Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (49 page)

Naturally we did not think the poets we chose to publish boring – except that I did become tired of Roy Fuller’s meditations on his own ageing, sometimes found Elizabeth Jennings’s thought less interesting than she did, and considered that ‘Not Waving But Drowning’ was the best-known of Stevie Smith’s poems because it was the best of them. Peter Levi’s early poems I found easy to love, but it was Geoffrey Hill’s dense and knotty poems which were, for me, the richest in sudden flashes and enduring illuminations. ‘If you are really without religious feelings,’ he once said to me, ‘how can you like my work?’ To which the answer is: ‘Does an agnostic have to dislike a Bach cantata or Botticelli’s
Nativity
?’ If an emotion or a state of mind has forced someone to give it intensely appropriate expression, that expression will have power enough to bypass opinion.

Geoffrey was a difficult writer to work with because of his anxiety: he was bedevilled by premonitions of disaster, and had to be patiently and repeatedly reassured although my own nerves, worked on by his, would be fraying even as I spoke or wrote my soothing words. Once something frightening happened. A book of his – I think it was
Mercian Hymns
– had been read in page proof by him and me, and I had just passed it to the production department to be sent to press. That same afternoon he telephoned apologetically, saying he was aware of how neurotic he was being and would I please forgive him, but he had suddenly started to worry about whether the copyright line had been included in the preliminary pages. I knew it had been, but I also knew how tormenting his anxieties were, so instead of saying ‘Yes, of course it’s there,’ I said: ‘Production probably hasn’t sent it off yet, so hold on and I’ll run down and check so that we can be a hundred per cent sure.’ Which I did, and the line was there, and Geoffrey was comforted. And when the printed book was delivered to us there was no copyright line.

Whatever it may be that causes a poet to know himself one, Geoffrey was walking evidence of his own sense of vocation. Living seemed to be more difficult for him than for most people. Once he told me – wryly, not proudly – that he was hesitating about doing something which he passionately wanted to do because if he did it, and thus ceased to suffer, he might never write any more poems. And his prose seemed to illustrate the degree to which writing poetry was his
raison d’être
: it was so unconfident and clumsy that it made me think of a swan out of water.

Stevie Smith, too, in her different way, found life difficult; although she solved the problem cleverly and decisively by withdrawing from those parts of it that were too much for her and keeping to a well-defined territory of her own. She was amusing, and – strangely, given the cautious nature of her strategy – met one with a beguiling openness, so that I always started our meetings with the feeling that we were about to become close friends. We never did, and I think the reason was sexual. I was still young enough to be at heart more interested in my own sexual and romantic activities than in anything else (though mostly I kept them out of my office life), so Stevie’s nervous asexuality distanced her. She almost fainted when she first came into my office, because I had on my wall a print of snakes. All the blood left her face and she could hardly make audible a plea that I should take the print down (after that I always removed it as soon as she was announced). Perhaps the notion that a phobia about snakes relates to their phallic quality is old-fashioned and misguided, but I supposed it to be true, and saw Stevie’s phobia as revealing. I’m sorry to say that some part of me slightly despised the fear of sex I sensed in her; and I hope that she got her own back (this is far from unlikely) by slightly despising its opposite quality in me.

That we had a poetry list was almost accidental. While we were still at Thayer Street André had met Laurie Lee and had fallen in love with his
Cider with Rosie
, which was published by Chatto & Windus. Laurie must already have been dabbling in the manipulative games with publishers that he was to play with increasing zest in the future, because André was given to understand that Chatto’s were in the doghouse for refusing to publish his poems,
My Many-
Coated Man
, and who knew what might come the way, in the future, of the firm which took them on. So André snapped up the poems (and we did indeed get Laurie’s next-but-one prose book). Six months later the acquisition of Derek Verschoyle’s list landed us with five more books of verse. They were by Ronald Bottrall, Alan Ross, Roy Fuller, Diana Witherby and David Wright – Fuller was to continue with us for the next thirty years. Then Elizabeth Jennings came to us on Laurie’s recommendation, and Peter Levi on Elizabeth’s, and after that one poet led to another in a haphazard way, or sometimes an agent bobbed up with one, or sometimes one of our novelists was a poet as well (notably John Updike), and once there was a small infusion from another publisher, called Rapp & Whiting, whose list came our way …

