Stet is "the story of one old ex-editor who imagines that she will feel a little less dead if a few people read it." Yet the voice coming 3,000 miles across the telephone line from a top-floor flat in London's Primrose Hill is hardly moribund. It is splendidly clear and slightly formidable, its consonants and vowels impeccably formed, redolent of a time when a certain accent had sole monopoly on the BBC and a certain caste ran book publishing in Britain.
The voice belongs to 83-year-old Diana Athill, who spent nearly a half-century in London's trade book business as a director of Andre Deutsch Ltd. She has distilled that experience into a slim volume that differs markedly from the recent American publishing memoirs of Michael Korda, Andre Schiffrin and Jason Epstein.
As its subtitle attests, Stet (Grove Press; Forecasts, Dec. 11, 2000) is "An Editor's Life" rather than a publisher's, a distinction its author makes plain. "If you were a director of Andre Deutsch, it didn't mean you did much directing," she laughs. Not directing suited Athill, who found it "almost impossible to do anything I didn't want to do... [including] many of the things a publisher had to do. The only part... I could ever bring myself truly to mind about was the choosing and editing of books."
Stet is distinctive, too, in that it is written by a woman intent on conveying a woman's perspective on work and life and some of the wisdom gleaned along the way. It's told with humor, charm and elegance, but with most of the veneer stripped off. Its candor astonishes and discomfits as it convinces. "I've got a beady old eye," its author explains matter-of-factly.
"I don't get surprised often by human behavior and never have been. Human frailties interest me as much as anything," not least those of the writers she has known.
She shares her flat with a Jamaican-born playwright, a man she's loved for 40 years. Athill has traveled far beyond the confines of the East Anglian landed gentry into which she was born. The great-granddaughter of a Master of University College, Oxford, she "would have preferred not to have had to work in an office." But long before her own Oxford graduation, she knew full well that her immediate family's money had run out. "You will have to earn your living," her father told her, and so she did, editing writers like Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Brian Moore, John Updike, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Margaret Atwood.
Athill has written five other books. Instead of a Letter and After a Funeral (reissued by Granta, which also published Stet in the U.K.) are wrenchingly autobiographical. Until well into middle age, she was unlucky in love and readily admits to PW: "I had always written books because of an inner need, as therapy.
"People suggested that I write about publishing, but I had thought I wouldn't," she says. "But six or seven years ago, I began to do bits and pieces, because it seemed a waste of material not to. I didn't believe anyone would want to read it and got stuck. Then I wrote about Jean Rhys and somebody mentioned it to Ian Jack, the editor of Granta.
"Talking with him," she says, "gave me the idea of a two-part book." The first, "about the daily occupation" of the editor, contains brief sketches of a slew of authors and colleagues. The second limns relationships with six writers: Rhys, Naipaul, Moore, Mordechai Richler, Alfred Chester and Molly Keane.
Embedded in the portraits of the writers is the editor's role in their lives. Of Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, Athill tells PW: "All editors have to some extent to play the role of nanny. Towards the end, when she was staying in London and drinking too much, three or four times a week I'd have to go to put Jean to bed. I used to think how very extraordinary she was such a strong writer, given she was so hopeless at life."
Of V.S. Naipaul, author of A House for Mr. Biswas and 17 other books edited by Athill, she writes: "Self-brainwashing sometimes has to be a part of an editor's job. You are no use to the writers on your list if you cannot bring imaginative sympathy to working with them.... I had increasingly to force myself into feeling genuinely sorry for him in order to endure him."
Her portrait of Brian Moore, author of The Luck of Ginger Coffey, is also stinging in its personal criticism. Athill says quite simply, "It was a shock he could be so beastly to his wife, Jackie, when he left her for another woman. He was a very nice man and it seemed at the time he was being frightfully unfair. So I did feel very strongly about it and told him how I felt and lost him as my friend and as my author. But it didn't obliterate what a good writer he is."
Yet if frailties make for interesting copy, professionalism does not. Certain writers with whom Athill maintained longstanding relationships receive surprisingly little ink. John Updike, she tells PW, was "one of the easiest authors, a joy. He knows exactly what he wants, is tremendously well-informed about the trade and not unrealistic." In Stet she writes, "From a personal point of view he is an exceptionally agreeable man. So I have nothing to say about him except the obvious fact that we would have been a much less distinguished publishing house without him."
Overall, Athill's sympathy lies more with women than men. It comes across in little remarks: "All publishing was run by many badly paid women and a few much better paid men"; "the love which most disturbed the office—this was both surprising and gratifying—was that which afflicted men, not women." And it comes through clearly in the portraits of Naipaul, Moore and of Deutsch himself. She confesses to PW, "It's true the men are seen very critically," even though, with a nod to Britain's rigorous libel law, Athill maintains, "I pulled my punches."
It all started in 1945 with a brief affair that began over an omelet and petered out a dozen unremarkable lovemaking sessions later. Andre Deutsch, the man in question, was a Hungarian-Jewish refugee who had landed a sales job in publishing. Athill and Deutsch were the same age and were introduced by her flatmate's Austrian-Jewish lover, another aspiring publisher, George Weidenfeld.
