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  Obviously it is true that indifference to status and pay is not found in all women, but I have seen it in a good many who, like me, enjoyed their work. All my colleagues during the sixties and seventies admired and sympathized with other women who were actively campaigning for women’s rights, but none of them joined in as campaigners: we could see injustice, but we didn’t feel the pinch of it, because we happened to be doing what we wanted to do. Lazy or selfish? Yes, I suppose so. But I have to say that when I search myself for guilt about it – and guilt comes to me easily – I find none. While conditioning must have played some part in the inertia displayed by myself and my friends, my own experience suggests that it was at work on an innate disposition to be satisfied with my lot. After all, there are some men who mind more about enjoying their work than about what they are paid for it and where they stand in the hierarchy; so why, when a woman does the same, should it be taken for granted that she is brainwashed?

  8

  THE CARLISLE STREET years hummed with possibility. Although we had now been in the game long enough to know that the majority of manuscripts received would disappoint, we still expected excitement daily, and among the seventy-odd books a year that we published, a fair number justified that expectation. To Mailer, Richler, Moore and Fuller we soon added Terry Southern, V. S. Naipaul, Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, Mavis Gallant, Wolf Mankowitz, Jack Schaefer, Jean Rhys – the poets Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Jennings, Laurie Lee, Peter Levi, Geoffrey Hill – the nonfiction writers Simone de Beauvoir, Peggy Guggenheim, Sally Belfrage, Alberto Denti di Pirajno, Lionel Fielden, Clare Sheridan, Mercedes d’Acosta (not all of them names likely to be recognized now, but all remarkable people who wrote remarkably well).

  By now I considered myself a proper editor, so perhaps this is the place to describe the job as I saw it. In many firms a distinction was made between editors and copy-editors, the first being concerned with finding authors and keeping them happy, encouraging them in their projects and sometimes tempting them down this path or that; the second being the humbler but still essential people who tidy texts. In our firm a book’s editor was responsible for both sides of the operation. Not until the eighties did we start farming out tidying jobs to free-lance copy-editors, and I doubt whether any Deutsch editor felt happy about doing so. I know I didn’t.

  The things which had to be done for all books were simple but time-consuming and sometimes boring (what kept one going through the boring bits was liking – usually – the book for which one was doing them). You had to see that the use of capital letters, hyphens, italics and quotation marks conformed to the house style and was consistent throughout; you had to check that no spelling mistakes had crept in, and make sure that if the punctuation was eccentric it was because the author wanted it that way; you had to watch out for carelessness (perhaps an author had decided halfway through to change a character’s name from Joe to Bob: when he went back over the script to make the alteration, had he missed any ‘Joes’?). You had to pick up errors of fact, querying ones you were doubtful about at the risk of looking silly. If your author quoted from other writers’ work, or from a song, you had to check that he had applied for permission to do so – almost certainly he would not have done, so you would have to do it for him. If a list of acknowledgements and/or a bibliography and/or an index were called for you had to see that they were done. If the book was to be illustrated you might have to find the illustrations, and would certainly have to decide on their order and captioning, and see that they were paid for. And if anything in the book was obscene or potentially libellous you must submit it to a lawyer, and then persuade your author to act on his advice.

  All that was routine, and applied to the work of even the most perfectionist of writers. Where the work became more interesting was when it was necessary to suggest and discuss alterations to the text.

  Editorial intervention ranged from very minor matters (a clumsy sentence here, a slight lack of clarity there) to almost complete rewritings such as I did on the book about Tahiti (although I don’t remember ever doing another rewrite as extensive as that one). Usually it would be on the lines of ‘Wouldn’t it work better if you moved the paragraph describing so-and-so’s looks back to where he first appears?’ or ‘Could you expand a little on so-and-so’s motive for doing such-and-such? It’s rather arbitrary as it stands’. I can’t remember anyone resenting such suggestions, though sometimes of course they would disagree for good reasons: mostly, if what is said by an obviously attentive reader makes sense, the writer is pleased to comply. Writers don’t encounter really attentive readers as often as you might expect, and find them balm to their twitchy nerves when they do; which gives their editors a good start with them.