In the almost fifty years I spent in publishing, poetry was never easy to sell, and we were not among the houses that were best at it. I find it hard to understand why we stayed with it as long as we did. Certainly I loved some of the books on our poetry list, but given my prosaic nature I would not have minded if we had never developed such a list: I edited most of the books on it, but I was not its instigator. It was André who liked to have it there. He had been an enthusiastic reader of poetry in his youth (Hungarians treasure their poets very earnestly), and was still, when I first knew him, reading Eliot’s
Four Quartets
aloud to young women whenever they gave him the chance (and reading them well). Nor was Nick much interested in our poets – except for Ogden Nash who was a friend of his, and whom he edited. I suppose André simply thought that a proper publisher had a poetry list, rather as, in the past, an English country gentleman, even if he devoted all his leisure to shooting game birds or riding to hounds, thought that a proper house had a library. In retrospect I see it as interesting rather than praiseworthy, given the frugal habits insisted on by André. Poetry may not have lost us money (we paid poets minuscule advances and designed their books very economically), but it certainly didn’t make us any, and none of us minded: an attitude which fifty – forty – thirty years ago was not worthy of remark, and now has become almost unimaginable.

To restore my balance after recalling the dutiful aspects of editing – the need to work conscientiously in spite of being bored, and to put oneself at the service of books that were not always within one’s range – I shall now describe what was certainly the most absorbing of all the tasks that came my way: working with Gitta Sereny on
Into That Darkness
, which we published in 1974.

Gitta spent her childhood in Vienna, the daughter of a Hungarian father and an Austrian mother, neither of them Jewish. She was fifteen years old when Hitler took Austria over. She was sent to school in France and was caught there by the war. During the German occupation she looked after abandoned children in Paris and the Loire, then got out to America where, in 1945, she took a job in UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) as a child welfare officer in camps for displaced people in southern Germany. Although many of the children were eventually reunited with their families, many more had no one and nowhere to go to: all had experienced unspeakable horrors. How could anyone have chosen to make concentration-camp and labour-camp victims of thousands of children, all under fourteen, many under ten? To quote from the preface of the paperback edition of
Into That Darkness
which we published in 1991: ‘Over the months of the Nuremberg trials and our own increasing work with survivors, including a few from the extermination camps in occupied Poland, about which almost nothing had been known until then, we learnt more and more about the horrors which had been committed, and I felt more and more that we needed to find someone capable of explaining to us how presumably normal human beings had been brought to do what had been done.’ Haunted by this question, she came to feel that ‘it was essential to penetrate the personality of at least one such person who had been intimately associated with this total evil. If it could be achieved, an evaluation of such a person’s background, his childhood, and eventually his adult motivation and reactions, as he saw them, rather than as we wished or prejudged them to be, might teach us to understand better to what extent evil in human beings is created by their genes, and to what extent by their society and environment.’

People sometimes ask why Gitta Sereny habitually writes about evil, but I do not see it as surprising that someone plunged into such a scalding awareness of it so early in her life should be haunted by it. It is only because it frightens us too much that we don’t all think about it much more than we do. Everything that makes life worth living is the result of humankind’s impulse to fight the darkness in itself, and attempting to understand evil is part of that fight. It is true that such understanding as has been achieved has not made much – if any – headway against evil; and it is equally true that horror and dismay at dreadful things are often used as disguise for excitement; but if those facts are allowed to discourage us from trying to understand how corruption comes about, what hope have we? It seems to me that Gitta’s need to seek explanations has led her to do valuable work, none more so than when she seized the chance, some twenty-five years after her experiences in UNRRA, to penetrate one particular evil personality.

She had become a journalist. In 1967 she was commissioned by the
Daily Telegraph
to write a series of pieces about West Germany, including the Nazi crime trials then taking place. She was present at the trial of Franz Stangl who had been Kommandant of Treblinka, one of the four extermination (as opposed to concentration) camps in German-occupied Poland, and who was sentenced to life imprisonment for co-responsibility in the murder of 900,000 people in that camp. There had been only four such men: one of the others was dead, the other two had escaped. Stangl, too, had escaped (to Brazil), but had been tracked down. Gitta realized that he was the object for study that she had hoped for, and that by now she herself felt capable of undertaking the task.

