Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  I spent about an hour with Myra Hindley, in a small room outside the open door of which sat a bored-looking wardress. If I had not known who the woman opposite me was, what would I have thought of her? I would have liked her. She was intelligent, responsive, humorous, dignified. And if someone had then informed me that this unknown woman had been in prison for twenty-two years I would have been amazed: how could a person of whom that was true appear to be so little institutionalized?

  We talked about writing, of course – she had just taken a degree in English from the Open University – and about her conversion to Catholicism. She described how nightmarish it was to have the press breathing down the back of her neck all the time, and how boring to be short of intelligent talk. She was flippant rather than grateful about what she called ‘my old men’ – Lord Longford, David Astor, and Tims. To begin with her speech was very slightly slower than normal, so that I wondered if she was on tranquillizers – and Mr Tims was to say yes, she would have been: she had had to use them a lot since she had agreed to visit the moors with the police in an attempt to find the place where Brady had buried a victim whose remains had never been recovered. By the end of the hour she was speaking quite normally, and we could easily have gone on talking. I still liked her – and I had become quite sure that I was not going to become her editor.

  The reason for this was two-fold: I could not believe that such a book would in fact teach anyone anything that could not already be inferred from the events, and I was also unable to believe that forcing herself to write it would help Myra Hindley. I was not a believer like Mr Tims, so about her soul I did not know: I was capable of envisaging the healing of guilt only in terms of tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner, and I did not think that this woman, if she compelled herself fully to acknowledge what she had done, would be able to grant herself pardon. When she did what she did, she was not mad – as Ian Brady was – and, although she was young, she was an adult, and an intelligent one. It seems to me that there are extremes of moral deformity which cannot be pardoned: that Stangl was right when, having faced the truth about himself, he said ‘I ought to be dead’. He then had the luck to die, but that is not a conclusion that can be counted on. By the law of our land Myra Hindley had been condemned to live with what she had done, and she had contrived for herself a probably precarious way of doing so: admitting guilt, but blurring it by exaggerating her youth at the time and keeping the extent to which she had been influenced by, and eventually frightened by, Brady to the fore. What would society gain if she were made to live through those murders again as the sane adult she had in fact been, and ended by saying ‘I ought to be dead’, or by breaking down completely, which seemed to me the likely conclusion? Nothing. So if I enabled her to write the proposed book, and André Deutsch Limited published it, we would simply be trading in the pornography of evil, like the gutter press we despised. No, it could not be done.

  Much of our non-fiction came in as a result of André’s visits to New York: for example, John Kenneth Galbraith’s books about economics, Arthur Schlesinger’s about the Kennedy presidency, Joseph P. Lash’s two about the Roosevelts. He also harvested many unexpected books such as Eric Berne’s account of transactional analysis, Games People Play, very modish in its day, George Plimpton’s funny stories about taking on professional sportsmen at their own games, and Helene Hanff’s almost absurdly successful little collection of letters to a London bookseller, 84 Charing Cross Road. Quickies by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Bernadette Devlin resulted from his rapid response to whatever happened to be going on in the world; books by Gitta Sereny from his inability to read a newspaper without asking ‘Is there a book in it?’. Simone de Beauvoir’s books came from his flirtation with his old friend George Weidenfeld, with whom he had almost yearly meetings at which they discussed collaboration (sharing a warehouse, perhaps?), always to no avail except (mysteriously) in the case of joint publication of de Beauvoir. And it was André who launched us into our lively and profitable series of ‘Insight Books’ from the Sunday Times.

  In the sixties Harold Evans made his name as the inspiring young editor of that paper, piloting it to the forefront of investigative journalism. His literary editor Leonard Russell, an old friend of Nick’s and newer friend of André’s, called André one day in 1967 to consult him about an offer the paper had just received. The Insight Team was doing an investigation of the Philby affair, it had occurred to them that there might be a book in it, and George Weidenfeld had offered £10,000: did André think this was about right? ‘No,’ said André. ‘I will give you £20,000.’ And that was that.

