Conversations With Mr. Prain (3 page)

He paused. I recognised it was a cue.

“And why is it that so few are printed?”

“As I said,” he replied, as if it were perfectly obvious, “There’s an oversupply of well-written prose. We live in a free market.” He did not say “consumer society.” I would like to record that he said that, but he did not. “It’s a question of supply and demand. Writers create a product, and we process it, advertise it, and then rely on book distributers to get it to the book-sellers, who also advertise and try to tempt the public. Ultimately, it all comes down to the question: will it sell? Publishing is a business like any other. Coymans is, first and foremost, a financial entity with responsibility to our shareholders. We can entice the buyers—invest thousands in PR and advertising, artistic covers and so on, or hope to God that the authors will, faint chance, be newsworthy in themselves—but the fact is that in today’s society people are not as interested in reading quality fiction as the talented authors of the world would wish. So of course my company has passed over a
number of writers who have gone on to be successful. It’s inevitable. One cannot publish everything that makes the grade. One has to make guesses about marketability, and sometimes one can be wrong.”

Throughout this address my attention was seized by one of his small collection of misericords. There was a grotesque head leering in my direction, with two anthropomorphic hares on either side. The effect was curiously pagan and unsettling. I believe it was at this moment that I began to feel a self-consciousness that had nothing to do with the ordinary, explicable timidity a writer might feel in my predicament. This other self-consciousness was of a more personal nature, and seemed to be provoked by stares: by Mr. Prain’s steady gaze reflected, as though through a distorting mirror, in that of the misericord ogre. The piece itself was constructed out of dark, polished oak and was so well-rubbed it seemed to glow. There was hardly a speck of dust on any of the omnifarious artefacts in this room. Despite its cluttered concentration in one area of the house, he kept the collection as immaculate as himself. His chin was closely shaven, and his dark brown hair was swept back off his high forehead. He did not smoke or fiddle with his clothes. He sat back, without slouching, in a black leather armchair, with his opposite fingertips touching, so that he looked, almost, as if he were at prayer.

Although I can trace the first tinge of disquiet to this instant, I would be exaggerating if I implied by this that it was more than the barest inkling. Perhaps, then, even
subconsciously, I knew he had invited me to his grand house on that close Monday afternoon of the late summer not to discuss my work, or literature in general, but for something else entirely, and perhaps I did not want to believe this. Whatever the case, consciously at least I put it to one side. Our conversation proceeded uninterrupted by this particular anxiety for a little time. I had enough to deal with restraining my natural spirits sufficiently to be civilised at the tea table, to bend my accent into something closer to BBC newscaster pronunciation, to say the right things, to impress him. I did want to impress him. I knew I was smart, but I wanted him to think so too.

“And poetry!” he exclaimed, with exasperation, “The would-be poets greatly outnumber those who actually read verse in this day and age.”

He eyed me, this would-be poet he had before him. He brought his fingertips closer to his mouth, as if he were about to kiss them, but he arrested the motion before contact. I saw on his lips an amusement at knowing his words would unsettle me. He wanted me to become flustered and drop my teaspoon on the floor.

Out of the corner of my eye I sensed that the ogre’s face under the wooden bracket leered wider, and I had to close my eyes. It is too easy for a writer to be kidnapped by imagination at times of stress. The mind seeks an escape. For example, then, when the ogre grinned, I was snared by Grimm. There was a flash of some folk tale, of a woodland creature half human, half demon. I sensed the glint of
swords, the smell of dragons, the shuffle of feet through leaves. It was as if the archaic components of the fable lying around in some collective subconscious were waiting to be summoned and joined together in my head, like the dry bones of Ezekiel’s vision, with a word, words. I had written some 25 new folk-tales and, of course, there is no market for them today at all. If Mr. Prain only knew! I wrenched myself away from the chaos of myth; those images had no right to intrude at such a time. I closed my eyes for a moment, turning out the light on fancy, and snapped back to the task at hand.

