Stet - Diana Athill (and a giveaway)

42. Stet - Diana Athill

I've been savouring the all-too-few pages of Stet (2000) by Diana Athill, and now it's going into my 50 Books You Must Read - and it was so good that I had to go and buy another copy to offer as a giveaway (to anywhere in the world.) Just pop your name in the comments, along with the author you most wish you'd been able to edit. (You can interpret that in a positive way - how wonderful to get to see their drafts! - or a negative way - my GOODNESS they needed editing!)  I'll do the draw next weekend on 20th April.

Right, now I'll write my review and tell you why I think you should enter to win! I bought Stet a year ago, adding it to my little pile of unread Diana Athill memoirs, knowing that at some point I would read it and love it.  What's not to like about a memoir by one of the most famous editors in the world?  I was saving it as a treat, when I saw that various bloggers were posting reviews, since the Slaves of Golconda were reading it (there's a sampling of those reviews at the end of mine.)  What better excuse to dig out my copy, and indulge?

Although Diana Athill now seems famously chiefly for being old (she is 95), she is also recognised as one of the country's best editors, having worked as one for five decades under the auspices of André Deutsch.  Her reason for writing Stet also explains it's title, so I'll hand over to Athill to explain:

Why am I going to write it?  Not because I want to provide a history of British publishing in the second half of the twentieth century, but because I shall not be alive for much longer, and when I am gone all the experiences stored in my head will be gone too - they will be deleted with one swipe of the great eraser, and something in my squeaks "Oh no - let at least some of it be rescued!!".  It seems to be an instinctive twitch rather than a rational intention, but no less compelling for that.  By a long-established printer's convention, a copy-editor wanting to rescue a deletion puts a row of dots under it and writes 'Stet' (let it stand) in the margin.  This book is an attempt to 'Stet' some part of my experience in its original form.

This explanation, though both moving and understandable, is also an example of the extraordinary modesty which Athill demonstrates.  Not a false modesty, or even a polite modesty, but a genuine refusal to believe how brilliant she is.  She occasionally quotes people's praise of her - which is not (in this instance) the action of the immodest, but the grateful incredulity of the humble.

Stet is divided into two sections.  The second, which I will come onto, looks in detail at her relationships with various authors whom she edited.  The first deals with her career in publishing in a fairly fast-paced manner (she covers 50 years in 128 pages - that's a few months per page, folks) and has a great deal of common sense to say about the practice of editing, as well as lovely gossip about what a controlling - though somehow lovable - monster André Deutsch was, and various illuminating revelations about how scattergun their policy for accepting submissions was in the early days.  Basically, everything they liked was accepted - from cookbooks to travel books to experimental short stories to children's books.  Quite how they described their list, I can't imagine.

Anybody interested in the process of how a book goes (or went) from a manuscript clutched in an author's hand to a copy on Foyles' shelves will inevitably find Stet interesting, but what carries it from being an interesting discussion of 'an editor's life' (the subtitle) is Athill's wisdom, warmth, and wit.  As an example of the latter, here's her brief account of working with an author on a book about Tahiti which was interesting but appallingly written:

I doubt if there was a sentence - certainly there was not a paragraph - that I did not alter and often have to retype, sending it chapter by chapter to the author for his approval which - although he was naturally grouchy - he always gave.  I enjoyed the work.  It was like removing layers of crumpled brown paper from an awkwardly shaped parcel, and revealing the attractive present which it contained (a good deal more satisfying than the minor tinkering involved when editing a competent writer).  Soon after the book's publication it was reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement: an excellent book, said the reviewer, scholarly and full of fascinating detail, and beautifully written into the bargain.  The author promptly sent me a clipping of this review, pinned to a short note.  "How nice of him," I thought, "he's going to say thank you!"  What he said in fact was: "You will observe the comment about the writing which confirms what i have thought all along, that none of that fuss about it was necessary."  When I had stopped laughing I accepted the message: an editor must never expect thanks (sometimes they come, but they must always be seen as a bonus).  We must always remember that we are only midwives - if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own.

(Which, of course, is what Athill has done.)  Although Athill admits that editing the competent writer is a less interesting activity, what I admire about her editorial eye is the willingness, often expressed in Stet, to do minimal work.  It takes a humble and wise editor to resist using her own taste as a benchmark, and looking, instead, for ways in which the author can express theirs.

The first half of Stet is filled with lively and observant accounts of her colleagues and friends, and is certainly very far from dry - but the second half is more overtly about the characters she met.  I shan't go into depth about this section; I'll just let you know the people to whom chapters are devoted: Jean Rhys, Brian Moore, Mordecai Richler, V.S. Naipaul, Molly Keane, Alfred Chester.  I've only read two books by all these authors combined, but I still found her portraits touching, intelligent, and (above all) observant.  The length of these sections, and the accounts she gives of these authors' personal and professional lives, are perfectly judged.

