Grub Street Irregular: Scenes from Literary Life - Jeremy Lewis

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drawing up contracts and checking royalty statements. Vulnerable and footloose, publishing editors are no longer fixed points in the literary solar system; and whereas publishing houses are labour- and capital-intensive businesses, with money tied up in advances, work-in-progress, stock and backlists, as well as in the salaries of those who work there, literary agencies rely entirely on the skills of the agents themselves, without whom they are empty shells. Because they are their firms’ most precious assets, successful agents tend to be far longer-lived than their publishing coevals: very few of my publishing contemporaries are still in the business, but many of the agents who loomed large in my youth – Michael Sissons, Gillon Aitken, Deborah Rogers, Pat Kavanagh, Bruce Hunter – loom as large as ever, providing welcome continuity in an increasingly unfamiliar landscape.

      There is, and always has been, a great gulf set between how much money an author needs to research and write a book, and what a publisher should sensibly pay for it by way of an advance. I haven’t looked at The Truth About Publishing for nearly forty years, but I suspect it was Stanley Unwin who decreed that, ideally, advances to authors should be based on 40 per cent of the royalties likely to be earned from the first printing of a book, and that on no account should the author’s share of any subsidiary rights income be included: that way there could be no question of a book failing to earn or cover its advance – which, it was emphasised, was in essence a loan from the publisher against future earnings.

      I spent much of my life working for famously parsimonious publishers – André Deutsch, and Chatto under the ancien régime – who were more than happy to go along with Sir Stanley’s recommendations, but during my time in publishing these were steadily eroded. Pressed by agents acting on behalf of full-time writers who needed every penny they could earn, publishers began to pay advances equivalent to all the likely royalties on the first impression, and then to include the author’s share of subsidiary rights income as well. In the late Eighties the publishers lost control. Panicked by the thought of losing their bestselling authors to predatory rivals, and boosted by the seemingly illimitable coffers of their new corporate owners, they regularly paid advances that bore no relation to likely earnings. We were told that paying over the odds was essential to keep authors or build up a list, and publishers’ accountants happily provided Jesuitical justifications for their masters’ excesses. I’m easily baffled by figures, but when, in a spirit of enquiry, I sometimes asked whether – to take a very modest example – paying an advance of £5,000 for a collection of stories which would earn £2,000 in royalties didn’t leave us with a deficit of £3,000, I was greeted with a condescending sigh. Did I not realise that advances, like stock, were written down in the accounts, and that all these unearned advances somehow evaporated into the ether? Years later I asked a numerate publisher to explain: he said that an economist would agree with me, but not an accountant; and, in the short term at least, the accountants’ view prevailed.

      Over the past few years, publishers have begun to pay most authors more ‘realistic’ advances, and new publishers continue to try their luck, making good use of computer technology and colonising markets ignored or overlooked by the conglomerates; but the combination of huge discounts and unreal advances has undermined the ecology of trade publishing, prompting agonised debates about the future of ‘midlist’ titles and the over-dependence of the trade on celebrity bestsellers which continue to attract enormous advances and are then sold on to wholesalers, retailers and the general public at discounts so huge as to erode any profits that might be made en route. Towards the end of my time in publishing I often felt I was working in a lunatic asylum, but although the vestigial publisher in me deeply disapproves of what has happened, as a writer I’m happy to benefit from an altered balance of power.

      Shortly after I’d been commissioned to write my Connolly biography, I bumped into the publisher Tom Rosenthal outside the old André Deutsch office in Great Russell Street.

      ‘Forgive my raising this, dear boy,’ he said, ‘but do you mind my asking how much Cape have paid you to write about Cyril?’ I didn’t mind in the least, and when I told him he flinched back like a boxer evading a blow, and drew in his breath between his teeth. ‘Tell me,’ he went on, ‘how much would you have paid for your book if you were still at Chatto?’ I suggested about a quarter of what I’d been offered. We both agreed that seemed a sensible amount, but had the old rules prevailed I could never have written my book.

       FOUR Wielding the Blue Pencil

      ‘At Chatto we don’t publish authors who need editing,’ Norah Smallwood once told me, in withering tones, after I had suggested that although a new novel by one of the firm’s long-established authors wasn’t a masterpiece, it would pass muster if cut and rewritten in places. Years earlier, the author in question had produced a bestseller, and although she had never repeated her early success, she had a loyal following and steadily outsold most of the more literary writers on the list; but Norah had never cared for her, in print or in person, and ever since Ian Parsons’s retirement she had longed to get rid of his middlebrow protégée. In the end we persuaded Norah that it made commercial sense to continue with her, and I was authorised to get out my hacksaw and shears: but her days with the firm were numbered all the same, since Norah’s successor felt the same about her work and had no hesitation about turning down her next.

      Writers, reviewers, literary agents and other denizens of the literary jungle spend a fair amount of time grumbling about the decline – or even extinction – of editing in even the most literary publishing houses, but I’m not sure they’re right to do so. Before the war Norah Smallwood had worked as a secretary on the elegant but short-lived magazine Night and Day, jointly edited by Graham Greene and published by Chatto, and she had clambered to the top of the publishing tree while her male colleagues were away at the war; she had grown up in a world in which writers and their editors had a better grasp of grammar than their modern descendants, and a stronger sense of a shared culture based on the Bible, the classics and general knowledge of British and European history, all of which reduced (but by no means obliterated: Cyril Connolly, for example, always spelt the possessive of ‘it’ as ‘it’s’) the likelihood of spelling, grammatical and historical howlers, and lent force to Norah’s claim vis-à-vis the kind of books published by a distinguished literary firm like Chatto. But what she didn’t mention – and what those who look back with yearning to an imaginary golden age conveniently forget – is the dependence of old-fashioned publishers on their typesetters. ‘Make it look like the last,’ Ian Parsons would scribble on the typescript of the latest Aldous Huxley or Margaret Irwin, and the typesetters would be expected not only to design the page, but to pick up spelling mistakes, factual errors and the fact that ‘Jim’ had inexplicably become ‘Joe’ halfway through, or the colour of his eyes had switched from green to brown: in other words, to do the kind of detailed editorial work nowadays expected of the editor, or copy-editor. Some of these typesetters had legendary powers, and were said to be able to compose and correct in Arabic, Greek, Urdu, Cyrillic and other languages and scripts, none of which they could read or understand. Every now and then, at OUP, I would spot a huge, baffled-looking man with enormous Spam-coloured legs shambling down the corridor wearing a pair of tiny khaki shorts even in mid-winter, and was told, in a reverential whisper, that he had spent his working life as a compositor in the University Press, and that he could set the most obscure languages and typefaces known to man, working from the feel and weight of the lead in his hand as well as from the look of what was on the page before him.

      Not even the most brilliant typesetter would presume, or dare, to suggest that the author should cut or rewrite: that kind of strategic editing was the preserve of the publisher or the commissioning editor. Norah may have been correct in suggesting that Chatto authors didn’t need editing in that way – though the correspondence between her predecessor, Charles Prentice, and T.F. Powys suggests that she may have romanticised the past in order to make her point – but in her days, and mine, there was a difference between firms like Chatto, where an editor was expected to look after every aspect of a book’s editorial well-being, and those like Cape or OUP, where a raft of sub- or copy-editors would take over. At Chatto a commissioning editor would be expected to agree and negotiate terms

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