by David Lodge
From the Kaplans, and from Bernard Bergonzi, Emeritus Professor of English at Warwick University, a very old friend who also knows his Henry James extremely well, I got encouraging overall reactions to the novel and valuable comments and corrections. The other readers of the MS at this stage were Mike Shaw, my agent at Curtis Brown since 1979, who had recently retired and was celebrating by sailing round the British Isles with his son Daniel in their oyster-dredger, the Susan J, and his former assistant Jonny Pegg, who had taken over my account. To assist the handover, and contrary to my usual practice, I had already shown both of them the first half of the novel in draft, and taken some notes from them at that time. I was pleased to get their positive responses to the completed novel. I did a final revision of the text, and sent it off at the very end of August to Curtis Brown for copying and forwarding to Secker, Penguin, and my American publisher, Viking. The novel had taken me almost exactly a year to write, during which time I did very little other work.
Waiting for a publisher’s verdict on a new book is always a somewhat tense experience, and in this instance the suspense was heightened by my awareness that Author, Author was a quite different kind of novel from anything I had written before, and that it might not immediately appeal to a large number of my regular readers. It was my first ‘period’ novel, and my first about a real person; its predominant mood was elegiac, its comedy muted, and its hero was celibate from start to finish. I did not doubt that Secker and Penguin would want to publish it, but I was not sure with what degree of enthusiasm or commitment. That would be indicated by the kind of advance they offered, which in turn would be based on their assessment of how many copies they would sell. Or, to put it another way: the more they paid for the novel, the more copies they were likely to sell, because the more effort they would put into promoting and marketing the book in order to recoup their investment. In the early part of my career I never expected or aspired to be a novelist whose books appear in bestseller lists, but in the 1980s, through a combination of factors (including Booker Prize shortlist nominations and TV serialisations of two successive novels, Small World and Nice Work) I acquired quite a large readership; and preserving it, without compromising my literary aims, is important to me. I don’t think I am alone in that respect among contemporary novelists who have had the same good fortune. In short, the offer that would be made for Author, Author was of more than merely financial interest to me.
Geoff Mulligan called me in the first week of September, having just read the novel, to say, with obvious sincerity, that he liked it very much, but that he needed to show it to other people in Random House before Secker could make an offer. This was exactly what I had expected, but when the second week of September went by without any further news, I began to get uneasy, suspecting some resistance higher up in the Random House hierarchy. It so happened that I had accepted invitations to two literary launch parties in London on the Monday and Tuesday of the following week. I went to these events, with Mary, in a state of concealed excitement and uncertainty about my own book, not guessing how many people I would meet who were or would be involved in its fortunes. The first party was for Antonia Byatt, marking the paperback publication of the last of her Frederica Potter novels by Vintage, and the issue of the completed quartet in a boxed set. It was held in the House of Barnabas, a handsome eighteenth-century building at the top of Greek Street, off Soho Square. The windows of the high-ceilinged reception room on the first floor were wide open to the warm evening. One of the first people I saw and spoke to was Dan Franklin, head of Cape, and formerly head of Secker when it belonged to Reed, where he had published my Paradise News. He immediately told me that he had started reading Author, Author at three that afternoon and was enjoying it enormously. This was a huge relief, because Dan is a senior and influential figure at Random House, even though, with his boyish features, owlish spectacles and short-back-and-sides haircut, he somewhat resembles a studious sixth-former from a 1950s grammar school. I assured him that if he had enjoyed the first hundred pages so much, he was bound to enjoy the rest of the book even more. We talked about Martin Amis’s new novel, Yellow Dog, which Cape had just published (the occasion of the following night’s party), and its largely hostile reception in the press. Dan felt that an injustice had been done, and I agreed with him. I was reading Yellow Dog myself, and although I didn’t think it was entirely successful it hadn’t shaken my conviction that Martin is the most original and inventive prose stylist of his generation of English novelists. On the other side of the room, I spotted the tall, bulky figure of the novelist Tibor Fischer, who had achieved some notoriety recently by vilifying Yellow Dog as ‘not-knowing-where-to-look-bad’ in an article in the Daily Telegraph, well ahead of its publication, something writers don’t usually do to their peers, especially when they have a novel coming out themselves at the same time.
