Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  Surely, I used to think as we moved into the eighties, we ought to be able to do something about this? Look at Allen Lane, in the thirties, thinking up Penguin Books: that had been a revolution in publishing to meet a need … couldn’t we do something like it in a different way? Piers and I discussed it occasionally (André couldn’t be bothered with such idle speculation), but we never got anywhere. Piers thought we should cut down on fiction and look for serious non-fiction of a necessary kind, and he was right; but it was easier said than done. I just went blank. I was too stuck in my ways to want to change, that was my trouble. We had been publishing books we liked for so long that the thought of publishing any other kind was horrible. So let’s talk about something else … Which must have been more or less what André was feeling under his irritability.

  Meanwhile recession was approaching. The first time it sent a shiver down my spine was when Edward Heath ordained a three-day week. Down we go, I thought, and how could anyone expect anything else when a country which was once the centre of a vast empire had become a little island off the shores of Europe? Gone are the days when we could buy cheap and sell dear – other people are going to pinch our markets … Perhaps this crisis will pass, but it would be foolish to suppose that it is going, in any permanent way, to get better.

  The feeling was so similar to those moments before the Second World War when one suddenly saw that it was going to happen, that all I could do was react as I had reacted then: shut my eyes tight and think of something else. André, after all, said that I was exaggerating, and he was much better at economic matters than I was … I managed to avert my mind from the depressing prospect so successfully that the rest of the seventies and the early eighties passed quite cheerfully; but I was not in the least surprised when recession was declared.

  André talked very little about selling the firm. I knew, quite early in the eighties, that he was half-heartedly sniffing around for an offer, and he had stated his reason as clearly as he would ever do: ‘It’s not any fun any more,’ is what he said.

  And it was not. He could no longer make those exciting swoops on ‘big’ books because the firms which had combined into conglomerates could always outbid us; and the ‘literary’ books at which we had been good … well, I was beginning to hope, when a typescript arrived on my desk, that it would be bad. If it was bad, out it went and no hassle. If it was good – then ahead loomed the editorial conference at which we would have to ask ourselves ‘How many do you reckon it will sell?’, and the honest answer would probably be ‘About eight hundred copies’. Whereupon we would either have to turn down something good, which was painful, or else fool ourselves into publishing something that lost money. We still brought out some good things – quite a number of them – during those years, and by careful cheese-paring André kept the firm profitable (just) until at last he did sell it; but there are some embarrassing books on our eighties lists: obvious (though never, I am glad to say, shameful) attempts to hit on something ‘commercial’ which only proved that we were not much good at it. And André was already starting to fall asleep during editorial conferences.

  He never surprised me more than when he announced, on returning from the annual book-trade jamboree in the United States, that he had found the right person to buy the firm.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Tom Rosenthal.’

  ‘Are you mad?’

  This reaction was not dictated by my own feelings: I had glimpsed Tom only occasionally at parties. It was because André had always seemed to dislike him. Tom began his career in 1959 with Thames and Hudson, which specialized in art books, and why he left them in 1970 I don’t know. Probably it was because he felt drawn to a more literary kind of publishing, since his next job, starting in 1971, was managing director of Secker & Warburg, and in the short interval between the two he had played with the idea of launching his own list, and had visited André to discuss the possibility of doing it under our wing. It was then that André had been rude – not to him, but about him. It seemed to be simply the dissimilarity of their natures that put him off.

  André was small and dapper; Tom was large, with the slightly rumpled look of many bearded men, though he was far from being among the seriously shaggy. André was a precise and dashing driver; Tom was too careless and clumsy to trust himself to drive at all. André, without being prissy, was nearer to being fastidious in his speech than he was to being coarse; Tom evidently liked to shock. And above all, André abhorred extravagance, while Tom enjoyed it. They were also very different in their pleasures. André had no important pleasures outside his work except for going to the theatre (he never missed a well-reviewed West End play, and adventured into the fringe quite often), and skiing, which he adored; Tom took no exercise except for a daily swim for his health (his back had been badly damaged in a traffic accident), preferred opera to plays, gave much time and thought to his collection of first editions, and had also built up an impressive collection of paintings – many of which André thought were ugly. They were not designed to be friends.

  But now André needed someone to buy the firm, so when Tom, who had become a director of the Heinemann group in 1972, told him that he was fed up with administration and longed to get back into hands-on book producing, he suddenly saw that he had been wrong about this brilliant publisher who was a much nicer man than anyone realized, and who – best of all – was our kind of person, so would not want to turn our firm into something else … As it would turn out, that ‘best of all’ summed up precisely why Tom was the wrong man, but the fact escaped us all: I can’t think why, given that most of us were well aware that the firm needed to change.

