I said I understood there was an editorial job available.
‘Yes,’ he breathed, ‘there is in fact an editorial job available, I believe.’ He pressed a button on his desk and spoke through an intercom. Tan, would you come in please? I have a lady editor who might in fact very well suit us. Yes, now, please.’
He rose and so did I. He walked me to the door just as it opened and Ian Tooley came in. Sir Alec offered me a limp hand and when I took it he seemed to throw my hand away into thin air. Tan, this is Mrs Hawkins.’ Then he said to me, or rather sighed out the words: ‘I hope you don’t believe that Shakespeare wrote the plays. The evidence in fact does not stand independent scrutiny. He must be laughing up his sleeve in the next world, if in fact there is one, when he looks down and sees what is in fact going on at Stratford-on-Avon.’
I followed Ian Tooley along a carpeted corridor, its walls lined with reproductions of the Boz illustrations of Dickens, into his own less vast but impressively oak-panelled office.
Ian Tooley was more robust than his father whom he resembled except that he appeared to have a squint, which presently I found was not so; it was an effect caused by his nose going off at a slight angle. Unlike his father he was casually dressed in a sports jacket and brown corduroy trousers, unusual for office-wear in those days. More unusual still, he wore a vivid green tie. I thought, after all he might be interesting.
He began by looking at me very closely, very carefully, not at all as a man looks at a woman but as if he were considering me as a specimen for some purpose quite beyond my understanding. I felt dreadfully physical.
‘You worked for the self-styled financial genius, Martin York?’ he said.
‘I was an editor in the publishing firm. They published some good books,’ I said.
‘Well then, you understand about proof-reading, dealing with authors, et cetera, et cetera.’
‘All that,’ I said, without any clear idea what the et ceteras meant.
Now I was anxious to get away; convinced they had only got me to come along out of curiosity, and that they were in any case looking for an honours graduate or someone of that nature.
A tall thin girl came in with a tray of tea, set out with a silver tea-pot and delicate china. ‘Thank you, Abigail. May I introduce Mrs Hawkins, who is coming to join us — Abigail de Mordell Staines-Knight.’
That was how I knew I had got the job. Miss de Mordell Staines-Knight swept me a small smile over her shoulder, for she had already started to leave the room.
‘Abigail’, said Ian Tooley when she had gone, ‘is a Virgo.’
My alarm at this saying was allayed by his going on to expound some part of his astral studies, promising me that he would have my full horoscope cast as soon as I could provide him with the exact hour and minute of my birth and that of my mother and father. Their birthdays and mine, he assured me, were not enough. One needed the hours, the minutes. And he ended the interview with the words I have already recorded: ‘I suggest you start next Monday … October 12 will be the next day, Tuesday, a full moon … a movement of authors.’
I believe it was only part-consciously that Ian Tooley, who was in charge of taking on the senior personnel, invariably chose someone, in some respect, not quite normal.
Because the office was peopled, although inefficiently, by a staff of secretaries, book-keepers, filing clerks, typists, according to their various departments, all of average tastes and appearance, it was some time before I noticed that those who were in charge, who administrated or had to deal with agents or authors especially, were in some way handicapped and vulnerable, either physically or in some other of their circumstances. My awareness was gradual, because of the spontaneous sympathy these colleagues of mine evoked. It was when I had begun to piece together the possible motive for their having been appointed to their jobs in the first place, unconscious though it might be, that I wondered what was ‘wrong’ with myself.
This process of increasing realization on my part took some months. Right away I could be in no doubt that the office was run by agreeable people. Only, one way and another one was obliged to feel sorry for them or embarrassed in their innocent company. It was abundantly difficult to find fault, disagree or show any impatience with these people. I didn’t try. But those who did try, outsiders for the most part — printers, authors, binders, agents — seemed to place themselves in the light of brutes, and probably felt themselves to be so.
Among the senior staff was a charming doctor of fifty who had been struck off the rolls, an accountant with a thin, white face who had a dreadful stammer and who said the most agreeable things when he did at last, word by word, form a sentence; my fellow-editor was a sweet-natured, though vague, young woman, a vicar’s daughter, her face frightfully marred all one side by a port-wine birth-mark. The head of the production department, totally incompetent but very witty, had a duodenal ulcer which he bore bravely, and limped from a war-wound. Ian Tooley’s fellow-director and next-in-command was equally nice. We saw little of her. She worked largely behind the scenes but when she made an appearance to deal with a specially difficult problem or to arrange an important contract for a best-seller with a high-powered agent, she was treated with hushed deference, tough business-woman though she was; she was the daughter of a notorious mass-murderer of the early ‘thirties; her father had been hanged; nobody could be tough with her.
