Paperback tiger
ANTHONY BURGESS
One is never satisfied. Able these days to get anything in paperback (Pelican treatise on Aztec prepuce taboos nestling in Smith's among the doylies), one yearns for those days in the late 'thirties when it was all beginning. Pen- guin had Ariel, Poet's Pub and A Farewell to Arms at sixpence each: with the Christmas gift of a ten-shilling book token, you could dream of building up a Penguin library (you had the money, you had the shelf space; all you wanted now was the books). Allen Lane, delivering his own merchandise in workman's overalls, heard a woman asking for Pelicans, meaning Penguins (she knew it was a bird begin- ning with P), and at once the heavier-billed fisher was ready for The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism (it was Krishna Menon who got that book from Shaw—two volumes at a tanner each) and, later, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, a book I've bought at least ten times and still haven't finished. Bliss was it in that dawn. The air was promise-crammed. We are blasé now. The very paperback medium has sophisticated itself (in the United States you can buy two stout little parcels called burgessboxes); with some elaborate pro- ductions there is no notable recommendation of cheapness; Penguin have gone into the hard- cover business. Our whole conception of what a book should be has radically changed. Thus, Len Deighton sees that paperbacks are now a , primary buy, and that the hard-cover edition is for the public library shelf. The mail-order people are selling books as pieces of furniture: buy a handsome Golden Bough and promise yourself to read it in retirement, which means never; meanwhile, preen yourself on your token culture. Real reading is no longer a show- off business : it's something crammed in the pocket and then taken out on a tube train. All this is healthy but unglamorous. No more well-thumbed old friends. Function and again function. Expendability. Victor Weybright's story is of the develop- ment of the good paperback in America, and it is a story that grows out of our English Penguin. There had been paperbacks before Allen Lane, on both sides of the Atlantic— Westerns, romances reeking of cheap scent, but rarely anything that could be called literature.
Weybright, in London during the Second World War to help purvey us information, went back to the States to promote the American branch of Penguin. The is had had their special cheap editions of good books; there was a postwar market for a civilian follow-up; there was money in it, but there had to be hard work first. Weybright, a farmer, agronomist and publisher of immense energy, terrifying in- tegrity and large culture, was the right man to market large-scale cheap (but not cheap) literature.
It was not conceivable that an American paperback firm could be for long a satellite of something back in a little England that was getting smaller. A declaration of independence in 1947 saw the birth of the New American Library; later came the classics and works of scholarship under the Mentor and Signet im- prints. The story of the development of the big business which Weybright inspired and sus- tained is heartening but, long before the denouement, we wonder how a man still com- pasatively young and undeniably dynamic has the time to write his autobiography : he should be still out there selling other people's books.
Then we learn. One of the mammoth take- overs that, after long subterranean bubbling, erupt overnight, sought greater efficiency and more spectacular sales, but it only succeeded in depersonalising the NAL, making it no métier for a man whose career had been fulfilled through contacts with authors, inspired hunches, audacious chances, the mingling of friendship with work. His final lament is about the growth of depersonalisation everywhere.
A good publisher, then; a man of high aims but no softie. The account of the promotion of Mickey Spillane—a writer serious British publishers have always been doubtful about —might, by the cynical, be interpreted as a typical New World example of God being brought in to bless Mammon. But the fact is that the uncouth-seeming creator of Mike Ham- mer was a Jehovah's Witness who sold The Watchtower on street corners and, at a cock- tail party given for him, Erskine Calder and Kathleen Winsor and a number of Catholics who were against the tough and the sexy, was found in a corner defying a group of Jansenists to provide doctrinal evidence for the existence of purgatory. And it was with a theological programme that Spillane was introduced to the intellectuals—eye-for-eye fundamentalism, as opposed to the more compassionate European Catholicism of Simenon. Clever, very. That is, without doubt, publishing.
Weybright gives us some enlightening por- traits of British publishers, most of whom —Lane, Unwin, Gollancz and the rest of the doyens—appear as English gentlemen who know when, in the interests of business, to throw off the suavity. The young . Gareth Powell, Rolls-Royce-owning whiz-kid, doesn't emerge too well. There he was at Annabel's on election night, celebrating 'a socialist vic- tory as managing director of a company that was far from over its deficits.' The company was the New English Library, for which the NAL was now responsible. 'It was a typical exhibition of "swinging London," celebrating a socialist victory on the fantastic largesse of Uncle Sam and the Times Mirror C.Ompany . . . His notion of prowess was to publish more and more Playboy trivia and Girodias pornography—with a bit of warmed up egg- head stuff from NAL in the USA.' Weybright hits hard when he has to.
But the final picture of dedication to cog- nate causes—the health of the American soil and, through the best paperback provender, the American soul—is attractive, and totally un- sophisticated by the kind of false modesty that disfigures so many British autobiographies. The audience for such a book may be regarded as a rather specialised one—publishers who want to see what is said about them by a confrere, as well as how the NAL described, integrity- wise, its Spenglerian parabola; authors -who want excuses for distrusting publishers even more than they do, or even want to learn to like them. But we're all readers, and we're all involved in the paperback revolution. This one man's inside view of it is always fascinating, sometimes hair-raising.
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