Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (53 page)

Most of his African experiences, however, were pleasant and productive, and I admired him for having taken the current interest among publishers in the newly freed countries a step further than anyone else. Most of the people in our trade were more liberal than not, feeling guilty at being subjects of an imperial power and pleased that with the war’s end Britain began relinquishing its so-called ‘possessions’ overseas. And many of them were genuinely interested in hearing what writers in those countries had to say now that they were free. For a time during the fifties and early sixties it was probably easier for a black writer to get his book accepted by a London publisher, and kindly reviewed thereafter, than it was for a young white person.

There was, of course, something else at work as well as literary and/or political interest. There are, after all, a vast number of Indians, Africans and West Indians in the world – a potential reading public beyond computation – and nowhere, except in India on a tiny scale, were these masses able to produce books for themselves. Certainly no British publisher was foolish enough to suppose that more than a minuscule fringe of that great potential market was, or would be for years, accessible, but I think most of us thought it would become increasingly accessible in the foreseeable future. The feeling in the air was that freedom would mean progress; that the market out there was certainly going to expand, however slowly, so that it would not only be interesting to get in on the ground floor of publishing for and about Africa: it would also prove, in the long run, to be good business. Longman’s and Macmillan’s, with their specialized educational lists, were the firms which addressed the situation most sensibly, in ways helpful to their customers and profitable to themselves. André was the one who did it most romantically. Instead of providing Nigeria and Kenya with books made in Britain, he felt, Britain should help them develop publishing industries of their own. André Deutsch Limited was a shareholder in both the African houses he got off the ground, but not a major shareholder; and it claimed no say in what they were to publish. It was a generous enterprise, which seemed for a while to work well in a rough and ready way …

History, alas, has not left many traces of it, nor of the often wise and persuasive thinking in the non-fiction books about African affairs, particularly those of the French agronomist René Dumont, which we were so proud of. In Tanzania Julius Nyerere ordered a copy each of Dumont’s
False Start in Africa
for every member of his government. He might as well have tossed them into Lake Victoria. But in the sixties it would have felt not only defeatist, but
wrong
, to foresee that the dangers Dumont warned against were not to be avoided.

Now I wonder whether we were expecting history to move faster than it can because we were witnesses of how fast an empire can crumble, and did not stop to think that falling down is always more rapid than building up … and what, anyway, were we expecting the multitude of tribal societies in that continent, many of them with roots more or less damaged by European intrusion, to build up
to
? Perhaps our concern was, and is, as much an aspect of neocolonialism as American investment in Nigerian oil-wells.

André, and to some extent Piers, were the people who dealt with the African houses. My only brush with them came when we published a book by Tom Mboya jointly with EAPH and he came to London for its launching. For some reason André was prevented from meeting him at the airport. Feeling that it would be rude just to send a limousine for him, he asked me to go in his stead. I had a clearer idea than he had of the value a Kenyan VIP would attribute to a middle-aged female of school-marmish appearance as a meeter, but André pooh-poohed my doubts and feebly I gave in. The drive from Heathrow to Mboya’s hotel was even less agreeable than I expected. Almost all of it was spent by him and his henchmen discussing, with a good deal of sniggering and in an extemporized and wholly transparent code, how and where they were going to find fuckable blondes. But that little incident did not prevent me from feeling pleased about our African connection, seeing it as adding stature to our house.

Although I did not get to Africa, I did to the Caribbean: the only ‘perk’ of my career, but such a substantial one that I am not complaining. Among our several Caribbean writers was the prime minister of Trinidad & Tobago (two islands, one country), Eric Williams, with his
Capitalism and Slavery
and
From Columbus to
Castro
. Such editorial consultation as was necessary could easily have been done by letter, but André delighted in collecting freebies. He saw journeys as a challenge, the object of the challenge being to get there without paying. At a pinch he would settle for an upgrading rather than a free flight – or even, if he was acting on someone else’s behalf, for an invitation into the VIP lounge; but he was not often reduced to spending the firm’s money on an economy fare. Acting on someone else’s behalf gave him a cosy feeling of generosity, so when Eric Williams’s proofs came in he staggered me by suggesting that I should take them to Port of Spain, and he wangled the works out of Eric: VIP lounge, first class, and free. I had to get to New York on the cheapest charter flight I could find (quite a complicated and chancy business in those days), but from New York to Port of Spain it was champagne all the way. And once there, after a short session with that aloof, almost stone-deaf man whose only method of communication was the lecture, I could extend the visit into a holiday.

