Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  So I became – it seemed like a dream, such a delightful happening coming so pat – Mr Louis’s first guest in the Hotel Jan de Moor: a former estate house in pretty grounds, scrupulously run and not expensive. Mr Louis had reckoned that American tourists would soon include American black people – school teachers and so on – who would expect comfort but would be unable to pay silly prices, so he had decided to cater for the likes of them. In that first week the only people who visited were his neighbours, dropping in for a drink in the bar as dusk fell, which made it almost as friendly as staying in a private house, and I have never enjoyed a hotel more.

  That whole holiday was a joy, not only because it was my introduction to the beauties of tropical seas, shores and forests, but because I knew the place so well. Of course I had always been aware of how well V. S. Naipaul and Michael Anthony wrote, but until I had stepped off an aeroplane into the world they were writing about I had not quite understood what good writing can do. There were many moments, walking down a street in Port of Spain, or driving a bumpy road between walls of sugar cane or under coconut palms, when I experienced an uncanny twinge of coming home; which made the whole thing greatly more interesting and moving than even the finest ordinary sightseeing can be. And after that I was always to find what I think of as the anti-Mustique side of the Caribbean, dreadful though its problems can be, amazingly congenial.

  In the nineteen-seventies we went through an odd, and eventually comic, experience: to the outward eye we were taken over by Time/Life. ‘Synergy’ had suddenly become very much the thing among giant corporations, and on one of his New York trips André had allowed himself to be persuaded that we would benefit greatly if he sold a considerable chunk of shares in André Deutsch Limited to that company. Piers and I both think it must have been about forty per cent, but we were never told. The chief – indeed, the only – argument in favour of doing so was that already the advances being paid for important books were beginning to sky-rocket beyond our reach, and with Time/Life as our partners we could keep up with that trend.

  I was present at the London meeting where the beauties of the scheme were explained to our board by two or three beaming Time/Lifers who appeared to be describing some mysterious charity founded for the benefit of small publishers. At one point I asked a question which was genuinely puzzling me: ‘But what do you see as being in it for you?’ After a fractional pause, a gentle blast of pure waffle submerged the question, and I was left believing what in fact I continued to believe: that they didn’t know. Shrewd predatory calculations might be underlying all this, but it seemed unlikely. ‘Can it be,’ I asked André after the meeting, ‘that they are just silly?’ To which he answered crisply: ‘Yes.’ I think he had already started to wonder what on earth he was doing, but couldn’t see how to back out of it.

  Oh well, we all thought, perhaps we will get some big books through them, and they don’t seem to intend any harm – and the truth was, they did not. We got one big book through them – Khrushchev’s memoirs in two volumes, the first of which was sniffed at suspiciously by reviewers who thought it was written by the CIA, and the second of which was claimed by Time/Life to be proved genuine by scientific means, but who cared? They made no attempt to intervene in any of our publishing plans. And they drove André mad.

  This they did by writing to him from time to time, asking him for a detailed forecast of our publishing plans for the next five years. The first time they did this he sent a civil reply explaining that our kind of publishing didn’t work like that, but gradually he became more and more enraged. I remember being taken aside at a New York party by the man who functioned as our link with Time/Life, and asked to calm André and explain to him that all he need do to keep the accounts people happy was send a few figures. He didn’t say in so many words ‘It doesn’t matter if they make sense or not’, but he very clearly implied as much, and that was the message I carried home … which made André even madder. It was their silliness that was getting to him, not their asking for information. Our accountant Philip Tammer (who, by the way, was the dearest, kindest, most long-suffering, most upright and most loyal accountant anyone ever had) once wrote to their accountants: ‘What we will be publishing in five years’ time depends on what’s going on in the head of some unknown person probably sitting in a garret, and we don’t know the address of that garret.’ André was feeling about Time/Life very much what I felt about André when he nagged the editorial department about lack of method.

  The other cause of indignation was the Annual Meeting of the Associates (there were ten or so other companies linked to Time/Life, like us). Sales conferences in exotic venues were much indulged in during the seventies – perhaps they still are? They were justified on the grounds that giving the reps a treat would improve their morale. This was not a belief subscribed to by anyone in our firm. On one occasion we ventured as far as a pub outside Richmond, but usually at the end of the conference we all sloped off to dinner at an inexpensive restaurant, the meal (if André had managed to get his oar in) ordered in advance so that no one could start getting silly with the smoked salmon (and they were fun, those evenings). So the idea of traipsing off to Mexico for what amounted to a glorified sales conference, as he had to do in the first year of this alliance, seemed to André an outrage. For the second year they announced that the venue would be Morocco, and he struck. He wrote to them severely, pointing out that all the Associates would be going, like him, to the Frankfurt Book Fair, so the obvious time and place for their meeting would be the weekend before the Fair, somewhere in Germany within easy reach of Frankfurt. I distinctly heard the sound of gritted teeth behind the fulsome letter received in return, which assured him that ‘this is exactly the kind of input we were hoping to gain from our Associates’.