  It was a rule with me that I must not overdo such tinkerings: it must always be the author’s voice that was heard, not mine, even if that meant retaining something that I didn’t much like. And of course it was an absolute rule with all of us that no change of any kind could be made without the author’s approval. It was those two points which I considered my ground-rules. The ideal was to receive a script which could go through unchanged (Brian Moore, V. S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys were outstanding providers of such scripts; and books already published in America were equally trouble-free, because such editorial work as they had needed would have been done over there). If, on the other hand, the text had needed work, then by the time it reached publication it must read as though none had been done on it, which could usually only be achieved by working closely with the author.

  Writers varied greatly in their attitude to intervention. I never came across anyone who was anything but grateful at having a mistake, whether of fact or syntax, pointed out, but when it came to changes some weighed every word of every suggestion, many accepted suggestions cheerfully, a few asked for more, and a very few didn’t seem to care one way or another.

  George Mikes, for example, needed a lot of work done on his books. He was a lazy man, one of those people who, once they have become fluent enough in a foreign language to say what they want, can’t be bothered to go the step further which would enable them to say it correctly. If his writing was to sound like natural, easy-going colloquial English, which he was aiming for, about one sentence in every three had to be adjusted. For the first two or three of the thirteen of his books that I edited, he took the trouble to read the edited script, but gradually he paid it less and less attention until, with the last three of his books, he would not even glance at the script – not even when I told him that I had put in a couple of jokes! Knowing him very well, I always felt quite sure that I had made his books sound just like he would have sounded if he had pushed his English up that last notch – that he was, in fact, right to trust me: but still I was slightly shocked at his doing so.

  One kind of editing I did not enjoy: cookery books. We built up a list which eventually amounted to over forty titles, mostly about national cuisines or the use of a particular ingredient – rice cooking, mushroom cooking, cooking with yoghurt and so on. This list was André’s idea – he it was who saw that as food supplies returned to normal, thousands of the British middle class would for the first time have to cook it with their own hands. I was too uninterested in food to have thought of it: in those days my notion of adventurous cooking was scrambling an egg instead of boiling it. But I was a woman, and where was the woman’s place but in the kitchen? So the cookery list became ‘mine’.

  Luckily André capped his first inspiration by meeting Elizabeth David at a dinner party and inviting her to become our cookery-book consultant, and her year or so of doing this saved me. Quickly she taught me to look for authenticity, to avoid gimmicks, to appreciate how a genuine enjoyment of food made a book tempting without any self-conscious attempts at ‘atmosphere’. Before long I could see for myself that Elizabeth would never have done as the sole editor of a cookery-book list because so many useful books would prove too coarse to get through the fine sieve of her rather snobbish perfectionism; but her respect for the art
of cooking and the elegant sensuousness of her response to flavour and texture were an education in the enjoyment of eating, as well as in the production of cookery books, for which I am still grateful.

  There is no kind of editing more laborious than getting a cookery book right. You cannot assume that a procedure described in detail on page 21 will be remembered by a cook using a recipe on page 37 or 102: it must be fully described every single time it is used. And never can you be sure that all the ingredients listed at the head of a recipe will appear in their proper place within it. You must check, check and check again, and if you slip into working automatically, without forcing yourself to imagine actually doing what you are reading, you will let through appalling blunders (oh those outraged letters from cooks saying ‘Where do the three eggs go in your recipe for such-and-such’!). I did become proud of our cookery list, and fond of some of its authors – but even so, cookery books ran advertisements close as my least favourite things.

  I suppose that when I started on them I had never come across any description of the traditional savagery of great chefs: I assumed that people, many of them comfortably built and rosy-faced, who wrote about what was evidently to them a great sensuous pleasure, would be by nature mellow and generous. When a West End book-shop devoted a week to promoting cookery books, and accepted our suggestion that it should open with a party for which six of our cooks should provide the food, I expected a merry evening. The six joined eagerly in the preliminary planning, which had to ensure that each would bring two dishes suitable for finger eating, which represented her own speciality and which didn’t clash with the other cooks’ contributions. They bravely undertook the task of transporting their delicate work to the shop, and all arrived in good time to set about arranging the food to its best advantage. Whereupon – crunch! and someone’s tray landed on someone else’s plate – splat! and a passing rump sent a dish flying to the floor – ‘Oh do let me help!’ and a knife was seized and brought to bear like a jolly hockey stick on a rival’s exquisite confection . . . Never again did I allow any of our cooks to meet each other.

  The kind of cookery book we brought out in the fifties, and which continued to do well in only slightly modified form during the sixties and seventies, would not get far today. It was an inexpensive, unillustrated collection of recipes which we assumed would sell (and which did sell) without being dressed up, because many of the new generation of middle-class cooks were enjoying holidays abroad for the first time and were therefore eager to make their meals more interesting by cooking dishes from foreign countries. As Britain’s culinary revolution progressed (and you only have to look at a few of the cookery books published before the Second World War to see that it was a real revolution), more publishers jumped on the bandwagon and more effort had to be put into making cookery books eye-catching. It was a good many years before the grand, glossy, lavishly illustrated tome swept the board, but the challenge became perceptible fairly soon, and we failed to rise to it.

  Booksellers began to insist that they couldn’t sell a cookery book unless it was illustrated in colour, so reluctantly we started to insert a few cheaply printed colour plates, the photographs usually scrounged from a tourist board, which was a waste of time and of the little money it cost. I knew this; it was obvious that the big successes were crammed with beautiful photographs specially taken for them and finely printed. They could only be so handsome because their publishers had the confidence to invest a lot of money in producing large editions, and printed their colour in even longer runs for several foreign editions as well as their own. To work on this scale they had to establish and cherish a Name – Carrier, Boxer and so on – culminating today in Delia, Queen of the Screen (one of the best things about cookery books is that no one who isn’t a truly good cook can become a Name, because recipes are used). Then the book had to be planned so that the purchaser could feel ‘That’s it, I shall never need another!’ (which didn’t have to worry the Name, because once solidly established, collections of his or her Summer, Winter, Christmas, Birthday, Party or Whatever recipes would still sell merrily, even though a critical eye might detect signs of strain). Then photographers who could make food look eatable had to be found – a much rarer breed than the uninitiated would suppose, and worth their weight in caviare. And finally a network of international relationships had to be built up. This kind of investment was foreign to André’s nature, and I certainly had not got the confidence to fight for it. Suppose we didn’t get it right first time? We easily might not, and we could not afford such a disaster. So we settled for the modest success of our own kind of book, which slowly decreased until the early eighties, when the list faded out.

  The stalest cliché about publishing – ‘You meet such interesting people’ – is true enough, but I think the greatest advantage it offers as a job is variety. Yes, I did find working on cookery books fairly boring, but how different it was from working on a novel or a book of poems. One was always moving from one kind of world into another, and that I loved.

  I was nervous in the world of poetry. My mother used flatly to refuse to read it, declaring that it made no sense to her, and although I was shocked and embarrassed on her behalf in my teens, when I read poetry a good deal and wrote it too (though never supposing I was writing it well), I had in fact inherited her prosaic nature. Poetry moves me most sharply when it ambushes me from a moment of prose, and I can’t really understand what it is that makes a person feel that to write it is his raison d’être.

  Knowing this, all I could do while a volume of poetry was going through my hands was stand by – which, luckily, is all that an editor ought to do unless he is Pound working with Eliot: one poet rubbing sparks out of another in mutual understanding. I read the work carefully, tried to make the jacket blurb say what the author wanted it to say, was moved by some of the poems as wholes and by parts of other poems . . . all that was all right. But I also felt a kind of nervous reverence which I now find tiresome, because it was what I supposed one ought to feel in the presence of a superior being; and poets, although they do have a twist to their nature which non-poets lack, which enables them to produce verbal arte-facts of superior intensity, are not superior beings. In the distant days when they were singing stories to their fellows in order to entertain and instruct them, they were useful ones: in the days when they devised and manipulated forms in which to contain the more common and important human emotions they were clever and delightful ones; and in the comparatively recent days when they have examined chiefly their own inner landscapes they have often become boring ones (I have stopped reading the Independent’s ‘Poem of the Day’ because of how distressingly uninteresting most of them are). And even when the poems are not boring, the poet can be far from superior – think of poor Larkin!

  Naturally we did not think the poets we chose to publish boring – except that I did become tired of Roy Fuller’s meditations on his own ageing, sometimes found Elizabeth Jennings’s thought less interesting than she did, and considered that ‘Not Waving But Drowning’ was the best-known of Stevie Smith’s poems because it was the best of them. Peter Levi’s early poems I found easy to love, but it was Geoffrey Hill’s dense and knotty poems which were, for me, the richest in sudden flashes and enduring illuminations. ‘If you are really without religious feelings,’ he once said to me, ‘how can you like my work?’ To which the answer is: ‘Does an agnostic have to dislike a Bach cantata or Botticelli’s Nativity? If an emotion or a state of mind has forced someone to give it intensely appropriate expression, that expression will have power enough to bypass opinion.

  Geoffrey was a difficult writer to work with because of his anxiety: he was bedevilled by premonitions of disaster, and had to be patiently and repeatedly reassured although my own nerves, worked on by his, would be fraying even as I spoke or wrote my soothing words. Once something frightening happened. A book of his – I think it was Mercian Hymns – had been read in page-proof by him and me, and I had just passed it to the production
department to be sent to press. That same afternoon he telephoned apologetically, saying he was aware of how neurotic he was being and would I please forgive him, but he had suddenly started to worry about whether the copyright line had been included in the preliminary pages. I knew it had been, but I also knew how tormenting his anxieties were, so instead of saying ‘Yes, of course it’s there,’ I said: ‘Production probably hasn’t sent it off yet, so hold on and I’ll run down and check so that we can be a hundred per cent sure.’ Which I did, and the line was there, and Geoffrey was comforted. And when the printed book was delivered to us there was no copyright line.

  Whatever it may be that causes a poet to know himself one, Geoffrey was walking evidence of his own sense of vocation. Living seemed to be more difficult for him than for most people. Once he told me – wryly, not proudly – that he was hesitating about doing something which he passionately wanted to do because if he did it, and thus ceased to suffer, he might never write any more poems. And his prose seemed to illustrate the degree to which writing poetry was his raison d’être: it was so unconfident and clumsy that it made me think of a swan out of water.

  Stevie Smith, too, in her different way, found life difficult; although she solved the problem cleverly and decisively by with-drawing from those parts of it that were too much for her and keeping to a well-defined territory of her own. She was amusing, and – strangely, given the cautious nature of her strategy – met one with a beguiling openness, so that I always started our meetings with the feeling that we were about to become close friends. We never did, and I think the reason was sexual. I was still young enough to be at heart more interested in my own sexual and romantic activities than in anything else (though mostly I kept them out of my office life), so Stevie’s nervous asexuality distanced her. She almost fainted when she first came into my office, because I had on my wall a print of snakes. All the blood left her face and she could hardly make audible a plea that I should take the print down (after that I always removed it as soon as she was announced). Perhaps the notion that a phobia about snakes relates to their phallic quality is old-fashioned and misguided, but I supposed it to be true, and saw Stevie’s phobia as revealing. I’m sorry to say that some part of me slightly despised the fear of sex I sensed in her; and I hope that she got her own back (this is far from unlikely) by slightly despising its opposite quality in me.