By the late Fifties Lane had taken to submitting handwriting samples from prospective employees to a professional graphologist: Ruth Simon had introduced him to graphology, and it was enjoying a vogue in the City and the business world. No doubt the energetic scrawls of both Godwin and Maschler were sent off for expert analysis; and, not to be outdone, Lane posted off an anonymous example of his own firm but spidery scrawl for diagnosis. ‘He is by nature warm, sensual and imaginative, but has developed a cold, competitive and combative outlook, which of necessity brings him to the front,’ the expert declared, adding that ‘His whole life is a hunting expedition, and although he is a successful hunter he is not satisfied – indeed, he is not satisfiable.’
Interviewed on the radio not long after the Chatterley trial, Lane revealed that he hadn’t lost his temper for ten years; he was, he admitted, solitary by nature, a man who didn’t like to be intruded on and was reluctant to allow other people to get too close. Colleagues and fellow-publishers hurried to offer their own interpretations of Lane’s elusive, paradoxical nature. ‘Relishing conviviality, he was terrified of intimacy, and though he had experienced tragedy he dared not lighten its burden by sharing it with others. Being intellectually incapable of analysing his own success, he was forever worrying that it would be snatched from him by someone whose cunning outstripped his own,’ J. E. Morpurgo suggested three years after Lane’s death, adding that he got rid of those he no longer liked or needed ‘with a ruthlessness that was all the more vicious if they had come close to discovering the frontier which he himself could not define: the frontier between his private and his professional nature’. Peter Calvocoressi, then at Chatto & Windus, saw something of Lane at this time, and found him ‘not an easy man to know outside his own close circle of friends. Although he liked talking and was a careful listener, there was also a sense of reserve, an unforthcoming watchfulness which came close to suspiciousness. Even in a tête à tête he left you wondering what he was thinking.’ Tony Godwin remembered him as ‘a stocky man in a conservative blue business suit with the freshly starched tips of a handkerchief peeping up out of his breast pocket and shirt cuffs that were always immaculate and secured by posh cufflinks… A trim, vigorous, cordial figure, he could easily have filled the bill as one of Conrad’s sea captains. But the final impression one carried away was of his jaw muscles, like steel hawsers and as unyielding.’
The writer and publisher Raleigh Trevelyan was exposed to Lane at his most capricious. Although Godwin offered him a job at Penguin, he already knew Lane. He and his friend John Guest, an editor at Longmans, had met Lane and Bill Williams when stranded in Paris by an impenetrable fog, and they had travelled back to London together by train. ‘I want you to go to Aleppo,’ Lane told Trevelyan soon after he joined the firm: while staying there recently with Freya Stark he had met the art historians Hugh Honour and John Fleming and had suggested that they should edit a new illustrated series to be entitled Style and Civilization, and since Trevelyan was a cultivated man with a knowledge of things Italian, he was perfectly equipped to carry matters forward. After some initial bafflement about why he should be expected to travel to Syria – it turned out that Lane had met Freya Stark in Asolo, where Lettice had taken a house, and not in Aleppo – Trevelyan happily obliged. Back in England, he saw a fair amount of Lane socially as well as professionally. He visited Lane and Susanne Lepsius in Whitehall Court, and the three of them spent long weekends together in Fowey, where Lane had sailed with his brother John before the war, and Trevelyan had recently bought a house. But then, quite suddenly, the friendship was withdrawn. Robert Lusty had told Trevelyan that if things didn’t work out at Penguin, he could have his job back at Hutchinson; Lane was not pleased when he learned this, and still less so when the offer was taken up. When Trevelyan went to say goodbye, Lane barely looked up from the balance sheet spread out on the desk before him.
No doubt it made cheerful reading. The phenomenal sales of Lady Chatterley’s Lover had a dramatic effect on Penguin’s figures for 1960: pre-tax profits were three times those of the previous year at £364,000, and profit margins increased from 9.3 per cent of turnover to 18.5 per cent. Lawrence’s novel helped to make Lane a millionaire when, in the spring of 1961, he decided to turn Penguin into a public company. ‘I should hate people to think that we were going public on the strength of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as if this were our one and only chance,’ he declared, but there was no doubt that publishing such a huge bestseller had made the firm attractive to investors at a time when the stock market was already riding high. Lane’s approach to the whole business was hard-headed and ruthlessly unsentimental. Michael Rubinstein had performed wonders with Lady Chatterley, but he was a literary rather than a commercial lawyer, and was replaced by Leslie Paisner, a practitioner ‘well versed in the ways of jungle life east of St Paul’s’; and Lane used the planned sale of shares to acquire Dick’s holding in the company, and finally sever his connection with it.
