The Golden Age of Editors

Stet: An Editor’s Life by Diana Athill.  Grove Press.  250 pp.  $16.00. ****

Stet is a memoir from what I think of as the golden age of publishing.  Diana Athill survived—and kept working—until publishing changed, and everything was about finding bestsellers and causing a stir.  But she began when it was a gentleman’s business (though ladies did a lot of the work), when you could start a publishing house without much capital, when what you wanted a steady group of solid writers you could depend on, and people were writing for serious readers, which has always been a select group.  Diana Athill not only chose many of the books her firm published, she also edited and copy-edited them (tasks she wasn’t wild about, but she did them).  She took the job because she loved books, didn’t expect to get rich and didn’t.  But she did years of interesting work, and met some notable people.

Then it turned out she was an excellent writer herself.  She published novels, but is most famous for her memoirs, of which this was the first.  She’s apparently known for being a sexual renegade, has published memoirs about various love affairs and escapades.  Stet for the most part is about her job.  I read it with fascination and a certain longing.  This was the world of publishing I hoped to be part of, serious readers and bookish editors.  I would love to have had the same editor my whole life (V. S. Naipaul published fourteen books with her firm).  As it turned out, only once did I have the same editor twice.[1]  And the publishing world became more and more dominated by the hunt for big bucks.

The publisher she worked with, Andre Deutsch, began with far less capital than usual, and the early years were hand-to-mouth: in the first building Athill occupied, she was in the same room with two other people, who might be on the phone or having a conference, yet she was expected to sit at her corner of the desk and work on manuscripts.  Eventually they moved to better digs—they seemed to move from one residential building to another—and she made a point of getting a room to herself, even if it was a small one.

As fascinating as the first half is for a writer—maybe not for everyone—I thought the second half better, when she wrote frankly about six writers of her acquaintance.  These weren’t the best writers she ever worked with, just the most interesting.  Two stood out for me, Jean Rhys and V.S. Naipaul.

Rhys’ story is both heartbreaking and heartening.  She had had an early career long before Athill knew her, but withdrew from public life, and apparently from her publishing career, for nearly thirty years.  Athill met her when she was near completion of the novel that would make her famous, Wide Sargasso Sea, intended as a prequel to Wuthering Heights.  Rhys seems to have been a lifelong alcoholic—she was certainly one when Athill knew her—but was absolutely devoted to her writing, in a way that was almost agonizing.  At one point when she had nearly finished Wide Sargasso Sea but was in poor health—Athill had read it, knew what a major work it was—she made Athill promise that if she could not finish the small revisions she still had to do, Athill would not publish the book.  Athill promised, though she was never sure she would have kept the promise; she would have been suppressing a masterwork.  It took Rhys two more years to be satisfied with the book.  It came out and made her famous.

Naipaul was perhaps more interesting as a psychological study.  He was born in Trinidad, seemed always to have a chip on his shoulder.  He’d apparently been treated as an inferior early on and never got over it.  As he published his books and got famous, he became more snobbish than British aristocrats; he was touchy about where his editor took him to lunch and what wine she paid for.  He was also extremely sensitive about his work; in one novel, where Athill felt there was a serious aesthetic problem—a couple of the characters were unbelievable as written—she spent a long time wrestling with the question of whether she should mention it to the author or not.  She finally did; he listened calmly but immediately—the next day—withdrew the book from her firm and took it elsewhere.  She was sorry to lose a substantial author but relieved that she no longer had to deal with him.  Deutsch felt the same way.  Some time went by and they suddenly got a call from Naipaul, who wanted to come back.  They weren’t sure why at the time.   Apparently his new publisher had referred to him in their publicity as “a West Indian author.”

Athill speaks of a cycle Naipaul went through with every book.  This may be a universal experience.  There was great excitement, a kind of exhilaration, when he finished a book.  There would be a period of anticipation at how well it would do.  Finally there was disappointment, often blaming the publisher, that it didn’t sell better.  Naipaul was the kind of writer who would be appreciated by a few but would never sell well.  That’s just who he was.  Writers grumble that their publisher didn’t advertise their books, but Athill felt—as most publishers say—that it is reviews that sell books, not ads.  She said she’d never bought a book on the basis of an ad, and I’d have to agree.  Reviews are a crapshoot for any writer, but they’re all we’ve got.

Athill ends with perhaps her favorite writer, one I’m embarrassed to say I’d never read, the Irish novelist Molly Keane.  Again, Athill hooked up with her only toward the end of her career, but those final novels made a major difference in Keane’s life, allowing her to live comfortably into a relaxed old age.  Unlike Naipaul, Keane was a delight to be around.  And at the end of her life she wrote to her editor expressing her gratitude.

“I feel a real loss at losing your company.  I shan’t get to London again and I’m too weak and foolish to ask you to come here.  But we have had many good moments together and you have done everything for my books—think what that has meant to me, to my life.  With my love and thanks.  Molly.”

I have no doubt other writers felt the same way, though they may never have said so.  A good editor is worth her weight in gold.

[1] I should say, though, that every editor I ever had, for the six books I published, was dedicated and helpful.  I’m very grateful to have known and worked with these people.