Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (45 page)

We spent VE Day (Victory in Europe) together, milling about the West End in a mass of people who mostly seemed deeply relieved rather than over the top with joy. Certainly my own feeling, which I had to keep stoking up to overcome incredulity, was ‘It’s over!’ rather than ‘We’ve won!’ VJ Day (Victory over Japan) worked better – unlike more sensitive people among my friends I felt on that day no shadow of horror at the Atom Bomb: that came later. We were swept into the crowd which surged up the Mall to call the royal family out onto the balcony over and over again, and there was no resisting the mood engendered by that crowd. It was one of a joy so benign that it was no surprise to read in a newspaper report next morning that although people had stood all over the flower beds in front of the palace, they had placed their feet so carefully that hardly a single plant had been damaged.

A
NDRé STARTED HIS
first publishing house, Allan Wingate, late in 1945. I missed its first month or so because I did not leave the BBC until after July that year, then took a refreshing break at home in Norfolk. I know I was still in the BBC in July because a wonderfully exhilarating experience – more so, even, than VJ Day – was spending the whole night in the Overseas News Room when the results of the first post-war election were coming over the ticker-tape machine, and we gradually realized that Labour was winning. That
was
a matter of ‘We’ve won!’ Other people’s memories of the years just after the war often stress the continuation of rationing and ‘austerity’, and a sense of fatigue, but it didn’t feel like that to me. Recovery was slow – how could it be anything else? – but it was going on all the time. Why fret when it was evident that things were getting better and better, and that society was going to be juster and more generous than it had ever been before? And for many years to come the existence, and smooth functioning, of the National Health Service was by itself (how can people forget this?) enough to justify this now naive-seeming optimism.

One of the things I missed was the naming of André’s firm. Before I left for Norfolk we had spent an evening together looking through the London telephone directory for a name beginning with D that he could feel at home with. (His father had written from Hungary, urging him not to use his own name, on the grounds that English people would think he was German and would resent him.) His reason for wanting to keep his initials was that he had just had them embroidered on some new shirts, the logic of which was as obscure to me then as it is now, and proved too flimsy to overcome his lack of response to any of the D-names in the book. Although I disagreed with his father (what about Heinemann?), I liked the name he hit on while I was away. It sounded so convincing that people sometimes said they were glad to see the firm in business again, as though we were reviving a house that had existed before the war.

By the time I got back to London André had rented an office – the ground floor of a late Georgian house in Great Cumberland Place, near Marble Arch – and had moved into it with Mr Kaufmann who was to be our accountant; two secretaries; Mr Brown our packer; and Audrey Harvey who had put up some of the capital and was to edit
Junior
, a magazine for children, under our imprint. Sheila Dunn, who drew well and wittily and made her small living as a commercial artist, was to come in part-time as Audrey’s art editor, and a gravely handsome man called Vincent Stuart was to design our books on a freelance basis. A figure in the background who remained shadowy to me was Alex Lederer, a manufacturer of handbags who had provided the greater part of the capital. My innate amateurishness is demonstrated by my lack of interest in how André persuaded this agreeable but alien being to cough up: it never occurred to me to ask. I did know, however, that our capital as a whole amounted to
£
3,000, and that it was generally held that no publishing company could make a go of it with less than
£
15,000: we were constantly reminded of that by André, as he urged us to recycle used envelopes, switch off lights behind us, and generally exercise the strictest economy in every possible way.

We had at our disposal a large front room, once the house’s dining-room, with two tall windows and a pompous marble chimneypiece; a smaller back room – perhaps once the owner’s study? – looking out into a well; a wide passage along the side of the well accommodating Mr Brown and his packing-bench; and at the end of the passage a lavatory and a small one-storey extension in which Mr Kaufmann lurked, which looked back across the well to the ‘study’.

Although at the BBC I had shared an office with several other people, I was dismayed by the front room when I first saw it. André had his desk at one of the windows, Audrey hers at the other end of the room, and against the wall opposite the fireplace there was a rather handsome dining-room table almost hidden under piles of manuscripts, paper samples, reference books and so on – we had as yet no shelves, cupboards or filing cabinets. A corner of this table was to be mine, and Sheila was to use another corner on the two or three days a week when she would be in. It seemed likely that the work would need more concentration than anything I had done before, and here I would be, sandwiched in the exiguous space between the intense working lives of other people, with their animated telephone conversations and frequent visitors … would I be able to endure it?

