Athill was born in 1917 and was educated at Oxford and joined the BBC during the war, after which she went into the publishing industry. Her boss in this enterprise was Andre Deutsch, who was a migrant from Hungary, and they worked together until he sold his second business in the 1980s. She continued working for the company for a while but then retired. Her partner was a black man, although she doesn’t say if they were married, and this fact only appears right at the end of the book, which is a memoir.
The book is mainly episodic and chronological in its first part, which is a digest of the publishing business from the 1950s to the 1980s. The second part of the book is a series of independent chapters about individual writers she worked with during her time at Andre Deutsch Limited. Both parts of the book are very chatty and gossipy but there is little thematic development, which a more skilled writer might have found ways to include.
The only concession to anything like a theme that Athill manages to make is to finish the second part of the book with a chapter about an Irishwoman named Molly Keane. This concluding chapter (there is just a postscript that follows it) is largely positive in tone because this author gave Athill far less grief than some of the others who are profiled in the book. So she finishes it on a high note.
One drawback that the book has is that some parts are not as easy to understand as the writer would have liked or imagined. At times you struggle to follow the thread that is being laid down in your path and you have to just get through these rough patches until things clear up. Being herself a copyeditor, she was presumably skilled at making sure things in the stories she worked on flowed smoothly, but for her own book she sometimes falls short of the reader’s requirements in terms of clarity. She is also a bit verbose at times, preferring the casual sentence that resembles spoken language to the more tightly constructed sentence of the committed stylist.
With some of the writers Athill deals with she is tight-lipped and discrete but with others, such as VS Naipaul, she lets you have all the details and I wondered why different writers were dealt with in different ways. It might have had something to do with how they dealt with her. The relationship between Deutsch and Naipaul was not always smooth. At one stage Athill describes how she critiqued a novel he had submitted to the company for consideration. She had thought that some of the characters were not formed well, and told him so. In response, Naipaul stormed out of her office and left the building, later calling Deutsch on the phone to tell him that he, Naipaul, was going to take his books elsewhere from then on. But for some reason Athill never really understood Naipaul was soon back with Deutsch and they brought out a number of his subsequent books. In the end he left them for good at a time when Deutsch was in decline (and everyone at the company knew it).
This kind of detail constitutes the bulk of the book. The tone is light and casual. Pub talk, mainly, but not uninteresting. Probably the most important parts of the book are concerned with books that Deutsch brought out in the wake of WWII, notably books about the Nazis. In these passages you get some idea of the fear that the war had inspired, and would continue to inspire in people who read about it. Sadly, a lot of that knowledge seems to be disappearing today and ugly trends are starting to emerge in some parts of the world that echo what had been though to have been obliterated forever.
One thing that strikes the reader of this book, at least it struck me, are the sometimes intimate relationships that publishers have with the authors they work with to bring out new books. Athill goes into some detail, for example, about the mental health problems that Jean Rhys and Alfred Chester, two authors that Deutsch handled, exhibited, and the types of interactions that Athill was obliged to have with them. In the case of Rhys, this took the form of visiting her in hospital and even visiting her home in Devon where she lived alone and in a penurious state. In the case of Chester, an American, it was delusional behaviour that Athill was unequipped (this was in the 1960s) to deal with. In these sorts of situations an editor takes on roles other than the merely professional one, the one that involves helping to get a text ready to print. He or she becomes a confidant, a nurse, a source of emergency funds, a friend, and a bulwark against adversity.
And you get to see different facets of Athill’s own character in the book, too. As a person Athill reminds me of someone like Stella Rimington, the former MI5 head who turned novelist, or the novelist Kate Atkinson (whose novel, ‘Transcription’ I reviewed on the blog on 14 September last year). Athill is one of those no-nonsense Englishwomen who lived through times that are now remembered in terms of the pop songs that they gave rise to rather than in terms that people alive at the time would think to be truly representative of their era.
