But the printed page, and the book in particular, still retains its magic and its réclame, and every now and then one is bullied or browbeaten into reading something written by the red-faced man at a party – egged on by his friends, who assume, quite wrongly, that jocular, articulate and entertaining anecdotalists must, by definition, be equally effective in print, and fail to realise that good writers are often tongue-tied and unforthcoming in company, only coming to life when seated at a keyboard. These good-hearted friends would never dream of asking solicitors, accountants or dentists for free advice, but writers, most of whom earn well below the minimum wage, are expected to devote long hours to reading and reporting on such works free of charge. They are thought to be unworldly, generous-minded characters, holy fools far removed from sordid financial considerations, while the publicity attracted by that tiny minority who receive huge advances misleads people into thinking that authorship is a lucrative profession.
‘He’s such a character, and has led such an interesting life,’ the good-hearted friends assure one, and the heart sinks as they speak. Those of us who have spent long hours trawling through publishers’ slush piles, carefully removing the stray hairs or tiny strips of Sellotape planted to ambush the professional reader (‘You can’t have read to the end, since the hair is exactly where I left it’), will recognise at once the telltale phrases which betray the man who might well be the life and soul of the party, but is hopelessly adrift once he tries to put it all down in print. ‘I’ll never forget old So-and-so. What an amazing character he was,’ we read, but when – if forced to discuss the work with its author – we ask how and why old So-and-so was such an amazing character, a bruised and baffled silence falls. ‘The times we had … how we all roared … I’ll always remember …’: the rhetoric is there, but missing are the details, the minutiae, the observations that bring abstractions to life. Writers notice and remember trivia which may seem unimportant to the world at large, but are touching and revealing when put to good effect. If I stop to ask directions, I am far more likely to remember my informant’s bottle nose or the colour of his tie than how to get from x to y, which is why – unlike the red-faced raconteurs – authors sometimes seem half-dazed, and are widely believed to live in worlds of their own.
‘There’s a book in all of us’ is one of those benign, well-meaning phrases which offer hope to the many while keeping the few firmly in their place. I have never believed it, but just occasionally the old cliché comes true – sometimes with unhappy and unintended consequences. I must be the least public-spirited of men, never involving myself in good works or the local community, and the only way in which I redeem myself – apart from being kind to cats and my daughters – is by encouraging potential writers, both professionally and in my private life. On one occasion I wish I hadn’t: not because the book was no good, but because of the effect it had on the author and his family.
Early on in my time at Chatto, we were sent a dog-eared, battered-looking typescript which looked so unpromising that, if I hadn’t been less busy than usual, I might well have turned it down after sampling a couple of pages at most. I started reading, and, to my amazement, found myself hooked. It described how, back in the 1930s, the author had been a pupil on board HMS Mercury, a training ship for boys moored in Southampton Water and run on despotic lines by Beattie, the sadistic wife of C.B. Fry, the cricketer and athlete who had once been offered the throne of Albania. The book was mercifully short – it needed heavy editing, and rewriting in places – but the story was so fascinating, and the interlacing of the author’s own experiences with the bizarre Fry ménage so tantalising, that I urged my colleagues to take it on. I had, I soon remembered, read it some years before, while I was at OUP, but had been easily outvoted when I suggested that we should take it on; later I learned from the author that it had been turned down by at least twenty publishers before it found its way to Chatto’s offices in William IV Street. Carmen Callil, by now in charge at Chatto, was happy to go ahead, but told me – not unreasonably – to make a very modest offer. We were unlikely to sell American or even paperback rights, so the book would have to pay its way through hardback sales alone. I don’t remember the terms we offered, but the advance was in the hundreds rather than the thousands, and it may well be that, as the author later claimed, we paid a starting royalty of 7½ per cent rather than the standard 10 per cent. But it had found its way into print at last, and I was determined to do everything I could to help it along.
Soon after the contract had been signed, the author called in at Chatto for the first of several lunches in an Italian restaurant in St Martin’s Lane. He was a bustling, stocky schoolmaster in his late fifties, with a mane of gleaming white hair, a Wellingtonian beak and a gait so upright that I expected him to topple over backwards at any moment: I liked him well enough, but he had the pomposity and the assumption of omniscience that goes with a lifetime spent ordering small children around. He had never published anything before, and had no knowledge of publishing or the literary life: he referred every suggestion I made to the local librarian of his home town in Nottinghamshire, and since she knew as little about publishing as he did, I fought to master my irritation when, at our next meeting, he quoted her views back to me in reverential tones.
Editing his book was the kind of work I enjoyed, and was good at. Sentences were reordered, entire paragraphs rewritten, and – this was long before the days of desktop computers – whole chunks were scissored out and pasted down elsewhere, with notes in the margin that read ‘Take in (A)’ or ‘Move to p.75 (B)’. But my tinkerings were only skin-deep: he had written a good and interesting book, and I was happy to do what I could to make it even better. I wrote a flamboyant and entertaining blurb, though he blenched momentarily when I referred to Beattie’s habit of inspecting the boys’ pyjama bottoms every morning for evidence of beastliness. We agreed to eight pages of black-and-white photographs; for reasons of cost, we could only afford a two-colour jacket, but the overall effect looked pretty good, and since there were no full-colour pictures of the Mercury in the late 1930s, our jacket had the virtue of verisimilitude. When the proofs came in, I sent copies to well-disposed authors like Richard Cobb and Alan Ross, both of whom wrote admiring letters. The reviews could not have been better, and William Boyd’s rhapsodic account was the lead review in the TLS. As expected, American publishers thought it far too English for their market, and the paperback publishers wouldn’t bite; but we sold out our modest hardback printing and made an equally modest profit, and both book and author received the acclaim they deserved.
All this was well and good – until I discovered that the reviews had gone to my author’s head. Over lunch one day, he told me that he had decided to give up his job as a schoolmaster in order to write full time. This was most alarming news, and I urged him to reconsider. Very few authors, I told him, could live off writing books alone, and it would be madness to take this step at his stage of life. Although I didn’t say so, I sensed that he was a ‘one-book author’, the living embodiment of the notion that ‘there’s a book in everyone’, but the fact that his book had been so well received had stirred up expectations that could never be satisfied. I begged him, in vain, to think again: pension time was only round the corner, he could perfectly well combine another book with teaching, and the literary life was a notoriously perilous business. In due course he produced an outline and a sample chapter of the next book he wanted to write. It was, as I had dreaded, utterly unpublishable. We turned it down and, as discarded authors will, he vanished from view.
Some fifteen years later I wrote a piece in the Author about the hazards of the literary life, at the bottom of which a potted biography mentioned that I had switched from publishing to writing, and had written two volumes of autobiography and a life of Cyril Connolly. Not long after it appeared, the Society of Authors forwarded to me a letter from my