The discomfort I went through to begin with – there must have been some – has faded from my mind, but I remember clearly a moment which occurred after three or four weeks. It was lunchtime; I pushed aside my work and looked round the room. There was André arguing for better terms with a printer’s representative, Audrey talking to one of her authors who had two children in tow, Sheila going through a portfolio of drawings with an artist. ‘How amazingly adaptable people are,’ I thought. ‘Until I happened to look round this room, I might have been alone in it.’

My job was to read, edit, copy-edit, proofread, and also to look after the advertising, which meant copy-writing and designing as well as booking space after André had told me which books he wanted advertised in which newspapers, and had given me a budget. Although reading and editing were by far the most interesting of my tasks, they did not at first seem the most important. This was because I could do them easily: I had read a lot and I was developing confidence in my own judgement. Against which I had never before even speculated as to how advertisements got into newspapers, and as soon as I had learnt what the process was I saw that I would be no good at an important part of it. Booking space was no problem, but after that was done I had to persuade the advertising manager of the paper concerned that although our space was a small one (usually a six or eight inch single column) it should be given the kind of conspicuous position usually occupied by much larger ads. This, to André’s incredulous indignation, I hardly ever achieved, and almost every time I failed he would telephone the newspaper’s man and tell him that next time he must give us an even better position to make up for his disgraceful failure this time – which the wretched man would usually do. But not without imploring me to keep André off his back because he couldn’t go on inviting trouble for himself by granting such favours. I was soon feeling sick at the mere sound of the word ‘advertising’, and the fact that I continued to carry this albatross round my neck for several years is evidence of the power André could exercise by the simple means of being utterly convinced that what he wanted was
right
.

Over the advertising he was aided by my own guilt at evading so many other disagreeable things: it was ample expiation. But his power
was
extraordinary. Watching him use it I often thought I was witnessing the secret of the successful pathological liar: the one who persuades businessmen and politicians to back crackpot ventures. The liar is, of course, helped by the greed and gullibility of his victims, but he could not succeed on a grand scale without the ‘magical’ persuasiveness which comes from utter self-persuasion. How lucky, I used to think, that André is by nature an honest man, or where would we all be?

Another of his characteristics which I learnt at this time was less useful – indeed, it was to be his great weakness as a manager of people. He saw everything not done
exactly
as he himself would have done it as being done wrong – enragingly wrong – and anything that was done right as not worth comment. Things often were done wrong to begin with, and his vigilance taught us a lot, but the apparent indifference which took the place of carping when all was well was discouraging. Sheila and I often pointed out that praise and kindness made people work better as well as feel happier, and he would promise to mend his ways, but he never did.

For a while my experience of this in connection with the advertising was painful. I think I was brave in the way I plunged into the unfamiliar task, and showed fortitude in overcoming my nature and going on with it for years in spite of loathing it (except for the bits which involved messing about with pencil, ruler and eraser, which I quite liked).

True to form, André was always sharply critical, not only of my feebleness with the papers’ advertising managers, but also of the wording and spacing within each ad. For some time this was helpful, then the implication that I was bad at this boring task into which he had shoved me began to get at me, so though I could soon see for myself that my ads didn’t look too bad, a muted drone of guilt was gradually induced, to underlie this side of my work.

It threatened for a time to underlie everything, because once André’s nagging focused on someone it did so with increasing intensity. I was sometimes slapdash about detail which struck me as unimportant. I might, for example, forget (not when dealing with a book’s text, but perhaps when typing out an ad or the blurb for a jacket) that it was our house style to use single quotation marks, reserving double ones for quotations within quotations. When something like this happened André’s shock would be extreme. ‘How can I go to Paris next week if I can’t trust you over something as simple as this? Don’t you realize what it would cost to correct that if it got through to proof stage?’ … and there would be a slight crescendo in guilt’s drone. And a creepy result was that one began to make more and worse mistakes. I was to see this happening over and over again to other people after the nagging had swivelled away from me (I came to envisage it as a wicked little searchlight always seeking out a victim). It could escalate with mystifying speed until you began to dread going into the office. You knew that justice was really on your side in that he was making an absurd and sometimes cruel fuss over small matters, but you had been manoeuvred into a position where you couldn’t
claim
this without appearing to be indifferent to the ideals of perfection to which we were all devoted. I can still recall the sensation of tattered nerves which came from the mixture of indignation and guilt which ensued.

