Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (46 page)

So there we were, the strain and gloom of war gradually fading away behind us, starting on a delightful adventure supported and exhilarated by the energies and abilities of the man who had launched it. Even if the ride had its bumpy moments there was no question of wishing to climb down.

I
REMEMBER ALLAN WINGATE’S
first premises rather than its first books simply because the first books were so feeble that I blush for them. The firm kicked off with a list of four:
Route to Potsdam
, a piece of political journalism commenting on the Allies’ plans for Europe, by Bela Ivanyi, one of André’s Hungarian friends, the argument of which had no perceptible effect on anyone; Beds, a boring history of mankind’s sleeping habits by Reginald Reynolds, to whom André had been introduced by George Orwell;
Fats and
Figures
, a little book on diet, sensible but hardly more than a pamphlet, by a prison governor who was to become Lord Taylor; and the fourth has vanished from my mind. To start with André simply snatched at any homeless manuscript that happened to float by, and the reading public just after the war was so starved of books and so short of alternative forms of entertainment that almost anything (in our case almost nothing) could be presented by a publisher without looking silly.

A sad irony underlay this situation. While André was with Nicolson and Watson George Orwell submitted
Animal Farm
to them and John Roberts asked André to read it for him. André declared it wonderful, but Roberts, when he heard what it was about, said: ‘Nonsense, laddie – no one nowadays wants to make fun of Uncle Joe.’ André, who was determined to help the penniless and modest Orwell whom he saw as almost saint-like, decided that Jonathan Cape was the right publisher for him, and Orwell took his advice. Cape accepted the book, but shared Roberts’s doubts to the extent of making a condition: it must be checked by some sort of official authority to make sure that it was not considered damaging to the war effort. And it was so considered: His Majesty’s Government sincerely hoped that Mr Cape would refrain from publishing something so sharply critical of our Soviet Ally – and Mr Cape did refrain.

Orwell, who by this time was getting pretty desperate and who knew that André was planning to start his own firm as soon as he could raise a little capital, then said to André: ‘Look, why don’t
you
do it? Why don’t you start off your firm with it?’ And André, strongly tempted to pounce but still far from sure that he would be able to start a firm however much he wanted to, felt that he must not let a man he liked and respected so deeply take such a risk. No, he said. And the essential resilience of his nature was later to be well illustrated by the fact that the more famous
Animal Farm
became, the prouder he was of his own early recognition of it and of his not letting Orwell take the risk of giving it to him, with never a moan at having lost this prize.

The first book we took on because of me still sits on my shelves, and fills me with astonishment. André, through Hungarian friends in Paris, had come to know several people in the French literary world, among them Gerard Hopkins. Hopkins suggested that he should look at the work of a writer called Noël Devaulx, so André brought back from a visit to Paris
The Tailor’s Cake
, a tiny volume of seven stories which he dumped on my corner of the table: he couldn’t read French while I, though I had spent no time with French people so had no confidence in speaking it, had been taught it very well and could read it nearly as easily as English. So the decision was to be mine.

There was a solemn awareness of responsibility. There was bafflement for a while, then an increasing fascination. These were surreal stories in which characters who assumed you knew more about them than you did moved through strange places, such as a busy sea-port which was nowhere near the sea, or a village in which everyone was old and silent except for foolish laughter, and which vanished the morning after the traveller had been benighted in it. Everything in these stories was described with a meticulous sobriety and precision, which gave them the concentrated reality of dreams. Perhaps they were allegories – but of what? The only thing I felt sure of was that the author was utterly convinced by them – he couldn’t have written them in any other way.

I would soon begin to find such fantasies a waste of time – of my time, anyway – but then, in addition to liking the sobriety and precision of the style, I felt the pull of mystification: ‘I can’t understand this – probably, being beyond me, it is very special.’ This common response to not seeing the point of something has a rather touching humility, but that doesn’t save it – or so I now believe – from being a betrayal of intelligence which has allowed a good deal of junk to masquerade as art. Whether that matters much is another question: throughout my publishing life I thought it did, so I am glad to say that the publication of
The Tailor’s Cake
in 1946, beautifully translated by Betty Askwith, was the only occasion on which I succumbed to the charm of mystification.

A more amusing aspect of that publication is that even in those book-hungry days we would have had to go far to find a piece of fiction more obviously unsaleable than those stories, yet once I had pronounced them good we didn’t think twice about publishing them. And they cannot have been a hideous flop: given my sense of responsibility for them, and André’s tendency to attribute blame, I would surely remember if they had been. It is sad to think that we did not appreciate the luxury of not having to ask ourselves ‘Is it commercially viable?’ in those happy days before that question set in.

At Wingate I was André’s employee, not his partner. My opinion of a book might or might not influence his decision, but if he took something on without asking my opinion I accepted without question that it was my job to work on it whether I liked it or not. Usually my attitude was ‘No doubt he knows best’. Partly this was a hangover from my original feeling that working with books was something for people cleverer and more serious than I was; partly it was a realistic assessment of my own inexperience; and partly – something which shocks me now that I recognize it – it was that old inherited idleness: it didn’t really matter enough to me what he brought in, provided a large enough proportion of our books struck me as good enough.

The first of these to appear on our list were of a sober – almost stately – kind, a result of the post-war book famine which meant that the reissue of classics was felt as a need. Villon and Heine, for example. André had met a man called Bill Stirling who considered himself capable of translating all the major poets of Europe. Although in this he was aiming too high, he did produce translations of those two which were up to appearing in good-looking bilingual volumes with which we could justly be pleased. We also produced a good edition of the novels and poems of the Brontë sisters edited by Phyllis Bentley, whose introduction stands up well against modern Brontë scholarship, and who included examples of their important juvenilia – the first time that had been done in a British edition.

