Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (38 page)

T
HE WAR WAS
in its third year or perhaps the beginning of its fourth. I was still working in the BBC, slightly better at living by then, since Felix was a part of my life and I had left bedsitting rooms behind me for a flat which I shared with another girl – a commonplace event which must be remembered by millions of working women as a turning-point in their lives. Who could feel their circumstances anything but temporary, their condition anything but one of time-biding, while the daily mechanics of living consist of eating only what can be boiled on a gas-ring (frying is usually forbidden because of the smell and the spitting of fat on to the carpet), keeping half one’s clothes in a suitcase under the divan or on top of the wardrobe, moving books and writing things from a table to a divan or chair before setting out a meal, and turning a divan from couch into bed every night before going to sleep in the froust of one’s cigarette smoke? I had taken a modest pride in my ingenuity with small bedsitting rooms, the way in which I could make myself comfortable and control the ebullience of my too numerous possessions; so much so that when I first experienced the delicious freedom of a flat, I was astonished by the violence with which I cast off single-room living. I had not known that it had been horrible, but it was with horror that I decided ‘Never again!’

In a flat we could give parties. To one of them a friend brought a small Hungarian said to be in publishing. He did not seem to be much amused by our company, although he did not whisper audibly, as I have heard him do since then, ‘Can we go now?’ He sat on the floor looking boyish and disdainful, then sang ‘The Foggy Foggy Dew’ in a manner implying that he, personally, had discovered this song. When he telephoned a few days later to invite me to a play, I was surprised. I was also pleased because I believed that anyone connected with publishing must be interesting.

It did not take us long to decide that our relationship would not be an amorous one. Instead we slipped into a friendship of a curiously intimate nature, nearer to the fraternal than anything I had experienced within my family. My real brother, with whom I had been close friends when we were small, had been taken out of my life first by his schooling, then by what his schooling had done to him. He had hated it and had spent much of his boyhood taking refuge in stupidity and near-oafishness, happy only when disguised as a gamekeeper or, better still, poacher, wearing an ancient, many-pocketed waistcoat, talking dialect, and sloping about the woods at Beckton either alone or with friends from the village. By the time he began to emerge from this camouflage I was at Oxford, and after that the war removed him. On the rare occasions when we met there was always a comfortable freedom between us, an ability to say or to listen to anything and a clear view of each other’s shortcomings which did not prevent affection, but we did not have much in common beyond our temperaments and our memories. With the Hungarian, André Deutsch, I shared a way of life, political views, and interest in the arts, as well as an undemanding kind of intimacy very similar to that I already knew with my brother.

We began to see each other often and became, in a lopsided way, each other’s confidants: lopsided because while I had a tendency to underestimate my own value, André had no doubt about his. He was always ready to put himself out for friendship’s sake in any practical way – lend money, or bring round food if I were in bed with influenza – but he did not find it easy to believe that I (or anyone else) would be as interested in a discussion of my own life as I would be in his.

He had come to England before the war broke out, ostensibly to complete his education but with a private determination to settle here. With liberal views and a Jewish father, he had decided while still a boy that Hungary under Horthy was not the country he would have chosen, whereas English literature, combined with everything he had heard about Great Britain, suggested to him that England was. So early and complete a transference of loyalties, made without any great pressure from events, seems to me unusual and strange. André had reacted to things which were in the air rather than to anything which had happened to him or his family. When I have questioned him about it he has answered no more than ‘I just knew, always, that that was what I wanted to do.’ Caught by the war, with no money but an occasional cheque from an uncle in Switzerland, he picked up jobs here and there and was working as floor manager in a big hotel when detectives came to remove him to the Isle of Man. To be an enemy alien was not, however, an unmixed evil. Internment did not last long, and once he was released he was free to take what civilian work he liked, provided he reported at the proper times to the Aliens’ Office. He found his way by chance into the sales side of an old – indeed tottering – publishing house, and by the time I met him he had burrowed well into its structure, was saving a little money, and was already talking of starting a firm of his own.

André was my age – twenty-six. By that time he did not have a penny beyond what he earned, nor did he have a single relative, old friend, or useful connection in this country. I used to listen to his plans indulgently, contributing to them as one contributes to talk about what one will do when one wins the Irish Sweep. ‘If you join me,’ he said to me one day as we walked arm-in-arm through Soho, ‘what would be the minimum money you would have to earn, to be comfortable?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What am I earning now?’ And he worked out for me, as he has so often done since, what my weekly salary came to by the year. It was three hundred and eighty-eight pounds, I believe – the BBC paid civil-service rates and Temporary Women Clerks, the category under which I worked, did not come high in those rates.

‘What about five hundred pounds?’ he asked, and I agreed to it, feeling that such a large sum could safely be considered since it existed only in his imagination. I had not yet understood that André is the kind of person in whom ideas and action are inseparable. It is true that when the time came, five hundred pounds proved at first to have been optimistic – but the time did come.

I have sometimes wondered whether, if chance had shouldered André into property, or manufacturing cars, or catering, his obsessive nature would have seized on that as it did on publishing. Perhaps it would have done, but it is hard to believe. Picture dealing, maybe, or concert promoting… The nature of his talent is practical, the demon which possesses him is a business demon rather than a literary one, yet it is impossible to imagine it functioning for an end unconcerned with artistic expression. The ultimate good for a business demon
ought
to be power through money, but André’s demon drives for something else. He is immensely concerned with money, but as an idea rather than as something to possess: while he can have a car and good clothes he is indifferent to his own income. He will cry out in pain at the least mistake in the costing of a book or the most trivial slip in his opponent’s favour during a deal, but the pain is aesthetic rather than pecuniary: he is offended in the way that a stylist is offended by a badly constructed sentence or an interior decorator by an ugly juxtaposition of objects. The only power without which he cannot live is that of being his own master – over other people he exercises it both reluctantly and clumsily. His business demon is one which, by some quirk, has become bound to the production of books so firmly that its energy would bleed away if it were cut off from them. Whatever he may say when he feels resentful at the demands of his own obsession, André is a man with a vocation.

