Grub Street Irregular: Scenes from Literary Life

ToAmy Freston(soprano supreme)andmy sons-in-lawTom Deards and Henry Dimbleby(inessential background reading)

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

SCENES FROM LITERARY LIFE

1 A Foot in the Door

2 Rogues’ Gallery

3 No More Long Lunches

4 Wielding the Blue Pencil

5 A Cautionary Tale

6 Ghostly Presence

7 Muscular Prose

8 The Melon-Shaped Grin

9 Trade Secrets

10 Temporary Postings

11 Critical Times

12 Oldies and Others

13 Odds and Sods

BIOGRAPHICAL BUSINESS

14 The Reluctant Biographer

15 Footnotes

16 The Sage of Trenarren

17 Battling with Barbara

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

18 Conversing in Como

19 On Safari

20 Auschwitz Visit

ABSENT FRIENDS

21 De Mortuis

22 The Loot

23 Peter Gunn

24 Closing Time

An Explanation, and Acknowledgements

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE A Foot in the Door

As a child, I excelled at nothing, and little has changed since then. I was academically average, but no more; cowardice, short-sightedness, physical ineptitude and a total absence of team spirit ruled me out as a games player; I had no artistic leanings whatsoever, and never had the slightest desire to paint, sculpt or play a musical instrument. I was far too self-conscious to sing or dance: so much so that when, in my unself-conscious, music-loving sixties, I am overcome by a bacchanalian yearning to give voice to my deep bass tones, or to hurl myself into a frenzied tribal dance, or to seize Petra in my arms and whirl her round the kitchen when the New Year’s Day concert of waltzes and polkas comes over the air from Vienna, I know, to my terrible frustration, that I shall never be able to do so, and have to content myself with humming along in my head and a convulsive twitching of the limbs.

Although I have never suffered since, except in the company of women talking interminably about other people’s kitchens, I remember being stupefied by boredom for much of my childhood, and hard-pressed to know how to fill in the long hours, many of which seem to have been given over to watching the rain drumming against the sash windows or being taken for long walks in Battersea Park, where the leaves of the plane trees were coated with the same black soot that left a ring round a forefinger thrust up my nose. I played games of cricket with my teddies in the nursery of our gloomy, rambling, first-floor flat in Prince of Wales Drive, conducted church services when they were not on the games field, and – until I realised that it would never grow back – occasionally trimmed their hair. I pored over maps of imaginary islands, and in order to link them to the mainland I drew red-funnelled Cunard liners, all of which were mounted on castors and trundled along the bottom of the ocean (that being the way I briefly assumed boats moved about the world). I was good at making people laugh: still more so since I was, and remain, superhumanly flatulent, and adept at snarling farts that sent my sister, and later my school friends, into paroxysms of mirth.

When not farting or consorting with my teddies – one of whom I took with me on my first term at public school, hastily hiding him away in my tuckbox when I realised that the other boys were more interested in cigarettes and cider – I greatly enjoyed making lists: a commonplace juvenile obsession shared, in later life, with Cyril Connolly and his father, a bibulous major who was also a world authority on snails and potted meats. Making lists seems, in retrospect, a particularly sterile activity, but it was all-absorbing at the time. I began with Mammals of the World, and to satisfy my craving I asked my parents and family friends to give me books on the subject for Christmas and my birthday. I read these carefully, and every time I came across the name of a mammal I had never heard of before, I entered it in a red-covered exercise book. I tried at first to arrange them in descending order, with apes and monkeys in the front, the egg-laying echidna and duck-billed platypus bringing up the rear, and dogs, cats, cows, deer, whales and the rest ranged in between: but there seemed to be so many mammals demanding entry that before long they began to leap the barriers, and I had to paste in extra pages to accommodate the overflow. To enliven the proceedings, I added a few stamp-sized illustrations: these were either cut out of magazines like Illustrated or Picture Post, or my own splodgy watercolours, which bore little resemblance to their subjects.

From mammals I moved on, at about the age of twelve, to Classical Composers: these were listed, plus dates, on sheets of blue Basildon Bond notepaper, and arranged in alphabetical order. The Composers never gripped me quite as much as Mammals of the World, partly because I had other distractions: we were preparing to emigrate to Canada at the time, and I spent a lot of time reading and dreaming about the Canadian Pacific Railway which, in a few weeks’ time, would be taking us to our new home on the prairies. But when we came back from Canada some six months later I resumed my list-making activities – with, once again, a musical theme. Although I was far too buttoned-up to tap my foot or snap my fingers in time to the music, I became a passionate devotee of traditional jazz, and an expert on the subject.

By now we were in the mid-1950s, and like most trad. jazz addicts of the time I took an austere and restrictive approach to the matter. Our gods were King Oliver, the early Louis Armstrong, Bunk Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton and Kid Ory; we took a dim view of saxophones, Sidney Bechet excluded, and listened to nothing later than Fats Waller and the early Duke Ellington. I read every book I could find on the subject, and collected records of varying speeds: in a fit of fashion-induced madness, I pushed out the middle of my 45s to make them look more like jukebox records, so making it impossible to play them ever again. I persuaded the jazz-loving father of my oldest friend, Tom Pomeroy, to take us to Humphrey Lyttelton’s club at 100 Oxford Street; for a short time Penguin Books sold DIY kits with which one could convert one’s paperbacks into home-bound hardbacks, and with trembling hands I subjected my Pelican of Rex Harris’s Jazz to the treatment, pasting in some illustrations at the same time. And, of course, I went on making lists, some of which I still find tucked into my copies of Rudi Blesh’s All That Jazz and Mezz Mezzrow’s autobiography: interminable names of long-forgotten cornet players and drummers and clarinettists, written in fountain pen in a careful copperplate hand on the same blue sheets of Basildon Bond.

