A TALENT TO ENTHUSE
The media: Paul Johnson salutes the Diaghilev of publishing
THIS is the week when the autumn pub- lishing season begins to get into top gear again. Review copies are thumping through my letterbox, my desk groans under the weight of the special issue of the Bookseller. It contains 539 pages of pub- lishers' advertisements, listing 10,544 new books or reissues which will be on sale before the end of the year. The magazine's guide to the most notable books on the list, category by category, which devotes a Paragraph or less to each one selected, takes up a formidable 240 pages. I often wonder what Dr Johnson would have made of this ceaselessly marching army of volumes. Much as he loved books, he thought too many were being published even in the 1770s. He might have been rather more worried, however, by the Sheer financial scale of publishing today, With firms changing hands for hundreds of millions of pounds. He, quite rightly, believed an author and publisher should have a close, not to say intimate, rela- tionship,
though in his case intimacy might take unusual forms: he was not above stunning a publisher who incurred his wrath by banging him on the head with a huge folio. The fact that the sheer indi- vidualism of British publishing still sur- vives, amid the high finance and scores of thousands of titles, would have pleased him. And there is no more potent symbol of this than the expansive figure of George Weidenfeld, who next month celebrates both his 70th birthday and 40 years of his firm.
Keeping a substantial publishing house both flourishing and independent for 40 Years is no mean achievement. I write as an interested party: Weidenfeld have been my main publishers for nearly two decades. As a firm, they are not perfect. Which of them is? I score publishers according to ten criteria: (1) generosity over advances and terms; (2) quality of editing; (3) quality of Production, especially proof-reading, illus- trations, indexing, binding and jackets; (4) Pricing policy; (5) salesmanship; (6) over- seas rights and other subsidiary rights; (7) Skill in handling publicity; (8) long-term vision; (9) general honesty; (10) and, not least, friendliness to authors. No publisher,
in my experience, will score ten. But he ought not to be below six. Decent pub- lishers will rate seven or eight. I have never marked Weidenfeld below seven. But there is also an 11th quality, what consti- tutes the `x factor', and which I term enthusiasm. Now in its original Greek sense, enthousiasmos, 'being possessed by a god', it is by no means a desirable quality, and religious enthusiasts, who believe they have a direct line to the deity, have wreaked havoc, as Monsignor Ronald Knox's splendid book Enthusiasm (1950) makes clear. But in its more modern sense, 'rapturous intensity of feeling on behalf of a person, cause etc', 'passionate eagerness' (OED), it is a salient virtue in a publisher.
Both the publishers I have known well, Martin Secker and George Weidenfeld, have been enthusiasts to an unusual de- gree. Martin survived into his nineties and in his last years was quite blind. We lived in the same Bucks village and I used to walk down to his elegant Queen Anne house two or three times a week to read to him. He talked of the writers he had known, going back to his first list well before the Great War: Norman Douglas and James Elroy Flecker, the young Arthur Ransome and Monty Mackenzie's brilliant Sinister Street (1913), Arnold Bennett and Lord
Alfred Douglas, Wilfred Scawen Blunt and Maurice Baring. Some of the best books he published had actually been planned or written or finished in his house, for he delighted to get his authors down there. Though he tried to remain cool and de- tached, his enthusiasm for books and their writers glowed and smouldered beneath the surface, occasionally bursting through. For him books were living children, con- ceived in a union between author and publisher, a relationship often ending in stormy divorce but beginning in affection, to which the progeny, whether still-born or growing lustily over the years, bore wit- ness.
In his quite different style, George Weidenfeld reminds me of old Martin. He has lived in a wider world, of course, bringing to London the cosmopolitan café culture of pre-war central Europe and an astonishing range of reading in many lan- guages, to which the massed volumes which line the walls of his Chelsea home testify. He has always possessed, too, a political judgment which is both sharp and penetrating, and based on detailed, up-to- date information: he is the ideal partner for a quiet, relaxed geopolitical chat. He might have chosen to be David Ben-Gurion's chef du cabinet, and thus gone on to a prominent career in Israeli and interna- tional affairs. But when the moment of decision came, he opted for books, believ- ing, like Dr Johnson, that the ultimate glory of any country lies in its literature, in which the publisher's role is not merely utilitarian but at its best creative too.
To this role he had brought the priceless gift of enthusiasm, which he both com- municates and provokes. Ultra-sophi- sticated and worldly-wise he may be, but cynical, tired, epuise never. No publisher in our time has had so many ideas. They bubble and flow in a copious, inexhaustible stream. Some indeed are misconceived and soon abandoned; others are tested and found not to work. But there are many winners too, and the important thing is that the zest with which this continual proces- sing of ideas emerges is catching. George not only produces ideas, he exhorts, en- courages, incites and almost goads others into generating ideas too, and then falls on them with ravenous appetite. He will take the risk of authors' ideas as readily as his own, and thus makes them feel fertile and cherished, Writing is a dusty business, all things considered: lonely and often de- pressing, more likely to end in failure and neglect than in triumph. Most authors are doomed to live in the shadows rather than in the limelight. It is George's great gift that he radiates heat, light and energy: his enthusiasm makes the world of books glitter for his authors, so that they are encouraged to go on. He is the great impresario, the Diaghilev of publishing. I salute his undiminished vigour on his dou- ble anniversary. Long may he continue to flourish, flatter, animate and vivify.
Previous page
