The Life and Times of Allen Lane

Lehmann’s hopes of monthly publication were soon in doubt as paper shortages and the bombing and disruption of printers and binders began to take effect. ‘It is only fair to tell you that what I have in mind at the moment is making Penguin New Writing a quarterly publication in place of the present monthly basis,’ Lane told him only two months after the magazine had been launched. Lehmann was understandably upset. ‘I was rather surprised to find you sounding a note of discouragement about PNW, considering how short a while ago you spoke of it with enthusiasm and confidence,’ he replied. Making it a quarterly would be ‘a real disaster for both of us. To abandon a monthly after only six months must appear to the public as a real admission of failure.’ A brief respite was offered by Bill Williams, who spoke to Lane and then wrote to say that ‘it would be absurd to alter things at this stage. Lane’s decision, which I think will be final, was to continue on the monthly basis for at least twelve months and then perhaps reconsider… He is perfectly satisfied with PNW, both from the prestige and financial points of view: his only uncertainty was whether he could reasonably spare so much paper for one enterprise.’

Despite a letter from Lane in June 1941 in which he told Lehmann that a friend who spent time ‘among dockside workers tells me she hears New Writing being spoken of constantly in terms of the highest praise’ – a pleasing notion, though more reminiscent of Soviet propaganda than of everyday life in Liverpool or Rotherhithe – Lane was forced to renege on his promises; and, as was so often the case, he did his best to avert his gaze, or leave it to others to break the bad news. ‘I hope you won’t think me disagreeable if I say that I find it increasingly hard to carry out my job as editor of Penguin New Writing while I am kept so completely in the dark about the publication date each month,’ Lehmann protested, while at the same time urging Lane to buy the rights in F. M. Mayor’s melancholy masterpiece The Rector’s Daughter, recently published by the Hogarth Press. In December that year, by which time the paper quota had been reduced from 42 per cent to 37.5 per cent, Lane decreed that from now on the magazine would be a quarterly Lehmann was shocked by Lane’s letter, which ‘seemed entirely in contradiction to everything you have said to me’. ‘Why don’t we have lunch together some time and talk about it a little less hurriedly?’ he suggested, almost certainly in vain. But the news was not all bad. Lane had promised that he would contemplate increasing the number of pages, and this he now honoured; he also agreed to include a section of black-and-white photogravure illustrations, devoted for the most part to ballet and theatre productions and the work of neo-romantic artists like Graham Sutherland, John Piper, John Craxton, Keith Vaughan, Michael Ayrton and Leonard Rosoman, and Bob Maynard’s rather amateurish lettering jackets were replaced by stylish John Minton woodcuts, with typography to match. Colour illustrations followed in 1945, and better paper was made available; a long-postponed meeting between the two men left Lehmann ‘impressed by your keenness to make Penguin New Writing the literary and artistic magazine for this country, and the cultural ambassador for abroad’. Lane was equally reassuring when, in 1945, Tom Hopkinson suggested that American magazines, with their large format and colour illustrations, represented the way forward. Lehmann was half-persuaded by his arguments, but Lane seemed unconvinced: American magazines concentrated far too much on ‘flashy presentation’, and, as far as PNW was concerned, ‘I think we should make up our own minds on what meets with our approval and stick to it, as I think our standards are sufficiently high to make this a good criterion.’

