by Diana Athill
A publishing firm is a complicated business which has to buy, sell and manufacture or cause to be manufactured. What it buys and sells is products of people’s imaginations, the materials for making books, and a variety of legal rights. What it manufactures is never the same from one item to the next. So a publisher must be able to understand and control a complex financial and technical structure; he must be a smart negotiator, good at bargaining; he must have a shrewd instinct for when to lash out and when to penny-pinch; he must be able efficiently to administer an office full of people, or to see that it is efficiently administered; and above all he must be able to sell his wares in all their forms. Against this, all I have ever been able to do with money is spend it; I loathe responsibility and telling people what to do; and above all I am incapable of selling anything to anyone. Not being a fool, I was well aware of the importance of all the aspects of my trade which I couldn’t and didn’t want to master, and even came to know a fair amount about them. But although I felt guilty about my own incapacities, the only part of the business that I could ever bring myself truly to mind about was the choosing and editing of books. This is certainly a very important part of the publishing process, but without all the rest of it, it would amount to nothing.
So I was not a publisher. I was an editor.
And even as an editor, a job which I thoroughly enjoyed, I betrayed my amateurish nature by drawing the line at working outside office hours. The working breakfast, and taking work home at weekends – two activities regarded by many as necessary evidence of commitment, both of them much indulged in by that born publisher, André Deutsch – were to me an abomination. Very rarely someone from my work moved over into my private life, but generally office and home were far apart, and home was much more important than office. And whereas I was ashamed of my limitations within the office, I was not ashamed of valuing my private life more highly than my work: that, to my mind, is what everyone ought to do.
In spite of this, being an editor did enlarge and extend my life in a way for which I am deeply grateful. It gave me a daily occupation which brought in enough money to live on and which was almost always enjoyable, and it constantly proved the truth of that ancient cliché about working in publishing: You Meet Such Interesting People. The first part of this book is about the daily occupation. The second part is about some of the people.
2
ALTHOUGH MY FAMILY contributed to my limitations in publishing, they prepared me well for editing. Asking myself what were the most important things in my childhood, I get the answer ‘Falling in love, riding and reading’.
They all started early. I can’t have been more than four when I first fell in love, because surely someone who attempted communication with the beloved by leaning out of a window and spitting on his head can’t have been older than that? He was the gardener’s ‘boy’, his name was Denis, he had melancholy brown eyes, and every day he manned a green iron hand-pump by the back door to provide us with bath water. Each crank of the pump-handle was followed by a splosh in the tank in the attic above the lavatory – rich, cascading sploshes to start with, gradually turning to meagre little splishes. One day, hearing the pump at work, I went into the lavatory to lean out of the window and gaze fondly down on the flat cap below, until I became unable to resist the longing for communication, collected a mouthful of saliva, and spat. He felt it, looked up, those beautiful brown eyes met mine – and I shot out of the lavatory, scarlet and breathless with excitement. After which I was never, so far as I can remember, out of love.
The riding, too, started earlier than it could properly be done. When my mother, instead of Nanny, took me out she disliked pushing the pram, so a strange little saddle shaped like a miniature chair was strapped onto an aged pony and I was tied into it, to be led over grass instead of pushed along paths – a lovely improvement, heralding many years of being on a pony or a horse pretty well whenever I was out of doors.