  Before each meeting all the Associates were asked to think up ten Publishing Projects (which meant books), and to send their outlines to New York, where they would be pooled, printed, and bound in rich leather, one copy each for every delegate with his name impressed on it in gold, to await him on the conference table. ‘Thinking up’ books on demand is one of the idlest occupations in all of publishing. If an interesting book has its origins in a head other than its author’s, then it either comes in a flash as a result of compelling circumstances, or it is the result of someone’s obsession which he has nursed until just the right author has turned up. Books worth reading don’t come from people saying to each other ‘What a good idea!’ They come from someone knowing a great deal about something and having strong feelings about it. Which does not mean that a capable hack can’t turn out a passable book-like object to a publisher’s order; only that when he does so it ends on the remainder shelves in double-quick time.

  So we asked each other ‘Do you think that all the other Associates are feeling just like us?’ – and what we were feeling was a blend of despair and ribaldry. We had a special file labelled ‘Stinkers’, kept in a bottom drawer of André’s desk, which contained a collection of all the most appalling ideas that had been submitted to us over the years, and I dug this out … But finally sobriety prevailed and we settled for two or three notions so drab that I have forgotten them. No one else, André reported, did any better, so they had all been feeling like us.

  Two years were as many as André could stand of Time/Life – and probably as much as they could stand of him. He never divulged which side it was who first said ‘Let’s call it a day’, nor how much money was lost on the deal when he bought the shares back, but his delight at being free of them was manifest. I thought of pressing him for details, and so, I think, did Piers, but it would have been too unkind. The silliness had not all been on the other side.

  Since starting this chapter about our long and mostly happy time in Great Russell Street I have spent hours remembering colleagues, remembering authors, remembering books … colleagues, especially. I suppose people who choose to work with books and are good at their jobs are not inevitably likeable, but they very often are; and if you
see them every day over long periods of time, collaborating with them in various ways as you do so, they become more than likeable. They become a pleasing part of your life. Esther Whitby, Ilsa Yardley, Pamela Royds, Penny Buckland, June Bird, Piers Burnett, Geoff Sains, Philip Tammer …: I can’t write about them in the sense of making them come alive and interesting to people who know nothing about them, without embarking on a different kind of book, and one which is, I fear, beyond my range, so I will just have to go on carrying them, and others, in my head for my own pleasure. And it’s for my own satisfaction that I now say how glad I am to have them there.

  The authors: well, about a few of them I shall write in Part Two. And the books: there were too many of them, and anyway nothing is more boring than brief descriptions of books which one has not read. But two of them have floated to the surface as being of great value to me. Neither of them was part of a literary career; neither of them sold well; neither of them will be remembered by many readers. What is remarkable about both of them is the person who speaks.

  Over and over again one sees lives which appear to have been shaped almost entirely by circumstances: by a cruel childhood, perhaps, or (like Franz Stangl’s) by a corrupt society. These two stories are told by a man and a woman who, if shaping by circumstances were an immutable law, would have been hopeless wrecks. They did not just survive what would have finished off a great many people: they survived it triumphantly.

  The first of these books is Parents Unknown: A Ukrainian Childhood, by Morris Stock. He was found as a newborn baby on the steps of a synagogue in a small Ukrainian town; was shunted around the Jewish community to various foster parents, ending with a brutal couple who almost killed him. If an interfering peasant woman hadn’t made a fuss when she noticed a little boy almost dead with cold, waiting on a wagon outside an inn, they would quite have done so. The community stepped in again, and he was passed on to a grain-merchant who was eventually to work him very hard, but who treated him well. Almost at once he began to be liked and trusted, learning how to read and write and mastering his trade: it seems that as soon as he was free to be himself he revealed intelligence, resilience and generosity. Before he was twenty he had set up business on his own, married a girl he was to love for the rest of her life, and decided to move to London, where he spent the next fifty years prospering, and raising a family remarkable for talent and ability. He was an old man when his daughter persuaded him to write his story, which he did with vigour and precision – a very charming old man. Some quality at the centre of Morris Stock had been able to triumph over formidable odds.

  And the same was true of Daphne Anderson, who wrote The Toe-Rags. By the time I met her Daphne was the beautiful wife of a retired general, living in Norfolk, better-read and more amusing in a gentle way than I expected a general’s wife to be. It was astounding to learn that this woman had once been a barefoot, scabby-legged little girl whose only dress was made from a sugar-sack, knowing nothing beyond the Rhodesian bush and speaking an African language – Shona – better than she spoke English. Her parents were the poorest of poor whites, victims of her father’s uselessness: he was stupid, bad-tempered, utterly self-centred, incompetent and irresponsible. He dumped her wretched mother, with three children, in the bush and left them there for months on end, sending no money. She scraped by, by allowing occasional favours to such men as were about, and the children were looked after by Jim, their Shona servant (no white could be so poor as not to have a servant: it was like Charles Dickens’s family taking their little maid into debtors’ prison with them). Jim saved not only Daphne’s life, but also her spirit, being a rock of kindness and good sense for the children to cling to.

