Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  From the five Wingate years we brought friends on both the manufacturing and retailing sides of the book trade, a good reputation with agents, and much useful experience. It hardly felt like starting a new firm, more like carrying on the old one in improved conditions: we now had the equivalent of Bertie’s and Roger’s money without Bertie and Roger – just what we had longed for. This was so delightful that it might have relaxed some people’s moral fibre, but not ours. Perhaps the most useful thing gained from Wingate was a disposition shaped by poverty. It had always been natural to André to be careful, and those who had worked with him at Wingate, seeing that his attitude was strictly necessary for survival, had fallen into it themselves – even those like me, whose natural tendency was towards extravagance. Since then I have often noticed that it is not good for people to start a venture with enough – not to mention too much – money: it is hard for them to learn to structure it properly, simply because they are never forced to.

  Even if we had been eager to relax we would not have been allowed to. André felt it to be a danger. He countered it by putting up a blood-chilling front of gloom about our prospects for the next forty years. However well we were doing, the slightest hint that expenditure of some sort would not come amiss (the redecoration of the reception area, perhaps, or thirty-two pages of illustrations in a book instead of sixteen, or – God forbid – a rise for someone) would bring on a fit of shocked incredulity at such frivolous heedlessness in the face of imminent disaster. Much though the rest of us used to complain about this frugality, it is a fact that our firm continued to make a profit every year until he sold it in 1985, in spite of the last five years of that time being hard ones for small independent publishing houses; and this might not have been – towards the end certainly would not have been – possible had his control of our overheads been less fierce.

  For three years we rented the top two-thirds of a doctor’s house in Thayer Street. They were happy years, but still a touch amateurish: did proper publishers have to put a board over a bath in order to make a packing-bench? Did proper editors and proper sales managers work together in the same small room? Our performance, nevertheless, was good enough to let us buy up Derek Verschoyle’s firm in 1956, and move into its premises at 14 Carlisle Street in Soho.

  Derek Verschoyle was a raffish figure, vaguely well-connected and vaguely literary, about whom I had first heard from my father who had encountered him as an agreeably picturesque feature of the Spectator. Verschoyle was its literary editor for a while. His room looked out over the mews behind that periodical’s offices in Gower Street, and he, lolling with his feet up on his desk, used to take pot-shots at the local cats out of his window with a .22 which he kept on his desk for the purpose. He must have been able to raise a fair amount of money in order to set up his own publishing firm (its assets included the freehold of the house, which was very well placed) but it didn’t take him long to get through it. We gained only two really valuable authors from him – Roy Fuller, whose novels and poetry added lustre to our list for a long time, and Ludwig Bemelmans, whose ‘Madeline books’ for young children did very well for us. One of the more burdensome books we inherited from him was a pointless compilation called Memorable Balls, a title so much tittered over that we thought of leaving it out when we were arranging our stand at the Sunday Times’s first book fair. Finally one copy was shoved into an inconspicuous corner – where the Queen Mother, who had opened the fair, instantly noticed it. Picking it up, she exclaimed with delight: ‘Oh, what a tempting title!’ André insisted that it was his confusion over this that made him drop her a deep curtsey instead of a bow.

  Verschoyle was the kind of English Gentleman André seemed fated to meet, but although undeclared liabilities went on leaking out of crannies for a long time, and the bills which came in with despairing regularity from his tailor and his wine merchant used to make our eyes pop, he did us no harm and much good. Settled into his house, we ceased being promising and became pros.

  There were two large and well-proportioned rooms, and the rest of the house rambled back from its narrow frontage in a haphazard but convenient jumble of partitioned spaces. André, as was only right, had the better of the two good rooms, and Nick Bentley had the other. I moved fast to secure the smallest room there was, knowing that only the physical impossibility of inserting a second desk would save me from having to share. If I had put up a fight for Nick’s room I would have got it, because Nick was far too well-mannered to fight back; but André would quite certainly have seen it as a chance to squeeze two other people into it with me, neither of whom would have been my secretary because I didn’t have one. It never entered his head to ask Nick to share it with anyone other than his secretary.

  Nick edited our non-fiction – not all of it, and not fast. He was such a stickler for correctness that he often had to be mopped-up after, when his treatment of someone’s prose had been over-pedantic, or when his shock at a split infinitive had diverted his attention from some error of fact. I don’t think I am flattering myself in believing that I was busier and more useful than he was (though there was nothing to choose between us in uselessness when it came to exercising business sense – a fact often bewailed by André, although he enjoyed the jokes he could make about it). I certainly noticed the privileges enjoyed by Nick as a result of his gender, just as I noticed that his salary was a good deal larger than mine; but what I felt about it was less resentment than a sort of amused resignation. All publishing was run by many badly-paid women and a few much better-paid men: an imbalance that women were, of course, aware of, but which they seemed to take for granted.