  We had a slightly proprietorial feeling about Philby, because he had been introduced to us during his curious limbo-years between the defection of Burgess and Maclean to the Soviet Union and his own uncovering as a spy. Since 1949 Philby had been the top British Secret Intelligence Service man in Washington, liaising with the FBI and the CIA, and he and Burgess were colleagues both in their above-ground roles in the British secret service and in their underground roles as spies for Russia – he had even had Burgess to stay with him in Washington. He was therefore recalled to London for investigation and, although nothing could be proved against him, left his masters so uneasy that he was asked to resign. Soon afterwards a friend of Nick’s, a rich picture dealer called Tommy Harris who had also been in the British Secret Service, came to us and suggested that we should commission Philby’s life story: the poor man was now short of an occupation and of money, and of course there was nothing in the very unjust rumours which had followed his resignation. Tommy Harris brought him to meet Nick and André, who found him impressive and congenial, as did most of the people who met him, and who signed him up, agreeing to let him have his advance in instalments to keep him going during the writing. None of which was done, of course – I think Tommy Harris repaid the advance. Philby’s failure to deliver was attributed to his finding, when he came to it, that he was not a writer. Another five years were to pass before the true reason emerged, on his disappearance to Russia. While it is possible for a dedicated professional spy to live a life of deceit – an effort constantly rewarded by the achievement of specific ends, and probably by the feeling that you are being cleverer than the enemy – it would be unutterably boring to write it: to slog away at a story completely lacking in the one element which gave it, from your point of view, meaning. Once Philby had ‘come out’ he was able to write what he felt to be the true story of his life very well.

  There were to be five more ‘Insight Books’: a detailed analysis of a presidential election in America (Nixon’s); a hair-raising account of how a financial colossus (Bernard Cornfeld) rose and fell; an overview of the Middle Eastern war of 1973; the inside story of the Thalidomide disaster; and (the tail-end of the series, lacking the zing of its predecessors) Strike, the story of Thatcher, Scargill and the miners. All of them were team books produced by a group of exceptionally brilliant journalists in different combinations, chief among them Bruce Page, David Leitch, Phillip Knightley, Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson and Charles Raw. The books emerged from a room at the Sunday Times so throbbing with activity that it was hard to imagine how a single paragraph of lucid prose could be written in it. It was Piers Burnett who edited them all for us, and he tells me that no experience in his long and varied publishing career was more entertaining.

  In spite of André’s record as a collector of square pegs, he did, of course, hit on many more round ones, and Piers was probably the roundest of them all. I think he was taken on as another attempt to impose on the editorial department that illusory orderliness and method of which André still spasmodically dreamt, and Piers did continue to function as an editor all the time he was with us; but quite soon his practicality, good sense and astonishing appetite for hard work got through to André. He had long nursed another dream in addition to that of the Editorial Manager; the dream of a Right Hand Man who would relieve the weight on his own shoulders by taking on at least some of the planning, negotiating and c
alculating with which he was burdened. He had recently made two attempts to bring this dream person in from outside, neither of which had worked – and very few of his onlookers would have been prepared to bet so much as a penny on any such attempt working. But now it dawned on him that perhaps what he needed was already in the house. He hesitated; he seemed for a while to be almost disgruntled at the prospect of anything so easy; and then the decision was made and Piers moved downstairs to the little room next to André’s, and there, at last, was the Right Hand Man who suited possibly the most difficult man in London.

  The most spectacular thing that Piers did for us was to bring in Peter Benchley’s Jaws on his first visit to New York; but he was not ordinarily much at home with fiction, and when from ’79 to ’81 a small list under his own imprint came out under our wing it specialized in psychology and sociology. Nowadays his own publishing firm, Aurum Press, which he runs with Bill McCreadie (once our sales manager) and Sheila Murphy (once our publicity manager), has a much wider focus but still avoids fiction. Otherwise it is the nearest thing going to a ‘Son of Deutsch’: much nearer than the firm which now bears our name.

