Aunt Annie was now the majority shareholder in The Bodley Head, and although Uncle John’s nephew only owned, as yet, a handful of shares, he had the benefit of her support, and was eager to make his mark as a publishing Lane. He continued to make useful contacts through the firm, among them the novelist Pearl Binder, who was to become a friend for life, and G. B. Harrison, who had been commissioned to edit a small-format series of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists for the firm, and would later edit the thirty-seven volumes of the Penguin Shakespeare; but it was not until some nine months after Uncle John’s death that he took on a book that might, it was hoped, turn out to be a bestseller.
In the high summer of 1926, John Willis Dunbar, an editor at Odhams, got in touch with him about a book called The Whispering Gallery. The anonymous diaries of a retired diplomat, it was crammed with scandalous and revealing revelations about assorted politicians, tycoons and literary men, including Lenin, Mussolini, Kitchener, Churchill, the late Tsar, Henry James and Cecil Rhodes: it could hardly fail to be controversial, and, given the current appetite for memoirs, would almost certainly sell in vast quantities as well. The book had been put into shape by Hesketh Pearson, who was beginning to make his mark as a journalist and literary man; the American rights had been snapped up by the modish new imprint of Boni & Liveright, and The People had expressed keen interest in acquiring the serial rights. Dunbar would be happy to send a copy of the typescript to The Bodley Head: the only condition was that the diplomat’s anonymity must be preserved, and divulged to no one, not even within the publishing house. ‘The name on the manuscript is a fictitious one but the author will not have his identity disclosed. I happen to know that he is an ex-ambassador,’ Dunbar told Lane, adding that ‘in spots your people might consider it a bit risqué’, and that it might be wise to have it read for libel.
All this sounded highly promising, and almost certainly appealed to the mischievous and subversive side of Lane’s nature. Hesketh Pearson had a similar cast of mind, and although there is no evidence to support J. E. Morpurgo’s claim that the two men were drinking pals before they met over The Whispering Gallery, they must have been kindred spirits. A tall, burly, jovial countryman with florid cheeks, an iron jaw and a pipe in one hand, Pearson was fifteen years older than his prospective publisher. After running a car showroom in Brighton with his brother, he had decided to become an actor and joined Beerbohm Tree’s celebrated touring company in 1911; he had resumed his theatrical career after serving in Mesopotamia during the First World War, during the course of which a piece of shrapnel, became lodged in his skull but was now giving up his acting commitments in favour of the literary life. His first book had been published in 1921; he had written for various Odhams publications, and it was through them that he had met Mr Dunbar. To Dunbar, and none other, he had revealed that the diplomat Diarist’s name was Sir Rennell Rodd. ‘Who the dickens is Rodd?’ Mr Dunbar had asked him; Pearson assured him that he had met the mysterious Rodd for lunch, and that the Diarist insisted that he had ‘already published with other publishers perfectly respectable books of reminiscences, and he could not on any account allow his name to come out’.
At this stage in his career, Lane’s fellow-directors were still anxious to ‘give the boy every encouragement’, and they suggested that he should pay a visit to Pearson, then on holiday in Bognor with his wife Gladys. Although his new Triumph motor-bike broke down en route to Sussex, Lane met the Diarist’s amanuensis for a drink and a slight discussion’ in the Dog & Duck in Bury on 3 September 1926, and again in the Norfolk Arms Hotel in Arundel the following day Pearson told him that the Diarist had kept a diary since university; that he, Pearson, had known about the diaries for years, and had begged to be allowed to edit them into shape; that the Diarist had eventually agreed, and had given his blessing to Pearson’s compilation and editorial labours. Lane offered an advance of £250, but insisted that, ‘as an act of good faith, the firm will require the diarist’s name to be divulged in confidence to one director’. ‘If I can tell my co-directors that you have given me a name, that will be enough – provided I could satisfy myself the name was that of a man who was in my opinion in a position to have written the original diaries from which the book was written,’ he told Pearson. Pearson promised to ask Boni & Liveright to delay their publication – the book was already in proof in the States – and said that although the Diarist was away on the Continent, he would obtain his consent to The Bodley Head’s terms.
