Grub Street Irregular, page 31
The part of the house in which Petra and I were staying was self-contained, with its own kitchen and marble-topped table off which we could eat our breakfast, and a rose-papered bedroom almost completely filled by a brass-framed double bed with a rose-patterned pot thoughtfully placed beneath, and on the walls gold-framed Victorian portrait drawings by Richmond, the highlights on cheeks and foreheads accentuated by chalky streaks of white. We were to entertain ourselves by day – going for long walks, squatting in the shelter of drystone walls, avoiding the local bulls, eating lunch in a pub in the valley, wondering how and whether we’d ever make our way up again – while our hosts got on with their writing; in the evening, after a bath and a change of clothes, we joined them for dinner, with Diana profusely apologetic about some delicious stew while Peter – no longer in any way alarming, despite some blackening of the brows and an occasional splenetic stammer – held forth about the iniquities of the book trade as he tugged open another bottle of claret. It was, I think, the first time either of us had seen the life of full-time writers at first hand, and very alluring it seemed.
One afternoon we drove back down the valley for tea with Rupert Hart-Davis in his grey Georgian rectory, the rooks wheeling in the trees about. He was very affable: with his grey moustache and his expensive tweed jacket and his blue-and-white-striped shirt and military tie and his pipe at the ready, he looked more like a retired brigadier than a publisher revered by his contemporaries for the elegance of his books and his flawless editorial judgement. I particularly admired his well-organised, tightly-packed bookshelves, sage-green on one floor, salmon-pink on another, and the way in which new books were set out in fan-like formation on a circular Regency table. He lectured me on the importance of printing a book’s title and the names of the author and publisher across the spine and the jacket, and deplored the vulgar modern practice of running them up and down: he had, he explained, had great trouble in persuading OUP to follow the correct practice with his Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, but had somehow won them round. He was, he reminded me, the literary executor of old friends like Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden and Arthur Ransome, all of whom respected him as a scholar and a safe pair of hands, who could be relied upon to act wisely and well on their behalf. Years later I was told that Hart-Davis had to be dissuaded from setting fire to documents which showed close friends like Duff Cooper in an unflattering or over-amorous light: in the concluding volume of his memoirs much space is devoted to the problems of keeping the Aga alight, but there is no evidence that incriminating diaries or letters were used to stoke the flames. Either way, pyromania is hardly what one expects from a scholarly publisher and man of letters who had edited a much-revered edition of Oscar Wilde’s letters.
Not long after my Connolly biography was published, Hart-Davis’s son Duff rang to ask if I would be interested in writing his father’s biography. I was attracted in principle: unlike most of its reviewers, I had found his multi-volume correspondence with his old schoolmaster, George Lyttelton, unbearably whimsical, pompous, smug and condescending, but I thought his biography of Hugh Walpole one of the best I had ever read, relishing in particular the sleight of hand whereby he made no explicit mention of Walpole’s homosexuality, which might have upset the large army of elderly ladies who enjoyed his novels, but made it apparent to those in the know via references to Turkish baths and the like; I loved the look of the books he had published and the care he took with their design and production, and I remembered the awe and admiration he excited among fellow publishers like Norah Smallwood and André Deutsch.
‘That’s marvellous, but don’t breathe a word of it to anyone,’ Duff said when I told him I liked the idea. ‘If he gets wind of it, he’ll set fire to his papers, and you’ll have nothing to go on.’ I dutifully kept my lips sealed, and began, in a desultory way, to do some background reading. A few years later, I bumped into Duff as we gathered on the church steps after James Lees-Milne’s memorial service in South Audley Street. Duff has a loud, commanding voice at the best of times, and – making no apparent effort to modify his tones – he boomed out, ‘I hope you’re still interested in writing my father’s life? Mind you, not a word about it to a living soul.’ Speaking in little more than a whisper, I swore myself to silence once again, but no sooner had Duff moved away than Hugh Massingberd tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Duff tells me he wants you to write Rupert’s biography,’ he said. ‘That seems a very good idea.’ It was all rather confusing.