Yellow Dog had, however, been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize (as it was now known, since acquiring a new sponsor), whereas Tibor Fischer’s novel, Voyage to the End of the Room, had not. The shortlist was due to be decided and announced the following day, and one of the judges, the novelist and critic D. J. Taylor, was present at the party. Though we crossed swords on television and in print early in his career we have since got on to amicable terms. ‘I’m sick of the Booker Prize,’ he said morosely, when I asked him how it was going. As a former chairman of the judges myself, in 1989, I recognised the symptoms of a familiar syndrome. Booker judges usually begin their task glowing with a sense of their own importance, and trusting in ‘the common pursuit of true judgement’; but sooner or later disillusionment in the objectivity of their fellow judges sets in, along with a daunting sense of the enormous pressure of conflicting expectations from friends, acquaintances and colleagues in the literary, publishing and media worlds. They realise that they too are going to be judged, and begin to wish they had never agreed to serve.
The next evening’s party was a bigger and more glamorous affair. The venue was the Roof Gardens in South Kensington, a rather wonderful place on top of the old Derry & Toms department store. As well as a large indoor reception area it has surprisingly extensive gardens, with full-grown trees, shrubbery, flower beds and a stream with flamingos and other water birds in it (their wings presumably clipped). The greenery screens out the London rooftops and the noise of traffic, and it is hard to believe that you are a couple of hundred feet above Kensington High Street. On a fine midsummer evening it is a magical place. But this was mid-September, and the party was from ‘9 till late’, so it was already dark by the time the first guests arrived. The weather continued warm, and it was pleasant to be outdoors, but the lighting of the Gardens is patchy. Guests gathered under patio lights in a noisy heaving throng just outside the main reception area, where musicians played to an empty dance floor, or they wandered in ones and twos through the dark, shadowy alleys, peering at the people they met to see if they recognised them. The party never quite gelled – but it wasn’t just on account of the lighting. Our hosts were in a sombre mood. The Booker shortlist had been announced that afternoon, and there wasn’t a single title on it from any of the Random House imprints, which include Cape, Secker, Hutchinson and Chatto & Windus – not even the much-fancied The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon. Random House had accounted for a third of the titles on the longlist, so their hopes had been high, and their disappointment was correspondingly severe. Geoff Mulligan, dressed down to an almost penitential degree in a black crew-neck pullover, described himself as being in shock. He was particularly disappointed at the omission of J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello which Secker had published. (Ample compensation would soon come in the form of the Nobel Prize, but he wasn’t to know that.) I had missed the shortlist announcement and asked him for the details, but apparently it was full of surprises and he could only remember that Margaret Atwood was on it, and a completely unknown novelist published by the tiny Tindall Street Press in Birmingham.fn7 It did not seem an auspicious m
oment to pump him about Author, Author, nor did he seem eager to discuss it. I saw Dan Franklin standing lugubriously alone, a glass of red wine in his fist. ‘So sad! So sad!’ he exclaimed as I approached. He was not referring to the shortlist, but to the chapter in Author, Author about the first night of Guy Domville, which he had just reached in his reading of my typescript. But he made it clear that this episode in James’s life chimed with his own sense of professional defeat.
The failure of Yellow Dog to make the shortlist cannot have come as a complete surprise, given its reception in the press, but it was hard on Martin Amis to have his party on this ill-starred evening. He arrived late, and looked as if he would have preferred to be somewhere else, but manfully played the part of guest of honour. I chatted with him briefly about Yellow Dog, whose tone of apocalyptic farce had reminded me distantly of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, and he said he had reread Scoop to warm up for the journalistic strand in his novel, and how good it was. He was at the noisy epicentre of the party, so I soon moved away, and met Simon Master, a big wheel at Random House, who told me that Author, Author had been passed to him but he hadn’t yet looked at it. He added that Thinks . . . hadn’t sold as well as they had hoped, which made me think he was softening me up for a modest offer for the new novel. Altogether I wasn’t enjoying this party much, in spite of the large number of literary friends and acquaintances who were present. By about midnight I was ready to leave, as was Mary.
