Читать книгу Grub Street Irregular: Scenes from Literary Life - Jeremy Lewis - Страница 8

Forty years ago, when I started out at the bottom of the pile, publishers were public figures, known to the world at large. They have long ago been elbowed aside by celebrity chefs, footballers’ wives, telly personalities and the other heroes of a less literate age, but in those days George Weidenfeld, André Deutsch, Tom Maschler and Tony Godwin were profiled in the colour supplements, and their activities recorded by Atticus, Pendennis, Peterborough and other pseudonymous gossip columnists; Allen Lane’s death in 1970 was front-page news, and not just in the upmarket papers, as had been his very public sacking of Tony Godwin three years before. Peter Mayer, the onetime ruler of Penguin, and Carmen Callil of Virago and Chatto were the last newsworthy publishers, hogging the column inches back in the 1980s, but although bestselling books and their authors attract more attention than ever, the men and women behind the scenes have become objects of indifference, except to their authors. The odd literary agent sticks his head above the parapet, but beyond the trade papers publishers receive about as much attention as actuaries or quantity surveyors.

This reflects, in part, the competition of rival media and, some would say, a general dumbing-down and shortening of attention spans – and the fact that publishing is a less colourful, individualistic business than it once was. Familiar names, once run by their founders or family members, have been swallowed up by American, French or German conglomerates. John Murray has exchanged its Albemarle Street home for a tower block in the Euston Road, Cape has traded in Bedford Square for the anonymity of the Vauxhall Bridge Road, and the traditional publishing office in a ramshackle Georgian house in Bloomsbury or Covent Garden – the entrance hall clogged with brown paper printers’ parcels, every square inch brimming over with teetering mounds of books, files, press cuttings, proof copies, photographs, letters waiting to be signed, discarded display material and recently emptied wine glasses – has become a relic of times past, to be recollected with rose-tinted nostalgia by watery-eyed old hands reminiscing over the whisky bottle. In working hours, though not thereafter, it is a more sober, less bibulous business than it was. Twenty years ago the long, boozy publishing lunch became the object of widespread disapproval, and steak and kidney pudding washed down with two bottles of claret was dropped in favour of smoked salmon, a lettuce leaf and Perrier water, while the long, rambling, after-lunch dictating of letters has given way to emails fired off left and right.

In those days the top echelons of the trade were white-haired, elderly and male, as often as not rather red in the face and prone to wearing tweed or chalk-striped suits. ‘Billy’ Collins, my first boss, and Hamish Hamilton were in their late sixties when I started out, ‘Fred’ Warburg and Victor Gollancz were even older, and judging by the photographs in the trade papers, Sir Stanley Unwin looked as old as the hills with his Colonel Sanders goatee beard, wire-rimmed specs and Shavian knickerbockers. Nowadays women predominate, both numerically and in terms of power exercised within the trade, but in the old days they were limited to being secretaries and receptionists, with a small band of heroic spinsters looking after children’s books or acting as underpaid and overworked editorial dogsbodies, devoted to their often tyrannical masters, lugging bags of proofs and typescripts home in the evenings and at weekends, and holding the fort while the menfolk moved on to the brandy at the Garrick or the Gay Hussar. Eunice Frost at Penguin and Norah Smallwood at Chatto were the first to reach the top in an all-male trade, followed shortly after by Diana Athill and Livia Gollancz. Reviewing my biography of Allen Lane, Carmen Callil reproved me for applying the word ‘formidable’ to Eunice Frost and Norah Smallwood, somehow suggesting that only an unreformed male chauvinist would instinctively employ such a word to clever and successful women: but my use of it was descriptive rather than mocking or pejorative, since those two in particular had to be tough, determined and seemingly thick-skinned to get where they did.

In the days of my youth, publishers ruled the roost, not only within their firms but in the trade at large. Booksellers were regarded as humble, impoverished, rather impractical folk who wore moth-eaten maroon cardigans, lettuce-green shirts, baggy cords and Pirelli slippers, and were grateful to be offered a discount of one third off the published price. Salesmen were there to obey, and wore nylon shirts with vests visible beneath, well-ironed grey suits and highly polished black shoes, which they burnished on the calves of each trouser-leg when summoned to report to the sales manager. Accountants were black-clad figures who announced their arrival with a deferential cough (‘Ahem’) and stood dutifully to attention behind their masters, pointing out items in the handwritten ledger with marbled endpapers as and when required; I like to think they came equipped with thin grey moustaches, Homburg hats and the kind of glasses worn by Reginald Maudling, the frames of which were tortoiseshell around the top half of each lens and transparent plastic below. Those working in production and design might get away with a black shirt with a red knitted tie, while corduroy and slip-on shoes were making inroads among the younger editors.