When, not long afterwards, I read in the paper that Sir Rupert had died, I turned to Petra and said, ‘Well, at least I know what I’ll be doing for the next couple of years.’ This pleasant feeling was short-lived: an hour or so later I received an apologetic letter in which Duff explained that, without telling him, his father had appointed Philip Ziegler to be his biographer. Now that I’ve read Philip’s biography, I’m glad my proposed involvement in the project fell through. Few publishers merit or can stand a full-length life, and, rather to my surprise, Hart-Davis proved to be no exception. With their bevelled buckram boards and Reynolds Stone engraving of a fox on the wrappers, the classics he published in his Reynard Library are, like their equivalents in Francis Meynell’s Nonesuch editions, among the most beautiful books to be published in the last century, and I admired the way in which he balanced his bibliographical and scholarly publications with bestsellers like Elephant Bill, My Family and Other Animals and Seven Years in Tibet; but, like all good literary publishers, he found it hard to remain both solvent and independent, and for the last forty-odd years of his life he lived like a recluse, far removed from the world in which he had played so distinguished a part. I’m afraid Duff was understandably annoyed when, in my review of the Ziegler biography, I described his father as a pompous curmudgeon (‘I was knighted in 1967, but clearly the news hasn’t filtered through to you yet,’ he thundered, after a young editor at Faber had dared to address him as ‘Mr’).
For some reason the Gunns were not on good terms with the Hart-Davises, but that evening they quizzed us eagerly about our visit over the pre-dinner drinks. The following day, very reluctantly, we packed our cases for the long journey back to London and the dreary wastes of office life. We stayed only twice in their windswept eyrie, but it remained in my mind as one of those rare, magic houses in which the passing of time and the tedium of every day seem somehow suspended, and its inhabitants enviably if misleadingly exempted from the wearisome routines of work and domestic life. But, like all romantics, the Gunns were seized with a fatal restlessness, a sense that somewhere else an even more perfect house could be found, and the ideal life awaited; and because, like old-fashioned rentier writers, they had just enough money to scrape by on, and because, with their children grown up, they wanted only to be with one another, working on their separate books and fretting about the other’s state of health and mind, they were able, far more than most, to divorce themselves from the humdrum and indulge their romantic yearnings.
The urge to move on was, inevitably, combined with terrible regrets: according to Diana, Peter ‘wept all the way down the lane’ when they left their Great Shelford house for the last time. Neither of them liked London, but for a time they divided their days between Swaledale and an elegant, box-shaped barge, painted maroon and gold and white and formerly the property of New College, Oxford, with mullioned windows and wooden pineapples running along the balustrade, which was, and still is, moored off Cheyne Row; but then they sold Swaledale, and their restlessness was given full rein. They sampled Lewes, but found it too noisy and too busy; a farmhouse in mid-Wales had the advantage of remoteness, but seemed a poor substitute for Swaledale; they tried Cambridgeshire again, but there were too many people and cars – and it was, no doubt, haunted by the shades of old friends like David Garnett and John Davenport, the hard-drinking literary bruiser and friend of Dylan Thomas who was said to have hoisted a pompous, undersized judge onto a mantelpiece in the Garrick, leaving him there to splutter in stranded fury.
The last time we saw them together they were back in Swaledale, only this time down on the valley floor, hundreds of feet below their lost eyrie. They were contemplating a return, and were camping out in a rented house, with not a gold-framed mirror or marble-topped table in sight. Peter met us at the door, tweed cap in one hand, walking stick in the other, and explained in a low, conspiratorial mutter, with much shaking of the head and raising of the eyes to heaven, that Diana was in a poor way, very low, and that we might do better to let her rest while we went to the local pub. It was raining, and the pub was full of bearded Pennine walkers in anoraks and chunky Norwegian sweaters and knee-length woollen socks and buckled moleskin trousers and boots with hooked eyes and interminable laces, and we had to pick our way over their rucksacks en route to the bar; but as Peter gave us his gloomy tidings over several pints of bitter – money was in short supply, Diana’s health was not good, her mother was a constant source of worry and aggravation – his face lit up with that contagious watermelon grin and his eyes twinkled like the Mediterranean in summer.
