So there are my first two, and Shakespeare must be on the shelf because I want to read him, not see him performed, but so as not to cause dissent in the home I will steer clear of all modern versions and plump for the old familiar Alexander edition. But the inclusion of a Complete Shakespeare leads to the argument that this is not one book but many. If I am to play strictly by the rules then I may take just one book containing one work. Ah, the old parlour game. Right, we shall play it. From Shakespeare, I will not keep:
Any of the poetry.
Any of the Roman plays.
A History play? Possibly. Henry IV Part 1 goes down on the longlist.
Then come the Tragedies. Macbeth is exciting. King Lear is depressing. Othello is a most annoying play … Of those three, Macbeth stays, for now. Hamlet, definitely. Exciting, dense and rich, varied, fast-paced scenes alternating with slower ones and a great ghost story … If it is between Macbeth and Hamlet then there is no contest. Or is there? Macbeth is one of the great crime stories of the world and has arguably the best villainess in literature. Both stay in for now.
The Comedies next, and Twelfth Night and As You Like It go out at once, as does The Comedy of Errors. A Midsummer Night’s Dream must stay.
Then come what we called the ‘Problem Plays’, though I gather the term has fallen out of favour in academia, and out of those I think I’ll keep All’s Well that Ends Well because it is strange and interesting. Of the late plays, The Tempest has to stay. It may be my favourite play.
So, we have a shortlist of Henry IV Part One, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, All’s Well and The Tempest and many people would find that an odd selection and wouldn’t dream of abandoning several of the others – but the arguments are half the fun of the game.
Henry IV has to go because one history play by itself does not quite work, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream goes too, because, although so much of it is magical, the lovers’ knots are very tiresome and Theseus and Hippolyta are dull. Do I knock out Macbeth or Hamlet? Pass for the moment. All’s Well versus The Tempest. No contest. The Tempest stays. Three in the ring. Help. I can’t do this. Yes. I can, it’s easy. I know Hamlet so well that if I absolutely had to, I could probably sit down and recite quite a lot of it but I couldn’t say the same of Macbeth, apart from what you might call the quotations. I’ll keep Macbeth.
The final choice? This is the only Shakespeare play I am allowed to keep and read for the rest of my life, unless I use up a precious second book out of my forty.
I am going to leave the decision to mature until later.
Some would call this business downsizing, others de-cluttering. I think I will call it ‘crystallising’.
Long Barn
I LOVE THE BOOK. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the compactness of it, the shape, the size. I love the feel of paper. The sound it makes when I turn a page. I love the beauty of print on paper, the patterns, the shapes, the fonts. I am astonished by the versatility and practicality of The Book. It is so simple. It is so fit for its purpose. It may give me mere content, but no e-reader will ever give me that sort of added pleasure.
I grew up loving both books and The Book, and having spent so many years reading and writing them I suppose it was inevitable that one day I would want to make them and publish them. It’s a bug that gets to quite a few people. I could feel myself moving inexorably towards becoming a publisher for several years but it was a very slow, semi-conscious movement. And then several things happened within a short space of time to make the last moves very swift.
I met Roy Strong on Paddington Station and as we waited for our trains we spoke of this and that, in the course of which he told me that he was wondering whether or not to publish his diaries. I urged him to do just that. And I suddenly heard myself telling him that I was wondering whether or not to start a small publishing company.
‘If you publish your diaries, I’ll buy them,’ I said.
‘If you start a publishing company, I’ll do a book for you,’ he said, and then he added, ‘Do it. We should all embark on something completely new every ten years. And besides, it will be fun.’
Roy published his diaries. In my copy he wrote ‘To Susan, who enters my life at significant moments.’ Well, so does he.
Meanwhile, he had started me thinking.