  I have been asked by younger women how I brought myself to accept this situation so calmly, and I suppose that part of the answer must be conditioning: to a large extent I had been shaped by my background to please men, and many women of my age must remember how, as a result, you actually saw yourself – or part of you did – as men saw you, so you knew what would happen if you became assertive and behaved in a way which men thought tiresome and ridiculous. Grotesquely, you would start to look tiresome and ridiculous in your own eyes. Even now I would rather turn and walk away than risk my voice going shrill and my face going red as I slither into the sickening humiliation of undercutting my own justified anger by my own idiotic ineptitude.

  But one can, of course, always walk away. That I could easily have done, and never thought of doing; so I doubt that it was only the mixed vanity and lack of confidence of the brainwashed female which held me there in acceptance of something which I knew to be unjust and which other women, whom I admired, were beginning actively to confront.

  Some time in January 1998 I read in the Independent an article about recent ‘research’ (it sounded small-scale and superficial) into the differences between the attitudes of men and those of women towards their jobs. Men had been found more likely to aim for promotion and increased pay, women to aim for work they would enjoy and the satisfaction of doing it well. As so often when industrious people ‘discover’ something obvious, my first reaction was ‘You don’t say!’; but this was followed by an oddly satisfying sense of agreement, because the article did so exactly sum up my own experience. I hadn’t just loved being an editor, I had also positively liked not being treated as the director I was supposed to be. This was because, as I have explained, I loathed and still loathe responsibility, am intensely reluctant to exert myself in any way that I don’t enjoy, and am bored by thinking about money (in spite of liking to spend it). So while it is true that André took advantage of my nature in getting me cheap and having to bother so little about my feelings, it cannot be said that in relation to the job he did any violence to those feelings.

  Obviously it is true that indifference to status and pay is not found in all women, but I have seen it in a good many who, like me, enjoyed their work. All my colleagues during the sixties and seventies admired and sympathized with other women who were actively campaigning for women’s rights, but none of them joined in as
campaigners: we could see injustice, but we didn’t feel the pinch of it, because we happened to be doing what we wanted to do. Lazy or selfish? Yes, I suppose so. But I have to say that when I search myself for guilt about it – and guilt comes to me easily – I find none. While conditioning must have played some part in the inertia displayed by myself and my friends, my own experience suggests that it was at work on an innate disposition to be satisfied with my lot. After all, there are some men who mind more about enjoying their work than about what they are paid for it and where they stand in the hierarchy; so why, when a woman does the same, should it be taken for granted that she is brainwashed?

  8

  THE CARLISLE STREET years hummed with possibility. Although we had now been in the game long enough to know that the majority of manuscripts received would disappoint, we still expected excitement daily, and among the seventy-odd books a year that we published, a fair number justified that expectation. To Mailer, Richler, Moore and Fuller we soon added Terry Southern, V. S. Naipaul, Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, Mavis Gallant, Wolf Mankowitz, Jack Schaefer, Jean Rhys – the poets Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Jennings, Laurie Lee, Peter Levi, Geoffrey Hill – the nonfiction writers Simone de Beauvoir, Peggy Guggenheim, Sally Belfrage, Alberto Denti di Pirajno, Lionel Fielden, Clare Sheridan, Mercedes d’Acosta (not all of them names likely to be recognized now, but all remarkable people who wrote remarkably well).

  By now I considered myself a proper editor, so perhaps this is the place to describe the job as I saw it. In many firms a distinction was made between editors and copy editors, the first being concerned with finding authors and keeping them happy, encouraging them in their projects and sometimes tempting them down this path or that; the second being the humbler but still essential people who tidy texts. In our firm a book’s editor was responsible for both sides of the operation. Not until the eighties did we start farming out tidying jobs to freelance copy editors, and I doubt whether any Deutsch editor felt happy about doing so. I know I didn’t.

  The things which had to be done for all books were simple but time-consuming and sometimes boring (what kept one going through the boring bits was liking – usually – the book for which one was doing them). You had to see that the use of capital letters, hyphens, italics and quotation marks conformed to the house style and was consistent throughout; you had to check that no spelling mistakes had crept in, and make sure that if the punctuation was eccentric it was because the author wanted it that way; you had to watch out for carelessness (perhaps an author had decided halfway through to change a character’s name from Joe to Bob: when he went back over the script to make the alteration, had he missed any ‘Joes’?). You had to pick up errors of fact, querying ones you were doubtful about at the risk of looking silly. If your author quoted from other writers’ work, or from a song, you had to check that he had applied for permission to do so – almost certainly he would not have done, so you would have to do it for him. If a list of acknowledgements and/or a bibliography and/or an index were called for you had to see that they were done. If the book was to be illustrated you might have to find the illustrations, and would certainly have to decide on their order and captioning, and see that they were paid for. And if anything in the book was obscene or potentially libellous you must submit it to a lawyer, and then persuade your author to act on his advice.

  All that was routine, and applied to the work of even the most perfectionist of writers. Where the work became more interesting was when it was necessary to suggest and discuss alterations to the text.