  The negotiations, which took place under the guidance of Arnold (Lord) Goodman, the ubiquitous fixer and smoother, lasted a long time. André never told anyone how much Tom paid for the firm, but we all knew that he was to pay in two stages. On putting down the first half of the money he would come in as joint managing director with André, and two years later (or perhaps it was three), when he put down the rest, he would become the sole managing director and André would be awarded the title of President and continue to have a room in the office if he wanted it, but would cease to have any say in its affairs. I remember André telling me: ‘Last week Arnold said I must remember that now the agreement has been signed the firm is no longer mine. He must think I’m dotty – of course I know that.’

  But alas, alas! Of course he didn’t.

  Tom made the sensible suggestion that they should divide our authors between them and each be responsible for his own group without interfering in the other’s. André agreed, but he was unable to keep to it. Over and over again he would pick up the intercom, or (worse) amble into Tom’s room, to say something on the lines of ‘If you are thinking of selling the German rights of such and such a book to Fischer Verlag, would you like me to drop a line to so-and-so?’ To start with Tom was civil: ‘That’s very kind, but I’ve done it already.’ But he is a man with a short fuse and it was not long before he was snapping … and not long again before he was yelling. Whereupon André would come into my room and report querulously ‘Tom yelled at me!’ And when I had extracted the details of the incident, and told him that it was his own fault for sticking his nose in when he knew how much it maddened Tom, in an even more querulous, almost tearful voice: ‘But I was only trying to help!’

  ‘Well, for God’s sake stop trying to help. You know it doesn’t do any good … and he doesn’t do it to you.’ And a few days later it would happen all over again.

  Then André’s pain began to turn into anger. He began to see almost everything that Tom did as wrong, and to complain endlessly – first to me, then to those other people in the office who were concerned with whatever he was complaining about, then to everyone in the office, putting out feelers for Tom’s sins in the accounts department, the production department, even to the switchboard. Nearly everyone in the place was fond of André, and felt for him now that he was losing the firm that had so obviously me
ant so much to him for so long; but people began to be embarrassed by his behaviour and to lose sympathy with him. Burly, bluff, bearded Tom was not a man of delicate sensibility (was even inclined to boast of that fact, as he boasted about many things), and he was extravagant, so people had reservations about him; but they didn’t feel he deserved this campaign against him. In fact, for quite a while after his arrival he cheered us up. If someone says loudly ‘Though I say it myself, I’m a bloody good businessman’, you tend to believe him simply because you can’t believe anyone would be so crass as to say that, if he wasn’t. Or at least I tended to believe it, and I think others did too. Tom liked to think big and generously, so if you said, for instance, that a book would be better with sixteen pages of illustrations – or even thirty-two – instead of the eight pages which André would have grudgingly allowed if he absolutely had to, Tom would say ‘My dear girl, let it have as many as it needs’, and that sort of response was invigorating. He brought in some interesting books, too – notably the first volume of David Cairns’s magnificent biography of Berlioz – and a few big names including Elias Canetti and Gore Vidal; so for a year or so it was possible to believe that, given his flair as a businessman, he was going to revitalize the firm. You did not have to be particularly drawn to him to be pleased about that – or to be shocked when André began to extend his campaign outside the office. For some time I hoped it was only old friends to whom he was confiding his grievances, but gradually it became clear that he was going on and on and on to everyone he met.

  And then came a substantial feature article in the Independent about the situation, telling the story entirely from André’s point of view, with all its distortions, and making Tom look silly as well as disagreeable. Even the illustrations were slanted: André looking young and handsome, Tom, in a really unforgivable photograph, looking grotesque. Tom was convinced that the story must have come from interviews with André, and no one could deny that it did represent his opinions and emotions with remarkable fidelity. I have never been able to blame Tom for his fury. It was some time since they had spoken to each other. Now Tom forbade André to set foot in the office ever again, and be damned to the agreement about his continuing to have a room there. What else could he have done?

  I have been reminded that I wrote funny letters to friends about all this – indeed, that one friend kept them for their funniness. But in retrospect it was far from funny. It became evident quite soon after André had been thrown out that his health had begun a long process of deterioration, and I now think this had started several years earlier, even before he sold the firm, when we first noticed him falling asleep during editorial conferences. He had always cried wolf about his health (you could safely bet that if you were just about to tell him that you were going down with flu, he would nip in ahead of you with angina pains), so I had a long-established habit of disregarding his complaints … But this time he would have denied that anything was wrong with him, so even if all of us had recognized that his ugly but pathetic campaign against the man he himself had chosen was not waged by a well man, we could have done nothing about it.

  My shares in André Deutsch Limited were so few that I made very little money from the sale of the company, and I had hardly any other income, so I was grateful when Tom told me that if I were willing to stay on at the salary I was earning when he took over, he would be glad to have me for as long as I could keep going. I was seventy by then, and would not start feeling like an old woman till I turned eighty; but in spite of that comparative spryness, having never been a specially good copy editor (picker-up of spelling mistakes and so on), I was now a bad one, and often alarmed myself when I read something a second time and saw how many things I had missed on the first run-through. I was therefore less valuable than I should have been at that side of the job; and in its larger aspects … well, I was still sure that I could tell good writing from bad, but was I able to judge what people the age of my grandchildren, if I’d had them, would want to buy? No – no more able than Tom was. We often liked the same books, among them Pete Davies’s The Last Election, Boman Desai’s The Memory of Elephants, David Gurr’s The Ring Master, Llorenç Villalonga’s The Doll’s Room, Chris Wilson’s Blueglass – each in its own way, I am still prepared to swear, very good: but none of them money-makers. So I could make no contribution in that way. Friends said ‘He’s getting you cheap’, but I didn’t think he was. I thought I was lucky in still earning money, and that although the job was ‘not any fun any more’, it could have been much worse.

  But quite soon three depressing things happened: Tom sold the whole of the André Deutsch Limited archive; he sold the children’s books; and he got rid of warehousing and sales, handing all that side of the publishing operation over to Gollancz.

  It was sentimentality to feel the loss of that intractable mountain of old files so keenly – we had kept copies of essential matter such as contracts, and never suffered in any practical way from the absence of the rest; but it did, all the same, give me a most uncomfortable feeling. A publishing house without its archive – there was something shoddy about it, like a bungalow without a damp course. And where was the money which came in as a result? – a question even more obtrusive when it came to the sale of the children’s books, for which he got a million pounds. We all supposed, in the end, that Tom must have had to borrow heavily in order to buy us, and was now selling off bits of us in order to pay off his debt – which, naturally, he had a perfect right to do; he would have had the right to spend the money on prostitutes and polo ponies, if he liked. But he had given us the impression that he had sold the children’s books in order to get the firm back onto an even keel, and that was only too evidently not happening. Fortunately Pamela Royds and the list which she had built up single-handed with so much loving care and unremitting labour (the most profitable thing under our roof, into the bargain!) were well-served by the change. Scholastic Press, which bought them, was a prosperous firm specializing in children’s books, which had a first-rate sales organization, and Pam reported that it was delicious to breathe such invigorating air after the oppressive atmosphere of the last few years at Deutsch. While for us… It was like having a hand chopped off with a promise that it would result in a magic strengthening of the rest of the body, and then finding oneself as wobbly as ever and minus a hand into the bargain.

  While as for losing control of one’s sales organization … Surely Tom must know that however good the intentions, no one ever ran someone else’s sales as well as they ran their own? Surely he must know that this move is the beginning of the end? When asked what the situation was, all he would ever answer was ‘It would be fine if it weren’t for the bloody bank’. From which we all concluded that they had over-indulged the firm hideously with a gigantic overdraft, which now he had somehow got to pay off, or else!

  And indeed, there was soon a man from the bank sitting in on meetings, and any number of little chisellings going on: people who left not being replaced, books postponed because printers couldn’t be paid, lies being told for fear of loss of face … It is depressing to remember that time, and pointless to describe it in detail. What it boiled down to was that Tom’s claim to be a bloody good businessman was poppycock, because no businessman who was any good would have bought our firm at that time, and then imagined that he could go on running it as the same kind of firm only more so. It was a fantasy, and he was lucky to get clear of it in the end, having at last found someone willing to buy the firm for, I suppose, the name and the building. To a man unable easily to admit, or even discuss, failure, the experience must have been excruciating.

  While those two last years were going on I did not allow myself to know how much I was hating them. I was frightened by the thought of living without my salary, and had become hypnotized, like a chicken with its beak pressed to a chalk line, by the notion of continuing to work for as long as possible. And when some quite minor incident jerked my beak off the line, and I thought ‘This is absurd – I don’t have to
go on with this’, elation was mixed with further alarm. I did not expect to be one of those people who find themselves at a complete loss when they retire – I would have a companion, a place that I loved, things to do – but my days had been structured by a job for all my adult life, and it seemed possible that freedom, at first, would feel very odd. I even had one fit of 3 a.m. angst, thinking ‘This is like standing on the edge of a cliff with a cold wind blowing up my skirt!’

  But I was overlooking the extent to which I had been drained and depressed by trying not to admit how miserable I was, and as it turned out there was no cold wind at all. When I woke up to my first morning as a retired person, what I thought at once was ‘I am happy!’ Happy, and feeling ten years younger. Instead of being sad that my publishing days were over, it was ‘Thank God, thank God that I’m out of it at last’. And then, gradually, it became even better, because the further I move from the date of my retirement, the less important those last sad years in the office become, and the luckier I know myself to be in having lived all the years that went before them.

  PART TWO

  IN 1962 I wrote – and meant – the following description of the relationship between publisher and writer.

  It is an easy one, because the publisher usually meets his writers only after having read something they have written, and if he has thought it good it does not much matter to him what the man will be like who is about to come through his door. He is feeling well-disposed for having liked the work; the writer is feeling well-disposed for his work having been liked; neither is under obligation to attempt a close personal relationship beyond that. It is a warm and at the same time undemanding beginning, in which, if genuine liking is going to flower, it can do so freely.