Hopefully that is enough to tempt you to read Stet.  I've barely covered the second half of it, but that means there is even more to discover for yourself!  So... if you have been tempted, pop your name in the comments, and that author whom you wish you'd edited. Stat!

Others who got Stuck in this Book:

"Athill is that very rare thing, a shrewdly selfish spectator. She’s quite unlike anyone I’ve met before, either in person or on the page." - Alex in Leeds

"I have this feeling that if you are lucky enough to be seated next to Athill at a dinner party, it would be an evening filled with sparkling conversation.  Reading Stet is (almost) the next best thing." - Danielle, A Work in Progress

"Athill has the gift of cutting through the complicated tangle to the simple heart of the issues that publishers face." - Victoria, Tales From The Reading Room

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Guard Your Daughters - Diana Tutton

41. Guard Your Daughters (1953)

What a heavenly book!  What a glorious find!  It has gone into my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About.  There was never any question that it wouldn't.

Occasionally I started a book and, after a page or two, know that I will hate it *cough* Mary Webb *cough - less frequently, it takes only the first page to tell me that a book is astonishingly brilliant (step forward Patrick Hamilton.)  Rarest of all is the book where, before the end of the second page, I know I will read and re-read it for many years to come.  We all recognise the difference between a book we admire and a book we love.  Often these overlap, but there are very few novels which feel like loved ones, so deeply are we attached to them.  Guard Your Daughters is on that list for me, now.

First off, I have to acknowledge how similar it is to Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle.  I mentioned that the other day, but I don't think I can really write a review without acknowledging it again.  Guard Your Daughters was published five years after I Capture the Castle, and I think Tutton must have been influenced by it - or perhaps there was something in the zeitgeist?  (Disclaimer: I'm going to make two big assumptions - that you've read I Capture the Castle, and that you love it.  I won't give away any significant spoilers, but my references to Dodie Smith's novel might not make complete sense if you've not read it.... ok, disclaimer over!)

Here are some of the similarities: The narrator is a young girl (Morgan Harvey is 19, to Cassandra's 17) who lives with her eccentric family in the middle of rural nowhere.  Her father is a writer (although Morgan's father is a successful and prolific detective novelist, not an avant-garde sufferer from writer's block) and there are posher folk living nearby.  Tutton even seems to make reference to Rose's disastrous attempts to dress up for her neighbours, when Morgan and her sisters are preparing to visit theirs:

Luckily, if you bother to read a few illustrated papers you can always find out what to wear when, so that we didn't make any crashing faux pas, such as wearing long dresses or flowers in our hair.

The most significant similarity is the feel of the novel.  Just as I Capture the Castle has a warm, nostalgic feel to it (don't ask me how), so Guard Your Daughters feels like a novel one read repeatedly throughout childhood, even though I hadn't read a word of it before this week.  Without being like those mawkish Edwardian children's books where everyone Learns A Lesson, Tutton has created a wonderful family of people who love one another and, somehow, make the reader feel included.  'About fifty years out of date', as one sister cheerfully confesses, and 'living in a completely unreal world' as another admits, but this isn't a realist novel.  This is a novel which glories in its own delightful eccentricity - but not without serious undercurrents.

Right, the family.  While Cassandra was blessed only with one sister and one brother, Morgan has four sisters.  Dreamy, shy Teresa is the youngest (at 15) - she warmed my heart by her forthright hatred of sports.  Next is Cressida, the only one of the unmarried sisters who craves a normal family environment - she rather blended into the background, but that turns out to be important.  Morgan is the middle sister.  One year older than her, Thisbe is dry, sardonic and loves to make visitors feel awkward - the only thing she takes seriously is her poetry.  Oldest is Pandora, recently married and thus absent from the home.  When she visits, her perspective on life has changed...

"The thing is--" said Pandora.

"What?"

"I realise now - I never did before --" She hunted for words and I turned and stared at her.

"What are you trying to say?"

"I realise now that we're an odd sort of family."

"Well of course we are."

"But I mean - Oh, Morgan, I do want you all to get married too!"

"Five of us?  I doubt if even Mrs. Bennet managed as well as that, unless she fell back on a few parsons to help out.  However, dearest, we'll do our best."

