Lane’s home life, like that of the office, was harmonious on the surface but permeated by a vague sense of unease and impending change; and although he seemed cool and in control, beyond the reach of other people, tribulations took their toll. He suffered a ‘crack-up’ after old Mr Williams Lane died in early 1950, Frostie reporting him as ‘suffering very much from an and-climax after his father’s death and the accumulation of unworked-off tension’. He took himself off to recuperate in the South of France. ‘I know myself better than most people think I do,’ he told Tanya Kent: he had become nervy and irritable of late, ‘strained of face and twitchy of finger’, and he was determined to change his life once he got back to England.
The loss of his mother, some eight years later, would prove a far heavier blow. After her husband’s death she had moved from Oxfordshire to South Cottage, a stone’s throw from Silverbeck. She was generally regarded as a formidable old lady, and Penguin staff jumped to when she rang in to speak to ‘my son’ or ‘my son Richard’. She liked a restorative drink in the evening, and Lane kept her fridge stocked with half bottles of champagne, many of which he helped to drain on his way home from the office. She died in the drawing-room at Silverbeck in March 1958, and her death prompted a massive clear-out and division of spoils between the two brothers: among the items shipped out to Dick, then living in Australia, were his RNVR uniform plus epaulettes, a sola topi, a set of silver spurs, a model cannon, a bush knife, two silver porringers, three powder horns, a soup tureen, a grandfather clock, miniatures of Dickens and Tennyson, a piano and a refectory table from Lancaster Gate; a pair of duelling pistols, specially requested by Dick, had mysteriously disappeared.
‘Look at poor old Allen Lane in this week’s Sunday Times, looking a tired old man of seventy,’ Agatha Christie remarked two years after he had been knighted, and signs of wear and tear could probably be put down to overwork and domestic unease. Lane’s health seemed sound enough, apart from the occasional twinge of gout, but every now and then Bill Williams urged him to visit ‘our old friend’ Karl Bluth, a German émigré doctor and a friend of Brecht and Heidegger who combined medicine with the writing of poems and plays, played the piano in the garage of his home in Hampstead, and numbered Arthur Koestler and Peter Watson of Horizon among his patients. He made sure that Estrid Bannister had her vitamin injections, and Lettice’s friend Anna Kavan her controlled doses of heroin: Williams urged Lane to allow Bluth to examine his ‘filters’, and claimed to be a new man whenever he allowed himself to be ‘decarbonized’ and have his ‘tappets’ adjusted. Whenever Lane’s trousers became too tight, he paid a visit to Champney’s, returning home leaner and more fractious. After one visit he decided to lay off the booze and asked Harry Paroissien to send him a vegetable-shredder from the States: like other expats at the time, Paroissien and his wife Eileen were subjected to a constant stream of requests for luxuries unavailable in post-war England, from nylons and cortisone cream to an electric blender, spare parts for Lane’s Sunbeam electric razor and a machine for clearing the leaves from the swimming-pool in which his children spent so much of their time in summer. He was devoted to his daughters, and as family holidays became a thing of the past, he liked to take one or other of the two older girls with him when he went on his travels: the Young Elizabethan, a magazine for teenage girls, included an account of a bicycling holiday he and Clare had taken on the Cherbourg peninsula, though the carefully posed photographs – Lane looking disconcertingly Germanic in knee-length shorts and long white socks – were taken near Silverbeck. Anna, the third daughter, had a mild form of Down’s Syndrome; for a time it seemed as though this might bring her parents closer together, but by the mid-Fifties their marriage was unravelling.