Our first two money-spinners could hardly have been less like the above, or each other. The first was
How to be an Alien
by George Mikes. André had been at school in Budapest with George’s younger brother, when he had glimpsed George enviously as a dashing grown-up. Meeting again in London, as exiles, they found that the years between them had concertinaed, and became friends. George’s little squib on being a foreigner in England had an extraordinary success. Its foreign rights seemed to sell themselves, it is still in print today, and it was the foundation stone of a career as a humorous writer that kept George going comfortably until his death in 1990. It also brought in Nicolas Bentley, who would become our partner when André Deutsch Limited was founded. A book so short needed to be given a little more bulk by illustrations, and an author so foreign and unknown could do with a familiar British name beside his own on the title-page. André persuaded Nick with some difficulty to do twelve drawings for
Alien
– and was never to let him forget that he had been dubious enough about an alliance with these two flighty central Europeans to fight for an outright fee of
£
100 rather than a cut of the royalties. When André refused to give way over this, Nick almost backed out. I don’t know exactly what he eventually made out of those twelve drawings, but it was certainly well over
£
10,000. Nick and his wife Barbara were soon close friends of André and the woman who became André’s great love soon after he had launched Wingate, to whom he would remain loyal for the rest of his life.

Our second money-spinner was
The Reader’s Digest Omnibus
: the first important chunk of loot brought home by André from New York. He had seen at once how important an annual shopping trip to the United States would be, and built up a network of good relationships there with amazing speed. Knowing that he would have trouble persuading Audrey and me that he was not disgracing us all for life by taking on this project, he made no attempt to do so but simply announced the
fait accompli
and told us we must lump it. We did indeed wince and moan – I more than Audrey, because I had to proofread the thing and write its blurb.
The Reader’s Digest
may have changed by now – I have never looked at it again since that intensive experience of it – but at the end of the forties its central message could fairly be represented by the following little story. A man is faced with the choice between doing something rather dishonest and making a fortune, or refusing to do something rather dishonest and staying poor. Virtuously, he chooses to stay poor – whereupon an unexpected turn of events connected with this choice makes him a
much bigger fortune
than he would have gained by the dishonest act. Looking back, I think that having started off so prune-faced about it, the least I should have done for dignity’s sake was keep up the disapproval; but in fact the book’s success was so great, and so many people seemed to think that we had been clever to get hold of it, that I ended by feeling quite pleased with it.

Two other books from those distant days were important to my apprenticeship. One was a serious technical account of developments in modern architecture which revealed an incidental pleasure to be found in editing: the way it can teach you a lot about a subject unfamiliar to you, which you might not otherwise have approached. The other was about the discovery of Tahiti, which taught me once and for all the true nature of my job.

The latter book was by a man who could not write. He had clumsily and laboriously put a great many words on paper because he happened to be obsessed by his subject. No one but a hungry young publisher building a list would have waded through his typescript, but having done so I realized that he knew everything it was possible to know about a significant and extraordinary event, and that his book would be a thoroughly respectable addition to our list if only it could be made readable.

André had recently met an urbane and cultivated old man who had just retired from governing a British outpost in the Pacific, and who had said that he hoped to find the occasional literary task with which to fill his time. We brought the two men together, the author agreed to pay Sir Whatsit a reasonable fee for editing his book, and the latter carried it off, sat on it for three months, then returned it to its author with his bill which the poor man paid at once before forwarding his ‘finished’ book to us. To my dismay I found that lazy old Sir Whatsit had become bored after about six pages, and from then on had done almost nothing: the book was still unreadable. Either we had to return it to its author with a cheque to cover the expense we had let him in for, or I would have to edit it myself. We were short of non-fiction. I did it myself.

I doubt if there was a sentence – certainly there was not a paragraph – that I did not alter and often have to retype, sending it chapter by chapter to the author for his approval which – although he was naturally grouchy – he always gave. I enjoyed the work. It was like removing layers of crumpled brown paper from an awkwardly shaped parcel, and revealing the attractive present which it contained (a good deal more satisfying than the minor tinkering involved when editing a competent writer). Soon after the book’s publication it was reviewed in the
Times Literary
Supplement
: an excellent book, said the reviewer, scholarly and full of fascinating detail, and beautifully written into the bargain. The author promptly sent me a clipping of this review, pinned to a short note. ‘How nice of him,’ I thought, ‘he’s going to say thank you!’ What he said in fact was: ‘You will observe the comment about the writing which confirms what I have thought all along, that none of that fuss about it was necessary.’ When I had stopped laughing I accepted the message: an editor must never expect thanks (sometimes they come, but they must always be seen as a bonus). We must always remember that we are only midwives – if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own.

The most important book in the history of Allan Wingate was Norman Mailer’s first novel,
The Naked and the Dead
, which came to us from an agent desperate because six of London’s leading publishers had rejected it in spite of its crossing the Atlantic on a wave of excitement (it was one of those books, always American at that time, which are mysteriously preceded by a certainty that they will cause a stir). Our list had gained substance and our sales organization was seen to be good, but we were still too small to be any agent’s first choice for a big book – or indeed even their seventh choice, had they not concluded that none of the more firmly established houses was going to make an offer.

The book was a war novel, all its characters soldiers going through hell in the Pacific, where Mailer himself had served. He was bent on conveying the nature of these soldiers and their experiences accurately, so naturally he wanted the men in his novel to speak like the men he had known, which meant using the words ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’, and using them often. His American publishers had told him that although they knew it to be a great book, they could not publish it, and nor would anyone else (which appeared to be true) with those words spelt out. I believe the use of ‘f—’ was suggested; but ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’ occurred so often that this would have made the dialogue look like fishnet, so ‘fug’ and ‘fugging’ were agreed as substitutes.