  Not surprisingly, when a decent man asked the mother to go off with him she did, taking her new baby but leaving the three other children in the belief that their father would be arriving next day. She thought that if no one else was there he would have to cope. He did not turn up. Three days later Jim, having run out of food, walked them to the nearest police station. They never saw their mother again, and had the misfortune to be delivered into the hands of their father’s sister. She was like him in every way except in being (although unable to read) ruthlessly competent, so that she had become rich by running a brick kiln. She took the children in because of ‘What would the neighbours say?’, then took it out on them by consigning them to the kitchen: where, once again, they were saved by an African man – her cook. He provided kindness, common sense about good behaviour, and a comforting sense of irony. Their aunt it was who dubbed them the Toe-Rags.

  There followed, until Daphne was in her twenties, a long chain of deprivation and disturbing events, with one blessing in their midst: Daphne was sent to a convent school. Right from the beginning the child had fallen on every tiny scrap of good that came her way – every kindness, every chance to learn, every opportunity to discriminate between coarse and fine, stupid and wise, ugly and beautiful, mean and generous. School came to her – in spite of agonizing embarrassment over unpaid bills and having no clothes – as a feast of pleasure. She does not, of course, tell her story as that of an astonishing person. She tells it for what happened, and out of delighted amazement at her own good luck. It is the reader who sees that this person who should have been a wreck had somewhere within her a centre so strong that all she needed were the smallest openings in order to be good and happy.

  I loved that book even more than I loved Morris Stock’s; and both of them I loved not for being well-written (though both were written well enough for their purposes), but because of what those two people were like. They brought home to me the central reason why books have meant so much to me. It is not because of my pleasure in the art of writing, though that has been very great. It is because they have taken me so far beyond the narrow limits of my own experience and have so greatly enlarged my sense of the complexity of life: of its consuming darkness, and also – thank God – of the light which continues to struggle through.

  11

  ALTHOUGH ANDRé’S CHIEF instrument for office management was always, from 1946 to 1984, the threatening of Doom, he was slow to recognize its actual coming. For a long time he preferred to interpret its symptoms as temporary blips.

  The demise of our house, a slow process, was caused by a combination of two things: the diminishing number of people who wanted to read the kind of book we mostly published, and the recession.

  Ever since we started in business books had been becoming steadily more expensive to produce: the eight and sixpenny novel became the ten and sixpenny novel, then the twelve and sixpenny, then the fifteen shilling (that seemed a particularly alarming jump) – after which the crossing of the hitherto unthinkable one pound barrier came swiftly. (What would we have thought if some Cassandra had told us that soon eight, ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty would be enumerating pounds, not shillings?) After each rise people continued to buy books – though not quite so many people. André was impatient of the idea that the falling-off was caused by anything other than the rise in price … But everything was costing more – that was life, people were used to it: it seemed to me that something else was at work. Which was proved true by several attempts, made by ourselves and others, to bring out cheap editions of first novels of a kind categorized as ‘literary’: making them cheaper did not make them sell better.

  People who buy books, not counting useful how-to-do-it books, are of two kinds. There are those who buy because they love books and what they can get from them, and those to whom books are one form of entertainment among several. The first group, which is by far the smaller, will go on reading, if not for ever, then for as long as one can foresee. The second group has to be courted. It is the second which makes the best seller, impelled thereto by the buzz that a particular book is really something special; and it also makes publishers’ headaches, because it has become more and more resistant to courting.

  The Booker Prize was instigated in 1969 with the second group in mind: make the quality of a book news by aw
arding it an impressive amount of money, and hoi polloi will prick up their ears. It worked in relation to the books named; but it had been hoped that after buying the winner and/or the runners-up, people would be ‘converted’ to books in general, and there was no sign of that. Another attempt to stir the wider public’s consciousness resulted in the slogan ‘Books are Best’ which still chirps its message from booksellers’ carrier bags – and is surely the kind of advertising that is not even seen by those who do not want the advertised object.

  What has been happening is that slowly – very slowly, so that often the movement was imperceptible – group number two has been floating away into another world. Whole generations have grown up to find images more entertaining than words, and the roaming of space via a computer more exciting than turning a page. Of course a lot of them still read; but progressively a smaller lot, and fewer and fewer can be bothered to dig into a book that offers any resistance. Although these people may seem stupid to us, they are no stupider than we are: they just enjoy different things. And although publishers like André Deutsch Limited went on having a happy relationship with group number one, and still, throughout the seventies, hit it off quite often with group number two, the distance between what the publisher thought interesting and what the wider public thought interesting was widening all the time.