One day in 1955 the German publisher Ledig Rowohlt came to stay at Silverbeck, bringing with him his mistress, Susanne Lepsius. According to office gossip, at the end of the weekend Rowohlt left for Germany with Lettice Lane, who was not averse to the occasional affair, while Susanne stayed behind at Silverbeck. Whatever the truth of the matter, Susanne Lepsius became, and remained, a fixture in Lane’s life; Lettice moved out of Silverbeck, and three years went by before she and Lane met again. Some eighteen years younger than Lane, Susanne Lepsius remains a curiously elusive figure. It was said that after leaving Rowohlt she was briefly married to an Englishman in order to get a British passport and be able to spend more time with Lane; she is variously described as tall, slim and slight, with a pale, rather fleshy face and a strong German accent; Richard Hoggart found her serious and solid, like ‘a piece of mobile furniture’, while George Weidenfeld thought she had a touch of Sonia Brownell about her; one of Lane’s young editors, who got to know her well, thought her sexy rather than beautiful, and her attitude towards Lane one of chilly detachment. Cultivated and well-read, she dabbled in antiques, imported Meissen china, and encouraged Lane’s urge to collect, with particular emphasis on snuffboxes; her detractors suggest that she palmed him off with inferior goods, and lined her pockets in the process. She lived for a time in Lane’s flat in Whitehall Court, and visiting publishers were sometimes disconcerted to find black underwear draped about the bathroom; a Penguin employee remembers the lingering smell of her ‘oversweet perfume’, and how the atmosphere of Whitehall Court was ‘cold to the point of sinister’. In due course Lane bought her a flat in Notting Hill, where they held literary evenings to introduce her to the publishing world. Lane, Susanne, Bill Williams and Estrid Bannister spent holidays together in Estrid Bannister’s cottage at Rosscarbery in County Cork; it proved a convivial retreat, but nothing was quite the same after Estrid Bannister, devoted though she was to her long-standing lover, fell in love with and married an Irish fisherman, much to Bill Williams’s loudly voiced distress.
The Rowohlt connection having proved ephemeral, and Lane providing a modest allowance – so modest that, or so it was said, many of her clothes were second-hand – Lettice worked for a time in the handkerchief department of Harrods; eventually she took a flat in Holland Park, where the girls spent their holidays from school. Adrift in the vastness of Silverbeck, Lane was looked after for a time by the gardener and his wife: the house soon became dirty and cold – Lane saw no point in keeping the Aga on – and he told Dick that when he eventually asked his mother and his cousin Ducka Puxley if they would like to move in, ‘they accepted with alacrity’.
Friends remarked how odd it was that so neat and well turned-out a man was prepared to live in the squalor that descended on Silverbeck after Lettice’s departure. ‘We must remember that it’s important to be kind to each other,’ Bill Williams wrote to Lane in Rosscarbery, after noticing how unhappy he seemed. ‘Part of my own recent sadness has been the realization that a private problem was invading your life and, to some extent, usurping the devotion we had always had in common’ – the shared devotion being, of course, to Penguin Books, that ‘rare and precious enterprise’. Lane’s melancholy must have been obvious to all. Writing from the SS Oronsay en route from Australia to England, where he planned to spend the next three months at Silverbeck, Dick said that he had heard some ‘most disturbing reports’ about his brother’s state of mind, and offered some bracing words of advice. To enjoy a ‘better existence’, he warned, Lane would have to cooperate with those around him: ‘If you are going to dig in your toes and stick out your jaw and say that not only are you capable of looking after your own affairs but also those of all your family and relations, not to mention a couple of hundred employees, we shall get nowhere.’
On holiday in Ireland in the summer of 1956, Lane got up early one morning while the children and his sister Nora were still asleep, sat down by a window overlooking an estuary, and poured out his woes to Frostie. ‘Our marriage was not a happy one, and but for the children I doubt if we would have kept it up for as long as we did,’ he told her. Over the last few years he had lost interest in everything, at home and in the office, on the grounds that ‘it all seemed so pointless’. ‘I didn’t love Lettice. My brother was making a mess of everything I gave him to do. The bickering in the office forced me back into my shell, and I thought, “Well, let them get on with it.”’ But the ‘German invasion’ had forced things into the open. ‘Much as my mother likes to be with me, I can see that it is not a good thing in the long run,’ he conceded: he had decided to leave Silverbeck and ‘strike out on my own’, and was eager to make Whitehall Court less ‘club-like’. As for Frostie, ‘I feel closer to you than I have ever done, and I’m grateful for your great understanding during this period when I have been particularly difficult to deal with.’ In a letter to Dick he referred to ‘the rather sticky period of the last eighteen months or so, which took their toll’, but assured him that he was now back on top form.