Brave words indeed; but as the magazine’s circulation dropped away from its peak of 100,000 copies in 1945 to 80,000 by 1947, 40,000 by 1949 and 25,000 each for the last two issues, it became harder to match deeds with rhetoric. ‘I liked a great deal of what was in New Writing, and I have to a certain extent basked in reflected glory,’ Lane wrote. ‘Hard facts, however, must have their place in this unholy business of publishing, and with the many difficulties which I see ahead, I think it is fairer to all concerned to clear our minds of delusions and face these facts now.’ In November 1946 Lehmann reluctantly agreed to quarterly publication, but in January 1947 he was told that PNW would now be appearing three times a year; in between, convinced that the end was imminent, he wrote to Lane lamenting the demise of ‘a venture that looked as if it was going to change the whole nature of literary periodical publications, and was recognized as a big cultural bulwark in an age when the breakers are dashing so violently against the walls’. ‘I do hope you will be able to let me have a word about this new turn in Dr Lane’s view of the patient, my little child,’ an unexpectedly saccharine Lehmann told Frostie. ‘His strength is very low, and he keeps on asking his Daddy in a faint voice whether it wouldn’t be better to send for another doctor. Naturally his Daddy is unwilling to do so, as long as the old family practitioner has a prescription or two up his sleeve.’ Such glutinous whimsicality was unavailing. The length of the magazine was reduced to 128 pages in 1949, and Lehmann was told that the most he could hope for was twice-yearly publication. He was, he told Lane, already losing money by editing the magazine, in that it left little time for his own writing and he had to pay his assistant, Barbara Cooper; and now he would be even worse off. ‘I am devoted to the little magazine, with its romantic wartime fortunes, but I am not so well off that I can face with equanimity supporting my (and your) child out of my own pocket,’ he told Lane. Cyril Connolly’s Horizon was about to go under – he had recently offered it to Lehmann ‘at a reduced price’ over a bottle of champagne at the Athenaeum – and ‘it seems particularly wrong when Horizon is collapsing that a literary magazine, one of the very few left, still badly needed, with a circulation four or five times Horizon’s, should follow it’. But nothing could postpone the evil moment, and Penguin New Writing followed Horizon to the grave in the autumn of 1950, after the publication of the fortieth issue. When Frostie wrote to ask for his comments on the end of PNW for a forthcoming issue of Penguins Progress, Lane scribbled on the bottom of her letter that he had nothing to say ‘except tears, idle tears’. ‘It is the worst loss so far, and for the greatest number of people,’ Stephen Spender declared. However unappealing in person, Lehmann had been an incomparable editor, and PNW remains one of the great literary magazines, along with Horizon, Encounter and Alan Ross’s London Magazine, founded by Lehmann in 1954; and although, in the end, he had to play the killjoy role of the money-minded proprietor, Lane deserves huge credit for supporting it for as long as he did.

Both men had much to be proud of in Penguin New Writing, but although book publishers have often been tempted into magazine publishing, gratified by the speed of production and a more immediate impact on the literary, cultural and political scene, books and magazines have such different gestation periods and are sold in such different ways that the experiment seldom works. Penguin Specials, written to supplement and expand upon the news, and published within weeks rather than months, may have given Lane a taste for magazine publishing which it took time to expel from his system. Penguin New Writing was the most durable and distinguished runner in his stable, but other wartime and post-war contestants were published, albeit – to the frustration of their editors – in a sporadic and seemingly ad hoc manner.

The brainchild of the ubiquitous Moura Budberg, the former mistress of H. G. Wells and Maxim Gorky, Russian Review mirrored changing attitudes towards the Soviet Union as the Cold War replaced wartime enthusiasm for kindly ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin. In October 1944, as the Russian army was advancing into Germany, Lane, Frostie, Bill Williams, Count Benckendorff and Baroness Budberg met and agreed to publish at least three issues of the magazine. The second issue contained a long piece about Polish prison camps; though recently returned from the Nuremberg Trials, Lane felt that ‘everybody has had enough of this “death camp” business, and the sooner we all block it out of our minds, the better for everybody’. By early 1946, Lane was losing heart. He had, he confessed to the Count, embarked on the magazine on a ‘somewhat idealistic basis’, but sales were ‘fairly catastrophic’, with 4,000 of the 25,000 copies of the most recent issue winging their way back from the shops. Tempers flared – Bill Williams reporting that ‘the Baroness stormed in on me yesterday’ – and the Count was replaced by the journalist Edward Crankshaw. But to no avail: at the end of 1947 Lane told Crankshaw that they had come to the end of the road, for ‘with the present feeling regarding Russia there really was no alternative’.

