Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  That is true, but only as far as it goes. I find it surprising – perhaps even touching – that after sixteen years in the trade I was still leaving it at that, because although the beginning is, indeed, nearly always easy, the relationship as a whole is quite often not. I would now say that a friendship, properly speaking, between a publisher and a writer is … well, not impossible, but rare.

  The person with whom the writer wants to be in touch is his reader: if he could speak to him directly, without a middleman, that is what he would do. The publisher exists only because turning someone’s written words into a book (or rather, into several thousand books) is a complicated and expensive undertaking, and so is distributing the books, once made, to booksellers and libraries. From the writer’s viewpoint, what a mortifying necessity this is: that the thing which is probably more important to him than anything else – the thing which he has spun out of his own guts over many months, sometimes with much pain and anxiety – should be denied its life unless he can find a middleman to give it physical existence, and will then agree that this person shall share whatever the book earns. No doubt all writers know in their heads that their publishers, having invested much money and work in their books, deserve to make a reasonable profit; but I am sure that nearly all of them feel in their hearts that whatever their books earn ought to belong to them alone.

  The relationship is therefore less easy than I once supposed. Taking only those cases in which the publisher believes he has found a truly good writer, and is able to get real pleasure from his books, this is how it will go. The publisher will feel admiration for this man or woman, interest in his or her nature, concern for his or her welfare: all the makings of friendship. It is probably no exaggeration to say that he would feel honoured to be granted that person’s friendship in return, because admiration for someone’s work can excite strong feelings. But even so, part of the publisher’s concern will be that of someone who has invested in a piece of property – how big a part depending on what kind of person the publisher is. With some people it would preponderate; with me, because of how useless I am as a business woman, it was very small indeed, but it was never non-existent. So there is potential complication, even looking at only one side of the relationship; and looking at the other side there is a great deal more.

  In the writer the liking inspired by the publisher’s enthusiasm may well be warm, but it will continue only if he thinks the publisher is doing a good job by making the book look pleasing and selling enough copies of it; and what the writer means by ‘enough’ is not always what the publisher means. Even if the publisher is doing remarkably well, he is still thinking of the book as one among many, and in terms of his experience of the market; while the writer is thinking in terms of the only book that matters in the world.

  Of course writers’ attitudes vary. I have known a few who, behind a thin veneer of civility, see their publisher in the way a man may see his tailor: a pleasant enough person while he is doing a good job, allowed a certain intimacy in that he has to know things the equivalent of your inner-leg measurement and whether you ‘dress’ to the left or the right – but you wouldn’t ask him to dinner (such a writer is easy to work with but you don’t like him). I have known others whose dependence on their publisher is as clinging as that of a juvenile tennis star on her parent (very boring). But generally the writer likes to like his publisher, and will go on doing so for years if he can; but will feel only mildly sorry if the publisher’s poor performance, or what he sees as such, causes him to end the relationship. When the ending of a relationship causes no serious personal disturbance it cannot be called a friendship. The only André Deutsch authors whom I count among my real friends opened the way to that friendship by going off to be published by someone else.

  But this is not to say that I haven’t been more interested in some of ‘my’ authors than I have been in anyone else: haven’t watched them more closely, speculated about them more searchingly, wondered at them with more delight – or dismay. Only two of them have actually played a part in my life (I have written books about both of them, After a Funeral and Make Believe). But several of them have enlarged my life; have been experiences in it in the way, I suppose, that a mountain is an experience to a climber, or a river to an angler; and the second part of this book is about six of those remarkable people.

  MORDECAI RICHLER AND BRIAN MOORE

  A FEW DAYS AGO I read The Acrobats again: Mordecai Richler’s first novel which we published in 1954. I had not looked at it for forty-five years. ‘Talk about a young man’s book!’ I said to myself. ‘What on earth made us take it on?’ It really is very bad; but something of its author’s nature struggles through the clumsiness, and we were in the process of building a list, desperate for new and promising young writers. I must say that I congratulate André and myself for discerning that underpinning of seriousness and honesty (there was no hint of his wit), and think we deserved the reward of his turning out to be the writer he is.

  Mordecai in himself presented rather the same kind of puzzle, in those days. I liked him very much from the moment of meeting him, but sometimes found myself asking ‘Why?’, because he hardly ever spoke: I have never known anyone else so utterly unequipped with small-talk as he was then. How could one tell that someone was generous, kind, honest and capable of being very funny if he hardly ever said a word? I still don’t know how, but it happened: I was always sure that he was all those things, and soon understood that his not saying anything unless he had something to say was part of what made me so fond of him. He was the least phoney person imaginable, and still is today (though he has become much better at talking).

  He and Brian Moore, to whom he introduced me, were the writers I had in mind when I wrote the optimistic paragraph quoted five pages back. I was thirty-seven by then, but the war had acted on time rather as brackets act on a text: when one got back to normal life it felt in some ways like a continuation of what had preceded the interruption, so even if you carried wartime scars you were suddenly younger than your actual years. When those two men were new on our list and in my life, the days had a flavour of discovery, amusement and pleasure which now seems odd in the light of chronology, but was very agreeable. By then, of course, I had already met a number of writers whom I admired, but those two were the first good writers I thought of as friends; and also (although I didn’t notice this at the time) the first two men I had ever deeply liked without any sex in the relationship. Our relationship depended on their writing – something which mattered to each of them more than anything else, and which happened to interest me more than anything else: that was what created the warmth and made the absence of sexual attraction irrelevant.

  Although I felt more attached to Mordecai than to Brian, I got to know Brian better – or so I thought. This was partly because I was more aware of being older than Mordecai, partly because of Mordecai’s taciturnity, and partly because of his women. His first wife combined a good deal of tiresomeness with many endearing qualities, so that impatience with her was inevitably accompanied by guilt – an uncomfortable state, so that I sought their company less often than I might have done. And Florence, his second wife, was so beautiful that she used to daunt me. I am happy to say that I have become able to see through Florence’s beauty (which endures) to all the other reasons why she remains the best-loved woman of my acquaintance; but in the past Mordecai did rather disappear into his marriage with this lovely person (you only have to read Barney’s Version – the latest, and to my mind best, of his novels – to see that Mordecai knows all about coups de foudre). Added to which they went back to Canada: a distancing which certainly made it easier to accept his leaving us without bitterness.

  And before he left I had the delight of seeing him come into his own. Both his second and third novels had been better than his first, but both were still dimmed by a youthful earnestness, so The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, in which he broke through to the wit and ribaldry that released his seriousness into the atm
osphere, so to speak, was a triumph. If it had come after his leaving us, I would have been sad; instead, I was able to be proud. And the last of his books with us (until, much later, he invaded our children’s list), The Incomparable Atuk, although it wilted a little towards its end, was for most of its length so funny that it still makes me laugh aloud. So he left pleasure behind him. And – this was the most important specific against bitterness – I understood exactly why he went, and would even have thought him daft if he had not done so. Mordecai was living by his pen; he had a growing family to support; and someone else was prepared to pay him more money than we did. A great advantage of not being a proper publisher with all a proper publisher’s possessive territorial instincts is that what you mind about most is that good books should get published. Naturally you would like the publisher to be yourself, but it is not the end of the world if it is someone else.

  It was Mordecai who introduced me to Brian Moore in that he told me that this friend of his had written an exceptionally good book which we ought to go after; but I must not deprive André of his discovery of Judith Hearne. As André remembers it, he was given the book by Brian’s agent in New York on the last day of one of his – André’s – visits there; he read it on the plane on the way home and decided at once that he must publish it. I think it likely that he asked to see it, having been alerted, as I had been, by Mordecai. But whether or not he asked for it, he certainly recognized its quality at once; and when he handed it over to me, it came to me as something I was already hoping to read, and its excellence was doubly pleasing because Brian was a friend of Mordecai’s. The two had got to know each other in Paris, and in Canada, where Mordecai was a native and Brian, an Ulsterman, had chosen to live in common – although the Moores moved to New York soon after we met.

  Before Brian wrote Judith Hearne (later retitled The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne for publication in paperback and in the United States), when he was scrabbling about to keep a roof over his head, he had written several thrillers for publication as pocketbooks, under a pseudonym, which he said had been a useful apprenticeship in story-telling because it was a law of the genre that something must happen on every page. But however useful, it came nowhere near explaining Judith. With his first serious book Brian was already in full possession of his technical accomplishment, his astounding ability to put himself into other people’s shoes, and his particular view of life: a tragic view, but one that does not make a fuss about tragedy, accepting it as part of the fabric with which we all have to make do. He was to prove incapable of writing a bad book, and his considerable output was to include several more that were outstandingly good; but to my mind he never wrote anything more moving and more true than Judith Hearne.

  When he came to London in 1955 for the publication of Judith, he came without his wife Jackie – perhaps she was in the process of moving them to New York. He was a slightly surprising figure, but instantly likeable: a small, fat, round-headed, sharp-nosed man resembling a robin, whose flat Ulster accent was the first of its kind I had heard. He was fat because he had an ulcer and the recommended treatment in those days was large quantities of milk; and also because Jackie was a wonderful cook. (Her ham, liberally injected with brandy before she baked it – she kept a medical syringe for the purpose – was to become one of my most poignant food memories.) When I asked him home to supper on that first visit he was careful to explain that he was devoted to his wife – a precaution which pleased me because it was sensible as well as slightly comic.

  Few men would be considerate enough to establish their unavailability like that. (Perhaps I was flattering him: it may have been a touch of puritanical timidity that he was exhibiting, rather than considerateness. But that was how I saw it.) Once he was sure that I was harbouring no romantic or predatory fancies, the way was opened to a relaxed friendship, and for as long as I knew him and Jackie as a couple there seemed to be nothing that we couldn’t talk about. They were both great gossips – and when I say great I mean great, because I am talking about gossip in its highest and purest form: a passionate interest, lit by humour but above malice, in human behaviour. We used often, of course, to talk about writing – his and other people’s, and eventually mine – but much more often we would talk with glee, with awe, with amazement, with horror, with delight, about what people had done and why they had done it. And we munched up our own lives as greedily as we did everyone else’s.

  In addition to seeing the Moores when they came to England (once they rented a house in Chelsea which had a Francis Bacon hanging in the drawing-room) I spent half a holiday with them in Villefranche (the other half had been with the Richlers in Cagnes), crossed the Atlantic with them on board the France, stayed with them in New York and twice in their summer house in Amagansett. It was from Brian himself that I heard, in Villefranche, the story of how he came to move to Canada.

  It was a painful and romantic story. Immediately after the war Brian had got a job in the relief force, UNRRA, which had taken him to Poland, and there he fell in love with a woman older than himself (or perhaps he had fallen already and went there in pursuit of her). It was a wild passion, undiminished by the fact that she was an alcoholic. The only effect of that misfortune was to make him drink far beyond his capacity in an attempt to keep up with her: he described with horror waking up on the floor of a hotel bedroom lying in his vomit, not knowing what day it was; crawling on his hands and knees to the bathroom for a drink of water; getting drunk again as the water stirred up the vodka still in him; and finally discovering that he had been unconscious for two whole days. And there had never been anything but flashes of happiness in the affair because he had never known where he was with her, whether because of the swerving moods of drunkenness, or because she despised the abjectness of his obsession, I am not sure. He remembered it as an agonizing time, but when she told him it was over and went away to Canada, although he tried to accept it, he couldn’t. He followed her – and she refused even to see him. And thus, he said, he learnt to detest the very idea of romantic passion.

  Thus, too, he made his break with his native Ulster, and became distanced from (he never broke with) his rather conventional Catholic family, which gave him the necessary perspective on a great deal of the material he was to use in his novels. Not that he began at once to write seriously. Among the ways he earned his living during those early days in Canada was proofreading for a newspaper, during which he met Jackie, who was a journalist. Then came those useful pocketbook thrillers – which must have paid pretty well, because by the time he felt secure enough to settle down to writing what he wanted to write, Jackie was able to stop working. Their son Michael was about two when I first met them, and although the comfort the Moores lived in was modest, it was comfort.

  They gave the impression of being an exceptionally compatible pair: as good an advertisement as one could hope to find for liking one’s spouse as opposed to being mad about him/her. They got on well with each other’s friends; they shared the same tastes in books, paintings, household objects, food and drink – and, of course, gossip. They laughed a lot together and they loved Michael together. They were delightful to be with. I remember trying to decide which of them I found the better company and settling for a dead heat: with Brian there was the extra pleasure of writing talk, in which he was simultaneously unpretentious and deeply serious; with Jackie the extra amusement of woman talk, in which she was exceptionally honest and funny. I used to look forward to our meetings with wholehearted pleasure.

  We were to publish five of Brian’s books: Judith Hearne in ’55, The Feast of Lupercal in ’58, The Luck of Ginger Coffey in ’60, An Answer from Limbo in ’63 and The Emperor of Ice Cream in ’66. Why, having made this good start with him, did we not go on to publish all his books?

  Well, we might have lost him anyway because of the frugality of our advertising. Book promotion, before the ways of thinking and behaving bred by television became established, depended almost entirely on reviews, which we always got; and
on advertising in newspapers. Interviews and public appearances were rare, and only for people who were news in themselves, as well as writers, like our Alain Bombard who crossed the Atlantic in a rubber dinghy to prove that shipwrecked sailors could live off the sea if they knew how. A novelist had to stab his wife, or something of that sort, to get attention on pages other than those devoted to books. So when a novelist felt that his publisher sold too few copies, what he complained about was always under-advertising.

  Publishers, on the other hand, knew that the sort of advertisements that books – even quite successful ones – could pay for were almost useless. Inflate them to the point at which they really might shift copies, and they would then cost more than the extra copies sold could bring in. Two kinds of advertisement did make sense: descriptions of all your forthcoming books in the trade papers, to which booksellers and librarians turned for information; and conspicuous announcements in big-circulation broadsheets, devoted to a single book provided it was by an already famous author. The run-ofthe-mill ad, a six or eight or ten inch column (sometimes double, more often single) into which as many books as possible had been squashed … For my part, I only had to ask myself: when had I even looked at such an ad (except for one of our own, to check that nothing had gone wrong with it), to say nothing of buying something because of it? It was reviews, and people talking enthusiastically about books that made me buy them, and why should other people be different? Yet we went on running those pointless, or almost pointless, ads – as few of them as we could get away with – simply so that we could keep our authors happy by reporting ‘Your book was advertised in newspapers A, B, C, D, E and F’, hoping they would be enough impressed by this true statement not to ask ‘And how many other books were in the same ad, and how big was the space, and where was it on the page?’ Often they were sufficiently impressed; but Brian quite soon began to be not impressed enough. By his third novel he had started to think that it ought to be treated like a novel by Graham Greene.