I knew who I wanted to emulate, of course. Virginia Woolf, that practical woman who, with Leonard, decided to launch the Hogarth Press and so bought a printing press, which was delivered into their dining room along with a manual on how to work it. I thought back to the Christmas I had received my equivalent, the John Bull Printing Set. No one who missed the era of the John Bull Printing Set can say they have lived. The set consisted of a cardboard box containing small wooden racks and strips of rubber letters, together with a few numbers and punctuation marks, tweezers, an ink-pad and stamp. You carefully split the rubber strips and removed each letter with the tweezers, a most fiddly job, and set it out on the rack. When you had formed two or three words to make a sentence, you transferred the words one at a time to the slots in the stamp – and, of course, everything was in mirror language and had to be inserted backwards. Then you pressed the stamp with its word on to the ink-pad and when it was nicely coated, stamped it on to paper. Invariably, you either pressed too hard, took up too much ink and made a blobby word, or you pressed too lightly and made a faint word, or only a part of it. It was a tricky and delicate operation. The other risks were forgetting to put the letters in backwards order so that your words came out as lluB nhoJ. Or sometimes, luBl Jonh. To make an entire sentence, even with patience and practice, by trial and error, took ages. The most common accident was, of course, the dropping of the box which, like buttered toast, always turned upside down so that little rubber letters went everywhere, to be eaten by the dog or the vacuum cleaner and never seen again.
I started several newspapers using my John Bull, and even one or two books, but in the end it was clear that the operation was too fraught with technical difficulties to succeed and that my manual dexterity left much to be desired, so although I continued writing, editing and publishing newspapers, albeit with a small circulation, they were handwritten. They all folded eventually.
But the charm of the John Bull Printing Set was still considerable because for a short time it seemed to lift me nearer to the worlds of printing and publishing, which fascinated me even then. The delight was fed when I went to King’s, and I often walked up into Fleet Street to see the printing presses thunder out the daily papers. During the final summer between school and university I had a job as a cub reporter on a local paper and went to watch my first article being typeset in the old way. The principle was pretty much the same as with the John Bull – trays of letters set in mirror language, great containers of ink, the finished sentences and paragraphs pressed on to paper. The history of printing is both interesting and romantic. I wonder if Leonard and Virginia Woolf dropped all the letters on the dining-room carpet while they were mastering the art and starting to print Hogarth Press pamphlets, early poems by T.S. Eliot and stories by Katherine Mansfield. On my Woolf and Bloomsbury shelves, I have a complete list of Hogarth Press publications, and it has been my inspiration. From time to time I just take it down and browse the titles, pour encourager.
Perhaps the desire to be a publisher was always there, ever since the John Bull Printing Set days. It was the remark of Roy Strong’s about embarking on something new every ten years that was the real spur.
But where to begin? How do you publish a book? How do you start a publishing company?
If in doubt, practise on yourself. I did not want to become a selfpublisher – that is something different, and I already had several publishers for my own books. But then I remembered the short stories. Penelope Fitzgerald once told me how astonished she was to discover that a lot of writers had drawers full of short stories. It astonished me, too. Short stories have always been as rare as hen’s teeth in this house. But something strange had happened a
year previously, when I had had a brush with death, survived, and, as a result, felt as if bits of my unconscious had floated to the surface, like debris after a storm. In among the bits had been four short stories, which I had written one after the other, quite urgently, as if afraid that they might sink back to the depths of the ocean again. But four stories do not a volume make, and I had put them away in a drawer, hoping that eventually I would have more to make up a collection.
I took them out, re-read them, tidied them up a bit. Here was what I could begin with – a small book of short stories, a modest paperback. I had my own name to trade on, as it were, which gave me a head start, but after that I had nothing.
I did not even have a name for the company. The Hogarth Press was called after the house in Richmond in which the Woolfs were living. Our house name would not quite work. But across the yard from the main house is a fine old barn, a long barn with three open arches at the front. One night I looked out of my bedroom window and saw it in the moonlight. ‘Long Barn’ I thought, and then added ‘Books’. Bingo. The next day I opened Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary at an entry which read ‘Just back from staying with Vita at Long Barn.’ If I had needed a sign, there it was.