Back in the office, Lane was authorized to go ahead: he had read only about half the typescript, but although Carr-Gomme, as a former politician, expressed some reservations, his colleagues were all in favour of clinching the deal. Lane went back to the Dog & Duck on 10 September, bearing with him two copies of the contract. The Whispering Gallery, it declared, had been ‘adapted by the author from the original Diary with the full consent and approval of the writer of the said original Diary’; and whereas the standard contract at the time allowed the author a niggardly six free copies, Pearson insisted on six for himself and six for the Diarist. He had already warned Lane that the Diarist – better described, he said, as an ‘envoy extraordinary’ than an ‘ex-Ambassador’ – would not and could not indemnify the publishers against any libel actions; for Pearson himself to assume responsibility ‘rather puts me in the cart’, since he was far from expert in the book’s subject matter and could not, in any case, afford to fight a case. Lane told him that he could safely ‘assure the Diarist that under no circumstances should we call upon him and you to go into the box in the event of an action being brought’; The Bodley Head’s own lawyers seemed unworried, but Pearson readily toned down some of the Diarist’s wilder flights at their suggestion, and The Whispering Gallery nudged its way towards publication.
Publishers like nothing better than a book that gives off positive vibrations, suggestive of both profits and prestige, and Lane’s purchase was boding well. The Sunday Chronicle was now keen to serialize, but – to Pearson’s intense irritation – The Bodley Head’s directors rejected their offer on the grounds that it might damage sales of the book itself, but agreed to go ahead with post-publication serialization. Lane sent out letters to newspaper and literary editors, including Clement Shorter at the Daily Telegraph and the editors of the Daily Mail and the Times Literary Supplement, assuring them that this would be ‘one of the most talked about books of the autumn season’ and that ‘we can vouch for the authenticity of the volume as we know the Diarist personally’; by the time the book was published on 19 November, 4,480 from an initial printing of 5,000 were out in the shops, and a reprint had been ordered. The sales, already promising, looked set to soar when, on the very day of publication, The Whispering Gallery was denounced in the Daily Mail. A SCANDALOUS FAKE EXPOSED, ran the headline, followed by MONSTROUS ATTACKS ON PUBLIC MEN and REPUDIATIONS BY FIVE CABINET MINISTERS. Lord Rothermere, it seemed, had been incensed by the Diarist’s account of how his brother, the half-demented Lord Northcliffe, had, when crossed, stamped his feet on the floor and pounded the furniture; nor was so Conservative a paper likely to feel well-disposed to a took which seemed sympathetic to Lenin, who was depicted as a kindly character, while describing the Tsar as an ‘ill-meaning skunk’. Although Pearson warned Lane that the Diarist was gravely upset by the Mail’s assault – ‘I was starting to read when the Diarist rang me up in the most agitated manner. In fact he could hardly speak he was in such a fury’ – the publicity seemed all to the good.
But Rothermere was not alone. The Observer savaged the book as ‘a reeking compost of garbage’, its widely respected editor, J. L. Garvin, attacking the author as ‘an impostor and a cad’ who had come up with ‘an unscrupulous farrago’; and he was followed by The Times and the Lord Chancellor, Lord Birkenhead. Tempers began to fray, and nerves to crack, at The Bodley Head: Carr-Gomme was so angry with the youngest director that he refused to speak to him again. Pearson warned Lane that he might well be ‘sleuthed’ by the Press, that he should make a point of leaving the office by a back door, and that they should not be spotted in public together.
