POSTSCRIPT

HAVING SEEN ANDRÉ Deutsch Limited fade out, why am I not sadder than I am?

I suppose it is because, although I have often shaken my head over symptoms of change in British publishing such as lower standards of copy-preparation and proof-reading, I cannot feel that they are crucial. It is, of course, true that reading is going the same way as eating, the greatest demand being for the quick and easy, and for the simple, instantly recognizable flavours such as sugar and vinegar, or their mental equivalents; but that is not the terminal tragedy which it sometimes seems to the disgruntled old. It is not, after all, a new development: quick and easy has always been what the majority wants. The difference between my early days in publishing and the present is not that this common desire has come into being, but that it is now catered for more lavishly than it used to be. And that is probably because the grip on our trade of a particular caste has begun to relax.

Of that caste I am a member: one of the mostly London-dwelling, university-educated, upper-middle-class English people who took over publishing towards the end of the nineteenth century from the booksellers who used to run it. Most of us loved books and genuinely tried to understand the differences between good and bad writing; but I suspect that if we were examined from a god’s-eye viewpoint it would be seen that quite often our ‘good’ was good only according to the notions of the caste. Straining for that god’s-eye view, I sometimes think that not a few of the books I once took pleasure in publishing were pretty futile, and that the same was true of other houses. Two quintessentially ‘caste’ writers, one from the less pretentious end of the scale, the other from its highest reaches, were Angela Thirkell and Virginia Woolf. Thirkell is embarrassing – I always knew that, but would have published her, given the chance, because she was so obviously a seller. And Woolf, whom I revered in my youth, now seems almost more embarrassing because the claims made for her were so high. Not only did she belong to the caste, but she was unable to see beyond its boundaries – and that self-consciously ‘beautiful’ writing, all those adjectives – oh dear! Caste standards – it ought not to need saying – have no right to be considered sacrosanct.

Keeping that in mind is a useful specific against melancholy; and even better is the fact that there are plenty of people about who are making a stand against too much quick-and-easy. The speed with which the corners of supermarkets devoted to organic produce are growing into long shelves is remarkable; and there are still publishers – not many, but some – who are more single-mindedly determined to support serious writing than we ever were.

I have just visited one: the first time in seven years that I have set foot in a publisher’s office. It astonished me: how familiar it was, the way I knew what was happening behind its doors . . . and how much I loved it. ‘It’s still there!’ I said to myself; and on the way home I saw that by ‘it’ I meant not only publishing of a kind I recognized, but something even more reassuring: being young. Old people don’t want to mop and mow, but age has a blinkering effect, and their narrowed field of vision often contains things that are going from bad to worse; it is therefore consoling to be reminded that much exists outside that narrow field, just as it did when we were forty or thirty or twenty.

Finding myself not gravely distressed by the way publishing is changing seems reasonable enough. I am harder put to understand how anyone can feel in their bones, as I can, that life is worth living when every day we see such alarming evidence that a lot of it is unacceptable: that idiocy and cruelty, far from being brought to heel by human ingenuity, are as rampant as ever. I suppose the answer lies in something of which that small publishing house is a part.

Years ago, in a pub near Baker Street, I heard a man say that humankind is seventy per cent brutish, thirty per cent intelligent, and though the thirty per cent is never going to win, it will always be able to leaven the mass just enough to keep us going. That rough and ready assessment of our plight has stayed with me as though it were true, given that one takes ‘intelligence’ to mean not just intellectual agility, but whatever it is in beings that makes for readiness to understand, to look for the essence in other beings and things and events, to respect that essence, to collaborate, to discover, to endure when endurance is necessary, to enjoy: briefly, to co-exist. It does, alas, seem likely that sooner or later, either through our own folly or a collision with some wandering heavenly body, we will all vanish in the wake of the dinosaurs; but until that happens I believe that the yeast of intelligence will continue to operate one way or another.

Even if it operates in vain, it remains evolution’s peak (as far as we can see): something to enjoy and foster as much as possible; something not to betray by succumbing to despair, however deep the many pits of darkness. It even seems to me possible dimly to perceive it as belonging not to a particular planet, but to universal laws of being, potentially present anywhere in the universe where the kind of physical (or should it be chemical?) conditions prevail which kindle life out of dust: an aspect of something which human beings have called by the various names of god, because having no name for it made them feel dizzy.

In the microscopic terms of my own existence, believing this means that in spite of reading the newspapers, and in spite of seeing the sad end of André’s brave endeavour, and in spite of losing a considerable part of my youth to heartbreak, I wake up every morning liking being here. (I apologize to André, and to my young self, for being able to dismiss so lightly events which were once so painfully heavy.) I also wake up knowing that I have been extraordinarily lucky, and a good chunk of that luck came with the job. When I was moved to scribble ‘Stet’ against the time I spent being an editor it was because it gave so many kinds of enlargement, interest, amusement and pleasure to my days. It was a job on the side of the thirty per cent.