Post-war Penguin magazines included the Penguin Film Review, edited by Roger Manvell, which boasted Michael Balcon, Basil Wright, Anthony Asquith and Michael Powell among its contributors but lacked both advertising and bookshop support, and was closed down after nine issues despite regular sales of 25,000 per issue; the Penguin Music Magazine, published sporadically between 1946 and 1949, and featuring work by Neville Cardus and John Barbirolli; and the quarterly Penguin Science News, suggested by C. H. Waddington of the Tots and Quots at a time when few national newspapers had science correspondents, which was published between 1946 and 1960 but was eventually rendered redundant by the rise of the New Scientist and Scientific American. But whereas they all adhered to the conventional Penguin book format, Transatlantic represented a very different foray into magazine publishing: it looked far more like a slightly smaller version of New Yorker or the short-lived Night and Day, and had the inestimable advantage of appearing on a regular monthly basis between 1943 and 1946. Designed to explain our new American allies to the British public, it carried advertisements, was enlivened by a four-colour New Yorker-style jacket, changed for every issue, and was initially edited by the economist Geoffrey Crowther, who had a lifelong interest in Anglo-American relations and had, since 1938, been the editor of The Economist. The first issue carried pieces by D. W. Brogan, William Saroyan and Paul Gallico, and later contributors included Alistair Cooke, John dos Passos and the American writer Janet Flanner.

Full-colour jackets of the kind flaunted by Transatlantic would prove a bone of contention on both sides of the Atlantic in the years to come, but in one area of the Penguin empire at least they were never seen as a problem. The youngest brother of the painter Dora Carrington, Noël Carrington was, like Lehmann, a veteran of the Bloomsbury world; but whereas Lehmann, with his ice-blue eyes and petulant manner, was a daunting figure – so much so that he was sometimes likened, unkindly, to an SS officer – Carrington was a good deal more amiable and easy-going. His sister thought him ‘almost as beautiful as Rupert Brooke’, though she worried that he was ‘so governed by conventions and accepts the “public school” opinions’. He had rowed for Christ Church, and worked for OUP in India; Kathleen Hale, best remembered for Orlando the Marmalade Cat, recalled him as ‘a fine figure of a man, tall and distinguished. He had lost the use of his right arm in the 1914 war. He had always lived in the country and dressed accordingly in a rather “arty” style, in faded and scrupulously clean blue shirts, corduroys washed until they were pastel shades, brightly coloured socks, and very shabby brown walking shoes or even shabbier check bedroom slippers. I was never to see him in a collar and tie or city suit, whatever the occasion.’

Noël Carrington would have worn a tie, and probably a suit as well, when he and Lane first met, at that meeting of the Double Crown Club at which John Holroyd-Reece had galloped to Penguin’s defence. He was then, among other duties, the Chairman of the Design and Industries Association – he had a keen interest in practical design, and years later pressed for the use of lower-case lettering on motorway signs – and when the meeting broke up Lane asked him if he’d like to write a Pelican Special on the subject. He declined, recommending Anthony Bertram instead, but the connection had been made. When not pondering the shape of things to come, Carrington worked on the book publishing side of Country Life; he was present when Orlando the Marmalade Cat was born, and published the celebrated High Street, with a text by J. M. Richards and illustrations by Eric Ravilious.

