Another author I was able to bring in early on was Lynne Reid Banks, whose The L-Shaped Room had been a huge bestseller and made into a film starring Leslie Caron. Though not Jewish, Lynne had spent eight years on a kibbutz with her sculptor husband Chaim Stephenson. I had read an evocative piece by her in the JC describing how she’d taken the children from her kibbutz on an outing to celebrate one of the Jewish festivals and told them stories. It made me think she could write an excellent novel for older children, and I wrote to her suggesting this. She responded quickly with a number of questions as she hadn’t written for children before – what length, what level should the writing be pitched at, etc. Since I, for my part, had never published a children’s book, I sought advice, and everyone said, ‘Tell her not to write down, not to condescend,’ so I passed this on to Lynne and she decided to accept the proposal. The book she wrote, One More River, the moving story of a developing friendship between a young Israeli girl and an Arab boy, divided by the Jordan river and eventually by the Six Day War, was superb. Simon & Schuster bought the US rights, and Penguin agreed to publish a UK paperback edition. For Lynne, it was the beginning of a successful career as a children’s writer.
I’d been at VM for about six months when copies of my new book of poems, In Focus, landed on my desk. Like any author, I anxiously awaited the reviews, but I got off relatively unscathed and my publishers seemed satisfied with the reception. There were a few readings lined up to tie in with the publication, and I undertook these gladly. I also had an invitation from Peter Orr, head of the British Council’s sound section, to record eleven poems from the book, together with an interview, for a series of poets reading their own work which they had instigated in collaboration with the Poetry Room of Yale University, copies of the tape going to various universities and British Council offices overseas. At about the same time, I was asked by the BBC to read one of my poems for a Radio 4 schools programme, and also to read two for a TV programme about the poetry and jazz scene, which was to include an interview with Robin Ray. Finally, to end a very busy period, Michael Garrick wrote with the good news that he’d been booked for the BBC’s Jazz Workshop programme and that the producer would like me to read three of the poems I’d written for jazz, to be recorded at the Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street. All this greatly boosted my new book and was an exciting diversion from the day job, though I tried not to let it intrude too obviously.
As thrilling as all this was, it was swiftly overshadowed and swept aside when Carole discovered she was pregnant – and not just pregnant, but pregnant with twins. If I was taken aback, she was even more so, staggering into the office of my cousin Teddy Stonehill, who was working as a doctor in the hospital where she’d just had the scan, and collapsing on his couch. Apparently a little brandy did the trick (you can always rely on Ted for a drink).
Expecting a first baby probably throws most people into something of a tizz, and you tend to forget that women have been having babies for quite some time as the world about you shrinks (I nearly said contracts) and you find yourself focusing on this one wondrous event. Having twins doubles all that. Like any young couple, we looked up books and tried to discover as much as possible. Strangely, there was very little about twins at that time (we were to change that in due course with the publication of our Twins Handbook). One thing we read everywhere was that when a baby is on the way, you shouldn’t add to the tension and anxiety by moving house. However, with only one bedroom in our little bungalow and the sudden prospect of being four, we ignored the advice, put the house on the market and started looking around for something a little larger, which we’d been saving up to do anyway. Carole went to antenatal classes with an exuberant childbirth guru called Betty Parsons, whose credo was ‘Relax for pregnancy and life’. I attended an alarming fathers’ evening with this enthusiastic lady – just in time, as it turned out. She didn’t quite get all the expectant fathers to ‘push’, but I felt she might do so any minute.
