My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles Page 4

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  My First Publisher

  GRANT RICHARDS

  My first novel was accepted by Grant Richards in January 1917. I was then a cadet at Sandhurst. On my next leave, I called on him in his offices near Leicester Square, across the way from Ciro’s. I knew more or less what to expect. ‘Grant Richards’, my father told me, ‘is the best-dressed publisher in London and he wears an eyeglass.’

  He was then in his middle forties and certainly an impressive person. He was the first ‘man of the world’ that I had met, and today, fifty years later, I have not met anyone who fits that role more effectively. He looked and behaved as the young Arnold Bennett from the Potteries dreamed of looking and behaving. He was supremely knowledgeable about food and wine and clothes and travel, about the practical ordering of existence. He had in a high degree what the Edwardians called ‘style’.

  Five years earlier he had escorted Theodore Dreiser across the Atlantic, to London and the English countryside, to Paris and the South of France. He described the trip in his autobiography Author Hunting. Dreiser also described it in A Traveller at Forty. The rough-grained Bohemian, hardened by reverse, embittered by opposition and neglect, had met no equivalent for the polished, assured cosmopolitan. Barfleur is Dreiser’s nom de plume for Richards, and the first chapter is called ‘Barfleur Takes Me in Hand’.

  Richards was at that time, to employ a current American phrase, ‘between wives’. He was free to concentrate his entire energies upon his guest. He stage-managed everything. He told Dreiser what to wear and what not to wear. It was, Dreiser learnt, ‘not quite good form to wear a heavy striped tie with a frock coat’, and ‘We never tie them in that fashion, always a simple knot’.

  Dreiser spent at Dover the eve of their trip to Paris and went on board before the train from London got in. Richards arrived by it, ‘as usual very brisk, a porter carrying four or five pieces of luggage and his fur coat over his arm, his monocle gleaming as though it had been freshly polished, a cane and an umbrella in hand, and enquiring crisply whether everything was in order. If it were raining, according to a strip of paper on which he had written instructions days before I left London, I was to enter the cabin on the vessel which crossed the Channel; pre-empt a section of seat along the side by putting all my baggage there and bribe a porter to place two chairs in a comfortable windless position on deck, to which we could repair in case it should clear up on the way over.’

  A Traveller at Forty has long been out of print. It is unlikely to be reissued; it is very long. Dreiser was diffuse; it is not easy to cut his work; its bulk can only be reduced by a process of compression. Much of this particular book is dated and a great deal of its interest is lost by its author’s habit of giving his characters pseudonyms or of referring to them as Miss E and Mr G. But anyone who finds a copy on a library shelf can be recommended to give up a couple of hours to it. It has many passages on the differences between Europe and the United States that make nostalgic reading now and it presents a full-length and sympathetic portrait of Grant Richards.

  The preceding paragraphs may have given the impression that Grant was managing and ‘bossy’ but that was not the case. It was a sense of assurance, of self-confidence, that he diffused. He was never in a hurry, he was never flustered, his voice was warm, his manner suave. His bearing suggested that the present was agreeable and, that no matter what the past had been, the future would be better still. His monocle heightened this atmosphere of well-being. It was not attached to a cord; it had no frame; it stayed in place. Only a very composed man can wear a monocle.

  This air of prosperity was one of his great assets as a publisher. He restored and sustained an author’s confidence. If your books were issued under his aegis, everything must, you felt, come right in the long run. He was always buoyant, always encouraging. He never interfered with a writer, never tried to edit his manuscript. He assumed that the author knew best what he wanted to say and how to say it. I published seven books with him; he only twice asked me to make an alteration. He suggested that one or two Greek phrases in The Loom of Youth might put off potential readers, making them suspect something over-scholarly. He was quite right. On the title page of The Loom of Youth I had included my middle initial, ‘R’—Alec R. Waugh. He asked me to drop the ‘R’. What sound advice that was.