Before then I had a brief conversation that seemed insignificant at the time, but which turned out to belong to the ‘zone of irony’ into which I had unwittingly strayed when I embarked on Author, Author. This was with Peter Straus, whom I had first met at a champagne reception held some years before, in the grand, gilt-encrusted rooms of Lancaster House, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Booker Prize. He was then the head of Picador, a Macmillan imprint with a reputation for publishing interesting literary fiction: a softly spoken, dark-suited man, youngish for his position. He frankly admitted to being ‘obsessed’ with the Booker Prize, and he certainly seemed to have a Mastermind-standard knowledge of its history. When I said I had just met Julian Rathbone, and that he had claimed the melancholy distinction of having written the only shortlisted novel (Joseph, 1979) that was never issued as a paperback, Peter Straus instantly informed me that this was also the fate of T. W. Wheeler’s The Conjunction, shortlisted in 1970. I had never even heard of T. W. Wheeler.
Straus seemed familiar with my work, and hinted that he would be very receptive if I ever contemplated a change of publisher. At long intervals in the years that followed he would drop me a friendly note, perhaps about a book he was publishing, or an enquiry on behalf of a friend of his who collected my work. Picador published Malcolm Bradbury’s last novel, To the Hermitage, in 2000; and after Malcolm sadly died in that same year Peter Straus asked me if he could reprint an obituary essay of mine at the front of the paperback edition, along with a similar piece by Ian McEwan. I agreed gladly, and also agreed in principle to write the introduction to a selection of Malcolm’s unpublished or previously uncollected writings which Picador intended to bring out.fn8 Before that was contracted for, however, I heard that Peter Straus had resigned from Picador, and had become a literary agent. He is not the only publisher to have made such a career move in recent times: it is symptomatic of the tension between cultural mission and corporate business principles in modern publishing.
The party at the Roof Gardens was the first time we had met since he took up his new profession, which he claimed to be enjoying. One of his clients was Adam Thirlwell, who had just published a racy Kundera-esque first novel called Politics, which I had read in proof and enjoyed. Probably Peter Straus had sent it to me – I can’t remember. We chatted about it for a while. Then he asked me if I was writing a new novel, and I said that I had just delivered one. ‘What’s it about?’ he asked. ‘Henry James,’ I said, smiling. ‘Henry James and George Du Maurier. A new departure.’ ‘That’s interesting,’ he said. His expression revealed no more than ordinary curiosity. ‘What’s it called?’ ‘Author, Author,’ I said. I don’t remember saying much more before we parted.
I went back to Birmingham the following day, Wednesday 17 September. On Friday Jonny Pegg called to say that Random House and Penguin had made an offer: it was exactly the same as they had paid for Thinks . . . , a substantial figure in the usual three instalments (on signature, hardback publication and paperback publication). Geoff Mulligan said they all loved the book, but didn’t think they could offer any more because it was a new departure for me and its prospects were difficult to assess. It was the best outcome I had hoped for, and I didn’t hesitate to accept. Geoff called immediately to say he was delighted. In the evening I got an email from Paul Slovak, my editor at Viking in New York, to say that he was finding the book ‘very enjoyable and moving’ and that they would like to publish it in the fall of 2004 – he promised to get back with an offer soon. So the week ended very satisfactorily.
