Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  I was as alarmed as he was. The book was printed and bound – the first printing was large – it was a long book, expensive to manufacture … close to the wind as the firm was still having to sail, if this book was banned we would go down.

  ‘Hurry and get some clothes on,’ said André. ‘We must rush a copy to Desmond MacCarthy – I’ve got his address.’

  MacCarthy was the most influential reviewer then writing. We scribbled a note begging him to read the book at once and to say publicly that it was not obscene, then we set off in Aggie to push it through his letter-box. To insist on seeing him so early on a Sunday morning might, we felt, put him off. In retrospect, the chief value of our outing was that it was something to do in this nerve-racking situation: I don’t think that MacCarthy’s eventual response can have been more than civil, or I would not have forgotten it.

  Next morning orders started pouring into the office, and only then did it occur to us that if we were not heading for disaster, it might be a triumph. Meanwhile we were instantly served with an injunction against publishing The Naked and the Dead until the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, had considered the case and had given us permission to do so (if he did). Whether the injunction was handed over by the large and apparently amiable police detective who spent the morning questioning us all, or whether it came separately, I do not know.

  During the next two or three weeks the flood of orders nearly submerged us, the frustration of not being able to supply them became acute, and the encouragement we received from everyone we knew began to make triumph seem more likely than disaster. Finally André persuaded an MP of his acquaintance to ask a question in the House of Commons about the book’s fate: was the Attorney General going to ban it or not? The answer was no – a rather grudging one in that Shawcross said that he thought it was a bad book, but still no. So we were off – into, ironically, quite worrying financial problems, because we were hard put to it to pay for the several reprints we had to order.

  What we gained from this adventure was more than a good and best-selling novel; more, even, than the presence of Norman Mailer on our list from then on. Overnight we began to be seen as a brave and dashing little firm, worth serious attention from agents handling interesting new writers, and André’s welcome when he visited New York became even more richly rewarding.

  6

  ALLAN WINGATE’S PERFORMANCE looked quite impressive from the outside. Our books soon became more interesting and we produced them well – even elegantly – within the limits imposed by continuing paper rationing. (The quality of paper was poor, and there were regulations controlling the use of white space in a layout and so on, which made good typography a challenge for several years after the war.) And we were good, by the cottage-industry standards of the day, at selling. André’s work as a rep for Nicolson and Watson had taught him a lot about booksellers and librarians (the latter our chief customers for fiction), and he never underestimated the importance of good relations with them: again and again we were told how rare and pleasing it was for the head of a publishing house to visit and listen to booksellers, as he often did, and to be ready to negotiate directly with them about, for example, returning copies if they had over-ordered, instead of leaving such matters to a rep. To begin with he did this because we had no reps – no sales department, for that matter – but it was an attitude which stayed with him for all his career. He would always be liked by the people to whom we sold our wares – vital to a firm like ours, which remained short of books which the trade had to stock such as works of reference, how-to-do-its, and the cosier and flashier sorts of entertainment book.

  From the inside, however, we looked wobbly. This was because the experienced people who said it was impossible to start a publishing firm on £3,000 were right. We were always running out of money.

  Not being able to pay our bills used to give me horrible sensations of hollowness mixed with nausea, and I think that poor Mr Kaufmann, the man who actually had to do the desperate juggling which was supposed to stave off disaster, felt much the same. To André, on the other hand, these crises appeared to be invigorating, chiefly because he didn’t feel ‘I have run up bills I can’t pay’, but ‘These idiotic printers and binders are trying to prevent me from publishing truly essential books which the world needs and which will end by making enough money to pay them all and to spare’. So although he recognized that he would have to raise some more money somehow, he was never debilitated. Instead he was inspired. Never, at the time when a crisis struck, did we know anyone who wanted to invest in a struggling new publishing house; but always, in a matter of days, André found such a person. My own way of weathering a panic was by thrusting it aside and concentrating grimly on what was under my nose – reading a manuscript, designing an advertisement or whatever – so instead of following his manoeuvres with the intelligent interest which would have made this account so much more valuable, I kept my eyes tight shut; and when I next opened them, there would be André, cock-a-hoop, with a new director in tow. This happened five times.

  There was, however, an inconvenient, though endearing, weak spot in André’s otherwise impressive life-saving equipment. He had come to England because he loved the idea of it. In the Budapest of his schooldays the language you studied, in addition to Latin, was either German or English, and he, influenced by a beloved and admired uncle, had chosen English without a moment’s hesitation, and had found it greatly to his taste. The books he read as a result must have been an odd selection, because they left him with a romantic picture of a country remarkable for honesty and reliability, largely inhabited by comic but rather attractive beings known as English Gentlemen. I am sure that if, when he was trawling for someone to invest money in his firm, his net had caught a fellow-Hungarian, he would have insisted on their agreeing a thoroughly businesslike contract; but each time what came up was an Englishman – an Englishman radiant with the glow which shines from the answer to a prayer, and coloured a becoming pink by his viewer’s preconceptions. So – it is still hard to believe, but it is true – what existed between André and these five timely miracles was, in each case, nothing but a Gentleman’s Agreement. You couldn’t even say that it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, because there wasn’t any paper.