  The Loom of Youth, published in July 1917, was a considerable success. It was not for eight years that another book of mine sold well. My second and third novels, published in 1922 and 1924, sold barely two thousand copies each and created no stir of critical interest. A book of reminiscences sold seven hundred copies. I imagine that by the end of 1924 most people had dismissed me as a ‘one-book man’. Perhaps Grant himself had his doubts, but he never let me suspect he had. I was welcomed with the same warmth when I called at St Martin’s Street. He would enquire about my new novel, wonder whether it would be ready for the autumn season, discuss who should design the wrapper. Then he would take out his pocket diary. ‘Now, which Sunday are you coming down to lunch?’

  He had a charming house at Cookham Dean; it was an easy excursion and a pleasant one. One was met at Maidenhead and driven, very likely in a pony trap, through a country-side that was still unspoilt. There would be other guests gathered on the lawn. It was unlikely that any of them would be writers. He liked to make his authors feel separate, distinct, apart. Grant was never the kind of man who wore open-necked shirts or high-necked sweaters. He would look countrified in tweeds or flannels. His wife, a Hungarian, beautiful and very many years younger than himself, was a gracious hostess. The food and the wine were good, but there was no excess. ‘Sybarite is a mild expression for your character,’ Dreiser said to Richards. But Grant was a gourmet, not a gourmand. He never overate or overdrank. I have the warmest memories of that dining-room, designed by Heal in terms of the fashion of the hour, with its bright blue walls, orange curtains and chair covers, its black carpet and cushions and black line below the ceiling. And always at some time during the meal he would find the right occasion to say something encouraging about the work of the author who was his guest. I would return to London resolved to make my new book better. I have been very lucky in my publishers, in London with Cassell’s, in New York with John Farrar, Doubleday, the Rineharts and Roger Straus, but I know their feelings will not be hurt if I say that there was something special, something very special about the attention that Grant Richards gave his authors.

  What a flair he had for publishing, how much of himself he gave, how much of himself he threw into it. Author Hunting was published in 1934. It was reissued in 1960, and it seemed to me when I re-read it that it had, like certain wines, improved with age. A few of the authors about whom he wrote are half-forgotten now, but many-have increased their stature, have become more interesting because we can see them and their work in focus. They are established figures now, but Richards knew them before they were established. He recognized their qualities before the world did. He was the first publisher of G. K. Chesterton, Alfred Noyes, John Masefield. Laurence Binyon was on his list, so were Katherine Tynan, John Davidson, William Watson, Frank Norris, George Bernard Shaw, Sir Hugh Clifford, Richard Le Gallienne, Alice Meynell, E. V. Lucas, Thomas Burke, Ronald Firbank, the Sitwells, Neville Cardus, Ernest Bramah—what a list of authors!

  How Grant loved books and the whole world of books. He knew that each book was personal, and, in consequence, just as each man evolves for himself a certain style of dress, so each book needs a certain format, a certain arrangement of type and binding. He was concerned with the machinery through which books are issued. He visited the big bookshops personally and made friends with the booksellers, not only in London but the provinces. He was never an extravagant advertiser, he had not the means to be, but he was a skilful one.

  In the summer of 1917 he invented a new style of advertising, and I was lucky in having this innovation coincide with the publication of The Loom of Youth. He took every week a half-column in the Times Literary Supplement w
hich he filled with gossip about his books and their authors. It was set in heavy small black type. He was a good writer and it was very readable. He was the first publisher to quote the unfavourable comments on a book. He stimulated controversy. He was unique. That was the thing about him.

  After the title-page of Author Hunting he printed a quotation from a letter to him by Shaw: ‘You should call your book,’ Shaw said, “The Tragedy of a Publisher who Allowed Himself to Fall in Love with Literature.…” A certain connoisseurship in the public taste is indispensable; but the slightest uncommercial bias in choosing between, say, Bridges’ “Testament of Beauty” and a telephone directory, is fatal.’

  This may puzzle the modern reader of Author Hunting. ‘Tragedy? Where is the tragedy?’ he may well ask. Here is the story of a man who loved books, who spent his life among books and bookmen, who published many of the best authors of his day over a period of thirty years. What a full, successful, happy life! Where does the tragedy come in? Author Hunting gives no answer to that question.

  In an earlier book, Memoirs of a Misspent Youth, he covered the first twenty-four years of his life; he wrote of his boyhood as the son of an Oxford don of frugal tastes who did not provide the mental and social stimulus that an imaginative boy needed. Grant was sent as a dayboy to the City of London School, staying in lodgings with a schoolmaster near the Crystal Palace. It was a dreary boyhood from which he broke loose at the age of sixteen to work as a junior clerk with a firm of wholesale booksellers in Paternoster Row, at a wage of twenty pounds a year. Within a few months, however, he was congenially employed under W. T. Stead on the staff of the Review of Reviews. He gives a lively account of his experiences and of the men and women whom he met there and of his times in Paris with Phil May and William Rothenstein. His association with painters was always close, and his publication of C. R. W. Nevinson’s war pictures was as important an event in 1916 as that in the following year of Siegfried Sassoon’s poems.

  Author Hunting is not, however, autobiographical. He has little to say in it about himself, except in relation to the books he published and the authors who were his friends. He only once refers, indirectly, to the financial difficulties in which he found himself, and no memoir of him would be complete, would give a true picture of him, that did not refer to his two bankruptcies and to the final reorganization of his business in 1927 that left him with so little control over the fortunes of the Richards Press that he resigned his chairmanship.

  His two bankruptcies came early in his career. The bibliophile will note that some of his publications appear under the imprint E. Grant Richards; that is because for a time he was unable to conduct a business under his own name and used that of his first wife. Those two bankruptcies were considerable reverses. Most of his authors went to other houses, he damaged his credit with the trade, and he lost his ‘list’. By ‘list’ a publisher designates those books five, ten, twenty years old which sell without advertising their fifty, two hundred or a thousand copies every year, that are his ‘bread and butter’, and which pay his overhead expenses. Richards had in the beginning a number of such books, the World’s Classics for example, and several excellent anthologies. He lost them all. Each time he had to start again from scratch.

  It was an immense handicap, too big a handicap. Shaw attributes his difficulties to his having fallen in love with literature, but that was a bad diagnosis. I heard a member of his family assert that his readiness to publish poetry at his own expense in the end proved fatal, but I should doubt if on the whole he lost money upon poetry. He made a great deal out of A. E. Housman. He was a good judge of poetry and good poetry eventually finds a public. He was always prepared to run a risk, but it was not because he ran risks with unestablished authors that he ran into difficulties. It was something much simpler than that. He wanted more out of life than publishing could give him; a trait that Shaw, temperamentally, could not understand, because he had not the clue to it inside himself; but Dreiser understood it, very well. To him Richards was a character out of Balzac, a middle-aged Rubempré. ‘Towards gambling, show, romance, a delicious scene, he carries a special mood. Life is only significant because of these things. His great struggle is to avoid the dingy and the dull and to escape if possible the penalties of encroaching age.… Just one hour of beauty is his private cry. One more day of delight, let the future take care of itself.… He had a delicious vivacity which acted on me like wine.’ With that kind of nature he inevitably took more out of the business than it could afford.

  When I first met him in the spring of 1917, he was probably as happy as he had ever been, happier than he was to be again. He was healthy, handsome, he was just too old for military service; his sons were just too young. He had remarried a year and a half before. He was in love. Books were booming. He had had the previous autumn a spectacular success with Bruce Bairnsfather’s Bullets and Billets. Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights was on its way to best-sellerdom. There was a glow about him.

  In a certain sense that glow never left him. He enjoyed the adventure of living to the end, but that particular high-summer radiance was short-lived. By the spring of 1922 the chill wind of a depression had begun to blow. I was working then in publishing in a part-time capacity for my father with Chapman & Hall and I was astonished at the pace with which the depression struck. In 1919 we were paying bonuses to the staff, in 1924 we were facing angry shareholders. It was hard to see how it had happened: the annual turnover was as high, our list seemed as good, books were selling well, but increased costs and high taxation cut profits to a minimum. And if Chapman & Hall, a ninety-year-old house with a long back list, its Dickens plates and a highly profitable technical department, was threatened, how desperate was the state of an orphan firm like Richards’s.

  It was an awkward time for Richards’s authors. He had never been a prompt settler of his royalty accounts and the delays now became exceedingly inconvenient to a race that lives upon a shoestring. I learnt from another of his authors that he preferred to settle his accounts with acceptances at six months. That seemed in keeping with his optimistic, improvident temperament, and I accepted the solution. ‘Grant,’ I would say, ‘it looks as though my next royalty account which is due in November will total about eighty pounds. I’m short of money. Do you think you could let me have a bill at six months that I can discount?’ He would stand against the light, benign and bland. He would nod his head. Yes, he thought he could manage that. He was generous, always anxious to help a friend. He might not be in a position to cash a cheque for twenty pounds but he would always sign a bill for fifty. And he looked so sleek, so prosperous; his manner was so assured, so reassuring that it was impossible not to believe that the situation was sound at base. For a year, two years, it went on like that. Then the day came when a bill was not honoured.

  It was a major shock to me. I was young and selfish, ambitious and self-absorbed. I thought of my own temporary embarrassment, not of the permanent predicament in which the man who had launched and befriended me now found himself. A sheltering presence had dissolved. I shivered. ‘You now go out into the wind,’ I told myself. During those months I was one of many, very many.

  Richards was then in his middle fifties. It was too late to make a third come-back.

  Author Hunting seemed to me in 1960 a better book than it had in 1934. It was also a different book. It had had on its first appearance a melancholy quality. Everyone knew about his difficulties, of his attempt to come back with insufficient backing and the public’s faith in him diminished. It was hard not to think, reading it, ‘Poor Grant, why couldn’t he have pulled it off?’ He was not, let it be understood, in a desperate position. He returned to authorship. He was far from being negligible as a novelist and a reprint company might well do worse than reissue Bittersweet. The Coast of Pleasure, about the Riviera, is far more than a guide-book. Max Beerbohm in his preface to Memoirs of a Misspent Youth, wrote of him as an author who ‘knows just what he wants to say and can say it—always lightly,
firmly, vividly, amusingly, endearingly’.

  I often saw Grant during the 1930s. His wife had a flat in Monte Carlo. He never forfeited her devotion. His zest for life was unabated. He still added to the enjoyment of any party he attended. He was still, moreover, operating as a publisher, in a restricted way. I remember a party in 1930 which Betty Askwith and Theodora Benson gave to celebrate their Lobster Quadrille of which Richards was the publisher, and how we lingered long into the morning at Cadogan Gardens with Grant not seeming by any means the eldest. But the big days were over. A curtain fell in 1927.

  Reading Author Hunting in 1934 one felt one was following the story of a failure. But in 1960, ten years after Grant’s own death, I felt that I was reading the story of a success. Events have fallen into focus. We can see the literary history of an era in perspective. We can see how much Grant achieved.

  The small magazines and the small publishing houses—how would authorship fare without them? The big firms—the Heinemanns, the Cassells, the Macmillans—are on the look-out for budding talent. But they cannot devote to apprentice work the attention which the young writer needs. A writer is self-taught. He teaches himself by writing. He needs to see himself in print. Until he does, he cannot judge himself, cannot assess himself. He needs to talk his work over with his contemporaries. The young must have something in print to show each other. That is how they become writers. And how can they do that without the small magazines, without the small publishers? Literature stands in the debt of those who give the young that opportunity. They do not, the men who fulfil that function, finish rich, with titles and large houses in the country. But they have their reward, in the history of their country’s literature.

  We make and pass and our place knows us no more. Nothing is more dead, nine times in ten, than the last decade’s best-seller. But there are those who do not ‘all glut the devouring grave’. There are those who set their names as publishers on books which are part of our eternal heritage; men who enrich the world by the work they do in it. Who can think of the eighteen-nineties without remembering Elkin Mathews, John Lane and Leonard Smithers? Who could write of the years 1910 to 1925 without paying tribute to Martin Secker? And the name Grant Richards will be always honoured on account of the authors that he sponsored.