A publisher's memoir of working with Naipaul and other writers
Diana Athill is living proof of truth of that great publishing cliche: You Meet Such Interesting People. Her career in publishing has brought her into close contact with many of the great literary figures of our times—not only writers, like V.S. Naipaul, Mordecai Richler, Brian Moore and Jean Rhys, but publishers such as Andre Deutsche, with whom she worked for nearly 50 years.
What she doesn’t tell you—because she’s far too well brought up—is that she herself is one of those Interesting People. Athill is a wonderful combination of Miss Marple and Sancho Panza as Deutsche goes about his Quixotic tilting at the literary establishment, first under the imprint of Allan Wingate, and then as Andre Deutsche Ltd. Their first major book was Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. It had been rejected on grounds of obscenity by six English publishers and was taken on at considerable risk to the fledgling firm’s reputation—not to mention bank balance. The risk paid off, an injunction against publishing it was over-ruled and overnight we began to be seen as a brave and dashing little firm, worth serious attention from agents handling interesting new writers. For book editors, dealing with difficult or neurotic authors is par for the course but Athill also faces some tough moral decisions with quiet but unshakable integrity. Whether or not, for example, to publish the autobiography of Myra Hindley, the mass murderer. Having met her, liked her and given the indisputable fact that the book would have sold by the truck load, she still decides against it, reasoning: If I enabled her to write the proposed book, and we published it, we would simply be trading in the pornography of evil, like the gutter press we despised. No, it could not be done.
Her chapters on both Naipaul and Rhys not only provide interesting insights into two writers renowned for their prickly and neurotic characters but also into how editing engages one at an emotional as well as an intellectual level: Self-brainwashing sometimes has to be part of an editor’s job. You are no use to the writers on your list if you cannot bring imaginative sympathy to working with them, and if you cease to be of use to them you cease to be of use to your firm. Imaginative sympathy cannot issue from a cold heart so you have to like your writers.
Of Naipaul, she writes: I thought so highly of Vidia’s writing and felt his presence on our list to be so important that I simply could not allow myself not to like him. Although she does admit that whenever I needed to cheer myself up by counting my blessings, I used to tell myself ‘At least I’m not married to Vidia’. The relief when he finally decided to publish with another firm, and she suddenly realises that she no longer has to like him, was immense but that still doesn’t stop her from viewing this episode as one of her two shocking failures as an editor.
Athill is endearingly old-fashioned in her views of publishing—she never had a head for numbers, felt nauseous at the mention of the word ‘advertising’ and was hopeless at managing: Although I felt guilty about my own incapacities, the only part of the business I could ever bring myself to truly mind about was the choosing and editing of books.
For anyone embroiled in the machinations of the modern day publishing business, where books are ‘products’, staff are ‘human resources’ and readers are ‘markets’, it’s sentiments like this which make you want to stand up and cheer. If ever there was a book by a book lover for book lovers, this is it.