The following week also began well. On Monday Geoff emailed me to say Secker aimed to publish in September ’04. It would be their lead title and ‘a massively important book for us’. Tony Lacey, my editor at Penguin, who had felt inhibited from contacting me while Random House was making up its collective mind, called to say how much he loved the book – had been totally gripped by it, read it in two sittings, had no criticisms to make. A day or two later his assistant editor, Zelda Turner, forwarded a letter to me, ‘which gives me an excuse to write and say how much I LOVED Author, Author’. Publishers and other media folk often flatter authors, of course, and throw words of praise around rather extravagantly, but in my experience when they say they ‘love’ something, they usually mean it. I had always had faith in the book myself, but it was gratifying to have this confirmed by others. It was more than gratifying – it was exciting; and I quote these enthusiastic responses to convey some idea of the euphoric mood I was in when it was abruptly shattered by a phone call from Jonny Pegg on the Thursday morning of that same week.
He said he was calling about two things. One was that Viking USA had, like Random House and Penguin, made the same offer as they had for Thinks . . . (a more modest advance than the British one, but very acceptable for the same reasons). The second item was ‘not very nice, really’. His voice faltered somewhat as he gave me the bad news. One of Curtis Brown’s foreign sub-agents had been sent the MS of Author, Author, and had just reported that they had already sold the rights in another forthcoming novel about Henry James, by Colm Tóibín, to my publisher in that country. Jonny read out to me a brief agency synopsis of The Master – it began with the first night of Guy Domville, traced James’s recovery from this setback, ended with the acquisition of Lamb House, etc., etc. It was 200 pages long and due to be published in England in April 2004. I have already described my emotions on receiving this news. Jonny did not need me to spell out my reasons for dismay, or my first thought of how to respond. ‘There is time to bring forward the publication of Author, Author,’ he said immediately, before I raised the question.
He meant that it would be feasible to edit and produce the book so as to bring it out at about the same time as Tóibín’s. (There was no way it could be published significantly earlier.) That would of course entail by-passing the catalogue for the relevant season, a procedure which has considerable practical disadvantages, but is not unheard of. Our initial feeling was that this was the best way to limit the damage to the prospects of Author, Author, and Jonny said he would put it to Geoff when he told him the news. As I brooded on the matter in the course of the day, however, I turned against this idea. The two books would inevitably be paired together in reviews, and compared as if they were rival biographies rather than novels. Colm and I would be doing the publicity circuit of interviews, bookshop signings, festival appearances, etc., at the same time, and the media would enjoy setting up something like a gladiatorial contest between us – a horrible prospect. It seemed to me that September publication, l
eaving a good stretch of time between the two books, was the lesser of two evils.
Jonny called in the afternoon to say that Geoff had reacted calmly to the news. He had taken counsel with colleagues, and they all agreed that to rush the book out would suggest a lack of confidence in it and that it would be better to avoid a head-to-head competition. Geoff made the point that my readership was bigger than Colm Tóibín’s and did not overlap much with his. I said that I had come to the same conclusion on different grounds, which was something of a relief to Jonny. Later Paul Slovak and my agent at Curtis Brown New York, Emilie Jacobson, emphatically concurred. So the publication of Author, Author in both countries in the autumn of 2004 was confirmed. I did not know that the information we had been given about the length of The Master was incorrect. It was quite a fortunate mistake, because the apparent brevity of The Master was the only crumb of comfort I could glean from the situation. It seemed to me that it must be a very different, and perhaps slighter, piece of work than mine. Had I known that it was in fact on the same scale and very nearly as long as Author, Author (359 pages compared to 382) I would have been even more anxious and apprehensive than I was in the months that followed.
While I was dealing with this crisis, I had a curious exchange of messages with Peter Straus. In the afternoon of the fateful Thursday I received an email from him, saying that he had been delighted to see me at the Martin Amis launch, and ‘it is very exciting about your new novel’. He thanked me for my comments on Politics, and said that Adam Thirlwell was reading from it at the London Review of Books Bookshop in November, and another writer was required to partner him. ‘I hope I am not being impolite to ask if you would be able or be inclined to read with him at that event – hopefully from AUTHOR, AUTHOR?’ This request puzzled me because the main point of such events is to sign and sell books, as Peter Straus knew very well, and he must have realised that if I had only recently finished mine it wouldn’t be on sale in November. I pointed this out in politely declining. The next morning he replied:
