Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (4 page)

‘Good gracious. I see Mr Lehmann contracted to pay you an advance of three hundred pounds. Is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Three hundred pounds. THREE HUNDRED POUNDS? For a
cookery
book?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘No wonder Mr Lehmann’s business wasn’t making a profit.’ The brave Captain sighed a surly sigh. ‘Well, all I can say is I hope we get our money back.’

The John Lehmann contract which Captain Harvey affected to find so outrageous had been signed in the autumn of 1951. Early in 1952 I left for Italy to research for what was to be my third book,
Italian Food
. It was by now late in 1953. Half-way into the book – that is to say both the cooking and the writing of it – I had heard from John Lehmann that after a dispute with the directors of Purnell’s, the printers who were the majority shareholders in his publishing firm and owners also of Macdonalds, he had decided to close down his business. His authors, or those of them thought worth taking over – I learned later that I had only one fellow victim, the American writer Paul Bowles – found themselves in the hands of the unknown Macdonalds. I was to discover, step by ugly step, that what had happened to me as a writer was a most unenviable fate.

Even with hindsight there was little I could have done. To abandon the book on which I had already spent a year and a half
and done much very difficult work, return the hundred pounds which was all I had so far received of that prodigal advance, and cancel my contract would perhaps have been a feasibility. A publisher has no means of forcing an author to deliver a book which that author has decided he will not finish. But the publisher can threaten action for breach of contract and/or seek to prevent the author selling that book to any other publisher. In any case my two earlier books were now beyond retrieval from Macdonalds’ grasp. I could not know what that was to mean to my own and their future. Although I then had no agent I was aware that the contracts John Lehmann had given me were the standard ones of the period and, except that no provision was then made for paperback or book club rights, are not so very different today. The clause providing for the transfer of an author’s contracts and rights to a publisher who takes over the business of the one with whom that author has originally contracted is generally accepted. It should not be. Authors learn too late that they and their books are part of the fixtures and fittings which go with the house. Their new owners may be uncongenial as well as ill-qualified to deal with their work. Not all authors now under contract to the Heinemann group will be overjoyed, I suspect, to find themselves the property of Paul Hamlyn and Octopus.

As quickly became clear to me, I had been spoiled by my initial contacts with the publishing world. The author–publisher relationship between John Lehmann and myself had been friendly, fruitful, civilised. He had produced my first two books in an attractive format, with good paper, pleasing design and binding and with striking dust jackets and illustrations by John Minton. He had set high standards. Had he remained in publishing I hope and believe I would still be on his list. Authors are not widely known for what the advertising business calls brand loyalty. All the same it does exist. Patrick Leigh Fermor, for example, has remained all his writing life with John Murray whatever the blandishments of other publishers. As is well known, Nancy Mitford would never have strayed from Hamish Hamilton. These are not isolated examples of abiding loyalty on the part of successful writers to their original publishers.

Those publishers who might more properly be termed accountants or printing tycoons fail to take into account the ties which bind an author to a publisher who has not only taken a gamble with his first book – and Heaven knows if the publication of
Mediterranean Food
in the conditions prevailing in the England of 1950 was a gamble – and brought it off to a modest extent, but who has also fostered his frail talent, shored up his tottery confidence, encouraged him to produce more and better work, treated his failings with tolerant understanding. That first publisher is likely to remain the yardstick by whom all subsequent ones are measured. So an author who has cause to feel that he and his work have been somehow sold up river will sooner or later turn on his new master and take action to effect his escape. It is unlikely that he will get much further than freeing himself from the option clause in his last contract. If he has any sense of self-preservation he will never again sign a contract which includes one.

In as po-faced an understatement as you could come across in a day’s reading, Anthony Blond in
The Book Book
remarks that some publishers have always been less perfect than others. During the past thirty-odd years it has been my lot to have personal dealings with, let me put it this way, more than one of the less perfect practitioners of the trade. Macdonalds, if not quite at the top of the list, remains highish on it.

