help.

  At that time Douglas was working on a book called Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung. It was a mass
ive and complex project and one of Foges’s great triumphs, for Jung had always resisted having his work popularised. But Foges had seen him talking to John Freeman in one of BBC Television’s celebrated Face to Face programmes, and somehow he’d managed to persuade Freeman to go to Switzerland on his behalf and propose to Jung that Aldus publish a book about his life’s work. ‘Jung listened to me in his garden for two hours without interruption,’ wrote Freeman afterwards, ‘and then said no.’ But Foges was too excited by the idea to let it go, and he managed to get Freeman to go back once more, with him, to try again. Remarkably, Jung had had a dream (and dreams were all-important to him) in which he was speaking in the marketplace to a great audience who couldn’t comprehend what he was saying, and he had read this as a sign. Foges, it seems, was to be his saviour, and this time he agreed to the proposed book, setting down various complicated conditions, and he completed it ten days before his death – a 500-page monster that Douglas was struggling to put to bed. When, some fifty years later, I was offered a book on John Freeman, I remembered this story and was glad to sign up Hugh Purcell’s masterly biography of the mercurial Freeman, a man who had nine remarkable careers, of which his famous television series was but one.

  Besides all this, the gambling book I was working on seemed rather humdrum, but it was the perfect book on which to cut my teeth and I’d pass edited chapters to Douglas, who would sometimes suggest areas where I could expand or elaborate further. Once I knew him a little better I’d also show him new poems and be grateful for his insightful comments. After a while it became a two-way trade and I appreciated his confidence in letting me see his poems. It was our secret poetry society, which naturally led to my asking Douglas to read at some poetry and jazz concerts. It was good to be able to add his wry Canadian voice to the mix and to introduce him to Dannie Abse and then to Elizabeth Thomas, for whom he started to review science fiction. Later, when he’d left Aldus and Elizabeth moved from Tribune to the New Statesman, Douglas took over as Tribune’s literary editor.

  As editors, we were spoilt rotten at Aldus, since on top of everything else there was a copy-editing department of three to put every word under the microscope (inevitably they came back with umpteen pernickety queries). I think they were responsible for my first migraine attack! Then there was the marvellous team of researchers, and an art editor to liaise with. I quickly got the hang of it all and came to realise that the art of good editing is not to impose one’s own style on an author, but to absorb theirs, so that when you make changes it is in his or her voice, not yours. It means having a good ear together with a large dose of humility. It’s the author’s book, after all, not the editor’s. I remember Alan Sillitoe writing in his autobiography that when his bestselling classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning first did the rounds of publishers, several editors came back more or less telling him how he should rewrite or change it. Alan’s response was simple: write your own book if you can, but don’t mess with mine.

  When I first started work at Aldus it was in Lower Oxford Street, near Tottenham Court Road Station, and I would often meet Carole for lunch in the cellar of a nearby coffee house called Bunjies, one of the original folk cafés of the 1950s and ’60s, which was down an adjacent side street. After a few months, the company moved into large, Lego-like, American-style offices in Fitzroy Square which had been specially designed and more or less rebuilt for Aldus, going way over budget in true Foges fashion. Douglas and I shared an office on the ground floor, overlooking the square, and the other editors – Kit Coppard (son of the short-story writer A. E. Coppard), Roy Gasson and Nick Russell – were alongside, on the same floor, fine editors all. The flamboyant Kit and I became good friends and we would often play squash at lunchtime at the nearby White House. Among his many interests, Kit enjoyed folk music, and we went to enjoyable parties at the Coppards’ Belsize Park flat, singing the evening away.

  Upstairs at Aldus was the holy of holies, Foges occupying a suitably enormous office, with his stocky secretary/assistant/guard Joyce always on duty outside, dressed in what looked like battle fatigues. The formidable Frame-Smith (known as Frame) was in a nearby office, and along the corridor was a team of Foges faithfuls – Count Hans Coudenhove, who looked after foreign sales; Mr Hellmore, a calm, soberly dressed, indispensable accountant whose first name I only discovered after I’d left; and Frederic Ullstein, son of the youngest of the four brothers who founded the German publishing dynasty. Ullstein seemed to be a kind of Foges troubleshooter, doing his bidding and putting a rather negative spin on whatever he came across. At any rate that was my impression at the time, which may be a harsh judgement on a man whose Jewish origins (as I found out only recently) forced him to leave Germany, where the family lost their business. Coming to England, he’d worked as a farmer before joining the army and marrying into the Guinness family. He and I locked horns on several occasions, but never unpleasantly. His life can’t have been easy, and apart from anything else he had Foges to contend with day and night. Upstairs there was also a large art department, and in the basement a library where the researchers worked and gossiped.