Publishers alone decided what should be published. The idea of consulting salesmen, let alone booksellers, about what to publish and what kind of jacket a book should wear would have seemed pernicious nonsense to the old guard, and close to lèse majesté. Books were costed, and memos written, on the backs of envelopes; deals were famously sealed over post-prandial glasses of port; meetings and paperwork were kept to a minimum, partly because the publishers saw no need to consult anyone other than their editorial advisers – the rest were told what to do, most particularly at the six-monthly sales conferences – and partly because computers, photocopiers and pocket calculators were either waiting to be invented or were great lumbering machines with wheels juddering and rotating in all directions, fed by spools of punctured paper, tended by men in white coats and emitting the occasional puff of smoke. For all the talk about ‘paperless offices’, technology is productive of bumph, and bumph is productive of meetings and the exhalation of hot air, and publishers of the old school would have been baffled and irritated by both.

All this began to change in the 1970s. For some inexplicable reason, the City began to show an interest in publishing – and not just in the less glamorous areas of publishing like legal, medical or academic textbooks, where advances to authors were unknown, discounts to the trade were minimal, the market was assured and quantifiable, price was no object to potential purchasers, and profits were large and dependable, but in the altogether more risky realm of ‘trade’ or ‘general’ publishing. There was much excited talk, seldom translated into action, about ‘synergy’: no one seemed to know what it meant, but it was thought to involve the interdependence of books and other media, and cooperation between the New York and London arms of multinational empires. Family firms, from the mighty Collins to the venerable John Murray, gradually sold out to conglomerates, as did all but a handful of independents. The grand old men of publishing died or retired or were put out to grass, and life continued much as before. It was generally agreed that publishing had fallen into the hands of accountants and sales managers, and that ‘mid-list’ titles – books that got well reviewed but only sold a handful of copies – were in imminent danger as a result of the Philistines taking command, but firms like Chatto, Cape, Weidenfeld, Allen Lane and Hamish Hamilton continued (and still continue) to publish risky and worthwhile books, but with greater resources at their command.

Towards the end of my time in publishing, in the late 1980s, something very curious happened. The big publishing groups were becoming ever larger and more musclebound, swallowing up firms to left and right; and yet, in what seemed like an act of self-immolation, they and their fellow publishers wilfully abdicated their position as the ringmasters of the literary circus. Far from ruling the roost, they became, in effect, supplicants, seemingly at the mercy of people whom, in days gone by, they had regarded as inherently inferior, namely booksellers and literary agents. Far from resisting or resenting their conquerors, they warmly welcomed them in, like decadent emperors confronted by virile barbarian tribes.

To begin with, dusty old backstreet bookshops were steam-rollered aside by the new chains, headed by Waterstone’s. Publishers and their sales managers were carried away by this, happily envisioning American-style shops in which customers were served hot drinks and cake and sat about reading in armchairs without spilling crumbs or coffee into the books they might or might not buy. The new shops were bright and smart, often in prime sites, and were said to be staffed by enthusiastic and well-informed graduates, but they ordered as many (or as few) copies of most books as the much-maligned men in cardigans, only at a far higher discount and on a sale-or-return basis. (In the dim and distant past bookshops had tended to buy firm, and were allowed to return copies only in exceptional circumstances.) Not only were publishers giving away a larger slice of the cake, but all too often they were so carried away by the huge orders from the chains that they foolishly reprinted – only to have all the sale-or-return copies flood back, leaving them with warehouses full of unsaleable stock, and converting what might have been a modest profit into a thumping loss.

Life became even more hazardous after the abolition in 1997 of the Net Book Agreement, which had legally prohibited the sale of books below the published price for two years after publication. Before long the chains were joined by supermarkets and online booksellers, all demanding ever larger discounts. Chains and supermarkets fought to undercut each other, offering bestsellers to the public at a fraction of the recommended published price, to the benefit of no one: the publishers were giving away their most valuable assets, the booksellers were making little or no profit on their bestselling titles, the authors were paid the derisory royalties that apply on high-discount sales, and the traditional balancing act whereby the occasional bestseller and boring but dependable books on gardening and bridge fund first novels and books of poetry was thrown into jeopardy.

Conceding higher discounts and more favourable terms to the retail trade coincided with a surge in the level of advances paid to authors. In the bad old days, authors without private means or a job teaching in a school or university were expected to live in a garret on a diet of baked beans. Despite the enormous earnings of a tiny handful of writers, which mislead the world at large into thinking authorship a lucrative profession, most writers still earn far less than the minimum wage, but can now wash down their beans with a glass or two of supermarket red. Nor is their loyalty to publishers what it once was. H.G. Wells used to be quoted as a dreadful warning because his readiness to move from one publisher to another with each new book meant that none of them had an interest in promoting his backlist or keeping his works in print. With editors forever on the move, the life expectancy of the average book put at weeks rather than years, and the chains concentrating their energies on short-lived, highly promoted bestsellers, backlists are no longer as prized as they were: authors shop around, and exploit other media in order to survive.

