Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

  Nor the furious winter’s rages;

  Thou thy worldly task hast done,

  Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.

  Golden lads and girls all must,

  As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

  That powerful, unmistakable, mesmerising voice filled the abbey, sending a shiver down everyone’s spine. It was an imaginative and noble way to end the readings. How wonderful, I reflected, that a poet could command such reverence and attention. But then it was not any poet. It was Ted Hughes.

  * * *

  It’s no secret that Ted had lived a dramatic life, full of turmoil and tragedy, though by the time we met up again in Israel in 1971 he had married Carol, who brought stability and order into his life. Nor is it surprising that interest in his life, and in Sylvia Plath’s, continued, amidst controversy, suppositions, inaccuracies and invective. So when, at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2005, I noticed the single line ‘Biography of Assia Wevill’ on the list of forthcoming titles of the American agent Scott Mendel, I approached with a cautious enquiry. ‘But how do you know who she is?’ asked Scott, since there was no descriptive blurb, and I could truthfully answer, ‘Because I met her once at a reading in Devon with Ted Hughes.’ It had been only a brief encounter, but it had stayed in my mind.

  The book, A Lover of Unreason, was by two Israeli writers, Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren, and a month or two later Scott sent me their meticulously researched and powerful text. The authors had been working on the book for several years, and since Assia’s story really started in Mandate Palestine, they were well placed to undertake her biography. Assia’s parents – her father a Jewish physician, her mother a Lutheran – had come to Palestine from Germany in 1934 to escape the Nazis. There, she went to school; later, she met a British soldier and came to England, where she married him. They emigrated to Canada but the marriage didn’t last long, and Assia, who had enrolled at the University of Columbia in Vancouver, met there a Canadian economist, Roger Lipsey, who became her second husband. Returning to England in 1956, she met on the boat a 21-year-old Canadian poet, David Wevill, with whom she started an affair, marrying him in 1960.

  She was with Wevill when, responding to an advertisement, they went to see a flat in Primrose Hill, discovering it was being sublet by Hughes and Plath, who had decided to move to Devon. The Wevills took the flat and met up and ate with Ted and Sylvia several times. ‘We got on like a house on fire,’ recalled David. It was shortly after the Wevills went to stay with Ted and Sylvia at their home in Devon that Assia, who was then working in an advertising agency and writing poems herself, began an affair with Ted. The subsequent tragedies – Sylvia Plath’s suicide, followed a few years later by Assia’s (hers made even more horrific by the fact that she also killed Shura, the daughter she’d had with Ted) – are heartbreaking.

  In addition to their own exhaustive research, the authors had the full cooperation of Assia’s sister, and were thus privy to many letters from both Assia and Ted as well as other personal documents and photos. This gave their book authority and depth. I passed the manuscript to Dannie Abse to read, and he felt, as I did, that it was a powerful story containing much new material, not only about Assia herself, but about Ted and Sylvia too, and that we should publish it. The fact that there were others in the story – poets, critics – we both knew who had contributed their own memories and opinions naturally augmented our interest.

  We announced the title at the London Book Fair in 2006, where it aroused huge media attention, which in turn started a bidding war among the main national papers for the serial rights. Finally, Corinna Honan at the Daily Telegraph went out on a limb and outbid her rivals. As well as publishing extracts, the Telegraph also ran a front-page news story, which was picked up by other papers. The book sold extremely well in both hardback and paperback editions, and incidentally provided a rich source for subsequent biographers of both Hughes and Plath to draw on. Another pleasing outcome was my continuing friendship with the lively authors and a successful collaboration on other highly original books, including The First Lady of Fleet Street, the story of Rachel Beer, who was the first woman to edit a national paper in Britain – in fact, two at the same time: The Observer and the Sunday Times.

  * * *

  Although we’d been to several of her exhibitions and greatly admired her strong and striking canvases, I’d never had a proper conversation with Frieda Hughes. A considerable poet as well as a painter, she had been writing a weekly column on poetry for The Times for some while, choosing a poem and discussing it and the author’s work in a highly perceptive and readable way. We had often thought it could make an excellent book, and when I mentioned this to a mutual friend, Annie Quigley, who runs Bibliophile Books, and whom we always met at Frieda’s exhibitions, she urged me to contact Frieda. However, by the time I did, Sandra Parsons, who had initiated the column, had moved from The Times to the Daily Mail, and with her departure the paper dropped it. Without its continuing presence and the paper’s support, it was no longer a feasible publishing proposition, bearing in mind also that permissions for all the poems would have to be sought and paid for.

  Nevertheless, Frieda and I arranged to have lunch, and it was a long and convivial one during which I gave her some photos of her father she’d never seen and a programme from the Israel tour. Warm and vivacious, Frieda didn’t seem at all concerned that I’d published the book on Assia, which was a relief, and the conversation ranged easily in many directions. A few days later, I received a signed copy of her own latest book of poems in the post, followed by an email in which she asked whether I’d be interested in publishing a memoir by her uncle Gerald, Ted’s elder brother. This, as I understood it, would focus mainly on his and Ted’s childhood in Mytholmroyd, where Ted was born on 17 August 1930. I was indeed interested – what publisher committed to poetry would not be? – and we readily agreed to take the book on.