As controversy steadily mounted, the editor-in-chief of Allied Newspapers wrote to Basil Willett, who had been all in favour of publication, to ask whether Lane would be prepared to submit a list of questions to the Diarist so that their papers could answer criticism levelled against the book, and possibly interview the author as well. Would the elusive diplomat take legal action against those papers which had described his book as a fraud? How would he answer those statesmen and public figures who had hastened to deny the claims made about them? Winston Churchill had claimed that he was on the Western Front at the very moment when, according to the Diarist, he was dining with Mr Asquith in Downing Street, and had described his alleged conversations with the Prime Minister as ‘puerile in their ignorance’; Asquith, described by the Diarist as an ‘old woman in trousers’, had denied ever calling Lloyd George ‘David’; Viscount Cecil was insistent that Lord Balfour had never called him ‘Robert’, nor had he ever smoked a cigar. Seemingly unabashed, the diplomat issued a statement, via his amanuensis, in which he refused to give his name and declared that ‘I do not mind if I am believed or not’; Pearson issued another in which he said that it had always been understood that the Diarist’s anonymity must be preserved. If the book was a fabrication, ‘it is no fabrication of mine’: his role was that of an ‘intermediary and editor only’, and as the book’s editor he neither knew nor cared whether the Diarist was telling the truth; he had ‘accepted the work in good faith from the source whence it emanated, just as the publishers accepted it in good faith from myself’.
By now, Lane’s fellow-directors were in a state of panic, and they made it clear that it was up to him to sort things out. Pearson rang from ‘a pal’s flat’ to say that he had got another statement from the Diarist; Lane met his managing director after dinner, and together they went back to Vigo Street to await Pearson’s arrival. He eventually turned up at 11.30, looking rather flustered, and told them that he had had ‘an awful time with the Diarist’, and ‘the greatest trouble’ in extracting a handwritten statement, which he had then typed up at home. ‘He is very excited and it is difficult to keep him to the point. He says among other things that it is my fault that the book has got all this publicity, and that he did not want it,’ he told the two publishers. He seemed curiously coy about showing the statement to Willett and Lane, but was prepared to read out the Diarist’s replies to the questions posed by Allied Newspapers. Willett found him plausible enough: he felt ‘for the moment satisfied as to his genuineness and that the Daily Mail attack was unjustified’, though ‘we formed the opinion that there was a little more “write-up” and a little less “diary” than we had at first imagined’.
Willett’s optimism soon proved baseless; and his own position, and that of his colleagues, became a great deal more uncomfortable when the Daily Mail turned its attack on The Bodley Head. In a leader headed ‘A Disreputable Publisher’, the paper declared itself amazed that the publishers had not apologized to their readers. ‘They have lent themselves to a fraud on the public and have debased the name of their firm. It remains to be seen whether reputable authors will be willing to have their works published by a firm which is capable of such disgraceful conduct,’ the leader page declared. Stung into action, the directors held a board meeting on a Saturday at which Willett rang Pearson and told him to instruct the Diarist to withdraw his book, ‘otherwise we shall have to sue the Daily Mail and call [him] as a witness’. Pearson told Lane that he had arranged to meet the Diarist at his home in Kensington – but when Lane at last got round to looking up Sir Rennell Rodd in Who’s Who, he discovered that he lived in Cavendish Square. Whatever his home address, the Diarist was, Pearson reported, happy to have his book withdrawn; where possible, copies were taken back from the bookshops, and a planned reprint was cancelled.
Abandoning all hopes of a quiet weekend, the Bodley Head board met again on Sunday, two days after the Mail had unleashed its bombshell. Pearson, who had been chivvying Lane for £25 still owing on the advance, claiming that he had to pay over two-thirds of the proceeds to the Diarist, was summoned again to Vigo Street. He was told that he must provide firm evidence of the Diarist’s existence; he should write at once to the Diarist, and Lane should deliver the letter in person. That, Pearson insisted, was quite impossible: not only had he ‘sworn not to communicate with the Diarist by letter’, but he could neither deliver letters through a third party nor phone the Diarist in Lane’s presence. Somehow overlooking the alleged meeting in Kensington, he claimed that he had only ever met the Diarist in a club or a flat belonging to a third party; but he would be very happy to show Lane a cheque for the Diarist’s two-thirds share of the £225 already paid by The Bodley Head, drawn by Pearson in the Diarist’s favour and bearing his endorsement.
