Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (55 page)
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Authors: Diana Athill
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
I
N
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.
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.
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).