Cyril Connolly once wrote that ‘No two biographies are alike, for in every one enters an element of autobiography which must always be different’, and this is no exception to his rule. Penguin Books were seven years old when I was born: I remember them all through my childhood, and since I have spent my entire working life in the publishing and literary world, Allen Lane and his colleagues have a certain familiarity. Writing about the years in which Penguin established itself as a national institution has been like revisiting a dimly remembered country, long gone but still familiar; and although I never met Lane, many of the figures who flit through these pages were known to me, by reputation or in person, from my early days in the publishing business.
As a second-generation Penguin reader, I looked out every month to see what new books were on offer, assumed that the only novels worth reading were those that had been paperbacked by Penguin in its famous livery of orange and white, and automatically turned to the blue-backed Pelicans if I wanted to know about the Ancient Greeks, the Hanoverians, the Roman Catholic Church, printing, Karl Marx or even the weather. For those of us who grew up in the Fifties and Sixties, Penguin seemed to be one of the benign monopolies that shaped our lives, along with the BBC and the National Health Service: a unique, unchanging institution, without rivals or compare. Quite who was responsible for it all, and how it had come into being, was a matter of complete indifference to me. The Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was put on trial the year after I left school, but I remember nothing of it; and even when, seven years later, I went to work in the publicity department at Collins, the name of Allen Lane meant nothing to me.
In those days publishers were still newsworthy, and the colour supplements regularly carried admiring profiles of the two ‘whizz kids’ of the book trade, Tom Maschler and Tony Godwin, both of whom, as it happened, had worked for Allen Lane: but although Lane had had more column inches devoted to his achievements than any other publisher, most recently for sacking Tony Godwin, he was tired and ill by the time I began to learn my way round the publishing world, revered by his fellow-practitioners but less in evidence to the world at large than such colourful figures as George Weidenfeld or André Deutsch. Like a good many other people, I assumed, wrongly, that he had invented the paperback, but since I knew next to nothing about him, I had no reason to think otherwise.
I remember nothing of his death in 1970, but the previous year I had gone to work as a junior editor at André Deutsch. Among my colleagues was a young man named David Teale, who was married to Lane’s second daughter, Christine, and was gaining some experience of hardback publishing before returning to Penguin: as André Deutsch liked to remind us, his firm had been chosen for the honour, and since his professionalism and dedication to publishing equalled Allen Lane’s, this made perfect sense. My wife and I went to dinner with the Teales in their flat in the Old Mill House, Allen Lane’s elegant eighteenth-century house in West Drayton, and since then I’ve often wondered whether Lane himself might have been on the premises: soon afterwards we went our separate ways, and I thought no more about David Teale until André Deutsch’s eightieth birthday party in 1997, when a genial figure tapped me on the shoulder and reintroduced himself.
The publishing world which I joined in 1967 was that in which Allen Lane had spent his working life. Although some mergers and takeovers had occurred, most firms were still independent: many, like Collins and John Murray, were still family firms; others, like André Deutsch or Weidenfeld & Nicolson, were run by their founders. Publishing offices were, as often as not, rickety Georgian houses in Bloomsbury or Covent Garden: their entrance halls were invariably clogged with brown paper parcels, while the offices upstairs combined elegance and squalor, marble mantelpieces cluttered with dog-eared showcards and half-empty bottles of wine, Victorian kneehole desks awash with proofs, catalogues, readers’ reports, old coffee cups, jacket roughs, brimming ashtrays, unanswered letters and pristine finished copies. With one or two formidable exceptions, publishing was, in the upper echelons at least, masculine and middle-aged; its denizens sported fiery tweeds or chalk-striped suits, were keen members of the Garrick or the Savile, scribbled memos and did their sums on the backs of envelopes, and were firm believers in the long alcoholic lunch. Accountants and sales people were there to receive, not give, the orders; much was made of a publisher’s ‘nose’ or ‘hunch’, and stories were told of how some book of the moment had been commissioned over the dinner table. Much of the hard work was done by a combination of old-fashioned clerking types, well-heeled ex public schoolboys with vague literary ambitions, and – most invaluable of all – a steady supply of middle-aged spinsters, all of whom were wretchedly underpaid, devoted their lives to the firm, and every evening lugged home baskets brimming with typescripts or proofs.
After I left André Deutsch I worked for A. P. Watt and Oxford University Press before spending ten long years at Chatto & Windus, and during my time in publishing the business changed in ways which Lane might not have enjoyed or approved. The firms he had known and done business with – Jonathan Cape, Hamish Hamilton, Secker & Warburg, Michael Joseph, Heinemann, Weidenfeld, Hutchinson, his beloved Bodley Head, even the seemingly impregnable William Collins – were taken over by conglomerates; Bloomsbury town houses were exchanged for a floor in a featureless office block; the middle-aged men in chalk-striped suits were elbowed aside by women who were no longer prepared to hover meekly in the background; the bibulous office lunch fell into disgrace, and steak and kidney pudding and claret gave way to a slice of salmon and Perrier water; bureaucracy triumphed as the computer and the photocopier spewed out mountains of bumph, and more and more meetings were held to discuss their contents; publishers ceased to be of interest to gossip-columnists and profile writers, giving way to PR men, celebrities, television cooks and the other heroes of a less literate age. And, as Tony Godwin had foreseen, Penguin lost its near monopoly at the literary end of the market as publishers set up their own rival paperback imprints, reserving for themselves books which would once have been published by Penguin, and reverting the rights in titles which had seemed part of Penguins birthright. But some things never changed. Somehow Lane’s principle of ‘swings and roundabouts’ survived: bestsellers and books on gardening or chess continued to subsidize first novels, unimportant memoirs and biographies of neglected eighteenth-century novelists.
Publishers with literary ambitions of their own seldom make it to the top, having one eye on the clock and another on the door, and lacking the monomaniacal intensity the trade demands. Like many of the best publishers, Lane was neither intellectual nor arty, but combined shrewd business sense with intuitive good taste and an ability to read the spirit of the age: he was, as has often been pointed out, a contradictory character, in that he was both affable and cold, ruthless and cowardly, loyal and fickle, but – like many of those who found and run business empires – he was an uncomplicated, single-minded man, more interesting for what he achieved than for his insights into the human condition and seldom afflicted by the ambivalence and indecisiveness endemic among writers and intellectuals. Though not the most bookish of men, he was a literary publisher in that he made the best writers of the past and the present available at prices everyone could afford, but his influence was cultural, social and even political as well as literary. Like David Astor at the Observer or Lord Beveridge or William Haley at the BBC or Kingsley Martin at the New Statesman, Allen Lane was one of the éminences grises who moulded the world in which I grew up, giving voice to the ideals that were made manifest by the post-war Labour government, prevailed through the ‘Butskellite’ consensus, and were only called into doubt with the rise of Mrs Thatcher. But unless they take to the soapbox, like Lane’s great contemporary Victor Gollancz, publishers are curiously elusive and hard to pin down: politicians, sportsmen and soldiers busy themselves in public life, journalists and academics write it up, publishers commission the result, and the thread becomes ever more tenuous. Publishers loom large in their lifetimes, but are quickly forgotten: Allen Lane is – or should be – one of the rare exceptions to the rule. And his insistence on making the best available to the many, without dilution or simplification, makes him, in an age of dumbing down, an exemplary figure as well.