An Empirical Tale
Rivalry between the IWE pioneers was fierce but never turned vicious. How else do you explain the strong, silent friendship between Nirad C. Chaudhuri and Khushwant Singh, despite all Chaudhuri’s prickliness and patronising airs. Legendary publisher Christopher Maclehose recounted the story of how Chaudhuri wrote his Clive of India. When he found out from Maclehose that his friend Khushwant had been commissioned to do a book on Robert Clive, he responded: “Khushwant would be disastrous. Let me do it instead.” And so he did—a brilliant, psychological portrait of the victor of Plassey which, as he promised the publisher, “won’t have a single fact”.
More Blue Blood
January is that happy month when publishers start sending out their half-yearly royalty cheques. From what we hear, the days when royalty cheques from Indian publishers could not buy you a pizza are long gone; now writers are bragging about what they can afford to buy with their royalties, including a Pajero! We kid you not: we have it from the horse’s mouth that Tarun Tejpal’s royalty cheque for 2009 is Rs 45 lakh, and his earnings from his two novels is Rs 3 crores. Doesn’t quite fit in with the picture of a writer starving in his garret.
Elsa Liked Him
Things publishers have to do for a living! Christopher Maclehose, in his talk held by Permanent Black, recalled the story of a colleague who went to visit Joy Adamson, author of Born Free. In the dead of night, he was subjected to a thorough licking by Adamson’s lioness, Elsa. The trauma turned his hair white overnight. In London, he was quizzed about it. In true clipped fashion, he said: “I had a spot of trouble at Joy Adamson’s.”