  Editorial intervention ranged from very minor matters (a clumsy sentence here, a slight lack of clarity there) to almost complete rewritings such as I did on the book about Tahiti (although I don’t remember ever doing another rewrite as extensive as that one). Usually it would be on the lines of ‘Wouldn’t it work better if you moved the paragraph describing so-and-so’s looks back to where he first appears?’ or ‘Could you expand a little on so-and-so’s motive for doing such-and-such? It’s rather arbitrary as it stands’. I can’t remember anyone resenting such suggestions, though sometimes of course they would disagree for good reasons: mostly, if what is said by an obviously attentive reader makes sense, the writer is pleased to comply. Writers don’t encounter really attentive readers as often as you might expect, and find them balm to their twitchy nerves when they do; which gives their editors a good start with them.

  It was a rule with me that I must not overdo such tinkerings: it must always be the author’s voice that was heard, not mine, even if that meant retaining something that I didn’t much like. And of course it was an absolute rule with all of us that no change of any kind could be made without the author’s approval. It was those two points which I considered my ground rules. The ideal was to receive a script which could go through unchanged (Brian Moore, V. S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys were outstanding providers of such scripts; and books already published in America were equally trouble-free, because such editorial work as they had needed would have been done over there). If, on the other hand, the text had needed work, then by the time it reached publication it must read as though none had been done on it, which could usually only be achieved by working closely with the author.

  Writers varied greatly in their attitude to intervention. I never came across anyone who was anything but grateful at having a mistake, whether of fact or syntax, pointed out, but when it came to changes some weighed every word of every suggestion, many accepted suggestions cheerfully, a few asked for more, and a very few didn’t seem to care one way or another.

  George Mikes, for example, needed a lot of work done on his books. He was a lazy man, one of those people who, once they have become fluent enough in a foreign language to say what they want, can’t be bothered to go the step further which would enable them to say it correctly. If his writing was to sound like natural, easygoing colloquial English, which he was aiming for, about one sentence in every three had to be adjusted. For the first two or three of the thirteen of his books that I edited, he took the trouble to read the edited script, but gradually he paid it less and less attention until, with the last three of his books, he would not even glance at the script – not even when I told him that I had put in a couple of jokes! Knowing him very well, I always felt quite sure that I had made his books sound just like he would have sounded if he had pushed his English up that last notch – that he was, in fact, right to trust me: but still I was slightly shocked at his doing so.

  One kind of editing I did not enjoy: cookery books. We built up a list which eventually amounted to over forty titles, mostly about national cuisines or the use of a particular ingredient – rice cooking, mushroom cooking, cooking with yoghurt and so on. This list was André’s idea – he it was who saw that as food supplies returned to normal, thousands of the British middle class would for the first time have to cook it with their own hands. I was too uninterested in food to have thought of it: in those days my notion of adventurous cooking was scrambling an egg instead of boiling it. But I was a woman, and where was the woman’s place but in the kitchen? So the cookery list became ‘mine’.

  Luckily André capped his first inspiration by meeting Elizabeth David at a dinner party and inviting her to become our cookery-book consultant, and her year or so of doing this saved me. Quickly she taught me to look for authenticity, to avoid gimmicks, to appreciate how a genuine enjoyment of food made a book tempting without any self-conscious attempts at ‘atmosphere’. Before long I could see for myself that Elizabeth would never have done as the sole editor of a cookery-book list because so many useful books would prove too coarse to get through the fine sieve of her rather snobbish perfectionism; but her respect for the art of cooking and the elegant sensuousness of her response to flavour and texture were an education in the enjoyment of eating, as well as in the production of cookery books, for which I am still grateful.

  There is no kind of editing more laborious than getting a cookery book right. You cannot assume that a procedure described i
n detail on page 21 will be remembered by a cook using a recipe on page 37 or 102: it must be fully described every single time it is used. And never can you be sure that all the ingredients listed at the head of a recipe will appear in their proper place within it. You must check, check and check again, and if you slip into working automatically, without forcing yourself to imagine actually doing what you are reading, you will let through appalling blunders (oh those outraged letters from cooks saying ‘Where do the three eggs go in your recipe for such-and-such’!). I did become proud of our cookery list, and fond of some of its authors – but even so, cookery books ran advertisements close as my least favourite things.

  I suppose that when I started on them I had never come across any description of the traditional savagery of great chefs: I assumed that people, many of them comfortably built and rosy-faced, who wrote about what was evidently to them a great sensuous pleasure, would be by nature mellow and generous. When a West End bookshop devoted a week to promoting cookery books, and accepted our suggestion that it should open with a party for which six of our cooks should provide the food, I expected a merry evening. The six joined eagerly in the preliminary planning, which had to ensure that each would bring two dishes suitable for finger eating, which represented her own speciality and which didn’t clash with the other cooks’ contributions. They bravely undertook the task of transporting their delicate work to the shop, and all arrived in good time to set about arranging the food to its best advantage. Whereupon – crunch! and someone’s tray landed on someone else’s plate – splat! and a passing rump sent a dish flying to the floor – ‘Oh do let me help!’ and a knife was seized and brought to bear like a jolly hockey stick on a rival’s exquisite confection … Never again did I allow any of our cooks to meet each other.