Better terms for writers reflected the increased power of literary agents. A.P. Watt, where I spent six unhappy years in the 1970s – unhappy due to my own incompetence and unsuitability for the job – is generally thought to have been the world’s first literary agent, setting up shop some time in the 1880s, and going on to represent Kipling, Yeats, Conan Doyle, Buchan and other great figures of the time. Watt’s near-contemporary J.B. Pinker had an equally impressive cast of authors, but his reputation for shady dealing blighted the trade. Agents came to be regarded as parasitic, slightly dodgy figures, literature’s equivalent of the used-car salesmen played by George Cole in post-war British comedies. Although he ended his career as an agent, Charles Pick of Heinemann was among the last publishers to make no bones about disliking and distrusting literary agents. More often than not they retained American, translation and serial rights, all of which he regarded as part of the publisher’s inheritance, and because he was nimble at selling such rights himself, to the benefit of his firm as well as his authors, he resented agents all the more. As a publisher, Charles Pick dealt fairly with his authors, but in the early years agents had their work cut out. Whenever possible, publishers would fail or refuse to pay royalties, and buy the copyright in an author’s work for a modest outright fee; in more recent times, Paul Hamlyn founded his fortune on paying flat fees to unworldly authors of highly illustrated books about seashells or macramé, which were then sold in huge numbers around the world in risk-free co-editions.

A.D. Peters is generally credited with converting literary agency into an honest and reputable profession. A former journalist, he founded his business in 1924, and included Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Blunden, J.B. Priestley, Storm Jameson, Stephen Spender, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Arthur Koestler, Rebecca West, C. Day Lewis, Frank O’Connor, Eric Linklater, V.S. Pritchett, Nancy Mitford and C.S. Forester among his clients. Petra worked there towards the end of his life, and I spotted him once or twice when I called in there to pick her up after work. The firm then inhabited an elegant eighteenth-century house in Buckingham Street, with a three-sided bow window overlooking the street, creaking floorboards, and barleysugar banister rails up the staircase. Peters was a sturdy, red-faced, blue-eyed man, clad in immaculate suits and highly polished hand-made shoes, a shy and benevolent Mr Toad who looked as though he should have had a large cigar in one hand and a brandy glass in the other.

Agents are, by definition, pullers of strings who work behind the scenes, and Peters was the ultimate éminence grise. A keen cricketer and a friend of J.C. Squire and Alec Waugh, he was part of the world immortalised between the wars by A.G. Macdonell in England, Their England. During the war he worked for both the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Food, while simultaneously running his business; in 1940 he joined Harold Macmillan, Hugh Walpole and others in a successful campaign to dissuade the Chancellor of the Exchequer from imposing purchase tax on books; a year later he was a moving spirit in the influential 1941 Committee which drew up blueprints for a more egalitarian and socialist post-war Britain, and included among its luminaries Victor Gollancz, David Astor, Kingsley Martin, H.G. Wells, Ritchie Calder, Douglas Jay and Tommy Balogh. In later life his liberal instincts manifested themselves in campaigning for the abolition of the death penalty, and on behalf of prisoners and refugee writers. He was one of the founders of Associated Television, together with Lew Grade and his author Norman Collins, the author of the bestselling London Belongs to Me and a former director of Victor Gollancz. He backed new plays in the West End, launching the theatrical careers of Terence Rattigan and J.B. Priestley, and produced films, among them An Inspector Calls. With A.P. Herbert, Billy Collins, V.S. Pritchett, Roy Jenkins and others he campaigned for reform of the obscenity laws, culminating in Roy Jenkins’s Obscene Publications Act of 1959. Yet if most publishers are forgotten within their lifetimes, agents are even more ephemeral. Peters may be remembered by the world at large as an occasional recipient in the published letters of Evelyn Waugh – his contemporary David Higham occupies a similar role in those of Dylan Thomas – but influence and celebrity don’t always coincide.

Relative anonymity is more than made up for by material success, and successful agents can make a good deal of money for themselves as well as for their more saleable authors; and never more so than over the past twenty years. The sums paid for serial rights by Sunday newspapers are not what they were back in the Sixties, but for the lucky few the sale of film and television rights more than makes up for this; and, more importantly for the average author, the advances paid for even modest-selling books far exceed those on offer in the past. Agents, or so it is said, have replaced publishers’ editors as the lynchpins in authorial lives, doling out editorial words of wisdom, advising on publicity, giving their views on jackets and typography and acting the part of manager-cum-nursemaid, as well as performing their traditional roles of haggling over terms, 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.