John Bull's First Job
Ghosts of the Row
By NEVILE WALLIS
SOME anonymous edifice has arisen on the SOME
site which an historic publishing
house occupied for generations in Paternoster Row on the north side of St. Paul's. In 1928, by appointment, I waited nervously on the firm's senior director, a great cricketing power. A Dickensian oppressiveness, I was to learn, pre- vailed in the bookmen's Row, rigidly feudal and beerily servile. Some reflected eclat assisted Me now, however. In the last century my grand- father, a bishop, had published with this firm a monumental volume on his continental ministra- tions. My prospective employer, whose business since the eighteenth century had been buttressed by the monuments of lords spiritual and tem- poral, signified approval of my tenuous connec- tion and engaged me forthwith as a junior clerk. The dynastic rule was that every newcomer should submit to 'the collar' by first serving a grim term down in the 'titles.' It was a noxious and basement containing honeycombed ;helves of the books readily available for orders. Thames-side rats scuttled continually along the Pipes overhead to gnaw at the bindings, and the basement cat only made conditions more un- savoury. It was a relief to flee at lunch-time to the grateful perfume of red roses and lilies of the valley dispensed from a little flower-stall on the pavement of St. Paul's Churchyard. As Pleasant was the haven of Stationers' Hall Court, long before the fire bombs destroyed the great Plane which cast its tremulous shadows over Stationers' Hall. All day there the flagstones echoed to the shuffle of booksellers' bagmen Passing in and out of Simpkin Marshall's ware- house until evening when quiet settled over the City, On Sundays, when I would enjoy making drawings of the archway and court, the utter silence was interrupted only by the booms from St. Paul's clock and perhaps the subdued step of some minor canon.
In my first year, a glorious brouhaha was caused by the firm's publication of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the Thornton Wilder novel. The reviewers had virtually ignored it, and in the early weeks The Bridge reposed pretty quietly down in my 'titles.' At length Arnold Bennett, then king-making and unmaking in the Evening Standard, blew the dust off his copy and glanced at it. His belated blast of the trumpet alerted every literary editor and bookseller in this coun- try and beyond. It galvanised our office, where for months on end everyone staggered around clutching toppling towers of The Bridge, whose sales rocketed to some quarter of a million, not counting paperbacks. Some thirty years after, sitting with Ken Tynan over iced whisky in Wilder's hotel suite an hour before the curtain rose on his Edinburgh Festival play, r men- tioned that electrifying review. Wilder's tortoise skull crinkled in delicious recollection.
In due course I was released into an upper atmosphere, and became more acquainted with the characters in those vanished Victorian premises. W. A. K., the manager, had entered the House in 1882, the year that Trollope died and a year after Disraeli's death. His brisk but mincing tread, aureole of white hair, and Ad- mirable Crichton stoop and suavity, could easily be related to a gas-lit London when every peg in the cloakroom had a top-hat. My artistic.lean- ings he regarded with deep suspicion as being inimical to strictly business methods, and it was with difficulty that I came to steer an advertise- 'I warned you I was a bad loser.' ment drawing or book-jacket design in my direc- tion. I lived far more intensely outside the office. My Saturdays were regularly devoted to gallery- going and to meeting Hubert Foss, an inspiring fellow who, thirty years ago, was creating the unrivalled music department of the Oxford Press, and consorting at night at the Cafd Royal with dear Tommy Earp, an urbane wag who exhibited the gentler and more erratic traits of the Blooms- bury group.
Possibly I became a little more methodical in Paternoster Row, or W. A. K. relented, for I was entrusted with the management of a periodi- cal with Anglican connections, and the proof- correcting of mainly religious books. The gaitered shadow of my grandfather was in- escapable, I realised, until war came, and after- wards Mr. Punch and art criticism delivered me from publishing. But attention to detail I owe, at least, to Paternoster Row. The vetting of Pat McCormick's popular broadcast sermons for publication was a most exacting youthful task. Oh, the pursuit of his main verb in the incon- clusive maze of verbiage! The Bishop of London's garrulities, on the other hand, only re- quired me to delete his repetitions of some trivial cable on the same page. 'Now there's a splendid purple passage,' I remarked to a colleague, as we observed Dr.- Winnington-Ingram's violet cassock sweep into Amen Court. 'A pity he never allows one to appear in print.'
Dean Inge's treasured proofs went always to W. A. K., though I would see the Dean's spidery postcards. One, I remember, described how some enterprising American publisher had offered him five thousand dollars for his life story. The Dean declining, the publisher was not to be put off. Would the Dean be willing to write a Life of Christ instead for half that sum? Clearly I see that frayed top-hat, the lined and parchment skin, the shoulder twitch and rolling gait of his figure. It pauses at the curb, veers circumspectly, then skips between the buses and vanishes into the Deanery courtyard. 'I never cross over Lud- gate Hill,' murmured the Dean abstractedly as I was bowing him out, 'but I call to mind Wren's epitaph, which I amend to read: "Nisi monit- mentin requiris, circtunspice"' (unless you .de- sire a memorial, look about you!).
It is a summer morning and Dean Inge is preaching in the Cathedral. In a thin, scholarly voice he refers to 'religious busybodies'—the sort of ladies who never tire of paying lip-service to the Church and re-arranging the altar candle- sticks. 'They misinterpret the Christian vocation of going about doing good,' he intones, his grey mask expressionless. 'They believe they are doing good—by going about. . . .' The service dies away, and canons as distinctive as gargoyles dis- perse on the wide steps. Canon Newbolt, hump- backed, his silk-hatted head sunk on to his chest, moves painfully away, his black cloak investing him with a rather horrible fascination. With him walks Canon Alexander, Newdigate prizewinner
and Treasurer to the Cathedral since Edwardian days, his high, domed forehead seeming to emu• late the other Dome he loved so well. The great clock booms twelve, and I go off to set up my old sketching-stool.
When Douglas Woodruff, with his weekly Tablet, found a corner in our haven of religious
tolerance, my time in Paternoster Row was coming to a close. Munich came, and 1 collected my Territorial equipment. Going round the
shabby departments almost with nostalgia, 1 looked in on the Tablet to see what Woodruff's own notes 'At Random' had to say about the Munich Agreement. It was quite short. 'Ce n'esi pas magnifique, mail ce West pas la guerre.'
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