To polish off this disagreeable subject, I must skip forward a few months to a time when he returned from one of those trips to Paris (they were book-hunting trips) and asked me for the key of his car. ‘What do you mean? I haven’t got it’ – and he exploded. ‘Oh my God – you’re impossible! I gave it to you just before I left. What have you done with it?’ I was stunned: how, in six short days, could I have forgotten something so important? I struggled to recall taking the key from him and was unable to summon up the least shadow of it, but his conviction was absolute and my own awareness of my shortcomings was inflamed: I had to believe that he had given me that key, and I truly feared that I might be losing my mind. I went home in misery, worried all night over this sudden softening of my brain, and next morning it was all I could do to crawl back to the office.

André’s car was parked outside it, and he was at his desk looking cheerful. How, I asked tremulously, had he got it started? ‘Oh that …’ he said. ‘I didn’t leave the key with you after all, I left it with the man at the garage.’

That silenced the guilt drone for ever, and soon afterwards I learnt to disregard unnecessary fusses when what he was complaining of was something being done in way B instead of way A, and how to forestall his rage when I had genuinely erred. It was simple: a quick resort to
mea culpa
. ‘Oh André – I’ve done such a dreadful thing. They’ve spelt Stephens with a v on the back flap of the jacket and I didn’t notice!’ – ‘Is it too late to correct?’ – ‘Yes, that’s what’s so
frightful
.’ – ‘Oh well, worse things have happened. You’ll have to apologize to Stephens – and
do
remember to get someone to give your jacket proofs a second reading.’ End of scene. Once I had twigged that confession always took the wind out of his sails I had no more trouble from the ‘searchlight’. But there would rarely be a time during the next fifty years when it was not making life a misery for someone, and working first in Allan Wingate, then in André Deutsch, would have been a great deal more pleasant if this had not been so.

One feels the lack of counterpoint when using words. Anyone reading the above account of André’s nagging might wonder why I continued to work for him; but that was only one thread in many. I was doing and enjoying other parts of the job in addition to the advertising, while as for André …

It was not easy to summarize his activities. He read books; he hunted books; he thought books up; for several years he did all the selling of books, and the buying and selling of book rights; he bought paper; he dealt with printers, binders and blockmakers; he made all the decisions about the promotion of our books; he checked every detail of their design; he checked copy-writing, proofreading, important letters; he soothed and cajoled the bank; he persuaded suppliers to give us unprecedented credit; he raised capital out of the blue when we could no longer pay our bills; he delivered books in Aggie, his Baby Austin named after its AGY registration number (I did that, too); if we were sending out leaflets he sat on the floor stuffing them into envelopes until after midnight and always did more to the minute than anyone else; and his own pulse was no more part of him than his awareness of our turnover and overheads. He also did all the firm’s remembering – the car-key incident was unique. Usually his memory for detail was so good as to be almost frightening. He had learnt his way about his trade so rapidly and so thoroughly, and had committed himself to it so whole-heartedly, that it is not fanciful to describe him as someone who had discovered his vocation. One never doubted that the firm, having been created by him, was now being kept going by him: if he had withdrawn from it, it would have ceased to exist.

Dictatorships work: that is why they are so readily accepted, and if they are demonstrably more or less just, as they can be to start with, they are accepted with a gratitude more personal than can be inspired by other kinds of regime. In its miniature way André’s dictatorship was strong for the following reasons: he had already learnt so much about publishing while those working for him still knew nothing; it was his nature to turn ideas into action without delay, which is a rare gift; while he paid us mingy salaries he also paid himself a mingy salary, and the company was so small that we could all see with our own eyes that there was no money available for anything else; when he was mean, chiselling down payments, scrounging discounts, running after us to switch off lights and so on, even though he was certainly not offending against his nature, yet he was still always and evidently doing it for the company’s sake; and when he nagged and raged, even when it was maddeningly out of proportion with the offence, that too was always and evidently for the company’s sake. Reasonable explanation of errors and amiable encouragement to avoid them would have been more effective as well as pleasanter, but if such behaviour didn’t come naturally to him, too bad: we would have to put up with him as he was which, on the whole, we were glad to do. Sheila and I, in particular, who were the people closest to him, had such a habit of fondness for him that it never occurred to us to do anything else.