Irrespective of any sale of shares, Lane was keen to reorganize Penguin’s Australian operations without his ‘plodding’ brother’s involvement; Dick continued to feel undervalued and hard done by, pointing out more than once that although he had provided the initial capital with which the firm had been funded, helped sort out Penguin Inc. after the war, and taken over the running of Australia after the sacking of Bob Maynard, neither his salary nor his pension reflected his long service or the success of the company: on a visit to England, he had stayed two nights at Whitehall Court, and ‘received a note from the accounts department suggesting I ought to pay for the privilege’. His sense of grievance was to be inflamed still further when Penguin went public. Lane had been advised to reorganize the capital structure of the firm, and to buy Dick out and insist on his resignation as a precondition of his doing so. Dick had told him that so long as he could provide for his wife and daughter, he would be happy to retire early, since his health was poor and he was reluctant to take orders from recently appointed directors.
In the spring of 1961 Dick received a letter in which Lane asked him if he would accept £200,000 for his shares in the company: at present Lane himself owned 50.018 per cent of the shares, and his children’s trust a further 24.9 per cent; he felt uneasy about not owning 51 per cent or more of the shares himself, and had made his offer to Dick on the misleading assumption that the shares would fetch between 8s. and 9s. each if put on the market. Dick was not unsympathetic, but as Lane piled on the pressure he dug in his heels and became increasingly resentful. A revised offer of £220,000, to include the shares, compensation for loss of office, a year’s salary and the cost of a trip to England, was followed by a cable which read ‘ESSENTIAL YOU RESIGN AS DIRECTOR OF AND CEASE CONNECTION WITH ENGLISH AND AUSTRALIAN COMPANIES’, and another demanding ‘URGENT YOU RESIGN AUSTRALIA UNCONDITIONALLY’. ‘OK LETS THROW THE WHOLE THING AWAY,’ Dick cabled back. ‘I DON’T WANT TO SELL MY SHARES OR RESIGN AS A DIRECTOR UNDER YOUR CONDITIONS.’ ‘You may think I feel a little bitter about things. Well, I am,’ he told Lane. Dick rang from Australia to say that despite his poor health, he was keen to go on working: could he not be re-elected to the board of Penguin Australia after his formal resignation, and was there no way his compensation could be increased from £10,000 to £15,000? But resistance proved in vain, and Dick’s shares were duly acquired. In April Lane announced that Penguin was to become a public company; Lane intended to keep 51 per cent of the shares in his own hands and 19 per cent with the family trusts, and 750,000 ordinary shares – 30 per cent of the total – were offered to subscribers at 12s. each. In the event, the shares were over-subscribed by 150 times; from some 150,000 applications, 3,450 were chosen by ballot, getting 200 shares each. Demand was such that by the end of the first day of dealing the price had risen to 17s. 3d. per share.
Lane had become a millionaire overnight. ‘For the first time since I started my career I found black ink being used by the bank,’ Lane informed Dick, and he had paid off the overdraft on Priory Farm. He told Leslie Paisner that Dick felt hard done by, and complained that he hadn’t been told the truth about the value of his own holding, but nevertheless a celebratory ‘stag dinner’ was held at the Marie Antoinette Room in the Savoy at which Lane, his lawyer, his financial advisers and male members of the Penguin old guard tucked into lobster thermidor, caviare and pâté de foie gras, washed down by magnums of Lanson 1953. Lane and Penguin Books had indeed come a long way since Dick had borrowed his parent’s insurance money to fund the fledgling firm.