Deutsch and Athill soon chose friendship over love, and when the Hungarian Anglophile scraped together £3,000 to start his own publishing house—he was advised the minimum necessary was £15,000, but was determined to do it nevertheless—he asked Athill to join him at Allan Wingate (a name adopted to forestall anti-German and anti-Semitic sentiment). Deutsch had the pluck to publish Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead when all the established British houses nervously shied away, but ever scrambling for money, he had brought in backers who were less than ideal. Six years into business, he was forced out of Wingate and started a new company under his own name. Athill followed him.
"In our firm, an editor did the whole thing," she recalls. "Your job was to have a relationship with the author, talk about his problems with him, understand the nature of his book, know how to promote it, copyedit the manuscript, write the blurb, etc." Of the manuscript work, she says, "Not often did one have to do much shaping with fiction. If a fiction writer read so badly that that was necessary, we weren't interested. We were rather snobbish, I suppose."
But Athill did not begrudge time spent reworking nonfiction, considering it "one of the most interesting parts of the job. You had to help the author find a voice that was not too unlike him." She learned her editorial lessons early on.
While still at Wingate she did a rewrite of a book about the discovery of Tahiti, "sending it chapter by chapter to the author for his approval." When the book received plaudits for beautiful writing, the author sent Athill a copy of a glowing review along with a note she assumed would contain thanks. What it said was this: "You will observe the comment about the writing, which confirms what I have thought all along, that none of that fuss about it was necessary."
"When I had stopped laughing," Athill writes, "I accepted the message: an editor must never expect thanks." Her advice to today's writers, she tells PW, is "try to be as economical as possible, unless your writing style is truly of the exuberant kind." Her advice to today's editors is: "Respect the writer. Don't try and impose yourself. Keep the writer's voice always and never do anything without telling him you're doing it."
Andre Deutsch, on the other hand, did much that profoundly affected his staff without consulting them at all. Of Deutsch, Athill says, "We knew each other so well and so long, it was like being members of a family. Somebody can be pretty god-awful, but still go on being your cousin." Stet describes him as "nagging," "raging," parsimonious and quite capable of "making life a misery" for anybody who hadn't figured out how to placate him for some small error exaggerated out of all proportion.
"Yes," she pauses, "Andre was a bully. He didn't mean to be, but he was so sure of his own point of view. His complete lack of understanding of others was very great. But on the other hand, when he was young he was fun and gave us an extremely amusing life.
"Anybody who makes something from nothing needs to be like that, sure of himself, very positive, very energetic, very quick. Andre's abilities and extra-persuasiveness were uncanny. It is a fact that our firm continued to make a profit every year until he sold it in 1985. He would make people give us much longer credit, he would make the advertising manager of a newspaper put one of our tiny ads at the top of the page." He was also willing to go out on a limb for a controversial book if the literary quality was high.
"I did feel bad" about the portrayal, Athill confesses. "He was very ill and pathetic, and I was awfully worried when I showed it to him. But by that time he was too tired to read it. He leafed through and said, 'I don't agree with everything, but she's got a right to her opinion.' I felt sad I wasn't able to be more loving about him, but I really couldn't. I wanted to publish it because I thought it was the truth and it gave a clear picture of what was, after all, a great achievement."
Certainly Deutsch did turn his fledgling firm into one of the preeminent literary houses of London, until a confluence of factors led to its sale and eventual demise. The weight of the accumulated years of constant juggling began to take its toll on the aging publisher. "It's not any fun anymore," Athill remembers Deutsch telling her in the early 1980s. Then, too, there was a recession and "a change in the culture. There were a diminishing number of people who wanted to read the kind of book we mostly published."
Of today's industry, Athill says, "There aren't many people who can publish books with as little interest in how much they're going to earn as we did. We didn't think in terms of bestsellers. Now people have to, because publishing is much more of a business and much less of a pleasure. What is important to people, what means being successful, these have changed."
New York publishers, Athill recalls, "were very important in our life. I think, on the whole, a trend started in New York and would come to London five years later. To begin with, there was much less difference between the two, then towards the end of my career New York became more and more money-oriented. On my last working trip, I was frantic because nobody would talk to me about literary merit, only about money."
Today, Athill says, "standards have changed on both sides of the Atlantic." She writes, "[R]eading is going the same way as eating, the greatest demand being for the quick and easy and for the simple, instantly recognizable flavors... but that is not the terminal tragedy which it sometimes seems to the disgruntled old.... It is not a new development... but... is now catered for more lavishly than it used to be." Of more concern, she tells PW, is that "editors are more willing to trade on the pornography of evil. Splendid moral indignation often covers a rather terrible pandering to the great interest people have in such things."
On the other hand, she wakes up every morning "liking being here," and liking the fact that "there are still publishers—not many, but some—who are more single-mindedly determined to support serious writing than we ever were."
Diana Athill has written "let it stand"—Stet—against her career as an editor. But in her ninth decade, she's not exactly standing still. "People still bring me manuscripts to look at," she tells PW. And she's already begun work on another book.