There was also, attached to the firm and often in evidence, a very small, raddled and parchment-faced photographer who called himself Vladimir, a White Russian, who was said to beat his mother. He had a small retainer fee from Mackintosh & Tooley, and his job was to photograph authors in the most ‘interesting’ which is to say unbecoming and grotesque aspects. Those foolish enough to sit for him were reproduced on the book-jackets. The rejected photographs Vladimir sold to a clandestine shop in Soho for a modest fee, so supplementing the pittance he derived from Mackintosh & Tooley and a few other publishers who desired to take their authors — always, to them, overweening — down a peg. Vladimir had an unfortunate destiny; he died of leukemia three years later, in 1957, at which point he turned out to be not Vladimir of White Russian princely origin, but Cyril Biggs from Wandsworth. But in 1954 he flourished and was an obliging ally to Mackintosh & Tooley. I think if there had existed a known descendant of Jack the Ripper they would have taken him on. It was their way of doing business as surely as crippledom, in the Far East, is still a profession and a way of life.
Ian Tooley himself was his own alibi. Vegetarian, graphologist and astrologist, he would put all trouble and vexation down to the stars rising in a certain sign or a phase of the moon. All ailments were caused by meat-eating, and these he held could be cured by a combination of vegetable diet and radionics. This latter treatment was, and still is, known as the Box. Ian Tooley possessed a Box and had trained his secretary, the tall, charming Abigail de Mordell Staines-Knight, to operate it. Ian Tooley proclaimed her to be highly talented at Box-operating, or radionics as he called it; and this, apart from her bringing in to him (but not making) a tray of morning coffee and one of afternoon tea, was her entire job. As it happened, Abigail didn’t believe in radionics. She thought the Box was a complete fake. She only did this job because it was to her a merry, effortless occupation, a joke for which she got paid.
The Box was in fact a small black box about the size of a dressing case. The Tooley model, one of the first of its kind, opened up to reveal a row of different coloured lights and a few knobs. There was a place for inserting a piece of hair or a blood-smear, and this was supposed to cure the ailments of those from whom the blood or the hair had been taken. I am describing my first sight of the electronic Box, as Abigail showed it and explained it to me, with a sort of casual solemnity. So far as I could see it was as devoid of any functional possibility as one of those children’s toy telephones with which they go through the motions of dialling a number and talking, but never get anywhere. That was at first sight, and I will say here that at last sight (only t
he other day) and after much study of radionics literature, the more elaborate and complicated instrument seemed to me equally unserviceable. At the time Abigail showed me her Box I was somewhat relieved to find it futile, because, as I pointed out, if the Box could do good it could also do evil. ‘It stands to reason,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ said Abigail de Mordell Staines-Knight, ‘how right you are. But don’t let Ian hear you say so. To him, it’s impossible to do anything wrong with the Box. And in fact, it does nobody any harm, let’s face it.’
She was a really nice girl in spite of her name. I, too, didn’t think you could do wrong with the Box, nor right with it, nor anything. I was more curious to know what, in reality, Ian Tooley fancied she was doing with it. Who, at the behest of Ian Tooley, was she aiming to affect or cure?
‘It’s rather confidential,’ she said, shyly.
Those strange memories I have retained of Mackintosh & Tooley are, however, overspread with a sort of tenderness. I know I shouldn’t have liked being there as much as I did, for the happiness of the firm was based first on the happiness of its members and only second on principles. Principles were the last thing anybody bothered about, although it was a very different establishment from that of the Ullswater Press, in that, for one thing, Mackintosh & Tooley flourished in their business affairs and were prosperous. But the mere fact of being able to balance your books and do good trade doesn’t mean that you are a person of moral principle. And in many ways poor Martin York was more principled than the Tooleys.
Often, now, in my beloved insomnia I recall the fine old offices of Mackintosh & Tooley, in a street off Covent Garden, those high-ceilinged offices which, eighteen years later when Mackintosh & Tooley merged and moved in with another publisher, were gutted and made modern, and even the exterior was fresh-painted and hardly recognizable to me, passing it in the street.
I see again, in my wide-eyed midnights, my own small office which looked out into the well of a back courtyard, and was ill-lit; but it felt good to have an office to myself, a step up in the world. Here I dealt with new and aspiring writers, in other words the authors; for generally the writers published by Mackintosh & Tooley were placed into two categories: Authors and Names. The latter were the few established living authors on the firm’s list, and these Names dealt with Ann Clough whose father, though completely crazy, had nonetheless been hanged.
My editorial colleague’s name was Connie, she with the port-wine birth-mark on her face and a timid vague air; try as I do, I can’t recall her surname. Indeed, her very abstractedness and insubstantial personality seemed to say ‘forget me’; she seemed to live in parenthesis; but I haven’t forgotten her, only her surname. And even the birth-mark on her face became unnoticeable as I got used to her, as blemishes do.
Connie occupied the office next door to mine. She received the manuscripts of new authors, glanced at them and, if they were fairly literate, sent them out to be reported on by readers who were mainly retired and indigent unmarried people who lived in the country, had a certain amount of education, were glad of the occupation and the extra money, and who were supposed to represent the average reader. Connie enjoyed a prolific correspondence with these readers. Their lengthy reports were generally gloomy, beginning with phrases like ‘I’m afraid that The Café on the Corner is hardly a masterpiece …’ or ‘This novel is not to be recommended. The sordid element in some of the scenes cannot be redeemed by the seriousness of the subject-matter.’ A synopsis of the story would follow at the undisciplined length of four or five pages. The end of the report would invariably be a paragraph of one sentence, put in for effect, such as: ‘No, and again, no, to your novel, Mr Travers,’ or ‘This author should definitely be rebuffed.’ These scornful missives were, however, enlivened for Connie by an accompanying letter informing her of the weather in Shropshire, the progress of the roses and geraniums, the nephews, the nieces and occasionally an ailing mother. Connie would reply to these pen-friends cheerily and at length, as soon as she had finished sending to the packing department the condemned manuscripts, with a rejection slip, there to be dispatched to their owners. God knows if any masterpieces were actually lost to the public through this means of selection. I wonder how many of the aspiring writers of those days still have in a drawer the leaf-eared typescripts that they sent to sea in a sieve.