With three children of his own to educate – one of whom had had polio and had to be taught at home – Carrington found himself brooding on children’s books of the informational variety. Eager to stimulate their interest in natural history and the man-made world around them, and to use illustrators rather than photographers, he was already much taken with the French Père Castor series of illustrated children’s books when Pearl Binder drew his attention to an inexpensive and brightly coloured series of Russian children’s books produced by auto-lithography. Whereas conventional colour printing involved photographing a painter’s artwork three or four times through different filters, auto-lithography was cheaper and, ideally, produced a finished object far closer to the artist’s original, in that the artist drew his own colour separations directly on to the stone or lithographic plate, so cutting out the expense of camera work and the possible distortions of mechanical separation. Days before Lane set out on his pre-war tour of Aden, India and Ceylon, he had lunch with Carrington, who suggested a series of cheap children’s books, rather along the lines of How Aeroplanes Fly, which he had just published at Country Life. Lane told him in less than a minute that he liked the idea, suggested that Carrington should do some costings to find out how many they would need to print in order to publish at 6d., and set off on his travels. Carrington continued his investigations into auto-lithography with the printer Geoffrey Smith of W. S. Cowell in Ipswich, but heard no more from Penguin until, early in 1940, Lane rang to say that the war had made such books more necessary than ever, and that he was keen to press ahead. Newnes, the new owners of Country Life, told Carrington that ‘There’s no money in sixpennies’ and, greatly relieved, he felt free to accept Lane’s offer: like Lehmann and the other outside editors employed by Penguin, Carrington was never a member of staff, and for much of the war he worked part-time for John Murray in Albemarle Street.

Landscape in format, and sporting a puffin drawn by Bob Maynard, the first Puffin Picture Books were published later that same year. The first three titles – The War on Land, The War at Sea and The War in the Air – had a topical edge, and in due course David Garnett described The Battle of Britain, but thereafter the series concentrated, for the most part, on natural history and arts and crafts. Subjects surveyed included insects, wild flowers, stamps and fireworks; among the artists commissioned for the series were Edward Bawden, Enid Marx and C. F. Tunnicliffe. Bernard Venables explained the mysteries of Fish and Fishing, E. G. Boulenger, the Curator of the Aquarium at the London Zoo, revealed The Wonders of Sea Life, Harold Curwen of the Curwen Press pronounced on Printing, and Gordon Russell, the pioneer of modernist furniture design and one of those responsble for wartime Utility furniture, told The Story of Furniture.

Once a fortnight Carrington visited Lane at Harmondsworth, Silverbeck or, since his own farm in Hampshire was no distance away, Priory Farm. Far from being a blasé tycoon, Lane displayed all the childlike interest and enthusiasm which, it was hoped, the series would arouse in its readers. According to Carrington, he loved to escape from the office, playing truant ‘like a schoolboy ready to take the day off’; he liked to discuss artists’ work with them, making them feel that, however modest the rewards, it was a privilege and a pleasure to work for Penguin. He insisted on the books being as accurate as possible, drawing on his own expertise when it came to the cattle and farm buildings displayed in On the Farm: when, in 1946, James Gardner revised his illustrations, both Allen and Dick, by now more experienced farmers, had forceful views on the matter, Allen finding his drawing of a milking machine ‘rather confused’, while Dick noted that ‘the plough is an old-fashioned type without tripping gear’. Dick was asked for his views on About a Motor Car, and produced a detailed critique of sodium valves, gudgeon pins and cylinder heads, while Baroness Budberg pointed out, apropos Waterways of the World, that the Rhine ran through four countries rather than three. When Carrington showed Lane Paxton Chadwick’s watercolours for Wild Flowers, he displayed all the enthusiasm of an old-fashioned schoolboy. ‘But this is absolutely tops!’ he cried. ‘Who is this chap? Of course we must do it.’ Carrington pointed out that Chadwick insisted on having colour on every page rather than alternate openings, that he wanted an extra colour, grey, to be used for the shadows, and that his book should not be more expensive than others in the series. The production manager had declared this to be impossible. ‘Nonsense,’ Lane said. ‘Nothing is too good for Penguins. We will double the print to bring the cost down. Bring this chap along to our next meeting. I want to see him!’ Lane must have prevailed over the doubters, since Chadwick went on to produce Wild Animals in Britain and Pond Life. Nor would Lane be dictated to by the sales department: he valued their views, and relished their support, but saw them, like accountants, as servants of the firm who should never be allowed to dictate policy or decide what should or should not be published. When booksellers were consulted about what eventually became one of the most successful of all Puffin Picture Books, the anatomically explicit The Human Body, they were both shocked and gravely pessimistic: mild enough by modern standards, it took ten years to find its way into print, and sold in huge quantities.

Published under Carrington’s aegis, Kathleen Hale’s Orlando’s Evening Out was the first ‘fictional’ Puffin Picture Book, and it was not long before Penguin started to publish full-length children’s books under the Puffin imprint. Eleanor Graham, its originator, was a veteran of the children’s book world. Her first children’s book had been published in 1925; two years later she started work in the children’s book department of Bumpus, the legendary Oxford Street bookshop, and she began to review children’s books for the Sunday Times in 1934. In the early days of Penguins, Lane talked to her about starting a children’s list, and they saw eye to eye about the kind of list they wanted. Neither was interested in merely reprinting out of copyright classics; both believed that a Penguin children’s list should, like its adult equivalent, publish the very best work that was then being written, the classics of the future; both were swayed by childhood memories of W. T. Stead’s Books for the Bairns. Eleanor Graham was working at the Board of Trade when the war broke out, and in the autumn of 1940, at the height of the Blitz, Lane rang her to say that he was now ready to start a Puffin list, and invited her down to Harmondsworth. She arrived at Hounslow West station in the middle of an air-raid, was told by the ticket collector that someone from Penguin was waiting for her in the pub opposite, and was driven to Silverbeck under a hail of flak. German bombers were as nothing to the opposition of the children’s book world. Librarians, teachers and the hardback publishers were united in their hostility to the very notion of paperbacks for children; even Jonathan Cape was adamant in his refusal to sub-lease the rights in Swallows and Amazons and the other Arthur Ransome titles, or the Dr Dolittle books. Unfazed by the opposition, Lane and Eleanor Graham pressed ahead. The first batch of Puffin Story Books was published in 1941, and included Barbara Euphan Todd’s Worzel Gummidge; another steady seller, Eve Garnett’s The Family from One End Street, was among those published in the following year. The early Puffins were, Eleanor Graham remembered, ‘thin little books, not at all impressive, with red and white covers and an ad for Kiltie shoes on the back’; but however modest their earliest manifestations, they pioneered a reading revolution, and although they came to be associated, above all, with the glamorous and flamboyant figure of Kaye Webb, it was Eleanor Graham who set the wheels in motion.

Like the Radio Times, Lilliput, Shell, London Transport and innumerable advertisements for cigarettes, stout and petrol, Puffins and Puffin Picture Books provided invaluable outlets for British artists and illustrators; and the British genius for painting, so long decried and undervalued, was celebrated in a new Penguin series, published at a time when art-lovers were cut off from the Continent and better disposed than usual to home-grown products. ‘For some time I have been interested in trying to do the same sort of work for the modern British artist as we have been doing for their opposite numbers, the authors,’ Lane wrote to Kenneth Clark in June 1942. As Chairman of the War Artists Advisory Committee, responsible for commissioning painters to cover every aspect of the war, and Controller of Home Publicity at the Ministry of Information, Clark was already thinking along similar lines: proclaiming the virtues of British artists helped boost morale on the home front and the image of Britain overseas, and coincided with a yearning, part patriotic and part escapist, for the music of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, for poets and writers who celebrated the English countryside and a lost Arcadia of country houses and Trollopian cathedral closes.