“People do read, though,” I said, “Even poetry. In any society, there will always be a need for storytellers. Before there was the written word there was the voice of the people in the tribe or the village who told stories. Poems may tell a tiny story and novels a large one, but they are both responding to human instinct.”

“And so in our society there will always be a market for new books. But the books that really sell are seldom the best-written. If publishers today were interested only in the business of making money from books we would publish very little quality fiction at all. Lightweight information books sell: travel books, diets, how-to’s, popular medicine and psychology, self-improvement, biographies of the rich and famous, or sports heroes. For fiction the public chooses chillers or thrillers, mystery, adventures, and there is always that genre my colleagues call ‘chick lit,’ amusing romances designed for office girls and frustrated housewives.
Then there’s all the cross-over adults reading as children business. Harry Potter and that dog book. I suppose no one saw that coming. Authors tend to forget that we may be looking for a blockbuster, but in the back of our minds we’re hoping to siphon the resulting funds into printing literary works of merit, even if they only sell 200 copies. We’re not simply money-grubbers. We have a sense of cultural responsibility.”

I presume his defensive tone was prompted by some expression upon my face, though I was not intending to put him on the spot. He spoke as if he was the official representative of all London publishers, but he was really speaking for himself alone. The royal “we.” Perhaps it was apt. He was like a prince on a throne, secure in his palace, while I was a visiting ambassador from a vastly inferior, and somewhat antagonistic, country in which he had deigned to take a paternal interest.

I looked away, through the high leaded window to my left, removing my attention to the greenness of the expansive garden. Mr. Prain’s lawns were being shorn and striped by a large tractor mower. Now the machine snarled and petered out at the perimeter of the surrounding wood. The driver was a small, squat man whose body movements indicated that he did not feel it was his responsibility to mend the temperamental machine every time bits of it fell off or clogged up. I saw him remove his cap and flap away an invisible fly, bend over the engine, and thereafter walk angrily towards the outbuildings on the eastern side of the house.

“You must remember, Stella, that Coymans is one of the very last independent British publishing houses of any size,” continued Mr. Prain. “These are perilous times. We may a seem a large concern to you, but the consortia are ever eager to absorb us. One has to be shrewd to maintain one’s autonomy. Eventually, I’m quite convinced, there will be a take-over bid too tempting to refuse, and then we will become an imprint.” He inhaled sharply and stopped himself. Although he was a man preoccupied with the realm of mergers and money, he had not invited me here to discuss these. He wanted now to wrap the subject up and put it away. “As I’ve said, publishing is a business,” he said, conclusively. “One cannot print a book without bothering to create a market, or satisfy one. Markets are not created by God. Coymans would not exist if we ignored consumer demands and thought only of talent.”

“Right,” I said, not quite knowing what to say next. I wanted to ask him outright, “What about my talent?” but I did not dare.

“Have a cream cake,” said Mr. Prain, leaning forward and picking up an eighteenth-century Delft plate spread with pastries that looked as if they would crumble into a flaky ruin on my napkin after one bite.

“No, thank you,” I said, smiling gratefully and holding up my hand,
nole-me-tangere
. A fallen cream cake was precisely what I did not need to maintain poise and calm.

“Do,” he insisted. “Monique makes them. They’re awfully good.” The pastries were decked with sifted icing sugar
and stuffed full of fresh clotted cream. The pastry looked crisp, light and beckoned to be demolished. “Have that round one in the middle.”

His tone had become almost imperative. The consumption of Monique’s French pastries appeared to be a requirement of my visit to the house. I smiled again, acquiescent, and used the silver tongs to clasp hold of the specified item, transferring it carefully through the air to my side-plate, where it then remained, seductively waiting to embarrass, to devastate my studied composure in an explosion of sugar and cream. I watched as he took the tongs and, like a crayfish manoeuvring its pincer claw, clinched a long, rectangular pastry and brought it down upon his dish, his eyebrows raised in anticipation of delight.

Meanwhile, I tried to seize the threads of our discussion. “Is that why you’re a publisher, Mr. Prain—because you have a sense of cultural responsibility?”