But my list-making days were almost over. At about the same time as I became a jazz addict, I decided, for no good reason, to support Leyton Orient Football Club. I had never been to Leyton in my life, and the East End in those days was thought of as a dangerous terra incognita; I had no interest in football and little understanding of the rules, even though I ended my school days as a qualified referee, a man in a brown blazer travelling down from Wolverhampton to present me with a certificate and express the hope that one day he would see me in action at Wembley Stadium; and Leyton Orient had an undistinguished record, forever lurking at the bottom of the Third Division (South). I expect I decided to feign an interest in football to ingratiate myself with the hearties who ruled the roost in the most games-mad house in a games-mad school, and chose Leyton Orient because I liked the name, and the tigerish striped shirts worn by the players: either way, I dutifully snipped out the details of that week’s defeat from the sports pages of the Sunday Express and pasted them into a notebook, along with the rare reports of the matches themselves. But this was not, strictly speaking, list-making as we know it; more the decadent remnant of a fading childhood addiction.

My literary ambitions as a child were equally modest, and easily satisfied: so much so that when I read about writers who have scribbled incessantly since they could first hold a pen, and are never happy except when seated behind their desks, I know myself to be a fake, or the literary equivalent of a Sunday painter, a dabbler who would probably never write another word if suddenly endowed with a large private income. Like thousands of my contemporaries, I was adept at knocking out jocular imitations of Belloc’s Cautionary Verses; like thousands more, I edited miniature newspapers, made by folding sheets of blank white paper again and again until it became impossible to bend them any more, and then filling the inch-high pages with tiny writing and drawings of pin men in action, arranged in columnar form. When I was at prep school I wrote, but soon discontinued, a story about two Romans, named – unwittingly, and to my parents’ amusement – Testiculus and Constipides; I don’t remember writing a word at my public school, and it was only when I went to Trinity College, Dublin, in the early 1960s that I began, very tentatively, to write poems and articles for the college magazines, two of which I eventually edited.

A few years later I took to reading my handful of poems out loud in London pubs, once in tandem with Jon Stallworthy; but I knew myself to be a hopeless dilettante, and soon abandoned both writing and performing. Despite my propensity for embellishing the truth, I have never had any desire to write fiction. When, in due course, I found myself poring over Cyril Connolly’s abortive attempts to write novels and short stories, and noted how this most eloquent of autobiographical writers became wooden and self-conscious in the process, I recognised, once again, a kindred spirit. (Connolly longed to be a novelist like Evelyn Waugh, but The Rock Pool, his only completed novel, is wretchedly stiff and unconvincing.)

When I left university I thought, in some vague way, that I might become a writer, but it never occurred to me that the only way to do so was to put pen to paper. I liked the idea of being a writer, but my approach was entirely passive: I assumed that, rather like the truths of Christianity or the existence of God, all would be revealed if I waited long enough. I never gave a moment’s thought to becoming a lawyer or an accountant, or going into business of any kind: partly because I suspected, rightly, that I would be no good at such things, lacking as I did both team spirit and the competitive urge, and partly from an arrogant and unjustified sense that I was cut out for better things. Had I done so, and had I survived the course, I would now be looking forward to an easy retirement and a reasonable pension rather than worrying where and how I can earn the next penny. But if my life has been short on both incident and material rewards – writers’ lives are famously dull affairs, and for the most part badly paid – at least it has been a continuum: editing and writing for the magazines at university had given me a taste for Grub Street existence, and I have gone on doing much the same ever since. But forty years ago, when I started out on the literary life, I had no idea where I was going, or what I wanted to achieve.

Cyril Connolly was always fascinated by the ways in which writers scraped a living. Shortly after the end of the war he sent a questionnaire to various eminent authors asking them what jobs or means of earning money were most compatible with the literary life, and published their answers in Horizon. Connolly himself recommended a rich wife; a common ideal among his less worldly contributors was a job, preferably manual, which wasn’t too exhausting, left the mind free, and didn’t compete with the business of writing. Wood-turning and vegetable-growing were among those mentioned by his correspondents. None suggested a job in publishing, so confirming Connolly’s own belief that the enemy of promise was not so much the pram in the hall as work in what he termed ‘cultural diffusion’ – publishing, journalism, broadcasting, the British Council and other agreeable, convivial and literate activities which brought one into contact with writers and the literary world, and could all too easily become a substitute for writing itself.

Despite such warnings, publishing houses inevitably include among their staff an above-average number of would-be writers, part-time writers and writers manqués. Every now and then one of them moves to the other side of the desk, and becomes a full-time writer. Most of them, no doubt, had gone into publishing for reasons which Cyril Connolly would have found deeply suspect. For my part, I assumed that all publishers were rather like the late Colin Haycraft of Duckworth – bespectacled, articulate, immensely well-read characters with double firsts from Oxford and a good line in corduroy jackets and colourful bow-ties – and that the life of a publisher’s editor (for such I assumed I would be) consisted of a little light editing in the morning, an afternoon spent reading the typescript of some new masterpiece, and the early evening given over to dry sherry and waggish repartee with eminent authors.

I eventually landed a very junior job in the publicity department at Collins, and I soon realised how misconceived my notions had been. There were plenty of literate, well-read individuals working there as editors, Philip Ziegler and Richard Ollard among them, but the salesmen ruled the roost; and although the formidable boss, Billy Collins, was a product of Harrow and Magdalen, he was, I’m sure, far happier haranguing the 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.

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