Later, over a glass or two of wine in the rented house, Diana drew us aside while Peter was drawing another cork in the kitchen and explained, sotto voce, that poor old Peter was in a very bad way, and in dreadfully low spirits for much of the time. By now we had learned that this mutual anxiety, though strongly felt, was endemic, a persistent leitmotif. Nor was it restricted to the Gunns themselves: whenever we saw them, after six months or a year or more, Diana would greet us with a cry of, ‘My dears, Peter and I have been so worried about you both: are you sure you’re all right?’ and we would worry what terrible things they had heard, or whether news of some fatal illness or imminent bankruptcy was being withheld from us by kindly, well-meaning friends. Though absorbed in each other, they took a passionate interest in the doing of their friends, asking eagerly after our daughters, revelling in one’s rare success, and convulsing with sympathetic shudders when, after A.P. Watt and I had gone our separate ways and I had reverted to being a publisher, I described the travails of working at Chatto & Windus under Norah Smallwood and her equally alarming successor.
For months, sometimes years on end, we would hear nothing from the Gunns beyond an occasional frenzied scrawl from Diana, prophesying doom – her writing, energetic and impulsive and pouring over the edge of the paper, was the antithesis of Peter’s cramped, impeccable hand – and then they would resurface in London, longing for news and as worried as ever about how they (and we) were going to survive. And then, in the summer of 1995, Diana rang to say that Peter had just died. She was struggling to write his obituary, and wondered if I knew anything about that sort of thing. I told her I’d write something for the Telegraph, and got down to work.
As is so often the case, I realised how little one really knows about people one instinctively likes, and thinks of as friends, but only sees from time to time. I found myself rereading Naples: A Palimpsest – my agent, Gillon Aitken, told me that it was the first book he worked on as a young editor at Chapman & Hall, back in the 1950s – and poring once again over Peter’s entry in Who’s Who, like a Kremlinologist hunting for clues. His list of publications was longer than before, with a study of the Acton family, a life of the Duchess of Abrantes (that really rang no bells) and a lavish volume for Weidenfeld on the churches of Rome added to those I knew of already, but even within the telegraphic restraints imposed by the publishers, it remained a typically reticent entry.
From Diana I learned that Peter’s father, a remote figure whom he hero-worshipped, had made a fortune in the timber trade in Tasmania and then committed suicide; that Peter had spent a year in Paris after leaving Melbourne, and had walked from there to Yugoslavia, sleeping in haystacks; that he had been stranded in Dieppe with John Davenport on the day war broke out, and had served as a firefighter with assorted literary men before joining the Rifle Brigade. An implausible soldier, he had been captured in North Africa while out on patrol; his Italian captors had plied him with brandy before despatching him to a prisoner-of-war camp in northern Italy, where his companions had included Eric Newby and the future literary editor Rivers Scott. He and a friend had escaped, and holed up in a cave in the Abruzzi before being recaptured by a German patrol and sent to a camp in Germany itself. She told me how, on their honeymoon in Athens, as later on their travels in France and Italy, he had displayed the topographer’s instinctive sense of place and direction, disdaining the use of maps and guide books: I found this entirely sympathetic and wished, once again, that I’d known him better. Two years ago, she went on, they had moved to an eighteenth-century house outside Dieppe. Peter had loved living there, but in the end he was brought down by bronchitis and heart trouble. It was time, once more, to be moving on; but this time he would be travelling alone.
TWENTY-FOUR
Closing Time
One of the great perks of literary life was lunch with Alan Ross. It was never wise to arrive too early – novices or the over-eager might be told, via the buzzer at the front door, to fill in the next half-hour in the pub next door, or over the road at the V&A – but, assuming punctuality, one would climb the stone steps of a white, stuccoed building in Thurloe Place, just round the corner from South Ken tube station, walk through the flagged floor of a solicitor’s office, let oneself out through the back door, pick one’s way down a precipitous iron staircase into the garden at the back, and push open the door of the superior garden shed which housed the magazine. Alan would rise from behind his paper-strewn desk – clad, it may be, in faded pink corduroy trousers, a v-necked cricket jersey, an open-necked blue-and-white-striped shirt, rather frayed at the neck, and a battered suede jacket – and greet one with some jocular remark; we would look through the teetering pile of review copies stacked up behind the door to see if anything appealed, I would help myself to the latest issue of the magazine and do a quick survey of the office to see what new pictures or postcards had been pinned to the walls, jostling for space among the nudes, Indian gods, literary men and views of Sussex; after which Alan would switch off the electric fire and lock the glass front door, and we would wander out.