And even that was free to begin with, because we were doing a book about the islands for tourists, and the owners of the biggest hotel on Tobago, confusing the word ‘publishing’ with ‘publicity’, invited me to stay there. It was a luxurious hotel, but the people staying in it were very old. The men played golf on its lovely links all day, the women sat by its swimming-pool, apparently indifferent to the emerald and aquamarine sea being fished by pelicans a stone’s throw away, and the ‘tropical fruit’ announced on its menus turned out to be grapefruit. I retired to my pretty cabin in a gloomy state – and became much gloomier when I read the little notice on the back of the door listing the hotel’s prices. I did know, really, that I was there as a guest, but it had not been put into words, and the question ‘Supposing I’m not?’ seized on my mind. If I wasn’t I’d have to be shipped home in disgrace as an indigent seaman (when I was a child my father told me that that was what consuls did to people who ran out of money abroad). So next morning I took to the bush with that irrational worry still gnawing, and had the luck to hit on Tobago’s Public Beach.

This was a folly wished on the island by the government in Port of Spain. Tobago was girdled by wonderful beaches open to everyone, and would have preferred the money to be spent on something useful, such as road-repairs. So nobody went to the Public Beach, and Mr Burnett, who ran it, had such a boring time that he couldn’t wait to invite me to join him and his assistant for a drink on the verandah of his little office. I told him my worry about the big hotel, and said: ‘Surely there must be a hotel somewhere on the island where ordinary people stay?’ There was a tiny pause while the two men avoided exchanging glances and I remembered with dismay that when people here said ‘ordinary’ they meant ‘black’ in a rude way; then Mr Burnett kindly chose to take the word as I had intended it, and said of course there was: his old friend Mr Louis was opening one that very week, and he would take me there at once.

So I became – it seemed like a dream, such a delightful happening coming so pat – Mr Louis’s first guest in the Hotel Jan de Moor: a former estate house in pretty grounds, scrupulously run and not expensive. Mr Louis had reckoned that American tourists would soon include American black people – school teachers and so on – who would expect comfort but would be unable to pay silly prices, so he had decided to cater for the likes of them. In that first week the only people who visited were his neighbours, dropping in for a drink in the bar as dusk fell, which made it almost as friendly as staying in a private house, and I have never enjoyed a hotel more.

That whole holiday was a joy, not only because it was my introduction to the beauties of tropical seas, shores and forests, but because I
knew the place so well
. Of course I had always been aware of how well V. S. Naipaul and Michael Anthony wrote, but until I had stepped off an aeroplane into the world they were writing about I had not quite understood what good writing can do. There were many moments, walking down a street in Port of Spain, or driving a bumpy road between walls of sugar cane or under coconut palms, when I experienced an uncanny twinge of
coming
home
; which made the whole thing greatly more interesting and moving than even the finest ordinary sightseeing can be. And after that I was always to find what I think of as the anti-Mustique side of the Caribbean, dreadful though its problems can be, amazingly congenial.

In the nineteen-seventies we went through an odd, and eventually comic, experience: to the outward eye we were taken over by Time/Life. ‘Synergy’ had suddenly become very much the thing among giant corporations, and on one of his New York trips André had allowed himself to be persuaded that we would benefit greatly if he sold a considerable chunk of shares in André Deutsch Limited to that company. Piers and I both think it must have been about forty per cent, but we were never told. The chief – indeed, the only – argument in favour of doing so was that already the advances being paid for important books were beginning to sky-rocket beyond our reach, and with Time/Life as our partners we could keep up with that trend.