Meanwhile, the world and the publishing (and the poetry) continued. There were two books I was proud to sign up during this period. Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary, a story of great heroism and sacrifice, was particularly important. Hannah was among thirty-seven Jews from Palestine who volunteered to be parachuted by the British into Yugoslavia during the Second World War to assist in the rescue of Hungarian Jews. She was caught, but, despite being tortured by the Nazis, refused to reveal details of her mission or the code to her transmitter. Hannah had kept a diary right up to the night she left, and this, together with some of her poems, formed the bulk of the book, but it also included dramatic accounts by two of the men who parachuted with her and were also captured. Thrown into the same prison as Hannah, they were able to recount how she was caught, brutally tortured and executed by firing squad. The book also included a heartbreaking account by Hannah’s mother Catherine, who was still in Budapest at the time of her daughter’s capture and tried desperately to save her. I worked carefully on the translation and even tinkered with the English translation of a few of her poems, to the evident satisfaction of her mother, who came to London to speak about her daughter and help launch the book. It was a moving occasion. Hannah is a national heroine in Israel, where her poems are widely read. As VM had published the original British hardback edition of Anne Frank’s Diary, it was fitting that we should bring out this classic too.
The other title I brought in at this time was by the actor David Kossoff. Apart from his distinguished film and theatrical career, Kossoff had written a book of Bible stories for Collins, which, because of his uniquely dramatic style, had become a bestseller. David Frost had labelled him ‘Bible storyteller to the nation’. When I was introduced to Kossoff at a reception, I asked him if he would be willing to write a book for us. He seemed reasonably receptive, asking me whether I had any particular ideas in mind, and on the spur of the moment I suggested that a Kossoff-style retelling of the Masada story would make a powerful book. Masada was the mountain stronghold on the eastern edge of the Judean Hills, overlooking the Dead Sea, where at the end of the Jewish revolt against the Romans in around 73ad nearly a thousand Jewish men, women and children committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Roman legions besieging them. According to the historian Josephus, only two women and five children survived, and David had the imaginative idea of telling the story, both of Masada and of the Jewish revolt, through the eyes and voices of the two women. A trained draughtsman, he also agreed to illustrate and draw maps for the book he called The Voices of Masada. It was an outright success and led to his writing other books for us, and to a friendship with him and his wife, Jenny. David was said to be a prickly man, though I never found him anything but friendly and accommodating, and when we were promoting his book I enjoyed listening to him at literary events recounting how his Bible stories book had evolved into a TV series. ‘This’, he would say, referring to the lunches he was invited to at TV headquarters, ‘was no carry-your-own-tray affair.’
By now it was September 1970 and Carole was really large, although only just into her ninth month. My father (who had predicted twins very early on) warned us to be on standby since twins generally arrive early, and he was right, for on the 17th Carole woke me at around 1 a.m. to say she thought things were on the move. They certainly were. Panicking a little, despite Mrs Parsons’s explicit instructions, we threw on some clothes, alerted the hospital and fell into the car. There was hardly any traffic as I drove as fast as I dared along the Edgware Road towards St George’s Hospital, then near Hyde Park Corner, only to be stopped by the police. I explained the urgency of the situation and they waved us on, wishing us luck and telling me to drive carefully. I think they would have provided an escort had we asked for it! Carole was in labour through the morning and into the early afternoon when, to the delight of the medical students who had asked permission to attend and the immense relief of her husband (who’d been drawing on a small flask of whisky throughout), she finally gave birth to two tiny, beautiful girls, Deb
orah and Manuela. I couldn’t have been more thrilled and more at sea, but in the middle of it all I suddenly remembered that I was due to take part in a poetry and jazz concert that night in Sutton, and I phoned Michael Garrick and explained that I would not be there. It was the only concert I’d missed in all the years we’d been giving them. But what better reason could there be?
As the new house we had managed to buy still had decorators all over it, we decided to accept my grandmother’s gracious invitation to stay with her. It was a blessing in a way, since my grandfather had recently died and our company was a great comfort to her; it also made life much easier for us. And so, several days after they were born, we eased our tiny daughters into the back of our car as if they were the most delicate and valuable of breakable items (which to us they were) and I edged away from the hospital a great deal more slowly than when I’d driven Carole there. Our world had changed, and nothing would ever be the same.