  Ten years older than Ted, and well versed in country ways, Gerald had a great influence on his little brother during his formative years. However, while the book was charming and contained valuable material, it was very short, and much of it covered later parts of Gerald’s own life, particularly his time in the RAF, and his life in Australia, where he settled and married. Yet it was easy to see where it could be expanded, and Frieda arranged for me to phone her uncle in Australia and ask him questions in an attempt to flesh out the stories. Gerald was reserved and wary at first, especially when I touched on Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill (he’d met Assia but not Sylvia, though she wrote him touching letters from Court Green about Ted and the children). That first phone call lasted two hours, and at the end of it, despite Gerald’s initial and understandable reticence, I had pages of notes, which I carefully worked into the manuscript. Then, via his son Ashley, who lived near him, I emailed questions and incorporated Gerald’s answers, sending him the revised text as I went along. All this had set him thinking, and he started to contribute further details that amplified the stories of their childhood adventures together – the magical years when they fished for pike in the pond Ted made famous, hunted rabbits, pigeons and stoats, flew kites, made model aeroplanes and boats, camped, and swam in the local stream. All these activities, inspired by Gerald’s passion for the countryside, had awakened Ted’s own love of and feeling for nature. So many of his poems were to have their roots in those early experiences. Gerald’s reminiscences were golden, and the book began to grow as he gave fuller descriptions of other members of the family – their mother and father, various aunts and their sister Olwyn, who was two years older than Ted and who also played an important part in his life.

  Ted Hughes and his elder brother Gerald at Hardcastle Cragg in 1946 – the cover photo of Ted and I, Gerald’s evocative memoir of their childhood together.

  Ted was at school when Gerald joined the Royal Air Force as an engineer, and was to follow in his brother’s footsteps when he did his National Service. When, afte
r working for a while as a gamekeeper, Gerald went to live in Australia, Ted planned to join him there after he’d finished university – but that went by the board when Sylvia Plath came into his life. However, the brothers kept in close touch: Gerald and his new wife Edith visited Ted at Cambridge, touring and spending time with him, and they wrote to each other regularly. Eventually, Gerald sent me copies of letters from Ted he thought relevant and some of these were included in the book. Then Frieda suggested I contact her aunt Olwyn, a formidable and notoriously difficult lady who lived in Kentish Town, not far from us. I knew that she was a highly educated woman who’d studied English literature at Queen Mary College before going to work at the British Embassy in Paris, and then for a publisher as a secretary and translator. Later, she’d become a literary agent and managed Sylvia’s literary estate as well as Ted’s work.

  We spoke on the phone and Olwyn suggested I visit her. Gathering my courage, I took the bus to the corner of her street as directed, and a few minutes later knocked on the front door of her narrow house. Eventually, she answered, looking rather like Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess of Grantham from Downton Abbey, but with a fag dangling from her mouth. Eyeing me carefully, she paused, as if thinking she’d made a big mistake, finally ushering me into the tiny kitchen where, amidst piles of books, papers and cigarette ends, I somehow found a place to sit. She made no bones about it: the text she’d seen was inadequate, her brother had missed out or failed to describe properly many vital things. Grumbling and cursing, she finally agreed to help, and in the next few weeks started bombarding me with handwritten letters and pages of notes and long passages in which she elaborated on the text, adding invaluable detail. In fairness to her, she knew her younger brother as well as Gerald did, and was still at home after Gerald had flown the nest, so her memories of that slightly later period brought a further perspective to the book. She patently had no love of either Sylvia or Assia, and I came away from our further meetings with the distinct impression that any woman who came between her and her beloved brother was going to have a rough ride. Since I was not there to become involved in Hughes family politics, I tried my best to keep her focused on the matter in hand, although she continued to press me to include a story about how Sylvia had discovered his affair with Assia, which seemed both far-fetched and way off-message. However, rereading the material she sent me, I realise that even in her old age, amidst the cigarette smoke, she still had a formidable mind and a lively literary style. She later described our cooperation as ‘heroic’, and perhaps – at any rate from my point of view – it was. At least I had survived!

  There was even more to come when I received a letter from Carol Hughes telling me she’d heard about the book and would like to read it. I sent her an early version, for which she thanked me while asking if she could see it again when it was finally edited. Once I’d added all the new material, I sent it to her, hoping it would pass muster. She rang me at home the next morning saying, ‘I can see what you’ve been doing, and I think I can help you.’ She said she’d be in London the following week and suggested coming to our office to go through it all. She brought with her a number of photos of Ted and Gerald together which she generously said we could use, and indicated the areas of the text which she could expand. She was wonderfully helpful, annotating the manuscript in precise detail, adding stories about the time Gerald and his wife visited Ted and her in Devon, describing the fishing expedition Ted had arranged for them all in Scotland, and much else. Everything she wrote was vivid and invaluable. She even suggested including several of Ted’s poems where they related to the text, which was marvellous. Throughout our meetings I noticed how careful she was not to be thought intrusive, concerned above all that everyone was happy with the final result – especially Gerald, to whom she spoke regularly.