In this book you can also find hints about novelists who used to be acclaimed but who have now fallen out of favour with the public and with critics. This sort of decline is perhaps inevitable but Athill’s reminders are certainly things that I will be following up on in future.
The book is mainly episodic and chronological in its first part, which is a digest of the publishing business from the 1950s to the 1980s. The second part of the book is a series of independent chapters about individual writers she worked with during her time at Andre Deutsch Limited. Both parts of the book are very chatty and gossipy but there is little thematic development, which a more skilled writer might have found ways to include.
The only concession to anything like a theme that Athill manages to make is to finish the second part of the book with a chapter about an Irishwoman named Molly Keane. This concluding chapter (there is just a postscript that follows it) is largely positive in tone because this author gave Athill far less grief than some of the others who are profiled in the book. So she finishes it on a high note.
One drawback that the book has is that some parts are not as easy to understand as the writer would have liked or imagined. At times you struggle to follow the thread that is being laid down in your path and you have to just get through these rough patches until things clear up. Being herself a copyeditor, she was presumably skilled at making sure things in the stories she worked on flowed smoothly, but for her own book she sometimes falls short of the reader’s requirements in terms of clarity. She is also a bit verbose at times, preferring the casual sentence that resembles spoken language to the more tightly constructed sentence of the committed stylist.
With some of the writers Athill deals with she is tight-lipped and discrete but with others, such as VS Naipaul, she lets you have all the details and I wondered why different writers were dealt with in different ways. It might have had something to do with how they dealt with her. The relationship between Deutsch and Naipaul was not always smooth. At one stage Athill describes how she critiqued a novel he had submitted to the company for consideration. She had thought that some of the characters were not formed well, and told him so. In response, Naipaul stormed out of her office and left the building, later calling Deutsch on the phone to tell him that he, Naipaul, was going to take his books elsewhere from then on. But for some reason Athill never really understood Naipaul was soon back with Deutsch and they brought out a number of his subsequent books. In the end he left them for good at a time when Deutsch was in decline (and everyone at the company knew it).
This kind of detail constitutes the bulk of the book. The tone is light and casual. Pub talk, mainly, but not uninteresting. Probably the most important parts of the book are concerned with books that Deutsch brought out in the wake of WWII, notably books about the Nazis. In these passages you get some idea of the fear that the war had inspired, and would continue to inspire in people who read about it. Sadly, a lot of that knowledge seems to be disappearing today and ugly trends are starting to emerge in some parts of the world that echo what had been though to have been obliterated forever.
One thing that strikes the reader of this book, at least it struck me, are the sometimes intimate relationships that publishers have with the authors they work with to bring out new books. Athill goes into some detail, for example, about the mental health problems that Jean Rhys and Alfred Chester, two authors that Deutsch handled, exhibited, and the types of interactions that Athill was obliged to have with them. In the case of Rhys, this took the form of visiting her in hospital and even visiting her home in Devon where she lived alone and in a penurious state. In the case of Chester, an American, it was delusional behaviour that Athill was unequipped (this was in the 1960s) to deal with. In these sorts of situations an editor takes on roles other than the merely professional one, the one that involves helping to get a text ready to print. He or she becomes a confidant, a nurse, a source of emergency funds, a friend, and a bulwark against adversity.
And you get to see different facets of Athill’s own character in the book, too. As a person Athill reminds me of someone like Stella Rimington, the former MI5 head who turned novelist, or the novelist Kate Atkinson (whose novel, ‘Transcription’ I reviewed on the blog on 14 September last year). Athill is one of those no-nonsense Englishwomen who lived through times that are now remembered in terms of the pop songs that they gave rise to rather than in terms that people alive at the time would think to be truly representative of their era.
In this book you can also find hints about novelists who used to be acclaimed but who have now fallen out of favour with the public and with critics. This sort of decline is perhaps inevitable but Athill’s reminders are certainly things that I will be following up on in future.
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