Publishing has been a hugely enjoyable sideline to writing my own books and it has taught me a very great deal about the other side of the business. I now understand why certain things have to happen the way they do, even though authors are not pleased by them. I know how much time, trouble, thought and financial risk go into making and bringing out a book. I know how difficult it is to sell books. My respect for my fellow publishers has soared.
And here are the Long Barn Books: Ronald Blythe’s essays, Going to Meet George and Other Outings; Debo Devonshire’s hilarious collection of pieces about life at Chatsworth, life in the country, and the madnesses of the world, Counting my Chickens; Quentin Crewe’s travel book, Letters from India; Nick Peto’s scurrilous, side-achingly funny autobiography, Peto’s Progress; Tom Parker Bowles’s first book, E is for Eating, with its zingy cover and quirky illustrations by Matthew Rice. Here is William Shakespeare: The Quiz Book by Stanley Wells, illustrated by John Lawrence’s woodcuts, and with the answer booklet printed separately and slipped into a pocket at the back so that if you are the sort of person who cheats at quizzes, you can remove it before attempting them. And then, inevitably, lose it. Knowing that this would happen, we offered a free replacement booklet on receipt of a stamp. Paddy Leigh Fermor got through four replacements, and because he lives in Greece for most of the year and does not have our stamps, sent me a cheque for £1. I never cashed it, of course. Whoever would bank a cheque for one pound, signed by Patrick Leigh Fermor?
I am proud of every book, proud to have made books as well as written them. Roy Strong was right and I am glad I learned something new in the last decade of the twentieth century. Publishing is a lot of fun and I bet Leonard and Virginia thought so, too. And so long as there are readers there will be publishers, and so long as there are both there will be books, real books, printed on paper and bound into volumes. I will put money on it.
The Way we Live Now
I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN the look of scorn that froze on the features of one particular English tutor when I mentioned that I was reading Trollope. It is hard to understand that attitude now, but it was not uncommon. The great Victorian novelists were Dickens, George Eliot, the Brontës, perhaps Thackeray. Trollope was thought of by many academics as a pen-pusher, who self-confessedly churned books out to a strict daily timetable, while working for the Post Office. I inherited this sort of intellectual snobbery and for a few years believed that real creative writers waited for inspiration and when it came, honed their few sentences like guardsmen shining their boots. Writing fiction was not regarded as something you did as a set task at a set time every day, let alone with a regular target of words. Those who saw things this way had never, of course, tried either and certainly never had to work to a deadline, let alone earn a living by writing. Yet Dickens published his books in parts – he was effectively a magazine writer in the first instance, and had to work whether or not he felt inspired to do so on any given day. Nobody has ever sneered at Dickens in the way people sneered at Trollope and I have often wondered what it is about him that provoked such derision, other than his working habits. Perhaps those who sneered did not stay to read. People do take up positions over books as over anything else, and stick to them wrong-headedly and stubbornly, on the flimsiest of evidence.
I first read Trollope for A level when we studied The Warden. I found it beguiling but melancholy and inevitably, after three terms of close analysis of what is a relatively slight novel, plus essays and exams on it, too, I wearied of it and did not feel interested enough to take up the next in the series. I came to the rest of the Barsetshire novels much later, when I was no longer prejudiced against reading more about clergymen. Before that, I read my way through the political novels and I did so, like many other people, because of the television adaptation in the early 1970s. The Pallisers, as the series was called, is not merely golden in the memory, it is one of the great television dramatisations in the history of that medium, and I say so having watched every episode again in the last year in the immaculately re-originated DVD version. So often, what we remember as great television later seems slow, over-acted and, in the case of comedy, no longer funny. But The Pallisers is enthralling, the acting some of the best I have seen on the small screen, the period detail flawless. After I watched them all again, I went back to the books, and the faces and voices of the dramatisation stayed in my mind – the faces of Roger Livesey, a young Anna Massey and the beautiful Susan Hampshire, the face of a perfectly cast Philip Latham as Plantagenet and those of others, long dead or vanished from our screens – these are still the faces I see as I read, down to the very young Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons as two of the Duke’s children.