Let us return now to gallant Captain Harvey who we have left recoiling from the sight of my typescript and fearful that his company might not recoup the three hundred pounds so recklessly allowed for in my contract. Not to waste more space on ancient history, yes, Macdonalds did get its money back on
Italian Food
. The firm is still gathering in, via the Penguin paperback, plus those of my two earlier books, that harvest which it did not sow. Paperback royalties, it should be explained, are customarily shared 50/50 between author and original publishers or, as contracts have it, ‘their successors and assigns’. Those publishers will retain their share of the paperback royalties long after they have relinquished the hardback rights. Nowadays Macdonalds is controlled by another bonny fighting man, Captain Robert Maxwell, and the last time I had any direct communication with a member of the firm was when in 1982 its accountant reluctantly – well, how else would it have been – agreed to pay me interest on three years’, repeat three years’, back royalties which I had at last succeeded in extracting from him.

No. I am sorry. I have no counsel to offer inexperienced writers on how to avoid falling into the hands of a bad publisher. Anthony Blond believes an agent is the answer. To me it seems that unsatisfactory publishers are one of the built-in hazards, and those are
not few, of the condition of authorship. The trouble is, one writer’s good publisher may well be another’s bogeyman.

What Bernard Shaw thought of publishers is fairly common knowledge. He held they were rascals, to a man. ‘The one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them,’ he wrote ninety years ago. If we don’t all feel quite as strongly as that, it
is
sometimes difficult not to agree with the wondrous Amanda McKittrick Ross who, fifteen years after GBS, expressed herself in more picturesque but no less forceful words. ‘I don’t believe in publishers who wish to butter their bannocks on both sides while they’ll hardly allow an author to smell treacle. I consider they are too grabby altogether and like Methodists they love to keep the Sabbath and everything else they can lay their hands on.’

Tatler
, October 1985

Scoff Gaffe

Ann Barr and Paul Levy, begetters of
The Official Foodie Handbook
(Ebury Press) are too young perhaps to remember that during the last war Greece was tragically occupied by the Germans. Still, if they’d checked with some responsible adviser they needn’t have committed the whopping gaffe of asserting that during the war years there was a British Ministry of Information in Greece and that I worked in it. For that matter, if they’d asked, I could have told them that I was not at any time ‘the Librarian at Alexandria’. Has there even been a Library there since the famous one was burned in
AD
270? Anyway, it was in Cairo that I ran the modest wartime Reference Library established by the Ministry of Information Middle East. There
is
quite a distinction to be made between Alexandria and Cairo. And while we’re about it, whoever thought up the bit about my being married to a Lt-Colonel in the Bengal Lancers must have been seeing too much of Hollywood’s Raj and Gary Cooper riding off in full-dress uniform, immaculate with turban and sash, to defend the North West Frontier.

Readers may well ask: what’s all this got to do with the Foodies? Well, Levy and Barr, having a crack at establishing the appearance of familiarity with the careers and backgrounds of living writers and professional chefs bearing well-known names, have compiled
a list they call the Foodies’ Who’s Who. I take it they didn’t want to ask the persons concerned. It’s time-consuming to obtain facts. Why bother when you can invent? So in the only really funny phrase in the whole of their facetious guide to food snobbery they disclaim responsibility for ‘any variance of fact from that recorded in good faith’. Variance of fact? Good faith? I’d like to hear a legal definition of a fact variant. And, in the context, of good faith. Oh well, 1984 was the year of Newspeak. Have a nice variant for 1985.

Sorry I had to mention myself. Over now to Paul Levy and the Dorchester dinner last October for the launch of
Foodie
. ‘I am a chronicler,’ confided Levy to Joe Hyam, editor of the trade weekly
Caterer and Hotelkeeper
, ‘the Boswell rather than the Dr Johnson of the Foodies.’ Well, Dr Johnson he ain’t. But Boswell? Hang on there. ‘An eighteenth-century parasite… passionately interested in himself… used others as his mirrors… an opportunist and a snobbish opportunist at that.’ Sorry Mr Levy. That’s how Sean Day Lewis described Boswell in November last when the BBC presented a programme called
Boswell’s London Journal
. It does indeed seem to me that in
Foodie
there’s more than a little of the mirror image of Paul Levy, whose aspirations, if not his achievements, appear all ways Foodie. As for Miss Barr’s editorial snobberies, I’m sure she would agree that they are nothing if not opportunist. After all, as deputy editor of
Harpers & Queen
it’s her business to sell her archi-snob magazine.
Foodie
is a sales ploy. In conception quite a clever one, but her foodist Boswell lacks both the detachment and the style requisite to carry it through. The fond mirror reflections keep getting in the way.