Ignoring Pearson’s caveats about the use of intermediaries, Willett told Pearson that ‘if you will not do any of these things, our Secretary will have to write to the man concerned, and deliver the letter in person’. ‘That, of course, would be much worse,’ Pearson replied. The ensuing silence was broken by Mr Crockett, the trade director, a sturdy Scot and former Bodley Head rep who had knocked down a picket who tried to stop him loading a van during the General Strike earlier that year. Crockett was the only man in the firm to have read the book in its entirety. ‘Well now, not to mince matters, is there a Diarist?’ he asked the embattled ghost-writer. ‘Of course there is,’Pearson shot back, sounding suitably indignant. Unabashed, Crockett then asked him whether he had written the book himself; this was fiercely denied. Lane then left the room to make a phone call; Pearson asked for a word in private with him, and joined him in the Chairman’s room. ‘This is a very unfortunate business. It’s come at the worst possible time, as Rodd’s daughter is being married this week,’ he told Lane. The two men rejoined the other directors, and Pearson told them that the Diarist might well have to start proceedings against The Bodley Head, in which case he would have to give evidence, and the name of the Diarist might be divulged: but ‘I should deny that I ever gave you the name.’ ‘Would you throw us over?’ Crockett asked him; to which Pearson replied, ‘Yes, I should be forced to do so.’ Tempers were frayed when they adjourned for lunch. Crockett, by now in the role of prosecuting counsel, asked Pearson to go home to Abbey Road and return bringing with him any correspondence with the Diarist, but when they resumed after lunch, Pearson told him that he could not comply with his request. ‘Do you mean that you are not able to find any document connecting you with the Diarist?’ Crockett asked him. No, he was told: ‘everything has been destroyed’. The board then turned on Lane and insisted that he should reveal the Diarist’s name.
Lane initially refused, but the following day, after consulting his solicitor, he revealed that the elusive Diarist was, in fact, Sir Rennell Rodd; he had just been to see him in Cavendish Square, and had ‘laid the facts before him’. Sir Rennell had denied any connection with The Whispering Gallery, Hesketh Pearson and The Bodley Head. By now in his late sixties, a product of Haileybury and Balliol and a former Ambassador to Rome, Sir Rennell was a highly respectable figure who had achieved a certain eminence as a literary man as well as a diplomat, and was planning to stand for Parliament at the next general election. He had won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford, and a collection of his poems, Ballads of the Fleet, had appeared in 1897: as a young man he had consorted with Burne-Jones, Whistler and Oscar Wilde, later to be the subject of Hesketh Pearson’s most popular biography, paperbacked by Penguin: Wilde had written a foreword to a collection of Rodd’s poems, but it was withdrawn by its recipient, who found it too effusive. A biography of the Prussian Crown Prince, written while Rodd was an attaché in Berlin, had given grave offence to its subject’s family, and since then he had devoted himself to studies of Ancient Greece while serving with Lord Cromer in Egypt, in Abyssinia, as the Ambassador in Rome and, more recently, as a delegate to the League of Nations. Had Lane taken the trouble to consult the reference books, he would have discovered that he had recently written his memoirs in three volumes; the last of these had appeared only the previous year, which made it all the more unlikely that he would have written The Whispering Gallery.
Before long word got out, and The Bodley Head received a further battering in the press. ‘Daily Mail Exposure Succeeds… Faked Book Withdrawn,’ trumpeted the Daily Mail. ‘The greatest literary scandal of recent times reached a dramatic climax last evening,’ it informed its readers, before going on to refer to ‘strong public indignation’ and ‘slanders upon public men’. The following day, it resumed the attack. The book was a ‘shameless forgery’ and Pearson ‘an impudent literary forger’: ‘the next step in the sordid affair lies with the Public Prosecutor’. Lord Birkenhead let fly another blast – ‘The fate of The Whispering Gallery will I hope warn garbage manufacturers and their publishers that they cannot with impunity slander the dead and insult the living’ – while Sir Rennell, who had already made clear his position through a letter to The Times, wrily observed that ‘Perhaps the unkindest cut of all is that the author of the memoirs is said to have used such abominable English.’
