Business life was equally tumultuous and unpredictable: according to Francis Wyndham, the bailiffs would arrive just as he was in the middle of typing a letter, hand over writs to him or to Moira, and whisk away the typewriters, office furniture and any other items of value, leaving any letters to be completed once the outstanding debts had been settled. Verschoyle was a generous employer who couldn’t bear to sack anyone, so the staff, such as it was, survived these turbulent comings and goings: these were the days of long publishing lunches, and Verschoyle enjoyed lengthy sessions at the Travellers or the Garrick with Patrick Kinross or Patrick Leigh Fermor, returning to the office rather red in the face but still in control. Francis Wyndham remembers him as a dandified, plummy-toned, manicured figure, given to wearing dubious Edwardian suits with tight trousers, waisted jackets with double vents at the back and fancy waistcoats; he found him cold, snobbish, conceited and keen on showing off, and was repelled by his pretensions and a whiff of crookedness. Alan Ross was more forgiving and more amused. ‘He was a considerate, genial, generous host, always delighted to purvey information of a kind not ordinarily come by. In this sense he was the reverse of a spy, but with similar instincts for elaborate fabrication,’ he wrote in Coastwise Lights.
Every now and then Verschoyle would invite Alan to lunch at the Garrick, but would sit there in silence, perhaps because ‘his general deviousness or marital problems were weighing heavily’. On other occasions, ‘possibly as a result of an excess of gin, he sometimes looked as if he might explode, his face getting pinker and pinker, his eyes smaller’. Roy Fuller, whose novels were recommended to the firm by Alan Ross, noted how ‘from Verschoyle’s reddish visage, somewhat watery eyes, one might have guessed he had no distaste for the bottle’; and after the collapse of the firm, his drinking reached epic proportions.
Like many small literary publishers of the time – John Lehmann or MacGibbon & Kee, for instance – Verschoyle did his best to pull off the admirable but impossibly hard double act of publishing worthwhile books he believed in while at the same time making a sufficient profit to remain in business. He failed, and had to sell out to André Deutsch, a similar practitioner who managed to keep afloat by a combination of parsimony, shrewdness, monomania and sound literary advice. Deutsch took over Verschoyle’s new offices in Carlisle Street, bang opposite the building that would later house Private Eye. In her publishing memoir, Stet, Diana Athill remembers Verschoyle as ‘a raffish figure, vaguely well-connected and vaguely literary’, and very much the kind of dubiously upper-class Englishman with whom, to her dismay, André tended to become involved. When they moved in, she remembers, the offices had been stripped bare: the only evidence of their previous occupants was an RAF dress uniform, hanging in a cupboard in an upstairs room. For some time afterwards, wine merchants’ and tailors’ bills continued to be delivered to Carlisle Street: more usefully, André inherited Ludwig Bemelmans’ bestselling children’s books about Madeline, Roy Fuller’s undervalued novels, Lawrence Durrell’s Pope Joan, Theodora FitzGibbon’s cookery books, which formed the basis for a list briefly edited for the firm by Elizabeth David, and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Violins of Saint-Jacques, published jointly with John Murray. Francis Wyndham moved too, and with Diana he was responsible for discovering V.S. Naipaul, and rediscovering Jean Rhys. When Deutsch moved on to Great Russell Street, where I went to work in the late Sixties, the Carlisle Street offices were taken over by Secker & Warburg.
Verschoyle’s later years make for melancholy reading. He spent some time in the early Sixties as the managing director of Grower Publications, and edited The Grower, a magazine for vegetable enthusiasts. Even more improbably, he went into partnership making prefabricated doors with the equally bibulous Goronwy Rees, his former colleague on the Spectator, then living in penury in Essex: the business was not a success. By now Verschoyle had left London for East Anglia. He and Moira moved into a large and handsome Georgian house near Framlingham and, with a hard-drinking ex-SOE man who lived in the same village, he set up the Deben Bookshop in Woodbridge; Collins the publishers then backed him when he established the Ancient House Bookshop in Ipswich, later the scene of a mysterious fire. He died in 1973.
‘I am rather surprised that you should consider Derek for a biography, because he is forgotten now except for a very few old people like myself who knew him,’ Anne Scott-James replied after I had written for information about him. He deserves a brief life at best: he is one of those characters who flit through the footnotes of other people’s diaries, letters and biographies, adding colour and comicality to the proceedings; and he was the antithesis of the average Old Malvernian.
A few years ago I thought of writing a literary rogues’ gallery featuring bibulous, rather raffish characters like Verschoyle and based on the post-war years: Julian Maclaren-Ross and Patrick Hamilton, my particular heroes, weren’t minor enough, and had already been written about at length, but possible candidates might have included hardened literary journalists like Maurice Richardson, John Davenport and John Raymond, all of whom fell victim to the enemies of promise. At some stage in the proceedings I went to Bryanston Square to have a drink with Charles Pick, a shrewd old publisher who had started life in the 1930s as one of Victor Gollancz’s reps, moved on to Michael Joseph in its heyday, and ended his publishing career as the managing director of Heinemann. Charles had come across Verschoyle at Michael Joseph, thought him a snob and a poseur, and couldn’t quite understand why I wanted to waste my time on him.
Towards the end of our session, when the gin-and-tonics had begun to take their toll, and a certain exhaustion had set in, I asked Charles who was the worst rogue he’d met in publishing. ‘John Holroyd-Reece,’ he answered, without a moment’s pause. ‘Now there’s a man you ought to include in your rogues’ gallery. Far more interesting than Derek Verschoyle.’ I had never heard of John Holroyd-Reece, and although, over the next twenty minutes, Charles gave a detailed account of his career and his publishing crimes, I was too tired to take it in. I wish I had. A few years later I suggested to Penguin that I should write a biography of their founder, Allen Lane, and during my researches I discovered that Lane had been a friend of Holroyd-Reece, né Hermann Riess, and that part of the inspiration for Penguins had come from Albatross Verlag, a much-admired firm of English-language paperback reprint publishers, originally based in Germany, of which Holroyd-Reece was a founder member: Albatross titles were only available on the Continent, and their plain lettering covers, colour-coded jackets, bird motif and elegant typography were among the qualities shared by Albatross and Penguin.
A pallid, monocled figure clad in a black cloak, Holroyd-Reece had, I discovered, been expelled from Repton after being cited as a co-respondent in a divorce case, had been appointed Governor of Zable and Malloake in the Sudan after World War I, and had taken over the publication of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness after Jonathan Cape had been threatened with prosecution for obscene libel by Sir William Joynson-Hicks, a famously censorious Home Secretary. A rabid pursuer of other men’s wives, Holroyd-Reece sounded a perfect candidate for a rogues’ gallery. Charles Pick, who had done work for Albatross in the thirties, was one of the very few people around who had known him well: but he had recently died, and now it was too late. My biography of Allen Lane would have been that much better-informed if I’d paid more attention over the gin-and-tonics. As for the rogues, I’d have to look elsewhere.
Back in the mid-sixties, towards the end of my time as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, I got to know through his daughter Deborah the Irish writer and man of letters Terence de Vere White, who had recently abandoned life as a Dublin solicitor for the literary editorship of the Irish Times. A sociable, eloquent and kindly character, with a leonine mane of thick grey hair, a distinguished cast