Dexterously, he moved his plate close to his chin, picked up the cake and bit into it. Slops of cream squirted down on to the china and sat, like nodules of snow, until he scooped them up with his right middle finger and licked it clean. The icing sugar puffed delicately away from its source in a dusty spray, landing on his trousers and lining his upper lip with white down. He clearly enjoyed Monique’s pastries very much indeed, for he ate them with a relish and panache that signified that the cakes and he had had a long acquaintance. He wiped his upper lip clear and briskly brushed the powder from his legs, having
completed the satisfactory operation. He then sat back and eyed the array again. Whilst engaged in this minor pursuit of pleasure, he managed to reply, haltingly, “Well, as you know, I’m a publisher because my father and grandfather were publishers and, partly, I was bound to continue the family business. I wasn’t the eldest son, but he was the less fitting one for the job really—sporty type—went to Argentina. I was the bookish one.”

“What sort of books do you personally prefer?” I asked. “Not thrillers and chillers, I presume.” And clearly not “chick lit.”

“Indeed not.” He thought for a moment, a little distracted by cream.

My typescripts?

“I’m fond of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Trollope, Thackeray, Maupassant. I prefer the writers of the past to those of the present, but that’s simply my taste. I certainly don’t believe one should endeavour to write like Dostoyevsky in this day and age.”

I looked about the room full of furniture and pieces of rooms from other times, avoiding the ogreish gaze from the misericord. There was little from the twentieth century apart from the light fittings, let alone the twenty-first. He mentioned no women writers in his list. The room in which we sat was also devoid of any feminine touches except for the embroidered linen cloth on the tea table and the cream cakes. Perhaps the floral china also reflected a woman’s choice: Monique’s, I guessed.

“Dostoyevsky!” I exclaimed inwardly, remembering my labours with reading
The Brothers Karamazov
, and remembering Dostoyevsky’s labours. I had once been much affected by a collection of his letters, and in one of them he told how for three years he had been working so hard on this book that he had become physically ill. Looking at Mr. Prain from the perspective of this image of the writer, he seemed irritatingly smug. I knew instinctively that pointing out the trials authors endure to produce their products would fall on cynical ears. An artist might suffer, he would say, but this does not prove that the artist is a good one. And he would be right.

I had asked him for his preference in books, and he had given me his favourite authors. Though “past fiction” was not a genre, he had indicated he enjoyed stories from times in which he perhaps would have felt more at home. I wanted him to tell me if there was a book which had moved him, or changed his life, or given him strength, or made him doubt himself, anything. I thought this might provide a way into a less formal discussion. It might tell me something that would allow me to understand him better, to establish some basis for easier conversation. I felt, here in his domain, I did not know him at all. He was different.

“Which of Dostoyevsky’s works do you … do you like most?” I asked. “Like” was not the right word. I could not find it.

By this time he had finished his cake, and was sitting back in the chair in his former position, fingertips touching.
He seemed to be sorting through the files of his memory, like a computer scanning a disk, an occasional ripple on the screen indicating a significant byte. Presently, he replied,
“Karamazov
, of course.”

“Of course” implied that I had asked yet another silly question, and banned me from further intrusion. If I dared ask why this was his favourite, he would again use the third person, and pepper the reply with expressions like “obviously” or “it goes without saying.” I wished I could gain the upper hand. Combatively, I eyed my cream cake. I had copied out tracts from Dostoyevsky’s letters into my journal. I wanted now to refer to some of these passages, but I knew my memory was fuzzy. Even still, would he be impressed?

“From the little I’ve read of his letters,” I said, employing a modest approach, “it seems to me that Dostoyevsky’s one driving motivation throughout his life was to express all that was in his imagination, and he was frustrated that he had managed to express only a fraction of what he felt was true and heartfelt. Should Dostoyevsky have tailored his work to fit the market-place and thought not so much about truth but more about whether his product was going to be a hit?”

“Not at all,” he said. “A writer must always write according to his conviction.”

“But the requirements of the market may mean that this writer might never be published.”