She was allowed to visit Stangl in prison and talked with him for many hours over six weeks, at the end of which – the very end – he reached the bottom of his guilt and admitted that he ought not still to be alive. There was still a detail which he wished to confirm about something he had said, so she agreed to return to the prison in three days’ time to collect the information. When she did so she was told that he was dead. It had been heart failure, not suicide. When the
Telegraph Magazine
published the interviews they refused to include this fact, saying that no one would believe it.

Having read these interviews, we asked Gitta to come to the office and discuss the possibility of a book, whereupon she told us that she was already deep in the work for it, and would be glad to let us see it. I can’t remember how long it was before she brought it in – or rather, brought in the raw material out of which it was to be shaped, but I shall never forget the sight of that mountain of script.

When I got it home that evening (it was far too unwieldy to deal with in the office) it covered the whole of my table. In addition to the central Stangl interviews there were interviews, many of them long, with at least twenty-four other people, and there was also much – though not all – of the material for the linking passages of description and explanation essential to welding the material into a whole.

No reading I have ever done has shaken me as much as the reading I did that night. Having seen the film of Belsen made when the Allies got there I thought I knew the nature of what had been done; but of course I didn’t. Groping my way into the history of this ordinary, efficient, ambitious, uxorious Austrian policeman, through the astonishing material about Hitler’s euthanasia programme to which he was transferred – all the men employed in the extermination camps, except for the Ukrainians, worked for that programme – was intensely interesting, but frightening because I knew where it was going. And then it got there. And then the voices began to tell me what it had really been like … I remember walking round and round the room as though I were trying to escape what was in that pile of paper, and I didn’t sleep that night. But one editorial decision I was able to make then and there: we must use no adjectives – or very few. Words such as ‘horrifying’, ‘atrocious’, ‘tragic’, ‘terrifying’ – they shrivelled like scraps of paper thrown into a blazing fire.

After the enormous amount of source material she had dug into, and all those interviews which had taken her to Brazil and Canada and the United States as well as to Germany and Austria, and had plunged her ever deeper into the darkness that I had just glimpsed, Gitta was near the end of her tether. She liked to have the support of an editor at the best of times, simply because, fluent though her English was, it was not her first language: she couldn’t be absolutely confident in it – and did, in fact, sometimes slip into slightly Germanic rhythms and over-elaboration of syntax. But chiefly it was exhaustion, and being too close to the material, which made it essential for her to have help. Often it amounted to no more than me saying ‘Let’s put that bit here’ so that she could say at once ‘No no – it must go there’; but she was also enabled to reshape passages when she had seen them afresh through a new pair of eyes. I could point out where clarification, condensation, expansion were needed. I could say ‘But you’ve said that already when you were describing such-and-such’, or ‘But wait a minute – I need reminding about that because it was so long ago that it first came up’.

It was clear enough that the Stangl interviews were the thread on which the rest must hang, but it was not easy to decide where to break them and introduce other voices: his wife’s or his sister-in-law’s, those of the men who worked under him, those of the five survivors, and many more. I have forgotten how long it took us, working usually in my flat (I had to take many days away from the office for this book); but I know it was months – Gitta often had to go back to her typewriter to provide links or expansions. From time to time we got stuck: there would be a chunk of material, fascinating in itself but seemingly impossible to fit in. ‘Oh God, we’ll just have to sacrifice it’, I would say; and then, a little later, there would be some slight shift in the mass of the book, and click! in would go the problem piece, fitting exactly. This happened with almost uncanny regularity. Gitta
thought
she had just been collecting everything she could find, but the extent to which she had unconsciously been structuring her book became clearer and clearer. An interviewer does, after all, control the direction of an interview, and the further she had delved into Stangl’s background, the more sure her touch had become at discovering what was relevant. We shortened a good deal, but we did not, in the end, have to leave anything out.