* * *
At that time, the Jewish Chronicle was in many ways the paper of the Jewish community (they used to say that if you didn’t have your obituary in the JC, you weren’t dead). But though it carried considerable authority, David Kessler never really seemed to me to be an establishment figure. Not an Orthodox nor even an observant Jew, he nevertheless cared about community matters and had a lifelong interest in the Falashas, the black Jews of Ethiopia, about whom he wrote a book. But he was also very much the country gentleman, with a lovely home in the pretty village of Stoke Hammond in Buckinghamshire, where he and his wife Matilda were pillars of the local community – in fact, David, who enjoyed walking, was known locally as ‘the squire’. Matilda, who was not Jewish, was a magistrate, something I’d forgotten when David invited Carole and me to tea one Sunday. As Vernon Scannell happened to be staying with us that weekend, I asked whether I could bring him with us. David said he’d be welcome. However, what I’d also forgotten was that poor Vernon had only recently spent a short time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for being drunk in charge. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds: he had been drinking after a reading (as one does) somewhere in the country and on returning to his car had rightly decided he wasn’t in a fit state to drive, so he’d run the car onto a verge and gone to sleep. Unfortunately, in doing so he’d scraped the fence of the adjacent house and the enraged owner had called the police, who woke Vernon up and arrested him. The literary world was up in arms when he was given a jail sentence, but to no avail.
We poets all felt Vernon had acted responsibly in the circumstances, but Mrs Kessler was far from sympathetic when the story came out over tea and scones on the lawn, and I realised I’d committed a faux pas which had embarrassed everyone. David was decent enough to gloss over the incident (even laugh), and our relationship was unaffected by the gaffe. (What I didn’t tell the Kesslers was that when the milkman called at the Scannell household one morning, Vernon’s little son told him, ‘My dad is on holiday in Brixton.’)
Around this time, the publisher Chatto & Windus accepted my proposal (via John Smith’s literary agency) to edit an anthology of The Young British Poets, an expanded and more comprehensive version of the bilingual book I’d edited a few years earlier for Poésie Vivante. Although my reviewing for Tribune (which still continued) had brought me into contact with many of the young poets then writing, I still had to do a fair amount of fresh reading and also, once I had selected the poems I wanted to include (the poets had to be born after 1935, thus being thirty-five or under), I then needed to contact them or their publishers for permission. In some cases the poets sent me new poems, and it was good to be able to consider these along with, or instead of, those already chosen. I was pleased to have made some discoveries and to have included poets who were then relatively unknown but are now the very opposite. My ‘cast’ included three outstanding Irish poets – Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon – as well as Brian Patten, Tony Harrison, Robert Nye, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Douglas Dunn and Hugo Williams. One of the rewards of editing this anthology was the friendly correspondence I enjoyed with many of the contributors, some inviting me to stay or suggesting meeting up when they were in town. I must have mentioned to Michael Longley that we’d recently had twins, for he wrote me a warm letter revealing that he himself was a twin and that his father’s phrase to describe his ‘privilege’ was ‘tuppenny stung for a penny bung’. How colourfully Irish! Interestingly, the Irish poets didn’t seem to be worried by the word ‘British’ in the title of the book, though I suspect they might have been later, especially Seamus.
The Young British Poets anthology, which I edited for Chatto, brought me into contact with poets who are now among our finest.