Connie’s other job was proof-editing, which she did very badly. Transferring the author’s corrections to a clean sheet of proofs was something Connie was unable to do without missing an average of three corrections a page, or transcribing newly inserted material all wrong. In those days the authors had long galley-proofs followed by page-proofs. It was only when the book finally appeared that Connie’s mistakes were discovered, but she was incorporeal about them. She put angry authors’ letters about the mutilation of their books under the cushion of her chair to deal with later; she timidly suggested to their irate voices on the phone that they should write a letter putting down their grievances which would be attended to in the next edition. But if they insisted on calling in to see her face-to-face, the authors were so overcome by the first sight of Connie’s poor port-wine mark that their rage immediately subsided. You couldn’t be nasty to Connie, and a friendly arrangement was always reached by Connie’s gossamer-voiced assurance that the matter would be put right in the next printing. Since the next printing hardly ever happened that was safe enough.
Sometimes an author’s agent would go over Connie’s head and complain about Connie, as when she overlooked a printer’s error on the first page of a book, which had been corrected accurately by the author, and by which a ‘blond’ man became a ‘blind’ man, so that nobody could make head or tail of the subsequent story. Situations like these were smoothed over by an expensive lunch given to the agent by breezy Colin Shoe, he who had been scored off the medical register, and whatever the outcome of these peace-revels, none of it reached the ears or the desk of Connie. ‘We can’t have our staff upset,’ many a time was one of the statements of charming Colin Shoe.
I used to spend my coffee-break and my tea-time with Connie, sometimes in her office, sometimes in mine. My job was to collect from her those few new manuscripts that had a faint possibility of being shaped into a book for publication, or whose authors should perhaps be nurtured. It was a very tentative affair, as Colin Shoe put it. I had to talk to authors. Colin didn’t, he said, envy me my job, amiably adding one of his more regular maxims, ‘The best author is a dead author.’ And it is true we would have had an easier time if we only had the books to deal with and no live authors; Mackintosh & Tooley had a small back-list of dead writers who caused very little trouble (except occasionally through their heirs and executors, who got taken out to lunches if they became too difficult).
I was quite aware of this feeling, at the same time that I wanted human contact in my work.
‘Books don’t wriggle. Authors do,’ was one of Colin Shoe’s remarks. ‘They take everything personally,’ Colin Shoe would say. ‘There isn’t an author who doesn’t take their books personally.’ I felt this was obviously a virtue on the author’s part; but, at the same time, these airily expressed prejudices gave us of the firm a coterie sensation which, amoral as it was, I shouldn’t have liked but rather did.
But I was glad of my authors, admitted that most of them were more or less pisseurs de copie. ‘In a way,’ said Colin, ‘you’re lucky to have authors, not Names, to deal with.’ He was full of euphoria at that moment, for he was about to lunch with famous Emma Loy who had hinted she might want to bring her next novel to Mackintosh & Tooley. Colin Shoe made a great occasion of his heavy responsibility in connection with this new Name. I earnestly hoped that Colin’s efforts would fail and Emma Loy take her book elsewhere.
I invited the new and aspiring authors to visit me. A few of them I had already been in correspondence with when I was at the Ullswater Press. I rigged up an electric hot-plate and a kettle in a corner of my office and so was able to offer tea and biscuits in t
he afternoon, coffee and biscuits in the morning, without applying to the typists who usually prepared the office teas and coffees. I suppose I must have been a formidable, somewhat maternal figure while I dished out tea, biscuits and advice. I can see now those men and women, mainly young, who came one by one, twice, three times a week to sit in the armchair I had placed for them and listen to what I had to say about their manuscripts. Very, very few were destined to make a literary career, but a great many of them were far better informed than I was, which made it difficult for me to deal with clever authors of uncertain talent. I have always been free with advice; but it is one thing to hand out advice and another to persuade people to accept it. At Mackintosh & Tooley, at this stage, my large presence assisted me sometimes but not always.
I remember random scenes and I also remember my subsequent memories; so that I recall that I was lying awake in the dark, about ten years ago, when to my mind came the image of a meeting I had had in my office at Mackintosh & Tooley with a young man, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen, the author of a large novel about nothing in particular. It proved only that he passionately wanted to write, and I told him we couldn’t take the book but he should try another, more concise, not so long and rambling, and about something in particular. I recall very little else of that interview but that he embarked on a lengthy discourse, citing famous long novels about nothing in particular. Had I read Finnegans Wake?