Basil Willett, exerting himself at last, stopped the most recent cheque issued to Pearson, and strove to appease his assailants. Pearson claimed that The Bodley Head’s directors hurried round to the Mail in search of absolution, and that ‘under the influence of champagne, their tongues were loosened’. They told the paper that although Pearson had ‘appeared to be a reputable literary man, whose books had been issued by other well-known firms’, they now realized that they had been the victims of a hoax; and, far from accepting collective responsibility, they tried to pass all the blame on to the hapless Lane. Willett wrote abject letters to all the national papers, including the Daily Mail, in which he denounced ‘our junior director’ for having given newspaper editors and others his personal guarantee of its authenticity without consulting the other board members. He wrote on similar lines to Rodd’s solicitors, who had asked how Lane could possibly have vouched for the authenticity of the diary on the grounds that ‘we know the Diarist personally’ when he had only recently met Sir Rennell for the first time: conveniently forgetting his own earlier backing for the book, Willett assured Sir Rennell’s solicitor that it had indeed been taken on by ‘the youngest partner in the firm in the course of business’, and that it ‘did not come to the knowledge of the other Directors until it was too late’. To Sir Rennell he expressed his ‘deep regret that your name should have been dragged into this unfortunate business’, and assured him that ‘we are taking steps to bring to justice the miscreant who has made use of your name in this disgraceful way’.
The miscreant, as it happened, was out of London when this second storm broke, appearing in a play in Cardiff. The theatre was besieged by reporters; Pearson made his escape via the nearest pub, and from there he headed to the railway station and the London train, but was recognized by reporters and had to lock himself in he train’s lavatory for the entire journey to Paddington. His house an Abbey Road was hemmed in by journalists, and a warrant for his arrest was lying on the hall table: his publishers had decided to sue him on the grounds of obtaining money from them under false pretences. He was eventually arrested in his solicitor’s offices by Detective Inspector John Howell, and appeared before the Great Marlborough Street magistrates on 26 November, charged with having unlawfully obtained ‘from one Allen Lane Williams Lane a certain valuable security to wit a banker’s order for the payment of £225 by false pretences and with intent to defraud’. He was committed for trial at the London Sessions on 26 January 1927, and his brother-in-law, Colonel ‘Dane’ Hamlett, paid his bail of £1,000.
Although Sir Patrick Hastings, the most eminent barrister of the day and a keen theatre-goer, had agreed to act in Pearson’s defence, he felt it to be a hopeless case, and urged Pearson to plead guilty. Bernard Shaw and Hugh Kingsmill were of similar mind. ‘I am afraid poor old Hesketh Pearson will get it in the neck. He is fighting the case instead of caving in. I am very sorry for the poor old boy,’ kingsmill wrote to a friend, while Shaw suggested that Pearson should ask the court ‘for no more consideration than to be treated as a fool rather than a scoundrel’, and found it hard to believe that ‘it was anything worse than the fictitious memoirs and travels that have often been published as genuine’. But Pearson, who had won the Military Cross in Mesopotamia, was determined to fight his corner. ‘Pat [Hastings] gravely warned me to go home and talk matters over with my wife… I answered that if the prospect was from three to six years I would still refuse to confess that I had wronged a pack of cads, cowards and humbugs like the Lanes’ – which seemed a little hard on the Lanes en bloc, given that Uncle John was dead and Allen was, as yet, the only other member of the family to be employed by the firm. Only the notorious lecher and arch-gossip Frank Harris – whose unexpected appearance in Vigo Street had once caused Uncle John to turn ashen with apprehension – insisted that Pearson should stick to his guns. ‘Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction,’ the moustachioed old rogue told Pearson from his bolt-hole in Nice. ‘Say that a well-known literary man told you so. It will make the court laugh.’
Harris’s words were all too prophetic: the court would have plenty to laugh at, both in the humiliation of The Bodley Head’s directors, and the bizarre behaviour of the defendant. According to the Daily Mail, which took a keen interest in the proceedings, ‘the well of the court and the gallery were filled, many of the public being women’: no doubt they were both shocked and titillated, since Hastings decided that, in this apparently hopeless case, attack was the best form of defence, and that he would do his best to discredit the plaintiffs by portraying them as unabashed pornographers. He described, luridly and in unwholesome detail, the illustrated erotica published by the firm, laying special emphasis on Ovid’s Amores, Balzac’s Contes Drolatiques and Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, Robert Graves’s version of which would, years later, be among Lane’s proudest achievements on the Penguin Classics list. Lane, struggling to keep his end up, would not admit that the Ovid was obscene, but refused to read an extract to the court; Hastings suggested that no ‘decent woman’ could bear to look at the illustrations by the Belgian Jean de Bosschère, and that one of those featured in The Golden Ass was almost certainly ‘the foulest thing that any judge in any court has looked at’. The judge, helpfully enough, played his part to perfection: Pearson later told Kingsmill how he ‘had to look at the drawings through the fingers of the hand that covered his face in horror’, and how ‘the jury (not the ladies) inspected these pictures with a care that led me to believe that their interest in them was not wholly legal. However, their faces showed a becoming sense of repugnance…’ Hastings, who had evidently done his homework, then produced a modern novel published by The Bodley Head: ‘Can you find a single page in that which is not utterly foul?’ he wondered. After it was all over, Pearson ridiculed the firm’s directors as so many ‘dirty little rats’ who had tried to send him to prison but ‘daren’t look their own publications in the face’, and described how the wretched Willett, with his drooping moustache and pincenez on the end of his nose, ‘went greyer and greyer as he stood in that box; he aged ten years in as many minutes, and he spent the remainder of the day with his head buried in his hands’.
Lane’s appearance in the witness-box was equally unimpressive. He was reproached for the careless way in which he appeared to have looked up Sir Rennell’s entry in Who’s Who, and for admitting that, until trouble loomed, he had only read about half of The Whispering Gallery. Far from quizzing Pearson about his part in the book, he admitted that ‘I did not say “Now! How much of this work is yours?”’: on the other hand, ‘I didn’t say “It doesn’t matter a bit. He won’t be asked to repudiate it because no one will ever know.”’ Nor, at his first meeting with Pearson, had he promised on his ‘solemn word of honour’ not to reveal the Diarist’s name, though ‘I probably said something to that effect at a later interview.’ Recalled to give further evidence the following day, he denied having said that he’d try to forget the Diarist’s name, or that Pearson had replied, ‘Well in that case any name would do.’ He denied having said, ‘We want to publish the book. The name is a formality,’ or that he had told Pearson that at least two of his fellow-directors thought the book a hoax fairly early in the proceedings; nor would he agree that Pearson had told him that ‘of course you realize my book is going to cause trouble’, to which he had replied that ‘If a firm doesn’t take risks it must put up its shutters,’ and that he hoped the book would ‘be attacked all over the place’. He admitted that the firm had initially welcomed the Daily Mail’s onslaught as valuable publicity, on the strength of which they had hoped to sell some 10,000 copies; and that, as far as Pearson was concerned, ‘the whole of the time I was doing this business with the defendant I entirely and implicitly trusted him’.
After such directorial evasions, Pearson must have seemed a wonderfully frank and refreshing witness. When asked why he had used Sir Rennell’s name, he admitted that he had done so ‘because I could not think of anyone less likely to have written the book’, and his words were greeted with ‘laughter in court’. When Sir Henry Curtis Bennett, the prosecuting counsel, tried to discomfit him by asking him why he had continued to lie about the non-existent Diarist, he thought this must have been ‘because I was mad’. After deliberating his case for twenty minutes, the jury returned a verdict of ‘not guilty’. Hastings told Pearson that ‘you got yourself off by your evidence in the witness-box’, and in the pub afterwards a member of the jury told him how his candour had won them round.