  Frieda was equally generous, describing the time she had spent with Gerald in Australia, giving us permission to use some of her mother’s evocative letters to Gerald, and writing a sensitive and touching foreword – and of course it was she who had thought to bring the book to me, which was my good fortune. All three women (even Olwyn, however grudgingly) were aware of Ted’s love for his brother, and for both their sakes they wanted Gerald’s book to be as good as they could make it. As Frieda put it, ‘My Uncle Gerald has always been an important figure in my life because he was a hugely important figure in the life of my father.’ Gerald was thrilled when he finally received a copy. It’s a charming and gentle book, and anyone studying Ted’s poems should find it illuminating – moving, too, especially Gerald’s account of his last telephone conversation with his brother from Australia, when Ted was dying.

  Ted and I: A Brother’s Memoir, published in October 2012, received wide attention, perhaps even more than the Assia biography, though of a less sensational nature. The Sunday Times published a long extract; The Times made it a major news story spread over nearly a page, headed: ‘Big brother tells evocative story of life with boy who would be Poet Laureate’; and when The Observer, in a full-page review, said ‘Life in Hebden Bridge blooms from the pages’, and referred to ‘a sepia-tinted world of tram rides and Sunday hats’, I felt we’d got it right. The book appeared in America, published by Thomas Dunne, but perhaps even more exciting for Gerald was the approach we had from an independent filmmaker, David Cohen, who loved the book and felt it would form the basis of a valuable film. David flew to Australia with a cameraman and filmed long interviews with Gerald, and then, on returning to England, spent days filming the areas where the brothers had roamed. He interviewed Frieda and others (but not the prickly Olwyn, who refused to cooperate), and with Carol’s considerable help produced a fascinating text, which was voiced by Juliet Stevenson. The film included recordings of Ted reading the poems quoted in the book, the words descending on a blank background, following his voice, as Carol said he would have wished. The film had a special showing at the Blenheim Literary Festival in October 2016, to a large and visibly moved audience, and again at the Oxford Literary Festival a year later. Gerald, who sadly had died earlier in 2016, would have been very proud, and I believe Ted would have been, too.

  It had been a family affair.

  24

  PUBLISHING MATTERS

  Looking at the list of the many authors we published over the years, it might seem to have been an easy ride, but it wasn’t. Running a small set-up with modest financial resources was always going to be challenging, and many were the nights I lay awake, figures racing around my tired mind as I wondered how we’d meet our end-of-month commitments, let alone how I would handle my next lunch with our bank manager – at my expense, of course, and tax-wise considered a perk! So often it proved to be the low-profile books for which we’d advanced almost nothing that unexpectedly took off and saved the day, covering the salaries, rent, printing bills and royalties, and putting a relieved smile on the face of our valiant accountant, David Pickin, as he struggled to prepare an acceptable cash-flow forecast. I suspect many small publishers will have had the same experience.

  Fortunately, we enjoyed relationships with all the major mass-market paperback companies and were often able to ‘lay off’ the money we’d had to pay upfront to get certain big books by sub-licensing the paperback rights (something that doesn’t really happen these days as hardback publishers issue their own paperbacks). We have also always tended to have the kind of books attractive to newspapers, and the income we’ve received from serial rights over the years has been substantial – often a lifesaver.

  One surprise was a small paperback called Condomania by Peter Maddocks, just a cheap cartoon book subtitled 101 Uses for a Condom. This was in 1987 and the book reprinted six times in the first year, and I have a copy of the sixteenth impression in front of me as I write. I don’t know what it was about condoms that year, but the timing was obviously right. Gift shops were the key outlets for books of that kind in those days, and the wholesalers who supplied them reordered in large quantities. We even did a deal with Durex and ended up
with boxes of contraceptives all over the office.

  Condomania certainly underwrote some of the more prestigious titles on our list, as did The Blue Day Book, a small, square hardback of captivating animal photos with witty or poignant captions, its theme being that everyone has a blue day. It must have been the pictures the Daily Mail published that set it racing away, for race it certainly did, ending up as No. 1 on the Times and other bestseller lists. The book was so appealing that all our sales people had to do was show it and it ended up everywhere – on shelves, on counters, by tills. The man who’d conceived it and put it together was Australian, and he was so thrilled to be on the Times bestseller list that he brought a box of Havana cigars to me at Frankfurt. That was certainly a first.

  A particular favourite of mine was André Bernard’s Rotten Rejections, a collection of actual rejection letters and readers’ reports publishers may well have regretted, a book that should surely be mandatory reading for all publishers. Thus to Flaubert on Madame Bovary, ‘You have buried your novel underneath a heap of details which are utterly superfluous…’ or to George Orwell about Animal Farm, ‘It is impossible to sell animal stories…’ or on The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, ‘You are welcome to le Carré, he hasn’t got any future…’ or on Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, ‘The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception which would lift that book above the “curiosity” level…’ or to Marcel Proust on Swann’s Way (Volume 1 of Remembrance of Things Past), ‘My dear fellow, I may be dead from the neck up, but rack my brains as I may, I can’t see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep.’ However, the last word must go to George Bernard Shaw: