Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (47 page)

It might be argued that the six English publishers who rejected the book because of the obscenity of its language were less ridiculous than the American publisher who accepted this solution. Given the premiss from which they were all working, that ‘fuck’ was unprintably obscene, how could another word which sounded so nearly the same, and which was loaded with the same meaning, not be equally obscene? There has never, I think, been a clearer demonstration of the idiocy of making words taboo.

We, of course, pounced. It is many years since I reread the book and much of it is now hazy in my mind, but I still have a strong memory of a passage in which exhausted men are struggling to manhandle a gun out of deep mud, which makes me think that I was right in feeling that it was very good – a book which had genuinely expanded the range of my imagination. We wanted to restore the ‘fucks’ but dared not; and as it turned out we were right not to dare.

Review copies went out to the press about three weeks before publication, and the literary editor of the
Sunday Times
left his lying about in his office. The newspaper’s editor, who was an old man nearing retirement, ambled in and chanced to pick it up and open it. The first thing to meet his eye was ‘fug’ … followed by ‘fug’ and ‘fug’ again. So that Sunday, on the paper’s front page, there appeared a short but furious protest, written by the editor himself, against the projected publication of a book so vile that (and he truly did use these words) ‘no decent man could leave it where his women or children might happen to see it’.

As always on a Sunday I was sleeping late, so I was cross when I had to answer the front-door bell at eight-thirty. There stood André, unshaven, a pair of trousers and a macintosh pulled on over his pyjamas, and a copy of the
Sunday Times
in his hand.

‘Read this!’

‘Oh my God!’

I was as alarmed as he was. The book was printed and bound – the first printing was large – it was a long book, expensive to manufacture … close to the wind as the firm was still having to sail, if this book was banned we would go down.

‘Hurry and get some clothes on,’ said André. ‘We must rush a copy to Desmond MacCarthy – I’ve got his address.’

MacCarthy was the most influential reviewer then writing. We scribbled a note begging him to read the book at once and to say publicly that it was not obscene, then we set off in Aggie to push it through his letter-box. To insist on seeing him so early on a Sunday morning might, we felt, put him off. In retrospect, the chief value of our outing was that it was something to
do
in this nerve-racking situation: I don’t think that MacCarthy’s eventual response can have been more than civil, or I would not have forgotten it.

Next morning orders started pouring into the office, and only then did it occur to us that if we were not heading for disaster, it might be a triumph. Meanwhile we were instantly served with an injunction against publishing
The Naked and the Dead
until the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, had considered the case and had given us permission to do so (if he did). Whether the injunction was handed over by the large and apparently amiable police detective who spent the morning questioning us all, or whether it came separately, I do not know.

During the next two or three weeks the flood of orders nearly submerged us, the frustration of not being able to supply them became acute, and the encouragement we received from everyone we knew began to make triumph seem more likely than disaster. Finally André persuaded an MP of his acquaintance to ask a question in the House of Commons about the book’s fate: was the Attorney General going to ban it or not? The answer was no – a rather grudging one in that Shawcross said that he thought it was a bad book, but still no. So we were off – into, ironically, quite worrying financial problems, because we were hard put to it to pay for the several reprints we had to order.

What we gained from this adventure was more than a good and best-selling novel; more, even, than the presence of Norman Mailer on our list from then on. Overnight we began to be seen as a brave and dashing little firm, worth serious attention from agents handling interesting new writers, and André’s welcome when he visited New York became even more richly rewarding.

A
LLAN WINGATE’S PERFORMANCE
looked quite impressive from the outside. Our books soon became more interesting and we produced them well – even elegantly – within the limits imposed by continuing paper rationing. (The quality of paper was poor, and there were regulations controlling the use of white space in a layout and so on, which made good typography a challenge for several years after the war.) And we were good, by the cottage-industry standards of the day, at selling. André’s work as a rep for Nicolson and Watson had taught him a lot about booksellers and librarians (the latter our chief customers for fiction), and he never underestimated the importance of good relations with them: again and again we were told how rare and pleasing it was for the head of a publishing house to visit and listen to booksellers, as he often did, and to be ready to negotiate directly with them about, for example, returning copies if they had over-ordered, instead of leaving such matters to a rep. To begin with he did this because we
had
no reps – no sales department, for that matter – but it was an attitude which stayed with him for all his career. He would always be liked by the people to whom we sold our wares – vital to a firm like ours, which remained short of books which the trade
had
to stock such as works of reference, how-to-do-its, and the cosier and flashier sorts of entertainment book.

From the inside, however, we looked wobbly. This was because the experienced people who said it was impossible to start a publishing firm on
£
3,000 were right. We were always running out of money.

Not being able to pay our bills used to give me horrible sensations of hollowness mixed with nausea, and I think that poor Mr Kaufmann, the man who actually had to do the desperate juggling which was supposed to stave off disaster, felt much the same. To André, on the other hand, these crises appeared to be invigorating, chiefly because he didn’t feel ‘I have run up bills I can’t pay’, but ‘These idiotic printers and binders are trying to prevent me from publishing truly essential books which the world needs and which will end by making enough money to pay them all and to spare’. So although he recognized that he would have to raise some more money somehow, he was never debilitated. Instead he was inspired. Never, at the time when a crisis struck, did we know anyone who wanted to invest in a struggling new publishing house; but always, in a matter of days, André found such a person. My own way of weathering a panic was by thrusting it aside and concentrating grimly on what was under my nose – reading a manuscript, designing an advertisement or whatever – so instead of following his manoeuvres with the intelligent interest which would have made this account so much more valuable, I kept my eyes tight shut; and when I next opened them, there would be André, cock-a-hoop, with a new director in tow. This happened five times.

There was, however, an inconvenient, though endearing, weak spot in André’s otherwise impressive life-saving equipment. He had come to England because he loved the idea of it. In the Budapest of his schooldays the language you studied, in addition to Latin, was either German or English, and he, influenced by a beloved and admired uncle, had chosen English without a moment’s hesitation, and had found it greatly to his taste. The books he read as a result must have been an odd selection, because they left him with a romantic picture of a country remarkable for honesty and reliability, largely inhabited by comic but rather attractive beings known as English Gentlemen. I am sure that if, when he was trawling for someone to invest money in his firm, his net had caught a fellow-Hungarian, he would have insisted on their agreeing a thoroughly businesslike contract; but each time what came up was an Englishman – an Englishman radiant with the glow which shines from the answer to a prayer, and coloured a becoming pink by his viewer’s preconceptions. So – it is still hard to believe, but it is true – what existed between André and these five timely miracles was, in each case, nothing but a Gentleman’s Agreement. You couldn’t even say that it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, because there wasn’t any paper.

Before this process began we lost Audrey, because André was unable to tolerate her husband Ronald. Her investment had been made largely to provide Ron with a job to come home to when he was demobilized from the Army, and within a few months of our opening he joined us as sales manager. He was a gentle, serene-looking person, a listener rather than a talker, and what his previous occupation had been I never knew. After he left us he trained as an osteopath, at which he was successful. There was nothing about him of the businessman – and certainly not of the salesman.

Because none of us had met him earlier, Ron was not strictly an example of André’s inability to see what people were like. This weakness related to his impatient and clumsy handling of staff, both of them stemming from an absolute failure to be interested in any viewpoint but his own. It was quickly to become apparent that if he wanted a particular kind of person for his firm – a fireball of a sales manager, for example, or a scrupulously careful copy-editor – then he would see the next man or woman who approached him as that person, and would impatiently dismiss any dissenting opinion. Before he was done he would cram innumerable square pegs into round holes, and it is exhausting to remember the emotional wear and tear involved when, to his furious indignation (against the poor pegs) he began to see them for what they were and they had to be wrenched or eased out. But in Ron’s case it was bad luck rather than bad judgement – bad luck, especially, for Ron, who was not with us three weeks before he was pinned helplessly in the eye of that alarming little searchlight, was seen to be doing nothing right, and as a consequence began doing more and more things wrong.

Sheila and I, who both loved Audrey and liked Ron, tried to make a stand, arguing and persuading as best we could, but in vain. I remember when Ron’s sin was paying a bill on demand, as I would have done in his place. ‘That blockhead! Doesn’t he know what credit means?’ – ‘But you can’t yell at a man like that – have you ever
explained
to him that their bills don’t have to be paid for thirty days? Why should he know that? He’s never done this sort of thing before.’ – ‘
I
didn’t have to have it explained to
me
.’

Ron
was
the wrong person for the job, but by the time he and Audrey decided that there was nothing for it but to pick up their money and go, what we would have to put up with for the sake of what we liked and admired in André had become uncomfortably evident.

Then the five timely miracles began, and brought us together again. They were all so astonishingly useless that it was impossible not to gang up against them. (Though none of them was quite so bad as one that got away because – by God’s grace – he approached me not André. He was a charmingly camp old friend of my childhood who had married a very rich woman and wrote out of the blue to say that if we had a niche for him he would gladly put a lot of money into the firm. André quivered like a pointer, but it was I who was asked to lunch so it was I to whom my old friend said: ‘Well, my dear, the chief object of this exercise is to give me something to do before lunch instead of getting drunk.’ I often wondered how André would have managed to blank that sentence out if he had been sitting in my chair.)

Of the five, numbers one, two and three soon became discouraged, whereupon numbers four and five bought them out, thus ending up owning more of the firm than André did – and he with no scrap of paper to give him any rights at all. Neither of them was a crook; both of them to start with were ready to admit that André had created Wingate and that he was the person who put most into running it. With a lot of tolerance and tact it might have been possible for them and him to rub along together, but tolerance and tact were not at André’s command.

Number four I shall call Bertie, because he looked and sounded exactly like P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster would have looked and sounded had he been in his forties. He was the son of a well-known middle-brow man of letters and had himself written several novels in which expensive sports cars figured more prominently than any human character (André used to say that the only thing that had ever given Bertie an erection was a Lagonda). He lacked business sense and common sense – indeed a nonsense was what he usually made of any of our daily tasks unless someone was breathing down his neck. I would take things away and quietly do them again, which naturally riled him, while André would attack him in an appallingly humiliating way.

Number five, whom I shall call Roger, had worked in publishing for years, but in an old-fashioned firm specializing in books on architecture and the British countryside, which had not demanded the expenditure of much energy. He knew the language of the trade, which was something, but he did not care to put himself out, and was often drunk (after, rather than before lunch, unlike my old friend). Occasionally he came in with a black eye, having been roughed up by an ill-chosen boyfriend, and he spent many of his afternoons in tears. (Roger was to end by killing himself – but at that time, on an acquaintance that was very superficial, I saw him only as foolish without understanding that he was also sad.) Perhaps he had thought he would work gently, between hangovers, on elegant books about eighteenth-century chinoiserie or Strawberry-Hill Gothick, but he never got round to signing up any such work and made no contribution to what we had on the stocks; so Roger, too, received short shrift from André. And, like Bertie, the more he was treated as an incompetent booby, the more he remembered that the two of them, not André, were now in financial control of Allan Wingate.

For a year or two this disastrous set-up bubbled and seethed, at first without the intervention of any outsider, then in the offices of lawyers. We had moved to more commodious offices near Harrods, and now had a sales department and a production department (but still no one in charge of publicity except me with my hateful ads). In spite of our problems we were producing about fifty books a year, most of them profitable, and we would have been exuberantly happy if we could have enjoyed Bertie’s and Roger’s money without their presence. It seemed impossible, with everything going so well, that André would be ousted from his own firm by these two fools … but the more expert advice he took, the clearer it became that this would happen. He hadn’t a legal leg to stand on and the best his lawyer could do was to wangle a ‘generous’ gesture out of Bertie and Roger which allowed him, when he finally left, to take a few cookery books and three or four very unimportant others (he and I had agreed, once we had brought ourselves to face the facts, that there was nothing for it but to start another publishing house).

There was, however, one book due to be delivered quite soon, about which a decision was still to be reached. This was the memoirs of Franz von Papen. To quote my own catalogue description of it:

To which I would add, now, that no one who hadn’t just lived through the Second World War can imagine how fascinating it was, so soon after it, to hear one of
them
speaking.

This book the old man had been persuaded to write by André, who had visited him in connection with
Operation Cicero
, the story of the valet to the British Ambassador in Ankara, who towards the end of the war had cheekily supplied the Germans with copies of the contents of the ambassadorial safe. Von Papen, having been our man’s opposite number at the time, was in a position to confirm ‘Cicero’s’ story (which at first sight seemed too good to be true), which he did. André might, of course, have written to him about it, but characteristically saw greater possibilities in a meeting. Capturing the Cicero story was already one of his more striking achievements, involving a lightning dash to Ankara, but the way he used that book as a lead into another and more important project was an even better example of his energy.

Technically the memoirs he had secured would, when completed, belong to Allan Wingate, but even the lawyers felt that André had a moral right to them; something which Bertie and Roger were reluctant to acknowledge. The wrangling was bitter, but they did finally accept a suggestion made by the lawyers on the Friday which was André’s and my last day at Allan Wingate: that there should be a ‘moratorium’ on the subject of von Papen until the following Tuesday, during which everyone should calm down in preparation for a decisive meeting about it.