But the litigation was not yet over: Pearson decided that he, in turn, would take out an action against The Bodley Head, claiming damages for the ‘pain and suffering’ caused him by their prosecution. The publisher’s solicitors recommended that they should settle for the original advance of £250, and informed Pearson’s lawyers that the firm would not ‘consent to pay a farthing to your client in respect of his pain and suffering or expense, all of which he brought entirely upon himself. Once again, words proved stronger than deeds: Pearson had asked for £250 plus £500 for the copyright in the book, and The Bodley Head finally agreed to pay over to him £416 8s. id. – the entire profit from sales before the book was withdrawn – much of which went on his defence costs. Nor had the firm’s reputation been enhanced by the whole affair: Pearson told Kingsmill that the publishers lacked ‘the spunk of a boiled rabbit’, and the literary agent David Higham, then starting out on his career, remembered how they became known as ‘John Lane The Badly Had’. Certainly their behaviour seems to have been greedy, craven and incompetent. Long before The Whispering Gallery came their way, The Bodley Head’s reader had found Pearson’s Parallel Lives ‘ clever and alert, but fundamentally unsatisfying’ and had suggested that ‘the manuscript should be examined with exceeding care, both for libels and faults of taste’. Pearson, who had polished his technique by writing political profiles for John Bull, readily admitted to taking a cavalier approach to the business of biography. ‘No artist worth his salt is concerned with accuracy in detail if it doesn’t suit his purpose… In order to achieve essential truth one often has to sacrifice the essential facts,’ he once declared. Michael Holroyd has suggested that Pearson’s Modern Men and Manners, replete with exaggerated and often libellous tales of theatrical folk, may have been a dummy-run for The Whispering Gallery, since when he had also published in John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi a collection of entirely imaginary conversations between Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton which were (and still are) widely regarded as authentic. He had read about Sir Rennell Rodd in TP’s Weekly, and had written the book simply to make some money; it was, he happily admitted, ‘an act of insanity’, exacerbated by the lump of shrapnel in his head, and ‘the work of an unbalanced person who, when he realized what he had done, acted like a lunatic’. To Pearson at least, ‘it must have been obvious to the intelligent reader that conversations on that level of familiarity and comical repartee can never have taken place’; he was amazed at his publisher’s readiness to be taken in, and ‘had I been in possession of my wits I would have told them squarely that I had written the book, and that they could no more have believed it to be the work of a real diplomat than of a real dinosaur’. No publisher would look at Pearson’s work for the next three years, after which he embarked on a successful career as an altogether more reliable biographer. Sir Rennell went on to become the first Baron Rennell, and died in 1941: his son, Peter Rodd, was married to Nancy Mitford, later to become a staple of the Penguin fiction list.
Given Lane’s own mischievous cast of mind, his readiness to publish Pearson’s biographies in Penguin and his refusal to bear a grudge despite the harsh things said about his family, it’s hard to repress a suspicion that he may well have known that the whole thing was a hoax from the very beginning, and hoped to get away with it. Pearson himself had warned Lane that ‘Lord Beaverbrook, you remember, thought it “too good to be true’”; and not long before his death, Lane told a retired army officer who had enquired about the case that ‘there is no question that Hesketh Pearson did write the book himself, and I must say that despite the fact that the book got us into a great deal of hot water, I always had a high regard for him’. Lane’s feelings towards his treacherous fellow-directors were a good deal less charitable, and from now on they regarded his every move with grave suspicion.
But the balance of power was about to change. Annie Lane had fallen ill during the trial, and died within weeks of its end: she left almost everything she had to the three Lane brothers and Nora, but whereas Dick and John inherited money, Allen was left her majority shareholding in The Bodley Head – a mixed blessing, since although it gave him control of Uncle John’s publishing house, the firm never declared a dividend thereafter, and his shares were worthless when the business went into liquidation. Three months later, Basil Willett departed to work for a paper merchant, and Lane was left in charge.