  An aspect of our activities which seemed in the sixties to be very important was André’s adventures in Africa. In ’63 we declared: ‘We are proud to announce that we are working in close association with AUP (African Universities Press, Lagos), the first indigenous publishing house in free Africa, the foundation of which was announced in Lagos in April this year. The greater part of AUP’s output will be educational books chosen to answer the needs of Nigerian schools and colleges. It will, however, have a general list as well. Books on this list likely to appeal to readers outside Nigeria will be published simultaneously by us.’ Two years later a similar announcement was made about the East African Publishing House in Kenya. Both publishing houses were started by André, who had chased up the local capital and editorial board for them and had found them each a manager. As a result we secured some good African novelists (my own favourites were The Gab Boys by Cameron Duodu and My Mercedes Is Longer than Yours by Nkem Nwankwo), and a number of intelligent books about African politics and economics – and André enjoyed some exciting trips. (One of them was too exciting. Meeting a seductive young woman at a party, he took her for a midnight stroll on a beautiful beach near Lagos, and they were hardly out of his hired car before he was flat on his face in the sand being knelt on by two large ragged men with long knives who slit his trousers pocket to get his wallet and car-keys, and might well have slit him if another large ragged man had not loomed out of the darkness to intervene. The thieves fled, the young woman was in hysterics, they were miles from the city centre or a telephone … all André could do was ask their rescuer to lead them to the nearest police station – at which all three of them were instantly arrested and the policemen started beating up the poor rescuer. It took André four hours to get the facts into the heads of the Law and procure a lift back to town – having not a penny left on him he couldn’t offer a bribe. Nor could he give his rescuer a reward. He delivered the reward to the police station next day but was pretty sure it would not be passed on.)

  Most of his African experiences, however, were pleasant and productive, and I admired him for having taken the current interest among publishers in the newly freed countries a step further than anyone else. Most of the people in our trade were more liberal than not, feeling guilty at being subjects of an imperial power and pleased that with the war’s end Britain began relinquishing its so-called ‘possessions’ overseas. And many of them were genuinely interested in hearing what writers in those countries had to say now that they were free. For a time during the fifties and early sixties it was probably easier for a black writer to get his book accepted by a London publisher, and kindly reviewed thereafter, than it was for a young white person.

  There was, of course, something else at work as well as literary and/or political interest. There are, after all, a vast number of Indians, Africans and West Indians in the world – a potential reading public beyond computation – and nowhere, except in India on a tiny scale, were these masses able to produce books for themselves. Certainly no British publisher was foolish enough to suppose that more than a minuscule fringe of that great potential market was, or would be for years, accessible, but I think most of us thought it would become increasingly accessible in the foreseeable future. The feeling in the air was that freedom would mean progress; that the market out there was certainly going to expand, however slowly, so that it would not only be interesting to get in on the ground floor of publishing for and about Africa: it would also prove, in the long run, to be good business. Longman’s and Macmillan’s, with their specialized educational lists, were the firms which addressed the situation most sensibly, in ways helpful to their customers and profitable to themselves. André was the one who did it most romantically. Instead of providing Nigeria and Kenya with books made in Britain, he felt, Britain should help them develop publishing industries of their own. André Deutsch Limited was a shareholder in both the African houses he got off the ground, but not a major shareholder; and it claimed no say in what they were to publish. It was a generous enterprise, which seemed for a while to work well in a rough and ready way …

  History, alas, has not left many traces of it, nor of the often wise and persuasive thinking in the non-fiction books about African affairs, particularly those of the French agronomist René Dumont, which we were so proud of. In Tanzania Julius Nyerere ordered a copy each of Dumont’s False Start in Africa for every member of his government. He might as well have tossed them into Lake Victoria. But in the sixties it would have felt not only defeatist, but wrong, to foresee that the dangers Dumont warned against were not to be avoided.