And reading started with being read aloud to, which went on to overlap with one’s own reading because my grandmother (we lived near her for many years) read aloud so beautifully that we never tired of listening to her. She might be doing a Beatrix Potter or the Just So Stories for the little ones, or Uncle Remus or The Jungle Book for the middle ones, or Kim or a Walter Scott (skipping the boring bits so cleverly that we never knew they were there) for the bigger ones, and whichever it was, everyone would be listening because she made them so marvellous. And everywhere we looked there were books. In our own house they were piled on tables and chairs, as well as on the shelves; and in Gran’s house, where we so often were, they rose from floor to ceiling all round the library, along one whole wall in the morning-room, on three walls of my grandfather’s study, along the full length of a passage called ‘the corridor’, and along three-quarters of a wall in the nursery. At Christmas and birthdays about eighty per cent of the presents we got were books, and no one was ever told not to read anything. My grandmother’s father had been Master of University College, Oxford, and my grandfather, who wooed her when he was an undergraduate, had written several prize essays (which she kept and published privately after his death) which suggest by their distinction that he must have thought about becoming a professional historian before his father’s death made him a contented landed gentleman. It never occurred to anyone in that family that reading could be a duty, so it never occurred to me. Reading was what one did indoors, as riding was what one did out of doors: an essential part of life, rather than a mere pleasure. As I grew older and ‘You will have to earn your living’ changed from being something my father said to being a real prospect, I was not bold enough to imagine myself worthy of work in publishing, but I would never have doubted that such work was the most desirable of all.
If publishing was too glamorous for me, what was I going to do? I was reasonably intelligent, I had been to Oxford … but I had certainly not qualified myself for anything while there. Indeed, it was at Oxford that my idleness found its fullest expression and all I did there was enjoy the best time of my life. Teaching was, I supposed, a possibility, or nursing; but both inspired in me the sensation of being faced with a bucket of cold porridge. And I didn’t really know of any other kind of work. A vast difference between then and now is that then a middle-class Englishwoman in her early twenties could, without being exceptional, know not a single woman of her own age who was in a job. I had a fair number of friends, but to none of them could I turn for guidance.
Before the problem could become truly agitating it was blown away by the beginning of the Second World War, which made it unnecessary – even impossible – to think in terms of a career. You had to bundle into whatever war-work offered itself and get on with it. If you liked it, lucky you. If not, that was just a part of the general bloodiness of war and you expected yourself to endure it without making a fuss.
I was lucky. After a couple of false starts I was given a nudge towards the BBC by an Oxford friend who happened to have found a job in its recruitment office and thought I would have a chance of getting into a new information service that was to be attached to Overseas News. I did get in, and was allowed to stay there until the end of the war. I forget which Ministry it was that controlled the matter, but all jobs were reviewed from time to time, and if you were seen to be making no contribution to the war effort you were directed into something more useful. Telling the Overseas News Room who General de Gaulle was or how much oil was produced by the wells of Ploeµti was work classified as essential, so my wartime lot was an easy job shared with pleasant companions. The job was easy because an information service is only a matter of knowing where to look things up – and anyway, in those days the BBC confused The Times with Holy Writ: you showed someone a cutting from The Times and he believed it*.
* The BBC’s Information Services were initiated by a man called Bachelor, who had built up the same kind of service for The Times. We used to laugh at our customers’ dependence on the newspaper, but the truth was that thanks to Mr Bachelor it w
as amazingly well-served with information. It had a slight edge on us because its press-cuttings library had been going for longer and was therefore larger; but we were no less admirably structured and no less keenly scrupulous. By the time I got there Batch, as we called him, had become too grand to be often seen by his minions, but he was undoubtedly brilliant at his job.
3
WITH ONE OF those BBC companions, after a while, I launched into flat-sharing. Until then I had lived in billets while our office was evacuated to Evesham in Worcestershire for safety’s sake, and in a sequence of depressing bedsitters when we were brought back to London to await Hitler’s secret weapons, the flying bombs and the long-range missiles. The flat was the two top floors of a stately house in Devonshire Place, one of the streets traditionally inhabited by England’s most expensive doctors who had left a temporary vacuum in the neighbourhood when carried away by the war. Marjorie and I had the top floor, which included the kitchen. George Weidenfeld and Henry Swanzy had the floor below us.