Pre-war art books had been long, cumbrous affairs, horribly expensive and designed for the art historian and not the lay reader: what Lane had in mind was a paperback series, in landscape format, priced at half-a-crown each and carrying an introduction by a well-known writer; and whereas OUP had earlier published a series of booklets at a shilling each, carrying a mere eight pages of monochrome illustrations, his would be illustrated half in colour and half in black-and-white. Clark had earlier suggested, through Bill Williams, that the ‘Art for the People’ scheme should be converted into book form, and he happily rose to Lane’s bait. ‘I was very much excited by your proposal of doing Penguin monographs on painters, and I could not help thinking how I would enjoy editing the series myself,’ he told Lane – though ‘you may feel I could not give enough time to it, and you would rather have an editor whom you could hustle’. In the event, most of the hard work was done by Eunice Frost, heavily laden as she was with editing Pelican originals, ploughing through new novels and soothing John Lehmann’s brow: her health was already being undermined by overwork, so much so that Bill Williams told her to take some rest ‘instead of carrying Penguin on your resolute and overburdened shoulders – take it easy, Frostie my love, or I’ll beat hell out of you…’ It was up to her to chivvy the authors, negotiate with the painters, deal with the owners of the paintings, keep tabs on the pictures themselves – Clark allowed her to use the National Gallery to store paintings in transit between owners and blockmakers – and nudge the books into print. Each artist was paid £100, and was expected to provide Lane himself with a painting, so enabling him to build up a superb collection of contemporary British art: introducers were paid £50, and Clark himself received £50 for each new title commissioned. This was far too much, he protested. ‘The greater part of the work has been done by Miss Frost,’ he told Lane, and he had done little more than suggest artists and writers, choose the pictures and check the proofs. More than once he asked to have his name removed from the series. A year or two later Lane told Bernhard Baer, the editor of the short-lived series of Penguin Prints, that ‘the firm is now so well known for the quality of its productions that anonymity of the editors, as is done with the correspondents of The Times, not only gives strength to the enterprise, but if anything enhances the value of the particular editor or correspondent’: but rules are made to be broken, Clark’s name carried more weight than most, and Lane had no intention of losing it.

The new series was called Penguin Modern Painters: ‘If there are people who are put off by this title because they think Penguin is publishing a series of books on house painters, they would probably be too simple-minded for our books anyway,’ Clark told Frostie, who was briefly worried by the title. The opening number, Geoffrey Grigson introducing a selection of Henry Moore’s work, was published in April 1944. Nineteen titles would be published in the series over the next fifteen years, including John Betjeman on John Piper, Raymond Mortimer on Duncan Grant, Herbert Read on Paul Nash, Philip Hendy on Matthew Smith, Edward Sackville-West on Graham Sutherland, J. M. Richards on Edward Bawden, Clive Bell on Victor Pasmore, John Rothenstein on Edward Burra, and Eric Newton on Stanley Spencer. Not everything ran smoothly: Clark was not keen to include abstract artists, doing battle with Herbert Read about the inclusion of Ben Nicholson, and reluctantly giving way, while R. B. Fishenden, the great authority on colour printing, was baffled by modern art of any kind. Clark opposed the decision to include Klee and Braque, and used this as an excuse to withdraw from the series. ‘The old scheme seemed to me valuable because it helped people to understand painters whose work they could buy, and it thereby helped the painters. I remember that this was in Allen Lane’s mind when he first proposed it,’ he told Frostie. (Lane’s attitude may well have reflected the influence of Lettice, who liked to support young and indigent writers and painters, and made a point of only buying works by artists who were alive and needed the money.) Clark felt that painters like Braque were already well known and widely admired, and ‘whether there is really any point in introducing the people of South Shields, at this late hour, to Matisse and Picasso, I am far from certain’. Competition to Penguin Modern Painters soon manifested itself in the form of Kurt Maschler’s Faber Gallery and, in due course, the co-editions pioneered by Walter Neurath at Thames & Hudson and Bela Horovitz at Phaidon; but the series had served to introduce the work of its subjects to an entire generation, and survived, intermittently, into the 1960s. ‘They are an extraordinary example of what can be done with a little courage, enterprise and good will,’ Kenneth Clark told Lane after four titles had appeared, and after he resigned from the editorship in 1946 he wrote to say that it had done ‘a great service to modern painting’. Like Penguin New Writing, Penguin Modern Painters was a memorable manifestation of the idealism and ingenuity of Penguin at war.

9. Branching Out