  Now I wonder whether we were expecting history to move faster than it can because we were witnesses of how fast an empire can crumble, and did not stop to think that falling down is always more rapid than building up … and what, anyway, were we expecting the multitude of tribal societies in that continent, many of them with roots more or less damaged by European intrusion, to build up to? Perhaps our concern was, and is, as much an aspect of neocolonialism as American investment in Nigerian oil-wells.

  André, and to some extent Piers, were the people who dealt with the African houses. My only brush with them came when we published a book by Tom Mboya jointly with EAPH and he came to London for its launching. For some reason André was prevented from meeting him at the airport. Feeling that it would be rude just to send a limousine for him, he asked me to go in his stead. I had a clearer idea than he had of the value a Kenyan VIP would attribute to a middle-aged female of school-marmish appearance as a meeter, but André pooh-poohed my doubts and feebly I gave in. The drive from Heathrow to Mboya’s hotel was even less agreeable than I expected. Almost all of it was spent by him and his henchmen discussing, with a good deal of sniggering and in an extemporized and wholly transparent code, how and where they were going to find fuckable blondes. But that little incident did not prevent me from feeling pleased about our African connection, seeing it as adding stature to our house.

  Although I did not get to Africa, I did to the Caribbean: the only ‘perk’ of my career, but such a substantial one that I am not complaining. Among our several Caribbean writers was the prime minister of Trinidad & Tobago (two islands, one country), Eric Williams, with his Capitalism and Slavery and From Columbus to Castro. Such editorial consultation as was necessary could easily have been done by letter, but André delighted in collecting freebies. He saw journeys as a challenge, the object of the challenge being to get there without paying. At a pinch he would settle for an upgrading rather than a free flight – or even, if he was acting on someone else’s behalf, for an invitation into the VIP lounge; but he was not often reduced to spending the firm’s money on an economy fare. Acting on someone else’s behalf gave him a cosy feeling of generosity, so when Eric Williams’s proofs came in he staggered me by suggesting that I should take them to Port of Spain, and he wa
ngled the works out of Eric: VIP lounge, first class, and free. I had to get to New York on the cheapest charter flight I could find (quite a complicated and chancy business in those days), but from New York to Port of Spain it was champagne all the way. And once there, after a short session with that aloof, almost stone-deaf man whose only method of communication was the lecture, I could extend the visit into a holiday.

  And even that was free to begin with, because we were doing a book about the islands for tourists, and the owners of the biggest hotel on Tobago, confusing the word ‘publishing’ with ‘publicity’, invited me to stay there. It was a luxurious hotel, but the people staying in it were very old. The men played golf on its lovely links all day, the women sat by its swimming-pool, apparently indifferent to the emerald and aquamarine sea being fished by pelicans a stone’s throw away, and the ‘tropical fruit’ announced on its menus turned out to be grapefruit. I retired to my pretty cabin in a gloomy state – and became much gloomier when I read the little notice on the back of the door listing the hotel’s prices. I did know, really, that I was there as a guest, but it had not been put into words, and the question ‘Supposing I’m not?’ seized on my mind. If I wasn’t I’d have to be shipped home in disgrace as an indigent seaman (when I was a child my father told me that that was what consuls did to people who ran out of money abroad). So next morning I took to the bush with that irrational worry still gnawing, and had the luck to hit on Tobago’s Public Beach.

  This was a folly wished on the island by the government in Port of Spain. Tobago was girdled by wonderful beaches open to everyone, and would have preferred the money to be spent on something useful, such as road-repairs. So nobody went to the Public Beach, and Mr Burnett, who ran it, had such a boring time that he couldn’t wait to invite me to join him and his assistant for a drink on the verandah of his little office. I told him my worry about the big hotel, and said: ‘Surely there must be a hotel somewhere on the island where ordinary people stay?’ There was a tiny pause while the two men avoided exchanging glances and I remembered with dismay that when people here said ‘ordinary’ they meant ‘black’ in a rude way; then Mr Burnett kindly chose to take the word as I had intended it, and said of course there was: his old friend Mr Louis was opening one that very week, and he would take me there at once.