Grub Street Irregular: Scenes from Literary Life - Jeremy Lewis

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reps or moving Collins titles to the front of the pile in bookshops than discussing new trends in poetry with John Lehmann or lit. crit. with F.R. Leavis. The best publishers, I soon realised, were neither literary nor academic, but were an intriguing and forceful combination of the businessman and the impresario. Although the period between the wars had seen the rise of the gentleman publisher who went into the business after public school and Oxbridge – some as members of publishing dynasties, like Billy Collins or Jock Murray, others as new arrivals, like Rupert Hart-Davis, Hamish Hamilton, Fredric Warburg or Ian Parsons of Chatto – the traditional publisher had tended to come from a lower-middle-class, non-conformist, rather Wellsian background, starting from the bottom after leaving school and learning every aspect of the trade as he worked his way up. Stanley Unwin and Allen Lane had begun in this way; and many of those who dominated the trade in my youth – Tom Maschler, Tony Godwin, Paul Hamlyn, Charles Pick of Heinemann – had followed in their footsteps, with both Godwin and Hamlyn selling books off barrows in their early days.

      From Collins I moved on to André Deutsch, where more salutary lessons were learned. Like all the best publishers, Deutsch himself was shrewd, quick-witted and parsimonious, adept at picking other people’s brains and possessed of an almost intuitive ‘nose’ or ‘hunch’ for a book or an author, and an equally strong sense of what books would or would not suit his list. The literary side of publishing – reading and assessing works offered to the firm, and then knocking them into shape – he could safely leave to Diana Athill in particular; and it formed only part of his job, competing for his time with the demands of printers, binders, papermakers, literary agents, booksellers, wholesalers, librarians, libel lawyers and literary editors. He was workaholic, monomaniacal and possessed of just the right amount of tunnel vision – all qualities that distinguish the publisher proper from the mere editor.

      The great publisher has to have something of the actor about him, able to simulate (and yet at the same time genuinely feel, if for an instant only) overpowering enthusiasm, excitement, rage and disappointment, as the occasion demands. ‘This is the most amazing book I have taken on in my entire publishing career,’ he will declare à propos a particular favourite on that season’s list, and he will believe it for the next six months at least; he will become almost apoplectic about some modish new novel on offer to the firm, and prophesy doom and destruction if he fails to take it on, but it will be instantly forgotten if it goes to another publisher – unless, of course, it proves to be a disaster in terms of sales, in which case a degree of schadenfreude and retrospective wisdom may be in order. What made Tom Maschler the most brilliant publisher of our time, apart from stylishness, charisma and a feeling for the spirit of the age, was his ability to persuade his colleagues, and then his salesmen, and then the world at large, that all his geese were swans, and that Cape books were synonymous with both excitement and distinction.

      However much the editor-cum-writer manqué may enjoy his work, he almost always has one eye on the clock and one foot in the door; and however much he may admire the authors whose books he edits, he is hard-pressed to indulge in the wholehearted suspensions of disbelief that distinguish the genuine publisher from his more apathetic and less driven colleagues. Asked out of hours about the modish new novel, assuming his firm has taken it on, he will probably concede that it’s ‘all right’, but no more, and recommend instead a rereading of Trollope or Turgenev. The most extreme example of the editor as Doubting Thomas was the poet and critic D.J. Enright, my colleague at Chatto for many years. Dennis thought that only a handful of books deserved to be published in any one year, and since he completely lacked the competitive spirit so essential to the successful publisher, he didn’t mind whether we or Faber or Secker or Cape published the few titles he thought worth taking on. A firm run by Enrights would soon die from inanition, publishing far too few books to cover the overheads, let alone make a profit; and since literary men employed by publishers tend to steer clear of the business side of things, this might not occur to them until it was too late.

      T.S. Eliot of Faber was the most famous writer-publisher still active in my lifetime; others included C. Day Lewis, Dennis Enright and Andrew Motion at Chatto, Graham Greene and J.B. Priestley at The Bodley Head, Nigel Nicolson at Weidenfeld, and Diana Athill and Nicolas Bentley at Deutsch. They provided useful contacts, they looked good on the notepaper in the days when directors’ names were still listed there, and they could be invoked to impress or overawe recalcitrant authors. ‘I would like you to meet Professor Enright,’ Norah Smallwood of Chatto would declare, summoning the sage from his lair with a peremptory blast on the internal telephone. Dennis, who was almost certainly tamping his pipe or trying to recover from a long lunch in The Marquis of Granby when she rang, would shuffle down the bare, lino-floored institutional corridor, grumbling sotto voce to himself, deliver his views while simultaneously scratching the back of his head and standing to attention, and shuffle back to his office once his services were no longer required (‘You may go now, Dennis’).

      Although some of the most interesting books of the last century were published by part-time writer-publishers like Leonard Woolf, John Lehmann and Alan Ross, publishing and writing call for very different attitudes and abilities, not easily combined in a single individual. Ernest Hecht of the Souvenir Press, who has remained in business longer than most, likes to quote Sir Stanley Unwin’s dictum that a publisher’s overriding duty to his authors is to remain solvent; effective publishers like Ernest, are, in the last resort, hard-headed if idealistic businessmen, and as such they are far removed from most authors and editors. As I discovered when researching my biography of Allen Lane, and as Tom Maschler’s ill-advised memoirs make plain, publishers are more interesting for what they do than for what they say or think; whereas writers and academics are prone to, and delight in, indecisiveness and ambiguity, priding themselves on their ability to see all sides of a question and to hold contradictory views at once, the businessman-publisher is, by comparison, uncomplicated, decisive and single-minded.

      But I knew nothing of this at the age of twenty-five. What I did know was that working as a minion in publicity departments, and then as a junior editor, was wretchedly badly paid, and that in order to keep afloat – and, in due course, to support a wife, two daughters and an endless procession of cats – I would have to supplement my earnings somehow; still more so since, unlike many of my contemporaries in publishing, I had no private means. I had only been working in publishing for a year when Petra and I got married, and shortly afterwards I began my double life as a reviewer, writing short, anonymous, hundred-word reviews for Michael Ratcliffe on The Times. I acquired my first byline when his successor, Ion Trewin, allowed me to give Peter Greave’s marvellous autobiography The Seventh Gate a full-length review after I had urged him to allot it more than a mere hundred words, and from then on I combined work as a publisher’s editor with as much reviewing as I could manage and acquire; and every month or so, feeling like a dealer in rubber goods or some kind of shady salesman, I would make my way to Gaston’s remainder shop off Chancery Lane with an overnight bag crammed with review copies, and take whatever he gave me with due deference and gratitude. When times were bad I wrote reports for paperback publishers and entries on molluscs and the countries of Eastern Europe for Reader’s Digest Books: a severe discipline in my case, since not only did the facts have to be checked and double-checked, but long sentences, parentheses and subordinate clauses were strictly taboo. I was becoming, perforce, a writer of a kind, and finding my way about the alleys and pubs of Grub Street; but I had no idea what, if anything, I wanted to achieve, and I felt almost claustrophobic with envy and admiration when I read (or read about) those authors who combined reviewing and articles with full-length books as well. Writing books was altogether different, and something I could never aspire to.

       TWO Rogues’ Gallery

      One of the disadvantages of having been to a rather humdrum public school is the occasional embarrassment of explaining where one went. Charles Sprawson is the only person I know who quizzes complete strangers on their schooldays, but every now and then a beaming Old Etonian of my own age will pop the question, hoping for the best and momentarily deceived by my fruity tones and superficial familiarity with his alma mater, gleaned from my researches into the life of Cyril Connolly, that most nostalgic and agonised of Old Etonians.

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