But there is more to Trollope than there is to, say, The Forsyte Saga, a television dramatisation of the 1960s. There is a depth of human understanding, a political insight and wisdom, a perceptiveness of how men behave in public and again in private life, and how one influences and supports the other. Trollope understands the nature of power – how it is used best and how it can corrupt. He understands the machinations of men who long for power, the wheeling and dealing involved in the political game, the nature of deception. He was an observer, as all the best realistic novelists have been, not an insider, and so he is able to make revelations, to strip away pretensions with a fine scalpel, to probe to the heart of a man, or the motives for an action. What he says about the political world, and the social worlds that revolve in its orbit, is as relevant today as it was in his own time, and so long as a parliamentary democracy continues to work in the same way it will continue to be so.
Trollope is a past master both at handling a great many characters within the novel, and in driving his narrative lines clearly forward. Dickens was a master at handling a large number of characters, too, but, probably because he was writing under pressure, part by part, his narrative line is sometimes confused and there are often discrepancies – though they never seem to matter, so swept on is the reader by the whole great performance. But Trollope has a cooler head.
He is also more of a realist. Dickens has pantomime villains and bizarre grotesques, sentimental heroines and pasteboard heroes. His scenes are great tableaux, strung together. Trollope’s characters are such as you might have met every day if you had moved in the worlds of politics and great houses, parishes and Victorian cathedral closes. He creates detailed and wholly believable worlds. Sometimes he is pedestrian, especially in the many minor Irish novels. But he is such an intricate writer, subtle in his observations, multifaceted as the societies he lays bare. The tutor who sneered at him as lightweight can surely not have read his masterpiece, The Way we Live Now. I have read critics describe Trollope as missing greatness, without the genius touch of Dickens, but The Way we Live Now is a masterpiece by any literary stand
ards, Melmotte one of the great evil men of fiction – ruthless, cold, cruel, manipulative, vain, cunning – and wholly believable. Dickens could have created him but he would have done so very differently. Dickens’s Victorian world is odd, slightly distorted – we see scenes and characters as if in one of those fairground mirrors which make some things elephantine, some elongated, others dwarfish. Dickens liked grotesques and some of his novels have the quality of nightmare, almost surrealist in effect. This is so far away from Trollope that we might be looking at a different age. Henry James wrote that ‘there are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition. It is the latter that Trollope gratifies.’
Dickens for one view, Trollope for another, Dickens for one reading-mood, Trollope for its counterpart. I would not want to be without either. My tutor was wrong about Trollope because he was reading him, as it were, with the wrong expectations, through the wrong lenses. Adjust the view and he comes into sharp focus.
My fiction shelves are not laden with Victorian novels but they seem thick with both Dickens and Trollope, and my forty books cannot contain very many of either. I go to the Dickens shelf and run my hand along the various editions, taking out several and discarding them, leaving a crystallisation again. What is left? Little Dorrit. Bleak House. Great Expectations. A Christmas Carol. Our Mutual Friend. The Carol can go because I know it so well I scarcely need it, and Great Expectations, because it is short and I must make each volume pay its way by the pound and the spine width as well as by the quality. My Dickens has to be Our Mutual Friend.
But Trollope is harder because how can I take one Barchester Chronicle, one political novel? Do any of them stand alone? I think The Last Chronicle of Barset does, and it is a mighty novel. It is the culmination and the crown of them. None of the political novels can be detached from its fellows in the same way without suffering damage. Then, bleak and dark though it is, and lacking the well-loved characters who walk through Barsetshire or stroll among the politicians and the Dukes and Duchesses as it does, I have to bring it down to the best and keep The Way we Live Now on my shelf.