With money in his pocket, Lane embarked on a brief flirtation which, like his dealings with Cass Canfield at Harper & Row, revealed him at his most whimsical and irresponsible. His old friend Jonathan Cape had died in 1960, still in harness at the age of eighty; Wren Howard, the firm’s co-founder, was in his late sixties, and although the firm had been the most stylish and innovative of literary publishers during the Twenties and Thirties, it had begun to lose vigour and direction. ‘That old carp Cape’ (Bill Williams’s epithet) had owned seventh-twelfths of the firm, and Wren Howard five-twelfths: Howard and his son Michael had exercised their option to increase their holding to seven-twelfths on Jonathan’s death, but that left 41.7 per cent of the shares, which would have to be sold to pay death duties. Nor was life much happier on the far side of Bedford Square. Michael Joseph had sold his firm to Illustrated Newspapers in 1954; seven years later they sold it on to Roy Thomson, the heavily bespectacled Canadian Press tycoon who had recently bought the Sunday Times. Charles Pick and Peter Hebdon, the firm’s two managing directors, and Roland Gant, the editorial director, were extremely unhappy about the takeover, and reluctant to renew their contracts. One day in December 1961, Lane had lunch with Charles Pick and John Wyndham, a Michael Joseph author whose novel The Day of the Triffids had been a bestseller for Penguin. According to Pick, Lane had assumed that Wyndham was a member of the Egremont family, and lost interest once he learned that his real name was Harris: this sounds improbable, but either way the conversation had far more to do with publishing politics than with science fiction. When Pick revealed how unhappy he and his two colleagues were about the Thomson takeover, Lane – seemingly on an impulse – suggested that he and the ‘Trinity’ should form a partnership, buy up the ownerless shares in Cape, and install Messrs Pick, Hebdon and Gant to run the firm: none of them had money of their own to invest, but he would be happy to put up £25,000 of his own money, and would in any case be seeing Cape’s lawyer that very afternoon. Lane’s only proviso was that, as he told Pick, ‘I will not have anything to do with Maschler.’ Maschler had been made a director of Cape in July, but since, under the proposed scheme, Roland Gant would be the editorial director, Pick was happy to go along with this.
The ‘Trinity’ travelled up to Hampstead Garden Suburb to see Wren Howard, who seemed happy enough with what: was proposed, while Pick approached Norman Collins, the novelist and former colleague of Victor Gollancz: Collins was keen to get back into publishing, saw possible benefits for Associated Television, which he had founded with Lew Grade and A. D. Peters, was prepared to put up another £25,000, and – apropos the removal of Maschler – told Pick that ‘He’s either a publishing genius or he’ll lose us a lot of money.’ Heartened by such rapid and positive progress, the ‘Trinity’ prepared to hand in their resignations, while Lane headed off to his house by the sea in Spain, a modest whitewashed building with marble floors, Moorish features and a phoenix weathervane. It was agreed that Pick, Hebdon and Gant should be appointed working directors, that Lane and Norman Collins should join the board in due course, and that Wren Howard should remain as Chairman for another year. All this appeared in the Bookseller, where Lane was reported as saying that ‘it would be a pity to let the Americans get too big a toehold here’: that same year both W. H. Allen and Rupert Hart-Davis had been bought by American publishers – Heinemann had sold Hart-Davis to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich – and Billy Collins had been in touch with Lane about the possible takeover of Pan by New American Library, which had itself just been taken over by the Times–Mirror group of Los Angeles: a move which had been bitterly opposed by Victor Weybright, and led to his departure from the firm and the severing of an increasingly acrimonious relationship with Kurt Enoch. Cape, it seemed, was to be saved from an equally dreadful fate. Pick cabled El Fénix to say that Norman Collins had agreed to increase his stake to £40,000 if Lane would do the same, and five days after Christmas, he cabled again with the news that he and his two fellow-directors had been given until 1 January to sign their new service contracts, and that they would resign once Lane cabled his continuing support: this must have been forthcoming, since all three gave in their notices at Michael Joseph, and the resignations were announced in the Bookseller. The lawyers and accountants got to work, and the future of Cape and the ‘Trinity’ seemed assured.