It is obvious that life cannot be normal for these five - but Guard Your Daughters isn't self-consciously wacky or absurd.  The events are entirely plausible - there are very amusing scenes where Morgan and Teresa try to run a Sunday School lesson, or Morgan and Thisbe attempt to negotiate a cocktail party, or the girls try to put together a meal for a visiting young man while subsisting on rations (and finer things illegally given by a nearby farmer.)  The various relationships between sisters aren't unlikely either - except perhaps the standard of their conversation and wit.  What makes the Harvey family eccentric is their detachment from the outside world, and their complete absorption in the feelings and doings of the family unit, to the exclusion of almost everybody else.  (The family unit is completed, incidentally, by their father and mother.  No Mortmain-esque step-parents in sight.  The father is only mildly absent-minded, and the mother... well, she has sensitive nerves... it's not all easy-going in this household or this novel.)

But, despite Pandora's fears, they do manage to meet a couple of young men.  Gregory's car fortuitously breaks down outside their gate (remind you of any novel?) and, later, Patrick offers Morgan and Teresa a lift in his car while they're on their way to a nunnery to learn French... Aside from owning cars, these young man share bewilderment at the Harvey family, and both become objects of desire for one sister or another.  Unlike I Capture the Castle, the romance plot never becomes of overriding importance.  Far more important is the family, their love and rivalry, and definitely their comedy.  There are many very amusing scenes, and a few quite moving and difficult ones, but the main wonder of the novel is the family, and Morgan's voice.  She is not so self-conscious as Cassandra, but has an inviting, charming, slightly wry outlook on her sisters - coloured, of course, by her love for them.  I have no idea how Tutton has created such a lovable character - if I knew, I'd bottle it.

These aren't the sisters in the book, of course... but they could be.
(picture source)

It's so difficult to write about a book when I have simply loved it.  I want to shelve any critical apparatus (not that I usually drag it out on my blog) and substitute rows of exclamation marks and smiley faces.  Guard Your Daughters is so warm, so funny, so lively and delightful.  It's a warm blanket of a novel, but never cloying or sentimental.  Basically, if you have any affection for I Capture the Castle, you'll feel the same about Guard Your Daughters.  I'm going to go one step further.  I think it's better than I Capture the Castle.  There.  Said it.

Bizarrely, unbelievably, criminally, it is out of print.  But I've seen the edition I have (the Reprint Society, 1954) in lots and lots of bookshops - I think they may have overestimated the demand!  I would love people to read it, so I'll probably buy up copies when I see them, and force them on friends and family... if it's languishing on your shelves, then go and grab it asap.  I'm so grateful to my friend Curzon for initially recommending it to me, and later Nicola Humble (author of the absolutely essential The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920 to 1950s) for reminding me about it at a conference earlier this year.  It's probably my book of 2012 so far, and if you manage to get a copy, please come and let me know what you thought.

Oh, what a heavenly book!

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Warner and Maxwell

38. The Element of Lavishness : Sylvia Townsend Warner & William Maxwell

I have had a very good reading year - so many wonderful books which have blown me away. It's going to be tricky, compiling a list of my top ten at the end of the year - indeed, making lists of my all-time favourite books is getting harder than ever - but I'm pretty certain this volume will be featuring on 2011's best reads (coming up soon). And it's nabbing place 38 on the books I think you should read, but might not have heard about. Which means there are only twelve more that I can add - ooo! Thrilling, no?

I still have so many novels and stories by Warner and Maxwell to read - it seems crazy that I've only read two novels by Warner and two-and-a-bit by Maxwell, since I still consider them amongst my favourite writers. But even with these stockpiles still to read, I was delighted to discover that they were correspondents. It seemed too good to be true - that two authors I love should have collaborated on a book in this way, especially since Maxwell lived in the US, and Warner in England, and they met only two or three times.  (Most, perhaps all, of my quotations here are from Warner, but that is because I read the book whilst researching a chapter on Warner - Maxwell is equally wonderful a letter-writer.  Almost.)

The title Element of Lavishness comes from a letter in which Maxwell writes to Warner that:

The personal correspondence of writers feeds on left-over energy.  There is also the element of lavishness, of enjoying the fact that they are throwing away one of their better efforts, for the chances of any given letter's surviving is fifty-fifty, at most.

I love the ethos here: even if they don't know whether or not their letters will be read more than once, fleetingly, it's almost as though they can't help writing to the best of their ability.  Evidently a lot of the Warner/Maxwell correspondence did survive, and it certainly reflects their talents.  While I love them both as novelists, I think The Element of Lavishess is the best thing I have read by either of them.  It's quite possible that this post will descend (ascend?) into a myriad of quotations - so beautiful are the sentences these authors penned so casually.

They wrote between 1938 and Warner's death forty years later, but only really became friends in the early 1950s, where the letters veer from the strictly practical to the lavishness of the title.  The relationship between Warner and Maxwell began professionally - Maxwell edited The New Yorker, to which Warner started contributing stories.  He loved them (I have shelves full of them, unread) and gradually this exchange became a friendship that encompassed not only work and writing but every conceivable facet of their lives.

Warner and Maxwell remained each other's most fervent fans, and happy to express it.  Novels and stories were read and praised, always carefully and thoughtfully; Warner embarked on her successful Kingdoms of Elfin series expressly to please Maxwell - and yet, throughout, Maxwell maintained his role as New Yorker editor.  He praised and praised - but would also, occasionally, turn down submitted stories.  How strong a friendship must be to survive this!  How brave of Maxwell, and how gracious of Warner!  And how beautifully Maxwell himself phrases his response to Warner's appreciation:

You have a way of putting praises that makes it hard for me to walk afterward.  My feet have a tendency not to touch the ground.  Listing a little to the right or the left, I levitate, in danger of cracking with happiness.  When one has been pleased one’s whole life as profoundly as I have been pleased by your work, one does terribly want to do a little pleasing in return, I mean I love you.

Naturally they did not solely get to know one another, but became as intimately involved in each other's families.  Warner's partner Valentine; Maxwell's wife Emmy and his two children.  They often ask after these people, of course - but, more than this, they grew to understand and love these background figures to their correspondence.  I love this quick note of Warner's:

I am thankful that Emmy is back.  In her absence you do not spell as well as at other times.  Does she know that?  It is a delightful tribute, she should wear it in a brooch.

Maxwell helped Warner through Valentine's illness and death, acting as a necessarily far-flung support - and the exchange of touching, thoughtful, perceptive letters became all the more vital. For Warner, in her final years, to all intents and purposes widowed, the correspondence was a weapon against loneliness.  Those little observances and stories she might have told Valentine across breakfast became the anecdotes she wove into her letters.  This was possibly my favourite letter - indeed, I immediately wrote it down and sent it off to my own correspondent, Barbara-from-Ludlow:

All this time I was picking & cursing strawberries.  I had an enormous crop, & my principles are of a niggardly kind that can’t let fool go to waste.  But I got one pure pleasure out of this.  I was picking & cursing and searching who I could give the next lot to when I saw a paddle rise above the garden wall.  And looking down, there were two boys in a canoe.  So without explanation, I commanded them to keep about, & hurried (to Valentine’s workroom) for the shrimping net, and filled it with strawberries and lowered it down to them.  They were silent and acceptant; & it was all very Tennysonian, & I realised that when they are old men they will remember those strawberries.

(This was written in 1972.  Let us assume the boys were twenty years old, at the most - so they are now no more than sixty.  Where are they?  Do they remember?  I believe I, at least, will remember this quirky, moving scene for many eyars.)  

Here, in letters, where Warner is not constrained by the novelistic strictures of plot and character and can instead turn her attention to anything and everything, Warner is at her most perceptive - and at her most deliciously playful.  She never writes a dull letter, and here are just a couple of examples from the notes I made:

Don’t ever think twice about asking me to amplify.   I love amplifying.  If I had lived when people illuminated MSS I should always have been looking for unoccupied capital O’s and filling them up with the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian and a pig-killing.

and

One of the emotions of old age is amazement that one was alive so long ago.  I suppose that is why so many people write autobiographies.  They are trying to convince themselves that they really were.

They are so lovable, so warm!  I want to quote to you endlessly - I want to tell you how Maxwell has ‘a defective sense of rancour [...] the first thing I know I am beaming at someone I suddenly remember I shouldn’t even be speaking to'; how, when Warner and Valentine had a servant, 'we used to count the hours till her half-days & evenings out when we would rush into the kitchen and read her novels and magazines: [...] such a grateful change from Dostoevsky.'  But I shan't - because I think you should just go and buy it yourself.   If you're even remotely fond of Warner or Maxwell, you'll love this.  Even if you've not read a word by either, or don't even recognise they're name, I would recommend this collection to you - anybody with any interest in friendship, literature, letters, perception... this book will delight.

Perhaps I should end with an excerpt from Warner, one of their early letters, which leaves me wondering quite how she would respond to my adulation:

But no reviewers ever understand one’s books; and if they praise them, they understand them even less.  Praising reviewers are like those shopwomen who thrust a hat on one’s head, a hat that is like the opening of the Judgement scroll in which all one’s sins are briefly and dispassionately entered, and then stand back and say that it is exactly the hat that Modom needs to bring out her face.  I have never yet had a praising review that did not send me slinking and howling under my breath to kneel in some dark corner and pray that the Horn would sound for me and the Worms come for me, that very same night.  The horn doesn’t and the worms don’t, and somehow one recovers one’s natural powers of oblivion, and goes on writing.

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