Although Lane was perfectly happy to be seen around with Susanne and enjoyed her company it may well be that he saw her as little more than a ‘trophy’ mistress, an accessory fitting a man of his standing in the world; nor does it seem likely that he was in love with her, or even found her particularly attractive. ‘Susanne is in Germany, so I too am living a life of bachelordom, but unlike you I find that I thrive on it,’ he admitted to Paroissien, three years into the affair; they spent less and less time together, and, he told Frostie, ‘I feel very badly about Susanne, but I am convinced that marriage would spell disaster. She is a complement to me in many ways, but in other ways we are vastly separated.’ By now there was no more talk of divorcing Lettice, or making a legal separation. ‘She wants to come back, but I’m sure that would be a mistake,’ he told Joan Collihole. ‘Although I’m a bit lonely at times, it’s a small price for the freedom which I enjoy.’ As for Susanne, ‘I do of course miss her very much, but the alternative, that of marrying her, would have been impossible. As an amusing companion she has no equal, but as a wife she would have driven me round the bend.’
It may well be that travel gave Lane a good deal more pleasure than women, and both his wealth and his job enabled him to indulge his wanderlust at a time when currency restrictions put foreign parts out of reach for all but the most well-heeled. In 1951, for instance, he took seven weeks off and travelled to Iraq to visit Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan, then on a dig at the ancient city of Nimrud. Reading Henry Miller ‘with mixed feelings’ as he went, he took a boat from Piraeus to Limassol, heavily laden with wine, potatoes, tractors and a consignment of Penguins, travelled on to Beirut in an Egyptian cargo boat crammed with donkeys, was outraged by the ignorance of Beirut booksellers, took a taxi to Damascus, and finally made it to Baghdad, where the booksellers were a good deal better informed. Once on site he tried (and failed) to fool Mallowan by burying a bogus artefact; he was present when the Ashurbanipal Stela was unearthed, and in the evenings Agatha Christie read them the first draft of The Mousetrap, written in her tent. Back in England, Lane sent a Stilton to his hosts to thank them for their hospitality; he and Lettice revisited the site in later years, bearing with them another ceremonial Stilton.
Later that year he made a business trip to Nigeria and the Gold Coast. The BOAC plane served ‘cocktails on the house’ and boasted ‘a kitchen complete with an oven and two stewards and a stewardess to dish out the grub’; they landed at Tripoli, where dinner was served in a nearby hotel, and ‘lots of gin’ was downed in Lagos. Africa, he confided to his diary, was the market of the future. On his return he was invited round to the Colonial Office and asked for his views. The Cold War was at its height, and the Government was keen to counteract Soviet and Communist propaganda in Africa: while recognizing that Lane was unlikely to accept ‘Colonial Office tutelage’ on what he should or should not publish, it was felt that Penguins could have a useful role to play in what was referred to as ‘ideological defence in immature communities’. Penguin’s leftish leanings were a drawback, but according to his interlocutor at the Colonial Office, Lane seemed anxious to start new series for the under-developed countries, and was ‘determined that it would be a mistake to write down for West Africa’: so ‘provided Lane in his zeal to sell his wares does not resort to Zilliacus and [D. N.] Pritt, his scheme should at least fill the vacuum with something wholesome. If the African is reading an abridged version of Adam Bede, he isn’t reading the products of Rosary Gardens’ (i.e. Communist Party publications). No more was heard from the Colonial Office, and although Lane’s vision of publishing textbooks for the African market was pre-empted by educational publishers like Longmans and Heinemann Educational Books, he did publish fourteen titles in the Penguin West African Library, as well as the Penguin African Library, launched in 1962; the Communists, on the other hand, may have drawn comfort from Andrew Rothstein’s notorious Pelican, A History of the USSR, which ridiculed the notion of slave labourers in the Gulag and was widely regarded as a piece of Soviet propaganda. Lane retained his interest in publishing for what would later become known as the Third World – writing from Ceylon two years later, he told Frostie that ‘the old order is changing so rapidly that we could really afford to ignore the European population and concentrate on the Ceylonese’ – but it would be left to others to put his intimations to practical effect.
Lane visited the West Indies in 1952, Ceylon and Australia in 1953, and met Hemingway, an old drinking companion, in Cuba the following year: his reading matter on that Caribbean cruise, he told Frostie, consisted of Rupert Hart-Davis’s biography of Hugh Walpole, Laurens van der Post’s Venture to the Interior, and a manual on rabbit-keeping. Equipped with eight Van Heusen drip-dry shirts, two of which he brought home unopened in their cellophane bags, he toured the world in eighty days in 1957, visiting Russia and China and returning home via Sydney and San Francisco. His Russian and Chinese diaries make tedious reading, short on human interest and crammed with meetings with long-forgotten dignitaries and editors from state publishing houses. The plane from Prague to Moscow had no seatbelts and an unpressurized cabin, making it hard to breathe at times; in Moscow he found ‘a complete absence of vitality, of sparkle, of enthusiasm’. China was preferable, not least because he had as a travelling companion Esmé Barton: the widow of the journalist George Steer, who had alerted the world to the German bombing of Guernica, she satisfied Lane’s liking for loud, strong women who bossed him around. Never a ‘finicky eater’, he happily sampled the food on offer, but was defeated by ‘a brew called goat’s wine’ in Canton, and had to fall back on his own supplies. Back in Europe, he developed a soft spot for the Dordogne and struck up a friendship with Estrid Bannister’s friend Philip Oyler, the author of The Generous Earth, a proto-hippie with long white hair and beard who grew his own tobacco, brewed his own wine and lived with a girlfriend half his age.
One country he always enjoyed visiting was Australia: its inhabitants may have contracted an unfortunate taste for American paperbacks, but he valued its vast potential as a market, and the fact that Nora lived in Sydney made it all the easier to combine business with pleasure. During the war, Penguins had been sold and manufactured under licence by the Australian firm of Lothian, but after the war Lane decided to set up an office of his own. After being demobbed from the Navy, Bob Maynard had worked for a while for the United Nations in London, and Lane used to visit him from time to time in the Berkeley or Brown’s Hotel ‘to satisfy himself that the Government gin was fit for overseas visitors’ consumption’. Maynard was keen to return to Penguin, but whereas he dreamed of opening a branch in South Africa, Lane decided that he should make for Australia. Dick was fiercely opposed to the idea, seeing it as yet another example of profligate impetuosity, but by the time he had made his opinions known Maynard and his wife were steaming towards the Antipodes. Consisting of a tin shack in the suburbs of Melbourne, lacking any form of insulation and blazingly hot in summer, Penguin Australia opened in 1946. Maynard and his wife ordered, packed and despatched the books; and when not on the road or in the warehouse – two years after their arrival, a prewar Vauxhall was shipped out for their use – they sent home food parcels to their half-frozen and under-nourished colleagues in Harmondsworth.
In the same year in which the Vauxhall was landed, Dick turned up in Australia on a visit. On the boat out he had met Elizabeth Snow, and they were married in Sydney, with Bob Maynard as best man; her father, Sir Sydney Snow, owned the Sydney equivalent of Selfridge’s, and although, in later years, Dick would often complain about how badly he had been treated by his older brother in terms of salary, pension and ownership of shares, his money problems were, from now on, a thing of the past. Bob Maynard, in the meantime, plodded dutifully on. In 1953 Lane paid his first visit to Australia: unaware, before his arrival, of the size or shape of the country, he asked Maynard if he would be at the quayside in Perth to meet him off the boat, with his Vauxhall at the ready. He soon realized that, for all his sterling qualities and long service, Maynard was not the man to convert an overheated shack into a modern, smooth-running publishing operation. Convinced that Maynard was not equipped to deal with academics and educational authorities, and that as a salesman he lacked the necessary fire, he began to whittle away at his confidence and authority. Dick was put in charge, and Maynard’s days were numbered. ‘I am tired of being kicked around and I am coming home for a showdown,’ he told Frostie, but Lane refused to be cornered. ‘No, no, no. Don’t do that on my account. I won’t be here. Don’t do that,’ he begged, when Maynard rang from Melbourne to suggest that he should come to England to discuss his future. They were the last words Maynard ever heard from Lane in his capacity as employer. Shortly afterwards, to the fary of many Australian booksellers, Maynard was dismissed – but that was not the end of the story. Some years later, Lane went to stay with the Maynards in Melbourne; he apologized for what he had done, and in his will he left a sum to be settled on their blind daughter, Laura.
Dick was appalled by what had happened, and – in Maynard’s company at least – referred to his brother thereafter, with heavy irony, as the ‘Noble Knight’. With Maynard removed from the scene, Dick was left in charge. Whether he accompanied Lane on a visit to the outback to see an author named Arthur Upfield remains unclear – according to the publisher Alan Hill, Lane and Upfield engaged in a ‘fearful drinking bout’ which left the outback author ‘senseless on the bedroom floor’ – but before long Dick’s own position was in doubt. There was talk of his returning to Harmondsworth, and the problems that would inevitably entail. Writing to Harry Paroissien, Lane confessed he had no idea what to do with Dick: he had made ‘such a mess’ of the farm that he could not bear to confine him to the cows, and in an effort to remedy matters he had taken on, as a farm manager, Sydney Goldsack’s son, who was now living in Dick’s half of Priory Farm. Nor was Lane alone in his views. Bill Williams wrote to say that all the members of the ‘coffee meeting’ – an informal meeting of senior editors – were worried about what would happen if, after his return from Australia, Dick was left in charge when Lane was on holiday or on one of his long world trips. Morale would plummet, and there would be ‘an unreasonable application of the brakes’: it was essential that they should feel free to press ahead ‘without the restraints which Dick invariably imposes’. Lane entirely agreed. ‘If it were not for the ties of blood and sentiment, we should be making radical changes’ in Australia, he told Paroissien. ‘There must be some parting of the ways between my brother and myself, certainly as far as the English company is concerned,’ he confessed. Dick felt bruised, rejected and hard done by, and was well aware that, with his brother’s active connivance, he had become an embarrassment and a laughingstock in Harmondsworth. Writing to Lane about a ‘spot of bother’ with his health – he had had a kidney operation, and went on to itemize details of enemas, diarrhoea and the like – he felt compelled to add, ‘for heaven’s sake don’t treat this as a business letter and send it to all your colleagues for comment’; he felt hurt when Lane failed, as promised, to meet him off the boat at Tilbury, quibbled over the costs of fares and whether Penguin should pay those of his wife and daughter, and claimed that, in monetary terms, Lane had given him a ‘very raw deal indeed’, refusing him a pension scheme or a salary increase, and forcing him to live off capital. Matters would get worse, but in the meantime Lane offered an olive branch by suggesting that Dick – still, just, in charge of Penguin Australia – might like to take the Bentley back with him as ‘passenger’s luggage’, and tried to explain their differences on the grounds that ‘we are entirely different characters, and when we run in double harness, it is like hitching two entirely different types of horse to the same vehicle. You are by nature steady-going, conservative and full of the sterling virtues, whereas I am more mercurial, much less reliable, and inconsistent…’
Finding the right man to run the Australian business was not easy, but Lane liked the country and felt very much at home there. America was, as ever, a very different matter. Every now and then Lane would appear in the States, visiting publishers in New York and Boston, and keeping on eye on the new Penguin Inc. office and warehouse, housed in an old mill in Baltimore: not only were the overheads far lower than in New York, but Baltimore was one of the first container ports on the east coast of America, and Penguin took full advantage of this. Harry Paroissien had been running the shop since 1949. ‘In a short space of time he has really done something astonishing,’ Blanche Knopf reported back to Lane two years after Paroissien’s arrival, but unlike Ballantine, or Enoch and Weybright, he had no desire to publish on his own account. Penguin Inc.’s publishing programme was restricted to an edition of Shakespeare and the printing, for copyright reasons, of titles by Bernard Shaw and Robert Graves: everything else was imported from Harmondsworth. It was a well-run business, and it consistently returned profits to the parent company Alun Davies, who worked there as a young man, remembered it as a slice of England set down on the East Coast, seemingly divorced from American publishing as a whole: there was no question of dealing with the dreaded magazine distributors, or selling titles on sale or return Lane seemed ill-at-ease in the American publishing world, confessing to Paroissien that ‘There is something about the American character which I find very difficult to understand’, and that ‘It is really the magnitude of the operation in the paperbound business which has always scared me.’ When not voicing his loyalty – ‘My aim is, and has been, to serve you and the Penguin idea faithfully and well. I am ready to bow out whenever you want me to’ – Paroissien devoted as much of his long letters home to the minutiae of the English book trade (‘Dorking North station would repay regular visits’) as he did to the American; while Lane, in return, interlaced gossip and publishing strategy with tips about dustproof floors and a request for some Roco Oil Bare Floor Sweep.
Over half Penguin Inc.’s sales were to colleges and universities, and Paroissien was the first publisher in the States to promote his books through college reps; but before long other American ‘trade’ publishers were casting covetous eyes on the college market. Weybright and Enoch were already producing their own equivalents of Pelicans and Penguin Classics at the New American Library, and in 1952 Jason Epstein, a young editor at Doubleday, invented the notion of the ‘egghead’, ‘trade’ or ‘quality’ paperback. Aimed at students and cerebral lay readers, and printed in modest quantities in the larger ‘B’ format, trade paperbacks were more expensive and better produced than mass-market paperbacks, and Epstein’s Anchor Books were soon being emulated by Random House’s Vintage and other up-market lists.
As a pioneer in the field, Penguin Inc. began to seem a desirable property to other American publishers, and although Paroissien invariably looked askance at their advances, and was to prove adept at guarding his patch, some kind of tie-up with a New York or Boston publisher made sense in terms of selling Penguins to the world at large. It was rumoured that Random House was keen to buy Penguin Inc., and that some kind of merger with the Encyclopaedia Britannica was imminent; Morris Ernst, Lane’s old friend from his Bodley Head days, reported in 1958 that ‘Penguin is the chief topic of gossip on the book Rialto’. ‘A modest exhibitionist, a common-sense logician, a warm-hearted curmudgeon’, in Victor Weybright’s opinion, Ernst adored name-dropping and publishing gossip, liked nothing more than broking and fixing deals and – if his letters are anything to go by – exuded an oleaginous servility, at least where Lane was concerned. Lane had no illusions about Ernst – he told Paroissien that he fully expected him to put a phone call through to Sam Goldwyn or the President during the course of a meeting, and was ‘quite aware that Morris is not altogether honest in his dealings with me’ – but he liked and valued him enough to publish his autobiography, The Best is Yet; and before long Ernst was hard at work on his behalf, trying to broker a deal whereby Penguin Inc. and an American publisher could work together to their mutual advantage.
Lane’s dealings with various American publishers make an unedifying tale, showing him at his most devious and inconsistent, and the ingredients were always the same. The publishers inevitably wanted to buy a half share in Penguin Inc., and Lane resented losing control; they were reluctant to limit themselves to importing and selling copies brought over from England, and wanted to be able to publish Penguins written by Americans and tailored for the American market; they insisted on being free to design, sell and market Penguins in the American manner, however distasteful this might seem on the other side of the Atlantic; and Harry Paroissien, who dreaded losing out, was always at Lane’s right hand, casting doubts on the value and viability of the Americans, and the character of those involved. Lane wanted the sales and the status that would flow from a connection with a major American publisher, but was lot prepared to loosen his grip, and his underhand methods did grave damage to his reputation within the gossipy, incestuous world of New York publishing.
Ernst’s son-in-law, Mike Bessie, was an editor at Harper’s, a long-established firm that combined commercial clout with a gentlemanly reputation; in a memo to his colleagues he described Paroissien as a ‘mighty impressive fellow’ who thought Penguins were under-exploited in the bookshops, and was keen to work with an established ‘trade’ publisher. Negotiations broke down when Harper’s insisted on a share in the equity of Penguin Inc., but when Ernst learned that Bessie and two of his colleagues, Pat Knopf and Hiram Haydn, were leaving the firm and setting up on their own, his exuberance knew no bounds. ‘You will look around the fabulous American publishers for years before you will find anything as exciting, honourable and interested in your type of editorial taste,’ he told Paroissien apropos the new firm of Atheneum; dropping heavy hints as he went – ‘If I were a director of Penguin England – a function I would greatly enjoy’ – he hurried to convince Lane to throw in his lot with the new firm. ‘If he goes on with all this backwards bending he will be permanently tilted aft,’ Paroissien remarked in one of his letters home. D. C. Heath, a firm of educational publishers, had recently been appointed to sell Penguins in the college market, and it was agreed that Atheneum should, on a commission basis, sell Penguins to wholesalers and booksellers.
No sooner had the knot been tied than Lane began to chafe at its restraints. He was not best pleased when Fred Warburg told him over lunch that, according to Victor Gollancz, it was rumoured in New York that Atheneum had bought up Penguin Inc.; Paroissien fanned the flames, telling Lane that he was ‘convinced that Pat and Mike are fundamentally interested in money and status, and that is why I would consign all Mike’s and Morris’s high-toned protestations to the trash can. We can either run the business as we have been doing for the past ten years, putting the Penguin idea first and accepting the financial limitations, or we can go all out for an American-type enterprise. I do not believe there is a compromise.’
It had been agreed that the arrangement with Atheneum would run for three years from 1958, but within a short time Lane was flirting with other publishers. Jason Epstein had earlier suggested that he might leave Doubleday in order to sell and distribute Penguins in the States, and one day in 1960 Lane came home to find Epstein and Barney Rosset of the Grove Press ‘sitting on the doorstep’: Epstein had left Doubleday, and they had flown over to discuss the possibility of working with Penguin. Nothing came of it: although Epstein thought Lane ‘a fine publisher, as sly as he was affable’, Lane dismissed his visitors as a ‘couple of clever alecks’. That evening, Bennett Cerf of Random House rang Epstein from New York, told him that ‘Lane’s bankers would no more let him sell his American branch than the Queen would let Prince Philip sell Canada’, and offered him a job at Random House instead.
The Atheneum connection came to an end in 1961. Morris Ernst posted off a lachrymose note of regret – there was a possibility of Pocket Books distributing Penguins, and ‘I shudder at the idea that Penguins may be sandwiched between breasts etc. on the jackets’ – but Lane’s mind was elsewhere. He was deep in discussions with Cass Canfield of Harper’s, and both men seemed ecstatic at the prospect of coming together. ‘I have never been more interested in any publishing project,’ Canfield told Lane. ‘Like you, I am really enthusiastic about this project, in fact I cannot think of one that has interested me more since I set out on the Penguin path,’ Lane replied. Quite unaware that Lane was carrying on an identical flirtation with Lovell Thompson of Houghton Mifflin, Canfield, the most upright and patrician of American publishers, made arrangements for a formal announcement to be made in New York, at which Lane would address the senior management and sales force of Harper & Row. Letters of agreement had been exchanged at the Century Club, but half an hour before Lane was due to step on to the podium, he rang Cass Canfield. ‘Sorry, I can’t be with you, the deal’s off,’ Canfield was told – followed by a click, as the line went dead.
Back in London, Lane dictated an apologetic letter to Canfield (‘I don’t think I have ever been faced with such a difficult letter to write’) and, as he often did when reluctant to face the consequences of his own behaviour, scuttled off to his newly-acquired ‘beach hut’ in Spain, leaving Schmoller and Paroissien to clear up the mess. He continued to dither, telling Schmoller that he was ‘heartily fed up’ with Houghton Mifflin, and that ‘as of now, I would be quite content to revert to Harper’s’. Houghton Mifflin eventually acquired 49 per cent of Penguin Inc., and Lane was made a director of the Boston-based firm, but although the marriage lasted until 1966 he could not rest until he had bought back their stake and severed the connection. ‘How could I work with a man like that?’ Cass Canfield asked a friend: his equanimity restored, he joined colleagues from Atheneum and Pocket Books in sending Lovell Thompson of Houghton Mifflin a black-bordered card of condolence. Morris Ernst, unctuous and long-winded to the end, wrote to say that he would be less than frank if I did not say that the tactics pursued by you, no doubt on the advice of Harry, have resulted in less than in honourable and tidy image for your good self and your great enterprise’. Harry Paroissien had won the day, and Penguin Inc. continued much as before.
Nor was Lane’s flirtatiousness confined to the States. He tantalized himself and his colleagues with talk of working part-time or stopping work altogether when he reached sixty, pondered on possible heirs-apparent, many of whom had no experience of publishing in particular or business in general, and would present no threat to himself, and enjoyed, almost as an end in itself, discussing possible mergers or even the sale of Penguin to an endless succession of companies and tycoons, from Cecil King and Roy Thomson to Neville Blond, the founder of the Royal Court. Lane had two reasons for contemplating a possible sale of all or part of Penguin: although, in later years, he pretended indifference to what happened after his death, he wanted to minimize death duties; and he wanted to go on running the firm after any sale, and ensure that those who took over Penguin would remain true to its principles when he finally departed the scene – impossible dreams that have beguiled and deluded a good many otherwise shrewd and hard-headed publishers in the years since his death.