  One of the great advantages of Fitzroy Square for me was that we’d ended up bang next door to the Centre 42 office, where Arnold Wesker and his co-director Beba Lavrin were based, and opposite the offices of the Scorpion Press, a small publisher with a first-rate poetry list on whom I’d sometimes call. What’s more, the clinic where Dannie Abse worked (and scribbled poems when no one was looking) was just around the corner, so we would often meet up at lunchtime, sometimes going to a salt beef restaurant called Felds in Wells Street where the powerful-looking, extremely rude Mr Feld would raise huge carving knives in the air like the demon barber himself and eventually do us the great favour of cutting us some beef. Douglas would join us occasionally, enjoying both the salt beef and the show. Other times, Dannie and I would stroll through Soho, playing on the pinball machines or dropping into the Patisserie Valerie in Old Compton Street, or into Bob Chris’s colourful second-hand bookshop in Cecil Court. It should really have been called Chris Court, since the white-haired bookseller would sit there like a king, rounding on any unsuspecting customer who had the temerity to walk through his door, and generally entertaining the writers who’d stop by to savour the cabaret. Inevitably he’d ask us to post a letter for him when we left. I always found him somewhat intimidating.

  Just as formidable was the uniformed doorman who accosted me whenever I went to pick up Dannie for one of our lunchtime sorties. ‘Dr Abse, please,’ I’d say distinctly, and without fail he’d respond, ‘I’ll let Dr Aspe know you’re here.’ One evening Joan Abse called for her husband. Time and again over the years she’d tried to correct the doorman, but to no avail. Always her ‘I’ve come to see Dr Abse’ was met with the rejoinder, ‘I’ll tell Dr Aspe you’re here.’ She knew when she was beaten, so one day, in rather a hurry and to save time, she asked for ‘Dr Aspe’. ‘There’s no Dr Aspe here,’ came the sharp response. ‘You mean, Dr Abse.’ I can still hear Joan laughing as she told the story.

  A colourful Soho denizen we bumped into on one of our lunchtime walks was the poet and writer Paul Potts. I’d first met him at Douglas and Gaila’s flat, for they were great admirers of this passionate, highly volatile wanderer, and perhaps the fact that he’d been brought up in Canada (though English) had something to do with their friendship. He was a large, bald man with a stammer which seemed to be compounded by the excited way he talked and the speed with which the words queued up to be released. He produced pamphlets of his own poetry which he sold in the streets and bars of Soho, and when my own Penny Pamphlet was produced, there were several references to his in reviews that appeared at the time, for he was a well-known figure. Eventually, perhaps because he never paid, or just because he was ‘trouble’, Paul was barred from some Soho pubs. Dannie had once run into him outside a restaurant in Charlotte Street and Paul had begged him for some money, saying, ‘Dannie, Dannie, I haven’t eaten for days,’ and of course Dann
ie, feeling sorry for him, had coughed up. Then, as Paul disappeared swiftly down the street, the restaurant manager came rushing out shouting, ‘Where did that man go? He’s just eaten here and left without paying his bill!’ Paul died in poverty, leaving behind a touching memoir called Dante Called You Beatrice, which I love for its openness and idealistic fervour.

  Dannie Abse, my lifelong friend and Laurie Lee’s friendly rival when it came to selling books, at an early concert.

  A rather more sober figure Dannie and I came across one lunchtime was the poet Edmund Blunden, who impressed me greatly. The longest-serving of the Great War poets, he’d seen continuous action from 1916 to 1918, and here he was, lively and alert and readily accepting Dannie’s invitation to join us for a drink. I thought of this strange meeting when, a few years later, I went to Hull to give a reading with Vernon Scannell, one of the finest poets of the Second World War. Some students met us at the station and in the car on the way to the university campus one of them turned to Vernon and (getting his wars and their poets confused) said, ‘I’m surprised to see you here today, Mr Scannell.’ An amused Mr Scannell was delighted to be there.

  Edmund Blunden was an historic literary figure for me, joined in my mind with Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, and so was Louis MacNeice, who surprised me one day when Douglas was out by walking into our office and asking if he could make a phone call. More than a little tongue-tied, I pointed to the phone on Douglas’s desk and said, ‘Of course.’ I was far too taken aback to introduce myself and engage him in conversation; besides, he seemed the kind of shy man who valued his privacy. Although in my mind he was one of the mythical ’30s poets along with Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis and Stephen Spender, he can only have been in his mid-fifties (a great deal younger than I am now!), had just finished a book on astrology for Aldus which Douglas had edited, and was continuing to write poems with great style and vigour, as I was shortly to discover. Tragically, he died a few months following that visit to Aldus, after potholing in Yorkshire and catching pneumonia. I always regretted my reticence but was at least able to voice my thoughts about him when, towards the end of that year, I was sent a posthumous book of his poems, The Burning Perch, to review. They had, I sensed, a disturbing premonition of death: