Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  When the fair ended, I visited various publishers and rights directors, and then we went to stay with our close friends Jan and Lloyd Constantine, both high-flying lawyers. Carole and I had first met Jan when she was sweet eighteen and had come to London with her grandmother (a friend of my grandmother). It’s strange that she should have ended up in the publishing world too, as an expert in intellectual property and employment law, working at one time as the in-house lawyer for first Macmillan (Robert Maxwell) and then News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch), before being appointed general counsel to the US Authors Guild. When we first met Lloyd, he was representing impoverished clients in civil rights and liberties cases, but subsequently became one of America’s foremost antitrust litigators, with his own highly successful law firm. As the lead counsel in a class action against Visa/MasterCard, he won the largest antitrust settlement in US legal history, later writing a book about this and about his dramatic experiences as senior adviser to the Governor of New York. They are both the kind of lawyers you would always want on your side, as I discovered when we published an anthology of that most anthologised poet in the English language, ‘Anon’. It seemed harmless enough, except that the author of one of the poems turned out to be not so anon, but an American writer with an aggressive lawyer who came out all guns blazing. Fortunately, Jan was there to return the fire on our behalf.

  After the exciting hustle of New York, and a few days in the country with the Constantines, where Lloyd and I had our usual battle on the tennis court, we returned to London. Three urgent messages were waiting for us: one from Robert Kirby, Dannie’s agent, and two from Keren Abse, all of them almost a week old. With a sense of foreboding, I dialled Keren’s number, to hear her forlorn voice stumbling the words, ‘Mum’s been killed.’ Surely not – it wasn’t possible! We listened aghast as Keren explained that Dannie and Joan had been coming back from a poetry reading in Wales and that as Dannie, who was driving, cautiously joined the M4 from the slip road, a car going at reckless speed had crashed into them. Joan had been killed instantly, Dannie had survived, though he had several fractured ribs and was badly cut and bruised. I learned that the funeral had not yet taken place, that there was to be an autopsy, and that the other driver, a young woman, was being charged with dangerous driving. Dannie, Keren told me, was out of hospital and at home with the close family around him.

  Carole and I stared at each other, shaking in disbelief. I asked Keren if we could see Dannie, and after consulting him she said we should come round. Dannie well knew that there was nothing one can say in such circumstances, and he stopped us as we tried to express some comforting words. Even in his distressed state, he was aware of how much we loved them both, and our presence there was sufficient. He looked like a ghost and was covered in bruises and cuts, but his real agony was not physical. He could hardly talk, and when he did he kept muttering, ‘It should have been me.’

  The funeral took place a week or so later, and with Dannie’s permission we attended, for apart from us only the family was present. As the coffin was carried into the prayer hall, Dannie said to us enigmatically, ‘Joan’s not there, you know,’ and I could never bring myself to ask him exactly what he meant.

  In the period that followed, Dannie was a virtual hermit, not wanting to go anywhere and not able to write, for he had lost his muse. Gradually, we managed to get him to come to us on Friday evenings for an informal meal of fish and chips, and I’d collect him in the car, driving very slowly at his nervous request. Little by little, he started to enter the world again. Carole encouraged him to talk about Joan, realising how important it was that he did. The following November, the Abse family arranged a ‘Remembering Joan Abse’ evening at Pavlova House in Highgate. Dannie felt unable to speak, and I was touched when he asked me to do so, which I did, drawing on some of the memories Carole and I cherished, and trying to inject a little humour too, since besides all her other qualities as a woman and as a scholar, Joan loved to laugh.

  Dannie never really recovered – how could he? – but slowly, over time, he began to write again, movingly and powerfully, though it was about a year before he brought himself to read again in public, and that was for the launch of a book of his poems, Running Late, which had been in the pipeline before Joan’s death. The launch was at Joseph’s Bookshop in Temple Fortune, an oasis of culture which sadly closed its doors in March 2018 following the retirement of its inspiring proprietor, Michael Joseph. The small restaurant that led into the bookshop, which Michael had run successfully for twenty-five years, was an intimate venue for stimulating talks and book events, and he and his warm and lively wife Maureen were welcoming hosts. It was the ideal place for Dannie to start reading again, and the fact that Michael had lined up the actress Eleanor Bron to accompany him, reading some of his often very funny autobiographical writing, must have helped Dannie enormously.

  After months of inactivity, Dannie started to write a book that he called The Presence, a kind of diary of the year following Joan’s death, but also a memoir in which he skilfully reached back into memories, stories, anecdotes of their life together from the earliest days – the Then and the Now. Despite the painful subject, there was a good deal of humour mixed with the tears. It had been therapeutic for Dannie to work on the book, but it proved to be a great deal more than that, and among the finest things he ever wrote. He had shown me passages as he was writing, and as soon as it was finished he gave me the complete manuscript, asking my opinion as to whether he should publish it. There was no doubt in my mind that he should. But, as Dannie knew, I was on the point of ending my association with Anova Books, so there was no real possibility of my publishing his book, much as I would have loved to. However, Tony Whittome, Dannie’s loyal long-time editor at Hutchinson, took it and it was a big success – a bittersweet success, Dannie always felt, given its genesis. Following its publication and the remarkable reviews and coverage it received (which included both newspaper and radio serialisations), letters poured in to Dannie from people who had also been bereaved, telling him how much they had identified with his feelings and thanking him for the help his book had given them.

  Gradually, Dannie started to regain his vitality, though the shadows always hung over him. We tried hard to get him to join us in France, but he wouldn’t leave home. He and I sometimes went to a local deli we both liked where we enjoyed a salt beef sandwich together, as we used to when he was working near our office in town. On one of our visits, Dannie suddenly confided, ‘It would have been our wedding anniversary tonight,’ and as I started to say how privileged I felt to be spending that evening with him, he said quietly, lightening the mood, ‘I’ll tell you one thing. If Joan had been here, the evening would have ended differently!’ We went home like two schoolboys, smiling.

  * * *

  Leaving Anova, as I did in August 2006, meant leaving our own company, Robson Books, behind, and for me it was a highly charged, emotional time. In some ways I felt ashamed, feeling I was betraying so much and so many, but the reality was that in the circumstances it was time. In my last hour in the small office I inhabited, which had come to seem like a cell, I looked around the shelves and was reminded of the many parts of my life contained within the covers of other people’s books – none of them strangers, many of them friends. Alan Coren’s name stared from so many of them that on an impulse, feeling blue, I dialled his number, trying to rein back my escaping emotions. We talked about future books in my new home, wherever that was, and he made it clear that he would always want me to be his publisher. (Alan could be tough, but he was also kind and loyal.) We also talked about getting the rights back for earlier titles, which we eventually did. Some years previously we had published an Alan Coren Omnibus, but he’d written so much since then that we decided we would work towards another ‘Collected Coren’ for the following year, as well as a new collection, and I left for the small drinks party Anova had sprung on me with Alan’s cheering words in my ears. He had a rather romantic, old-fashioned attitude to pu
blishing which chimed with my own. For him, publishing companies were ‘Houses’ and editors were ‘Editors’ with a capital E. I liked that.

  Alan and Anne always spent the summer in the south of France, where they had a house, and it was there, perhaps bitten by an insect, that he contracted a terrifying flesh-eating disease called necrotising fasciitis. Anne, a doctor, had rushed him to the hospital in Nice but quickly got him back to England, where he remained very seriously ill in hospital for quite some time. I’ve never been sure how well Alan really was when he finally left hospital and started to write again, and to take part in The News Quiz, of which he was such a star. As well as making others laugh, he was able to laugh about himself and his illness, if wryly, as his Punch colleague and friend Michael Bywater recalled in an article in The Observer. In response to an invitation from Bywater, Alan had replied that he had this dreadful illness: ‘All I lost was my left armpit,’ he wrote. ‘Got big hole now, perfect for carrying Walther PPK 9mm should Daniel Craig chuck in the sponge. Also got ulcerative colitis, so, director, please note, scenes should not be longer than ten secs.’ But he said he’d ‘cork up’ for the party and come. In that article Michael Bywater also gave a wonderful picture of Alan, the great Punch editor:

  His word was law. Although theoretically a triumvirate with individual powers of veto, Coren made the running. I once made the mistake of writing a riff about a woman with a vibrator. He wouldn’t have it. The joke was, he said, structurally illogical. I argued. He shouted. I argued some more. He shouted louder. Soon the entire editorial staff had gathered in the doorway of his office as he stood, legs akimbo, like some empurpled Mussolini, bellowing with righteous anger. I couldn’t resist it and took another poke. Alan swelled to twice his normal size and went scarlet. Hitting a volume that can’t have been heard since Soviet Russia set off the fifty-megaton Tsar Bomba, he declared that if I ‘argued the fucking toss any more I am going to get aaanngryyyy’. There was a stunned silence, then a swell of applause, after which things returned to normal. Or as normal as they ever got.

  When we had lunch together in a fish restaurant near his house in Primrose Hill (by which time I was fully established in my new ‘House’ in the guise of JR Books, of which more later), Alan certainly seemed to be driving at full throttle, his conversation as scintillating as ever. It was time, we both felt, for another book, and he started putting together what became his last one for us, 69 for 1 – the title Alan’s, of course. In an email dated 1 June 2007 and timed at 13.26 he wrote, ‘69 for 1 – first time I’ve seen it written down. It looks good. Just came to me in a flash, a good sign in itself. Mail me back, ever A.’ Then, at 17.30, came another email:

  It gets better. Not only 69 (my age) for 1 (me), not only the soixante-neuf petit frisson to catch the Waterstones browser, but also 69 pieces for one book – I just worked it out, 69 of my shorter pieces will come out at around 50,000 words – say 190pp. Cover price £69? Ever, Alan.

  As the editor of a magazine that published the country’s best cartoonists and employed top graphic designers, Alan always had his own ideas when it came to book jackets and he wasn’t easy to please. I gave this to one of our favourite freelance designers, and he came up trumps, Alan emailing:

  I think Andy Wadsworth’s cover rough is terrific – EXACTLY what I’d envisaged. In fact, I’d treat the rough as the finish, because it’s so strong as it is. I really like the green on green lettering, as if cut in the turf, I like the brute force of the b/w scoreboard and the cheery blue sky behind it – all spot on. Ever, Alan.

  As always he produced his word-perfect blurb, starting with a reference to his illness, then continuing in his usual knockabout way, obliquely referring to pieces in the book:

  Having taken up his pen again after contracting a rare illness, Alan Coren found that the world had changed little in his absence. Threatened by Josef Mengele’s poisoned chickens, children still turned to Winston Churchill to save them from school dinners, Clark Gable snuggled, as ever, against the bristly chest of his lover Errol Flynn…

  His blurb ended with the sentence: ‘For that is the world in which Alan Coren, by a stroke of luck, lives.’

  However, as the book progressed through the summer, I felt there was something odd. Alan spent an unusually long time checking the proofs, and didn’t seem to be taking his normal care, more or less leaving it to our proofreader, and not wanting to double-check the revises. Also, in one phone call he said, ‘Jeremy, whatever happens to me you will publish the book, won’t you?’ I somehow found the voice to reassure him.

  What I didn’t know was that he had been diagnosed with cancer, and his death followed very quickly, just as we were going to press. Awful though it was, we felt we had to change the tense of that last sentence in his blurb, and the word ‘live’ to ‘lived’. Naturally, the papers were full of tributes to Alan’s genius as editor, broadcaster, writer and humorist, for he was, in the words of the Sunday Times, ‘the funniest writer in Britain today … the undisputed guvnor’. A rather more personal tribute reached me in an email from Tom McCormack, whose St Martin’s Press had published several of Alan’s books:

  As you did, I appreciated his writing and his presence. I recall the gathering at your home with Alan, Harry Secombe and others as the paradigm of what wit and sophistication can bring to a dinner party … and then the book party here at Central Park West. It was supposed to be cocktails and hors d’oeuvres and then a few of us were to go out to dinner. But nobody would leave! Luckily the caterer had brought platters of hors d’oeuvres the size of billiard balls, there was plenty left over, so sometime between nine and ten we had the platters out again and dinner was right here, munching on leftovers. Alan did indeed mean wonderful times wherever he went.

  * * *

  The saga that follows is one I find painful to revisit. Alan’s funeral was at Hampstead Cemetery, just down the road from where the Corens lived for many years, not a Jewish place of burial but a tolerant and broad-church one, where Alan had long since reserved a space, rather fancying the thought of being in the eternal company of Marie Lloyd, one of the other colourful occupants. (He had, in fact, written two emotive pieces about ‘the Queen of the Music Hall’, enchanted to have discovered that she lay some two hundred yards from his home. ‘Tonight,’ he had written, ‘I shall put on “A Little of What You Fancy”, turn up the volume, and open the window for her to hear.’) A rabbi officiated in what was a deeply affecting ceremony, and a great many people came to pay their last respects. Later, at the shiva, the customary Jewish prayers at the mourners’ home, I chatted to Alan’s very friendly son Giles and told him that when he, his sister Victoria and Anne felt ready, I would love to get together with them to work on the new ‘Collected Coren’, which Alan and I had been discussing and which I hoped they would consider editing and introducing. I mentioned it again on another occasion but refrained from pressing the case as I did not want to appear insensitive while feelings were still so raw.

  It was at an informal supper in our kitchen that I brought up the book idea again to Anne Coren, and there was a pause before she said, ‘Well, you will have seen Victoria’s letter, I imagined you had asked me here to talk about it.’ That certainly was not the reason we’d invited her – and in any case I had not received Victoria’s letter. However, a copy came through our letter box early the next afternoon, Sunday. It was a long letter, in which Victoria explained that Canongate (her publisher) had written to her agent and made a substantial offer for a ‘Collected Alan Coren’. She and Giles felt very bad about it, given our long relationship and family friendship, but they didn’t want to put me in a position of having to compete, and hoped I’d appreciate that they wanted to do their best for their father, and so on.

  They obviously wished to accept the offer, but wanted to know how I felt before responding. I realised it had been a difficult letter for Victoria to write and I read it several times before suggesting we meet to talk about it. Victoria had asked for my feelings an
d there was no hiding the fact that I was stunned by the prospect of someone who didn’t even know Alan publishing his last book, after all we’d gone through together, and that – yes – I was hurt and saddened and it felt like a kind of betrayal, the more so since this was the book that Alan and I had planned together. I tried to take comfort in the thought that their father had received many such approaches over the years, and never once had he considered them.

  Giles and Victoria came to the office and we discussed it at some length, and I ended up swallowing my feelings and offering to top the offer they’d had. But their minds were made up and they went with Canongate. They did, though, invite me to participate in the service of thanksgiving for Alan’s life and work, which they’d arranged at St Bride’s Church in Fleet Street – to read a piece of Alan’s and say a few words ‘to represent all those years of working together’. Naturally, I accepted.