While all this was going on, Tom Maschler was in New York, on his first buying trip for Jonathan Cape. Wren Howard’s son Michael thought it might be polite to keep him informed, and wrote to tell him the news. Maschler, who had just bought the British rights in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, rang as soon as he received Howard’s letter. ‘Where does this leave me?’ he wanted to know; Howard, doubtless intimidated by the molten mix of anger and righteous indignation heading in his direction, told him, ‘We haven’t discussed that yet.’ Back in London, Maschler was determined to save his job, but thought his chances of doing so were slim. He insisted on a meeting with the ‘Trinity’: Peter Hebdon told him he would have to go, but after the meeting was over Wren Howard clapped his hands together and, much to Maschler’s gratitude and relief, told his young colleague that the deal was off. An embarrassed Wren Howard then had to tell all those involved that he could take things no further. Cables winged their way to Spain: ‘DEADLOCK OVER TOM STOP NEGOTIATIONS ENDED’ (Charles Pick); ‘GREAT REGRETS OUR PROJECTED ASSOCIATION PROVES UNWORKABLE STOP NEGOTIATIONS NOW DISCONTINUED’ (Wren Howard). Pick and Gant discovered when Lane was due back from Spain, and met him at Heathrow to urge him into battle on their behalf – but to no avail. Soured by the experience, Pick believed that Lane felt no sense of responsibility for what had happened: ‘he shrugged it off as a setback, but not a setback to his career, and he wanted to wash his hands of the situation’. Before long, however, Pick and Gant had moved on to Heinemann – Pick as managing director, Gant as editorial director – while Peter Hebdon returned to Michael Joseph as its managing director.
Quite why Tom Maschler had roused such hostility in his old boss remains a mystery. According to Charles Pick, Maschler had lost him so much money at Penguin that ‘he would never put his money where Tom Maschler was’, but none of that rings true. By the late Fifties paperback firms were beginning to pay hardback publishers higher and more competitive advances than they had in the past – as Lane himself confessed in 1958, ‘we are, whether we like it or not, in a tough, highly competitive industry, and we have to fight every inch of the way, from the facing of colossal advances if we are to keep books away from Pan, Corgi, Ace, Panther etc. to the real struggle to retain space at the retail outlet’ – but Penguin could still afford to stay aloof; and there is no evidence to suggest that Maschler paid, or was in a position to pay, ‘colossal advances’ or, like Godwin in the years to come, to insist on providing his books with expensive four-colour jackets. Writing under the pseudonym of Mark Caine, Maschler had published, with Hutchinson, a Machiavellian manual entitled The S-Man: it was rumoured by some that Maschler had then paid himself over the odds to buy the paperback rights for Penguin, and that Lane took a dim view of the matter, but in fact the rights were acquired by Maschler’s good friend Tony Godwin: the book had been taken on in secret, and Lane only discovered who its author was when tipped off by Robert Lusty, its original publisher. The fact that post-war British publishing had been energized by a brilliant group of Jewish immigrants from Germany and Central Europe – among them George Weidenfeld, Andre Deutsch, Walter Neurath, Max Reinhardt, Paul Hamlyn and, the rogue elephant, Robert Maxwell – may well have excited spasms of genteel anti-semitism among their embattled contemporaries. Some said that Lane took against Maschler because he was Jewish, but there is no evidence that he was remotely anti-semitic, and he was more than happy to number Hans Schmoller and Nikolaus Pevsner among his colleagues. Maschler himself believes that Lane had seen him as his heir-apparent, and was so put out by his leaving Penguin that he determined on revenge, but although Lane could and did turn against his favourites if they failed to come up to scratch or seemed no longer right for the job, this had not been the case with Maschler; nor, Krishna Menon always excepted, was Lane a great grudge-bearer, preferring to put the past behind him and move on to other things. One other possibility occurs. Maschler was good-looking, attractive and charismatic, and it could be that he had become too friendly with Susanne Lepsius. Raleigh Trevelyan believes that Lane may have turned against him because he was jealous of his friendship with Susanne, chaste as it was, and Maschler too may have excited the ire of Jove. Whatever the truth of the matter, Maschler’s departure was Penguin’s loss: within a very short time he had revived Cape’s reputation as the most exciting publisher in London, and as such he would soon be banging on Penguin’s door, demanding that they compete for the rights in his books with the same energy and commitment as their more overtly commercial rivals. The problematic shares, in the meantime, were acquired by Sidney Bernstein of Granada.
‘I realize that this is the close of a phase of my life, and I find that I like it that way,’ Lane told Frostie on Good Friday 1961. ‘The pace is getting too hot for me, and the young group with a little schooling will be able to stand up to it far better than I would be able to.’ He was right about the changing pace of life, but he would not accept its implementation with such equanimity.