The City was beginning to show an interest in publishing, partly on the reasonable grounds that the educational market was a ‘growth industry’ and partly from the more dubious belief that there was some mysterious ‘synergy’ between the book trade and the world of entertainment, and before long large corporations would be taking over the most eminent publishing houses on both sides of the Atlantic. The omens were not all good – Rupert Hart-Davis had burned his fingers when he sold his firm to Heinemann, and would do so again before abandoning the trade altogether – but temptation was too strong to be ignored. In 1957 Thomas Tilling, a bus company which already owned a sizeable chunk of Heinemann, offered Lane 400,000 for the firm: Lane told Paroissien that he was seeing its boss, Lionel Fraser, but ‘though I am not unsympathetic to the idea, I shall want to know a great deal more about what is expected of me, and what interference I might expect of them’. ‘I don’t like the idea of being put in a position in which I was not in control of my operation,’ he told A. S. Frere of Heinemann: ‘I value my freedom of action more than the idea of being a publishing tycoon.’ Bill Williams learned that Longmans were prepared to offer £500,000, and both Collins and Odhams expressed interest. ‘As to what happens to the firm after your demise, you’ve never really given a bugger, and I don’t blame you,’ he told his old friend after urging him not to reduce his own holding to less than 51 per cent. ‘But if you lost control of it in your lifetime, you’d break what you use for a heart.’
Writing ‘on a bright sunny morning in the Dordogne’, Lane told Williams that ‘we have enjoyed the best and happiest years of the firm; what we have to do in the few years left to us is to see that the principles on which it was founded are going to be maintained into the foreseeable future’. Much to Williams’s relief, the negotiations with Tillings fizzled out. ‘I am now definitely decided against letting go of control,’ Lane informed an equally relieved Harry Paroissien, ‘as I think there might be a grave danger of changing the whole character of the firm if the financial voice was in a position to speak loudly.’ Nowadays we tend to look askance at hard-boiled businessmen who affect to be swayed by anything other than profit, suspecting them of humbuggery, naivety or both, but in Lane’s case – and that of some other tycoons with whom he had dealings – such cynicism would have been misplaced.
But not always, alas. A year or so later Lane began discussions with Geoffrey Crowther, the editor of The Economist and a Trustee of the News Chronicle, about the possibility of Penguin being sold to the group of which the magazine formed a part. ‘You would not find that we were interested in profits exclusively or even primarily,’ the former editor of Transatlantic told him. ‘I have never hesitated with The Economist to take action that would reduce the immediate profits if it seemed the right or the interesting thing to do, and I have a great belief that in doing so one gets more profit in the end.’ ‘I attach less importance to legal covenants than I do to an understanding on principle,’ Crowther continued. ‘If we can agree, on the one hand, that you won’t walk out on the firm until it is in safe hands, and on the other, that when it is, we won’t try to hold you, that would be enough for me. But to satisfy my colleagues I think we ought to have some sort of agreement on paper…’ Such noble sentiments were all very well, but shortly afterwards an outraged Lane broke off negotiations when he learned that Crowther and his fellow-trustee, Lord Layton, had sold the News Chronicle and the Star to the right-wing Daily Mail: the News Chronicle, like Penguin Books, had been a pillar of the liberal left, and if Crowther and his colleagues could so blithely sell it off to the enemy camp, how could he trust any assurances they might give about the future of Penguin Books? Disillusioned on that particular front, he held equally fruitless discussions with The Times, and with David Astor at the Observer and Laurence Scott at the Manchester Guardian, both of whose papers were owned by trusts of a kind that might better preserve the Penguin ethos.
In the meantime, Ben Travers had put him up for the Garrick, and he had been made a director of Bumpus, the famous but old-fashioned bookshop then being revitalized by an energetic bookseller named Tony Godwin. He was in touch once more with Lettice, and a new generation of young editors would soon be making their mark on the firm, but all was not well. ‘I haven’t a clue what I’m going to do next. I’ve got the firm, the farm, the Zoo, Bumpus, and a lot of acquaintances, a few friends, an enormous capacity for enjoyment but a rather empty personal life,’ he confided to Joan Collihole. That may have been the case, but huge changes were around the corner, not all of them to his taste.