The few young men in the BBC at that time had to be exempt from military service. George was exempt because he was still an Austrian, Henry because … and I suddenly see that I don’t know why Henry was exempt, which speaks well for the Second World War compared with the First. In the First a feverish jingoism prevailed, with women thrusting white feathers on men simply because they were not in uniform. In the Second I never saw or heard of any jingoism. Perhaps Henry was disqualified for active service by some weakness in his health, or perhaps he was a conscientious objector who was considered more useful in the BBC than down a coal mine. Probably I once knew, but if so it was unimportant to me and my friends. Anyway, there he was, sharing the flat at first with George and a man called Lester Something, and when Lester moved away from London, with George, Marjorie and me. George was wooing Marjorie at the time, so our inclusion was probably his idea.
The men’s floor had an enviable bathroom, all black glass and chrome, given extra distinction by containing a piano on which Henry often played moody music. Our bathroom was very mere – it had probably been the maids’ – but the kitchen gave us an advantage since what communal living went on in the flat had necessarily to centre on it. Neither Marjorie’s parents nor mine questioned the propriety of our ménage – but whether this was because they chose to believe us unshakeably chaste, or because we avoided mentioning George and Henry, I no longer remember.
The two of us who ended up in bed together were Marjorie and George. She fell seriously in love with him, causing some of our colleagues to exclaim ‘Yuck!’ and ‘How could she?’, because George at twenty-four already had a portly presence and a frog face. But he also had five times the intelligence of most of the young men we knew, and a great deal of sexual magnetism. I soon noticed – though Marjorie did not – that the women whose ‘Yucks!’ were the most emphatic were usually in bed with him before a month was out.
To be more exact, I did not notice this, but heard it from George himself, because in his early salad days he relished his sexual success too much to be discreet about it. He kept a list of his conquests at the back of his pocket diary, and would bring it out to show me when we were in the kitchen together without Marjorie. I remember him saying gleefully: ‘Look – the fiftieth!’
At that time I was all but unsexed by sadness, because the man I was engaged to, who was serving in the Middle East, had first gone silent on me, then married someone else, then been killed. A little later I would start to find that promiscuity cheered me up, but our Devonshire Place days were too early for that. My inner life was bleak, which made surface entertainment all the more important. If Marjorie had been sailing into happiness with George I might have found the spectacle intolerably painful; but as it was, although I liked her and was far from wishing her ill, I found watching the relationship so interesting that it became enjoyable – the first time that I was shocked by my own beady eye.
After eight or nine months Lester came back and claimed his half of the apartment, so Marjorie went to live with her parents for a while and I returned to bedsitters. Just before we left, our kitchen witnessed a significant event: the four of us chose a name for the periodical which George would soon be editing. After much list-making and many disappointments when good names turned out to have been used already, Contact was picked. During one of our naming sessions, when we had drifted onto other subjects and one of us asked George what his central ambition was, he replied: ‘Very simple – to be a success.’ So that was where George’s publishing career began, and where its direction first became apparent; and soon afterwards, because of someone I met through George, my own publishing career put out the first pale tip of an underground shoot, like a deeply buried bulb.
Before this happened I had begun to feel a good deal better, partly because I had the luck to fall into a frivolous and enjoyable affair, and partly because Marjorie’s mother’s dentist told her that he wanted to let the top floor of his house in Queen Anne Street, which is a few minutes from Devonshire Place, and Marjorie and I took it. The dentist had converted this floor into an elegant little flat for his son, who had killed himself in its kitchen by putting his head in the gas oven – which we did not at first enjoy using. But soon we began to think that the poor young man must have had a weak personality, because no flat could have had a pleasanter atmosphere. Devonshire Place had been fun, but also uncomfortable and shabby to the point of squalor. Queen Anne Street was a delight to come home to.