  Before this process began we lost Audrey, because André was unable to tolerate her husband Ronald. Her investment had been made largely to provide Ron with a job to come home to when he was demobilized from the Army, and within a few months of our opening he joined us as sales manager. He was a gentle, serene-looking person, a listener rather than a talker, and what his previous occupation had been I never knew. After he left us he trained as an osteopath, at which he was successful. There was nothing about him of the businessman – and certainly not of the salesman.

  Because none of us had met him earlier, Ron was not strictly an example of André’s inability to see what people were like. This weakness related to his impatient and clumsy handling of staff, both of them stemming from an absolute failure to be interested in any viewpoint but his own. It was quickly to become apparent that if he wanted a particular kind of person for his firm – a fireball of a sales manager, for example, or a scrupulously careful copy-editor – then he would see the next man or woman who approached him as that person, and would impatiently dismiss any dissenting opinion. Before he was done he would cram innumerable square pegs into round holes, and it is exhausting to remember the emotional wear and tear involved when, to his furious indignation (against the poor pegs) he began to see them for what they were and they had to be wrenched or eased out. But in Ron’s case it was bad luck rather than bad judgement – bad luck, especially, for Ron, who was not with us three weeks before he was pinned helplessly in the eye of that alarming little searchlight, was seen to be doing nothing right, and as a consequence began doing more and more things wrong.

  Sheila and I, who both loved Audrey and liked Ron, tried to make a stand, arguing and persuading as best we could, but in vain. I rem
ember when Ron’s sin was paying a bill on demand, as I would have done in his place. ‘That blockhead! Doesn’t he know what credit means?’ – ‘But you can’t yell at a man like that – have you ever explained to him that their bills don’t have to be paid for thirty days? Why should he know that? He’s never done this sort of thing before.’ – ‘I didn’t have to have it explained to me.’

  Ron was the wrong person for the job, but by the time he and Audrey decided that there was nothing for it but to pick up their money and go, what we would have to put up with for the sake of what we liked and admired in André had become uncomfortably evident.

  Then the five timely miracles began, and brought us together again. They were all so astonishingly useless that it was impossible not to gang up against them. (Though none of them was quite so bad as one that got away because – by God’s grace – he approached me not André. He was a charmingly camp old friend of my childhood who had married a very rich woman and wrote out of the blue to say that if we had a niche for him he would gladly put a lot of money into the firm. André quivered like a pointer, but it was I who was asked to lunch so it was I to whom my old friend said: ‘Well, my dear, the chief object of this exercise is to give me something to do before lunch instead of getting drunk.’ I often wondered how André would have managed to blank that sentence out if he had been sitting in my chair.)

  Of the five, numbers one, two and three soon became discouraged, whereupon numbers four and five bought them out, thus ending up owning more of the firm than André did – and he with no scrap of paper to give him any rights at all. Neither of them was a crook; both of them to start with were ready to admit that André had created Wingate and that he was the person who put most into running it. With a lot of tolerance and tact it might have been possible for them and him to rub along together, but tolerance and tact were not at André’s command.

  Number four I shall call Bertie, because he looked and sounded exactly like P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster would have looked and sounded had he been in his forties. He was the son of a well-known middle-brow man of letters and had himself written several novels in which expensive sports cars figured more prominently than any human character (André used to say that the only thing that had ever given Bertie an erection was a Lagonda). He lacked business sense and common sense – indeed a nonsense was what he usually made of any of our daily tasks unless someone was breathing down his neck. I would take things away and quietly do them again, which naturally riled him, while André would attack him in an appallingly humiliating way.

  Number five, whom I shall call Roger, had worked in publishing for years, but in an old-fashioned firm specializing in books on architecture and the British countryside, which had not demanded the expenditure of much energy. He knew the language of the trade, which was something, but he did not care to put himself out, and was often drunk (after, rather than before lunch, unlike my old friend). Occasionally he came in with a black eye, having been roughed up by an ill-chosen boyfriend, and he spent many of his afternoons in tears. (Roger was to end by killing himself – but at that time, on an acquaintance that was very superficial, I saw him only as foolish without understanding that he was also sad.) Perhaps he had thought he would work gently, between hangovers, on elegant books about eighteenth-century chinoiserie or Strawberry-Hill Gothick, but he never got round to signing up any such work and made no contribution to what we had on the stocks; so Roger, too, received short shrift from André. And, like Bertie, the more he was treated as an incompetent booby, the more he remembered that the two of them, not André, were now in financial control of Allan Wingate.