‘Indian or Italian?’ Alan would ask, both being on offer immediately opposite, on the far side of Thurloe Place. More often than not we headed for the Italian, where Alan immediately ordered a bottle of Lambrusco, a sweet pink Italian sparkling wine: it didn’t seem to go with any of the food that followed, and tasted faintly like Lucozade, but he must have discovered it on visits to Italy in the 1950s, and never wanted to sample anything else. He was not particularly interested in or knowledgeable about food, but he liked well-ironed pink tablecloths, low lighting, gold-plated pudding trolleys heavily laden with thick slabs of tiramisu and sliced oranges floating in Grand Marnier, and a bowing, beaming maître d’ rubbing his hands together and saying, ‘Good morning, Mr Ross, and how are you today?’ At the end of the meal Alan made a point of asking for ‘Il conto, per favore’: as the erstwhile author of a book about Sardinia he may well have had more Italian at his command, but that was as far as it went, over the lunch table at least. I once took him and Mordecai Richler, who had similar tastes, to an Italian restaurant in Soho where the food was far superior to that on offer in Thurloe Place but the tables were formica-topped, the salt and pepper dispensers were of moulded glass with silver-plated screw-on tops, and a fat housewife in an apron dished out the steaming bowls of pasta: it wasn’t a success.
Once the pleasantries had been exchanged with the maître d’ and the food had been ordered – Alan usually had a first course and a pudding, followed by a glass of grappa and a cigar – we would get down to the business of the day. He shared my liking for hyperbolical gossip, whereby a nugget of truth is embellished by the elimination of such qualifications as might have diluted or contradicted the main thrust of the story, and the punchline polished and refined by endless repetition: and since he forgot much of what he was told, and liked to repeat old favourites in a low, conspiratorial mutter, the same anecdotes or items of gossip would be recycled again and again, with Alan exclaiming ‘Really?’ in tones of amazement when on the receiving end, his round Armenian eyes bulging like those of a lemur caught in the beam of a torch. He was always the best of company – funny, affectionate and well-informed, as devoted to the London Magazine and its writers, and as keen to discover new talent, as he had been when he took over as editor from John Lehmann in 1961. ‘He’s a good fellow,’ was his highest term of praise, ‘He’s no good, is he?’ the moment of damnation.
One day in the summer of 1988 I called by on the dot of a quarter past one, but instead of heading over the road we made for the Rembrandt Hotel, a couple of hundred yards up the Brompton Road. Alan didn’t seem his usual jocular self, and when we got there he slumped in his chair and peered out at me through dead, coal-black eyes. Every trace of animation had drained from his face, as if all the lights had been turned out in a skyscraper that was, under normal circumstances, more dazzling than its neighbours. As he toyed with a sandwich and looked askance at his glass of wine, I tried to engage him in conversation, and regale him with the kind of literary tittle-tattle he normally enjoyed, but I could get no response beyond a reluctant ‘yes’ or ‘no’. After a while he told me that he was feeling so utterly depressed that there was no point in our trying to talk; we spent the rest of the lunch sitting in silence, after which I walked him back to the office. On the steps he turned and, as always, gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder before vanishing back into the garden shed.
He had, I later discovered, suffered a severe bout of depression shortly after becoming editor of the London Magazine – brought about, in part, by John Lehmann’s grouchy and resentful behaviour as he reluctantly let go of the magazine he had founded seven years before. It had been treated with blasts of ECT, a form of shock treatment then in its infancy, and compared by patients to being plugged into the mains. Melancholia had been kept at bay since then, but now it had returned with a vengeance, prompted by his split with his long-time girlfriend, who had become fed up with his refusal to commit himself to a more permanent relationship, and by the death of his old English sheepdog, Boppa, who had walked with him to and from the office every day from their mews house in Elm Park Gardens, greeted visitors as they picked their way down the vertiginous metal staircase, and held the fort when his master was lunching over the road. He was put on lithium, several doses of which were flushed down the lavatory; he went, for a time, to stay with his son Jonathan in his large house in Clapham, from where he wrote to say that he thought he would never recover or be happy again, and that he sat for hours in the garden, rocking to and fro like a Jew before the Wailing Wall.