There was wide and generally very positive coverage in the press, and I was amazed to wake up on the Sunday of publication to find a lead review in The Observer by Kingsley Amis, who seemed to approve of my introduction and selection, writing: ‘A look through the text bears out these heartening declarations … no stock tactics, no word-salads, no obscurity, no trip-taking, very little mere showmanship.’ I felt relieved, knowing the sharpness of his pen. The Guardian was also kind, saying the book ‘should be useful for anyone who wants to find names to watch for’, while the respected poet and critic Richard Church, writing in Country Life, called it ‘a valuable surprise for readers who are sick of so much pretentious nonsense that is offered as the poetry of our day … Every one of these young poets has something to offer that is distinctly a personal revelation of experience.’ I’d happily settle for that, or for the Irish Press, which said, ‘All the poets are first class.’ To counter this, however, there was an interminable review in the London Magazine in which the venerable Geoffrey Grigson seemed to devote most of the space to claims he thought I’d made for the book in the blurb, taking issue with the fact that it drew comparisons with the earlier influential anthologies New Signature and New Lines. What he hadn’t realised was that the blurb was written not by me but by the Poet Laureate, Cecil Day-Lewis, who was a director of Chatto! I smiled quietly to myself, leaving Mr Grigson to prattle on and vaunt his wit, and I did so again just now on reading this description of him on Wikipedia: ‘Fiercely combative, he made many literary enemies for his dogmatic views.’ Not of me, he hadn’t. He’d just made me smile, as I remembered the old adage about measuring your reviews, rather than reading them. Despite Mr G, the book did well enough, going into a mass-market paperback edition with Corgi and being published in America.
* * *
I’d never been to the Frankfurt Book Fair, though at Aldus Books I’d heard endless talk about it, since this was where Wolfgang Foges always held court in the salons of the exclusive (and very expensive) Frankfurter Hof. Whether he ever graced the ordinary fair halls with his presence is questionable. Guy Meyers hadn’t been to Frankfurt either and we both felt that with our expanding list we should take a small stand. To save money, we drove there and stayed in a hotel outside the town.
I hadn’t realised until we approached the German frontier from Belgium just how uneasy I felt at the prospect of stepping onto German soil. It was almost dark when we reached the customs post, which made it seem all the more eerie, and I felt a surge of panic as we were approached by two heavily armed policemen. But Guy calmed me down and we drove through. That first fair was memorable for one thing in particular: a man with a black bag full of books stopping at our stand, pointing to a poster and asking, ‘What’s your David Kossoff book?’ That man was Tom McCormack, CEO of St Martin’s Press, and he’d just bought Kossoff’s book of Bible stories from Collins. I described The Voices of Masada as vividly as I could and he said he’d like to publish a US edition of that, too. Not only was it my first sale of American rights, it was my first meeting with a publisher I came to admire greatly: Tom, a man of exceptional business acumen and publishing flair, took the relatively small, academic imprint of St Martin’s Press and built it into one of the giants of American publishing. Coming to England regularly with his black bag and doing the rounds of publishers and
agents, his sharp eyes always on the lookout for that book, special both in content and in style, he would make a number of purchases, some relatively modest, and turn many into bestsellers. James Herriot’s semi-autobiographical veterinary books were a prime example – seemingly very English books that Tom had spotted on an agent’s shelf and bought. Then, with a change of title, he took them to the top of the US bestseller lists, making a great deal of money for all concerned. All Creatures Great and Small was the first of these. He’d shut himself away, hermit-like, in his room at the Connaught Hotel, reading the manuscripts and proofs he’d stuffed into his black bag during his daily forays, working late into the night, his publishing antenna on red alert. When his wife, Sandra – like him, a fine editor – was with him, she would do much the same. And when it came to a deal, he was a master in judging the right offer to make – high or low – for the book he had in his sights. His editorial input could also be considerable. Tom was always generous to us, inviting us to lunch or dinner at the Connaught, or in New York when we visited. We did our best to reciprocate, but he was not an easy man to lure away from his books.
Over the years, apart from our growing family friendship with Tom and Sandra and their daughter Jessie (still a close friend of our daughters), we did many deals together, and even since Tom’s retirement and the sad death after a long illness of the warm and effervescent Sandra, we have stayed in touch, dining together only recently in New York. One of our joyous memories of them is the long weekend they spent with us in Normandy. We have also retained a special relationship with St Martin’s Press and the exceptional people there – Sally Richardson and Tom Dunne in particular. It is a company like no other I know of in the US, since despite its size it manages to retain a family feeling.
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