Leaving aside the detachment deficiency, have a look at the style. Here comes the Magimix,
page 30
. ‘Suddenly, in the early seventies, the whole monstrous heap of meunière was seen to have been fertilising the soil for new plants of every kind.’ Ouch. Our Boswell, describing the old-fashioned puréeing, whisking and mincing demanded by the nouvelle cuisine, is of the opinion that it was only the advent of the food processor that enabled home cooks to adapt the style from the restaurants. But without food processors there wouldn’t have been nouvelle cuisine in the first place, or at any rate not the one we’ve got, and anyway food processors of one kind and another were around long before the household Magimix explosion. Now skip two paragraphs and proceed to
page 31
. ‘Suddenly the whole monstrous heap of business lunches was seen to have been fertilising a dead idea.’
Oh help. Change the needle. Cram that heaving heap of compost back into the processor. All right, the word processor if you like, and re-extrude it as a great big beautiful crunchy puff for, you’ve guessed,
Harpers & Queen
. The magazine, its advertising people say, is read by more
men
– oh, them – than ‘
Vogue, House & Garden, Punch
, and the colour supplements’. Chuck it, psoodies. Back with you to your Bombay Brasserie tiffins and your Dorchester foodscapes laid out on white octagonal plates – the shape helps the chefs align the foie gras parfait with the tomato-skin rosebuds, you know – lay down your editorial pens, go reactivate your gelato chefs and your pasta mastas, and in between bouts of wild-mushroom spotting and headhunting in Foodieland you might every now and again spare time for a glance at Dean Swift’s furiously ironic
Modest Proposal
concerning the feeding of the half-starved Irish peasantry of his day.

The point is that an examination of the fads and foibles of a consumer-crazed society, its preoccupation with the glamour-invested personalities of the classy professional chefs and their food and the emergence of the restaurant as a theatre-substitute could well make an entertaining little study, even a useful one. The
Foodie Handbook
is not such a study. For one thing, what the subject really calls for is the worldly wit of a James Thurber combined with the bite of a Jonathan Swift; for another the authors of
Foodie
are, for their different reasons, too self-enmeshed to create valid social comment. To be sure they are skilful enough in the arts of toadying to their public and providing it with a little giggle at itself, but the meaning of satire in its true sense eludes them. Their truly awful brand of teasy jocularity isn’t any kind of substitute.

Tatler
, February 1985

The Oxo Story

A book celebrating seventy-five years – yes, really – of Oxo cubes is to be published by Collins at the end of November. Its short title, predictably enough, is
Taking Stock
. The book offers plenty of reproductions of period Oxo advertising, effectively dating from 1910, when the cube was introduced, through two wars and up till recent years. There is a selection of recipes for dishes with
names like ‘Pork ’n’ Peaches’ and ‘Oxo Parsnips’. There’s more about Oxo Katie than this reader wants to know. There’s a commentary written in a dottily blithe PR style: ‘Oxo has always been a part of history’…‘Immortalised for ever was the red Oxo van, scaled to Dinky Toy size to sell for 3d’…‘The second world war was battled through and won.’ In 1953, ‘the Queen sat on her throne and the Union Jack flew over Everest.’ Oh, and the little red Oxo cube, we find, was right up there alongside the triumphant mountaineers and the red, white and blue waving over the eternal snows.

Critical assessment of the value of meat extracts and cubes wasn’t to be expected from
Taking Stock
. After all, the book is a publicity exercise. That and other aspects of the subject are not without general interest though, so here goes.