No two people could be more different than he and I. He has the most exact and capacious memory I have ever encountered, while I can remember hardly anything but people and feelings; he is a fiend for detail, while I am sloppy; he has this instinctive understanding of money and what can be done with it – the structure of a company, the financing of a new enterprise, are things which he can grasp at once without any previous experience – while to me the simplest contract is sterile: words on paper which I can understand if I concentrate but which have no implications beyond the mere statement, none of which I can criticize in relation to a set of ideas. André has the sometimes blinkered driving force of the obsessive, to whom his own ends are both
necessary
and
right
. I have the detachment of the disassociated, always prepared to believe that the other side of the question may have something in it. Above all, André is active, he compels things to happen, while I am passive, I accept. It is easier for me to see what I have gained from our long partnership than it is to understand why he values it.

As soon as the war was over, André formed his company: Allan Wingate, it was called, we picked the name out of a hat in the belief that ‘Deutsch’ would still meet with prejudice. I had to round off my work at the BBC and then took a three-months holiday at Beckton, so I did not join him until 1946 and cannot exactly remember how the absurdly small capital was raised. It was little more than three thousand pounds. Part of it, I know, came from a man who made handbags, who liked books and who had sized up André as a young man who would go far. Printers, binders, and papermakers reached the same conclusion, allowing him generous credit and taking extraordinary trouble to be helpful. Partly they were charmed, for André is capable of exerting great charm, and partly they were convinced, because absolute conviction breeds conviction. It is fortunate that André is by inclination honest, for if he were a liar he would be one of those mesmeric pathological liars whose fabrications dupe everyone for years, simply because such liars believe in them themselves.

Our first office was two rooms, a passage, a WC and a box-room with a skylight next to the WC in which sat a sequence of morose little men who did our accounts. That they were morose was not surprising. The chief thing that I remember about those first few years was the agony of bills coming in: the agony of paying them when we had to, and the agony of not paying them when we could get away with it. There is at all times a sum without which, the pontiffs say, you cannot launch a publishing house. It stood in those days at fifteen thousand pounds – five times what André had been able to raise – and stands today at fifty thousand. At any period I am sure that this sum can safely be halved by anyone prepared to work hard, while by fanatics it can probably be quartered. But in cutting it by five we had gone too near the knuckle. What was to happen later could still have been avoided, but the need to avoid it would not have arisen if we had begun with more capital.

Meanwhile, in spite of money worries, we enjoyed ourselves. We made a few mistakes, published one or two of those handsome editions on handmade paper, illustrated with woodcuts by expensive artists and bound in buckram, which few people can resist producing when they first get their hands on the means of bookmaking and which never earn their keep. But for the most part we managed, thanks to Andre’s vigilance over every halfpenny, to produce our books at an economic price, and we succeeded, after great difficulties, in organizing their distribution on the right lines. That our overheads should have been unnecessarily high by as little as a pound would have shocked us all: ‘Have you switched off your fire?’ ‘Why are you using a new envelope for this, don’t you know what stickers are
for
?’ We kept our stock in the passage leading to the WC where a narrow bench had been installed, and there, just before a publication date, the whole firm would stand, working away with sticky paper and string, under the benevolent eye of our real packer, Mr Brown.

Mr Brown would always have to accompany whoever it was who was making the London deliveries in Andre’s small car, because only a Union member could hand a parcel of books to another Union member. I used to enjoy my turn on deliveries, listening to a gentle burble of London lore, for Mr Brown, a compulsive talker, prided himself that he knew every inch of the city, and so he did. His interpretations of what he knew were sometimes eccentric, museums becoming cathedrals, and monuments commemorating events that had happened or people who had existed long after they were erected. Strange things went on in Mr Brown’s London, too: men in Islington bit off the heads of rats for a shilling, and there was a building near Westminster Cathedral full of holy images covered with blood – ‘You know, all Christ and bloody Mary and that.’ When I asked him how he knew, he told me that he had once spent a whole night there, packing singlehanded to oblige, and that all these images with the blood on them had got him down so much that he didn’t half let out a yell when the bishop came in at three o’clock in the morning to offer him a glass of wine. ‘Wine, that’s what he called it, but if you ask me it wasn’t nothing of the kind.’ When I laughed and said, ‘Do you mean that he was trying to poison you?’ he answered, ‘Well, I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say
that
,’ but in a doubtful voice. And then, he said, when morning came, a great many women arrived, all dressed in black from top to toe, and all of them crying as though heartbroken. Mr Brown often left his stories hanging at a point like that, but I was so disturbed by all these sad, black-clad women that I persuaded him to explain them. ‘Well, they was all rank Catholics, you see,’ he said, ‘and some old cardinal had kicked the bucket. I tried to jolly them along, I did. You wouldn’t see me taking on like that, I said, not for him anyway, he’s just another man to me. Cor, they didn’t half think me a
vile
man.’

Mr Brown called me by my first name, but I would have felt it impertinent to have addressed him by his – André was the only person who ever did. He was a fatherly man, and kind, although his kindness could be disconcerting. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t hold with giving up my seat in a bus to a young girl, she’s as fit to stand as I am, only when she’s having her monthly I will.’ ‘But Mr Brown, how can you tell?’ ‘Tell? I can always tell. Tell at a glance with the lot of you, I can.’ The intimacy of a small business is certainly no myth.