So we decided to celebrate it by giving a party. George came, of course, and brought André Deutsch, the man who had introduced him to the publishing firm which was going to produce and distribute Contact: a firm which would soon cease to exist, called Nicholson and Watson. André, a Hungarian the same age as I was (twenty-six), had come to England to study economics, had been caught by the war, and had been interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. The Hungarians were soon let out on condition that they reported regularly to the authorities, and André returned to London armed with a letter from a fellow internee to a well-known bookseller who had passed him on to John Roberts, managing director of Nicholson and Watson. Roberts, a kind, lazy, rather boozy man who was struggling to keep the firm going almost single-handed, took him on as a salesman and was pleased to discover that he had acquired an intelligent and energetic young man who was greedy to learn every aspect of the trade: who was, in fact, finding his vocation. By the time André came to our party he was doing much more for the firm than visiting booksellers and librarians – not that I was bothered about that. He could have been a junior packer for all I cared. His being the first person I had ever met who was ‘in publishing’ was enough to exalt him in my eyes.
He was small, trim and good-looking in a boyish way. I remember thinking that his mouth was as fresh and soft-looking as a child’s, and being surprised that I found it attractive – usually I liked my men on the rugged side. He sat on the floor and sang ‘The foggy foggy dew’, which was unexpected in a Hungarian, and charming, so that I was more aware of him than of anyone else in the room. Two days later, when he asked me to dinner and a theatre, I was gratified. He was living in a tiny house in a Knightsbridge mews, and that was impressive, too. The possibility of having a house had never entered my head. André’s had been lent him by a friend who was away on war-work, but it seemed like his, which made him more ‘grown-up’ than I was. In that little house, after the theatre, we ate an omelette and went to bed together, without – as I remember it – much excitement on either side.
In old age I can still remember the matchless intoxication of falling in love (which may well be a neurotic condition, but still nothing else lights up the whole of one’s being in that way) and the more common but no less delicious sensations of a powerful physical attraction; but I have gone blurry about the kind of affair I had with André. I wonder what took me into such affairs, and what held me in them, almost always, until the man moved on. Rather than remembering, I have to work it out.
It was not t
hinking myself in love when I was not – I was too clear-sighted for that. And it was not simply the nesting instinct, because I was romantic enough (or perhaps realist enough?) to be sure that I couldn’t marry a man I didn’t love. To start with it was probably curiosity – a cat-like impulse to poke my nose round the next corner – combined with the emptiness of my emotional life at the time: this would at least seem to fill it. And once it had got going … well, perhaps the nesting instinct did start to come into it, after all. Although I knew from experience that whenever I genuinely fell in love it happened almost on sight, perhaps in this other kind of affair I allowed myself to slide into a vague hope that this time, given the chance, love might develop. And anyway I was pleased to be wanted; I liked the social and erotic occupations involved; I enjoyed being fond of someone; and I continued to be moved by curiosity. Quite early in my career the image of a glass-bottomed boat came to me as an apt one for sex; a lovemaking relationship with a man offered chances to peer at what went on under his surface. Once, listening to someone as he told me for the third time a story about his childhood, I caught myself thinking ‘He’s a squeezed orange’ … oh dear, the beady eye again!
It was soon apparent that André and I would not be lovers for long. I felt that I could have enjoyed making love with him if he had been more enthusiastic about making love with me, and given my essential coldness since the shock of losing the man I really wanted, he probably felt the same about me: less than adequate grounds for an affair. And he was an insomniac whose bed, though a double one, was not wide. When I wanted to sleep, he wanted to sit up and read The Times, and what he wanted to do he did, with much uninhibited rustling: it was his house, his bed – and insomnia commands respect while somnolence is boring. Englishwomen are notorious for somnolence, he told me tetchily. He often remarked on the shortcomings of the English as lovers, a habit shared by many continental men with a touching failure to see how easily it can provoke the bitten-back response ‘Who are you to talk?’ Rather than enjoying the dozen or so nights we spent together, we went through them ‘because they were there’, and the only sadness I felt when he moved on to another bedfellow was the knee-jerk reaction ‘There you are, you see – you’re unable to keep anyone’. Understanding that I owed this droopy feeling to the fiancé who had jilted me, I didn’t hold it against André. It turned out that the slightness of our affair did not matter because – mystifyingly given how unlike we are in temperament – we had ended it as friends.