  For a year or two this disastrous set-up bubbled and seethed, at first without the intervention of any outsider, then in the offices of lawyers. We had moved to more commodious offices near Harrods, and now had a sales department and a production department (but still no one in charge of publicity except me with my hateful ads). In spite of our problems we were producing about fifty books a year, most of them profitable, and we would have been exuberantly happy if we could have enjoyed Bertie’s and Roger’s money without their presence. It seemed impossible, with everything going so well, that André would be ousted from his own firm by these two fools … but the more expert advice he took, the clearer it became that this would happen. He hadn’t a legal leg to stand on and the best his lawyer could do was to wangle a ‘generous’ gesture out of Bertie and Roger which allowed him, when he finally left, to take a few cookery books and three or four very unimportant others (he and I had agreed, once we had brought ourselves to face the facts, that there was nothing for it but to start another publishing house).

  There was, however, one book due to be delivered quite soon, about which a decision was still to be reached. This was the memoirs of Franz von Papen. To quote my own catalogue description of it:

  Franz von Papen’s life has faithfully reflected the fortunes of his country for over half a century. As a boy, when he was a court page in the Kaiser’s entourage, he witnessed the traditional pomp of imperialism. In his seventies, though cleared of war guilt by the Nuremberg Tribunal, he experienced defeat to the full when his own countrymen sentenced him to imprisonment. Between these extremes he was always at the centre of affairs in Germany, and whether the balance he maintained was the result of a clear or an ambivalent conscience is still a matter of conjecture.

  His own interpretation of his career and the events with which it was so closely connected is of the greatest importance. He describes his activities as military attaché in the United States from 1913 to 1915; he gives an account of Allenby’s campaign in the Middle East, as seen from ‘the other side’; he analyses the decline of the Weimar Republic, which he knew both as a member of the Reichstag and as Reich Chancellor. On the subject of his collaboration with Hitler as Vice-Chancellor, his mission to Austria before the Anschluss, and his appointment as Ambassador in Ankara during the last war he is exhaustive. He does not shirk the central enigma of his career: his acceptance of further high office under the Nazis after his open criticism of their methods in his Marburg speech, the murder of his colleagues during the Roehm Putsch, and his own house arrest.

  This book is of outstanding interest, both as a commentary on recent history from the German viewpoint, and as a personal record.

  To which I would add, now, that no one who hadn’t just lived through the Second World War can imagine how fascinating it was, so soon after it, to hear one of them speaking.

  This book the old man had been persuaded to write by André, who had visited him in connection with Operation Cicero, the story of the valet to the British Ambassador in Ankara, who towards the end of the war had cheekily supplied the Germans with copies of the contents of the ambassadorial safe. Von Papen, having been our man’s opposite number at the time, was in a position to confirm ‘Cicero’s’ story (which at first sight seemed too good to be true), which he did. André might, of course, have written to him about it, but characteristically saw greater possibilities in a meeting. Capturing the Cicero story was already one of his more striking achievements, involving a lightning dash to Ankara, but the way he used that book as a lead into another and more important project was an even better example of his energy.

  Technically the memoirs he had secured would, when completed, belong to Allan Wingate, but even the lawyers felt that André had a moral right to them; something which Bertie and Roger were reluctant to acknowledge. The wrangling was bitter, but they did finally accept a suggestion made by the lawyers on the Friday which was André’s and my last day at Allan Wingate: that there should be a ‘moratorium’ on the subject of von Papen until the following Tuesday, during which everyone should calm down in preparation for a decisive meeting about it.

  On the intervening Sunday I went to André’s house at lunchtime, to discuss our next move. While I was there the telephone rang, and hearing André switch to talking German it dawned on me that von Papen was on the line. Who, he asked, was this person who had just ca
lled him to say that André had been sacked from Allan Wingate? How could he have been sacked? What on earth was happening?

  André, always quick on his feet, was never quicker than at that moment. The call had come as a complete surprise, the situation he had to get across was not a simple one, and he was trembling with rage at this sudden revelation of Bertie and Roger’s sneaky manoeuvre; nevertheless in little more than ten minutes he had explained what was up with perfect lucidity and in exactly the right tone, and by the time he hung up he had von Papen’s assurance that in no circumstances would Allan Wingate ever set eyes on his manuscript, which would be André’s just as soon as he had launched his new firm. Seeing that silly pair of English Gentlemen being hoisted so neatly by their own petard remains one of the choicest satisfactions of my career.

  This event also provided a solid foundation for André’s new firm, of which I was to become a director. Within a very short time he had sold the serial rights of von Papen’s book to a Sunday paper called the People for the sum (peanuts now, but awe-inspiring then) of £30,000.

  7

  1952: TWO THINGS about the new firm were certain from the start: it would be called André Deutsch, and André would be its absolute boss. There would be other shareholders – eight of them including Nicolas Bentley and me, who would be working directors – but the value of each holder’s shares would be limited so that even if one of them bought out all the others, he would not gain control. A loan, soon to be repaid, enabled André to ensure this satisfactory state of affairs, and the von Papen serial deal lifted the firm at once into profitability.

  My own investment, the minimum necessary to qualify me for a directorship, was £350 given me by my godmother. Like Nick, I was in it for the job. The other shareholders were in it as a friendly gesture to André, not as a business venture, although all would end by making a modest but respectable profit. It was a sensible and pleasant arrangement, and a profound relief after Allan Wingate – which, gratifyingly, died a natural death about five years after André’s departure.