I was present at the London meeting where the beauties of the scheme were explained to our board by two or three beaming Time/Lifers who appeared to be describing some mysterious charity founded for the benefit of small publishers. At one point I asked a question which was genuinely puzzling me: ‘But what do you see as being in it for
you
?’ After a fractional pause, a gentle blast of pure waffle submerged the question, and I was left believing what in fact I continued to believe:
that they didn’t know
. Shrewd predatory calculations
might
be underlying all this, but it seemed unlikely. ‘Can it be,’ I asked André after the meeting, ‘that they are just silly?’ To which he answered crisply: ‘Yes.’ I think he had already started to wonder what on earth he was doing, but couldn’t see how to back out of it.

Oh well, we all thought, perhaps we
will
get some big books through them, and they don’t seem to intend any harm – and the truth was, they did not. We got one big book through them – Khrushchev’s memoirs in two volumes, the first of which was sniffed at suspiciously by reviewers who thought it was written by the CIA, and the second of which was claimed by Time/Life to be proved genuine by scientific means, but who cared? They made no attempt to intervene in any of our publishing plans. And they drove André mad.

This they did by writing to him from time to time, asking him for a detailed forecast of our publishing plans for the next five years. The first time they did this he sent a civil reply explaining that our kind of publishing didn’t work like that, but gradually he became more and more enraged. I remember being taken aside at a New York party by the man who functioned as our link with Time/Life, and asked to calm André and explain to him that all he need do to keep the accounts people happy was
send a few figures
. He didn’t say in so many words ‘It doesn’t matter if they make sense or not’, but he very clearly implied as much, and that was the message I carried home … which made André even madder. It was their silliness that was getting to him, not their asking for information. Our accountant Philip Tammer (who, by the way, was the dearest, kindest, most long-suffering, most upright and most loyal accountant anyone ever had) once wrote to their accountants: ‘What we will be publishing in five years’ time depends on what’s going on in the head of some unknown person probably sitting in a garret, and we don’t know the address of that garret.’ André was feeling about Time/Life very much what I felt about André when he nagged the editorial department about lack of method.

The other cause of indignation was the Annual Meeting of the Associates (there were ten or so other companies linked to Time/Life, like us). Sales conferences in exotic venues were much indulged in during the seventies – perhaps they still are? They were justified on the grounds that giving the reps a treat would improve their morale. This was not a belief subscribed to by anyone in our firm. On one occasion we ventured as far as a pub outside Richmond, but usually at the end of the conference we all sloped off to dinner at an inexpensive restaurant, the meal (if André had managed to get his oar in) ordered in advance so that no one could start getting silly with the smoked salmon (and they were fun, those evenings). So the idea of traipsing off to
Mexico
for what amounted to a glorified sales conference, as he had to do in the first year of this alliance, seemed to André an outrage. For the second year they announced that the venue would be Morocco, and he struck. He wrote to them severely, pointing out that all the Associates would be going, like him, to the Frankfurt Book Fair, so the obvious time and place for their meeting would be the weekend before the Fair, somewhere in Germany within easy reach of Frankfurt. I distinctly heard the sound of gritted teeth behind the fulsome letter received in return, which assured him that ‘this is exactly the kind of input we were hoping to gain from our Associates’.

Before each meeting all the Associates were asked to think up ten Publishing Projects (which meant books), and to send their outlines to New York, where they would be pooled, printed, and bound in rich leather, one copy each for every delegate with his name impressed on it in gold, to await him on the conference table. ‘Thinking up’ books on demand is one of the idlest occupations in all of publishing. If an interesting book has its origins in a head other than its author’s, then it either comes in a flash as a result of compelling circumstances, or it is the result of someone’s obsession which he has nursed until just the right author has turned up. Books worth reading don’t come from people saying to each other ‘What a good idea!’ They come from someone knowing a great deal about something and having strong feelings about it. Which does not mean that a capable hack can’t turn out a passable book-like object to a publisher’s order; only that when he does so it ends on the remainder shelves in double-quick time.