T. G. Rosenthal on an occupation for players
Company histories are usually, after the memoirs of second-rate generals and cabinet ministers, perhaps, the most boring books in the world, prompted as they inevitably are by a depressing psychological cycle of guilt, puffed-up vanity, frustration, self-justifica- tion and a feeble attempt to impress an otherwise forgetful posterity. In the sense that 'the large public companies, by their sheer size, affect large numbers of people and tend, when they crash, to make the earth move a little, social and economic historians have to read the commemorative, hard-bound public relations handouts that drop costively from the presses every few months, secure in the knowledge that not a single major scandal will be revealed, yet knowing perfectly well that no great indus- trial fortune was ever made without great chunky slices of treachery, skulduggery, mayhem and other assorted commercial mis- demeanours. What, therefore, could be more presumptuous than to produce the history of publishing houses whose names are un- known to ninety-five per cent of the pop- ulation, whose annual turnovers rarely reach seven figures and where the dirty deeds rarely go beyond a poached author or two, a manager not awarded his promised seat on the board or a blackball at the Garrick?
But, as the Registrar of the Restrictive Trade Practices Court had to admit, books are different; and so are publishers different from other businessmen and entrepreneurs. They seem to include a higher proportion of frustrated writers and academics than any other group of men and, consequently, the tales of their infighting are more interesting and the tellers write, as indeed they should, with rather more style and wit than the average soap-maker. One of the most sig- nificant anecdotes in Michael Howard's ele- gantly written and finely produced history of the publishing house founded fifty years ago by his father and Jonathan Cape, is that of the English financier who 'had the idea of making a corner in• publishing, ob- tained from Somerset House the balance sheets of all the public publishing companies, and spent some days analysing them min- utely. Afterwards he declared disdainfully that, having investigated the prospects of the publishing trade, he could see that there was "nothing in it".' In that sense the finan- cier would be wrong today, since a substan- tial proportion of English publishing output is now controlled by financiers and even soine of the best private companies, of which Jonathan Cape is a perfect example, have substantial minority holdings in the hands of outside entrepreneurs. In other words,
there is money to be made in publishing it just happens to be a damned sight harder to make it out of books than, say, washing machines, but even they can lose their bloom, while the number of people who want to work and/or invest in book publishing is as large as ever.
From a normal business point of view, however, publishing is clearly a dotty enter- prise, marred as it is by a bewildering multi- plicity of product, a total inability to do adequate market research and a grem- lin-dominated, internecine competitiveness which will result in three definitive biog- raphies of one of Napoleon's minor regi- mental commanders appearing within four- teen days of each other. I suspect that it is precisely this almost indefinable confusion which attracts to the trade such diverse and genuinely talented men. Some, who had better remain nameless, want to be cultural impresarios and are motivated at least partly by vanity, others like Victor Gollancz — probably the most influential political publisher of this century — are moved by a kind of messianism and others, like Allen Lane, by an educational and egalitarian zeal.
The most common motive, for all its ap- parent naivety, seems to be to publish good books, and, if not good ones, then at least those that will interest the public. (Despite the cynicism supposedly inherent in our trade I do not actually believe that any civilised publisher actually wants to publish such novelists as Jacqueline Susann or Harold Robbins.) Herbert Jonathan Cape was, in that sense, a common publisher but an uncommonly good one. Driven into setting up his own business for the classic reason of being un- acceptable as a partner by the firm for which he was making a substantial part of the profits, he had a sound instinct for what was good as well as what would sell; and an almost infallible sense for what he could get out of other people, ranging from his partner Wren Howard to his three most important readers, Edward Garnett, William Plomer and Daniel George. Howard, a real partner in all senses, supplied the organisa- tional and financial skills (without which the most flair-laden publisher will go bank- rupt) as well as superb taste coupled with infinite attention to detail in production and design which made Cape books, for so many years, a distinctive force for good in a book production industry not noted for either beauty or skill at the semi-popular level. Garnett, Plomer and George supplied the literary judgment which Cape was able so brilliantly to analyse, select and exploit. The most striking photograph in the book is surely that of Garnett in 1929, massive head, rumpled, English, eccentric and glowing with that fierce literary integrity and intelli- gence which made him for at least two decades possibly the most important single figure in the cultural life of this country. Michael Howard does not evade the fact that Cape consistently underpaid him and quotes Daniel George's engaging little quatrain:
Here lies the body of Timothy Hillier, Who died a victim of haemophilia: He was a publisher's reader Poor bleeder.
George was clearly an old-fashioned 'man of letters' with nicely ironic editorial gifts. After praising with genuine enthusiasm Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day, George pointed out a few sentences whose structure he found needlessly complex: "Absolutely," he said with fervour, "not". Far, I diffidently suggest, fetched.'
Yet, as in most good publishing houses, it was the taste and ideas of one man, Cape himself, which decided the fortunes of the house and Cape, with his odd mixture of innovation and reaction, succeeded in mak- ing the house a kind of institution, at least until his own powers began to fade. His chief innovations, apart from his brilliant exploitation of T. E. Lawrence, were to take great care to acquire major American authors including Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill etc. and to launch highly successful series of cheap editions such as The Travellers' Library and Florin Books.
His occasional lack of foresight could be seen in his reaction to the creation of Pen- guin Books. Allen Lane wanted to buy ten of his first books from Cape, itself a mag- nificent compliment, at twenty-five pounds each against a farthing a copy royalty. Cape pushed Lane up to £40 each against three
eighths of a penny. As Lane recalled: Years later, when the trade was not very good, I was talking to Jonathan and he said, 'You're the b . . . that has ruined the trade with your ruddy Penguins.' I replied, 'Well, I wouldn't have got off to such a good start if you hadn't helped me.' He said, 'I know damn well you wouldn't, but like everybody else in the trade I thought you were bound to go bust, and I thought I'd take four hun- dred quid off you before you did.'
One cannot help reflecting, when savour- ing that anecdote, that Sir Allen Lane died much honoured and extremely rich, but his company is now part of a huge industrial empire, whereas both Cape and Howard died relatively unhonoured and, while surely not poor, certainly not particularly rich, yet their company is now medium-sized, highly profitable, still independent and run by ex- tremely able publishers still under forty.
Israel Sieff of Marks and Spencer once asked Fredric Warburg whether publishing was an occupation for gentlemen or a real business. Those who want to know the full answer will have to read Warburg's engaging book, but it is not insignificant that one of the reasons why Gerald Duckworth denied Jonathan Cape a directorship was that he did not consider Cape his social equal. Presumably Cape was not a gentleman, a remark few would have been able to make about Howard, who thought that the Eton- ian Ian Fleming was a 'bounder'. Yet what emerges with absolute clarity from the younger Howard's book is that both his father and Cape were real players when it came to the publishing game. Successful publishing houses are built up by about one per cent of luck; the rest has to be sheer unremitting professionalism and it is that characteristic; above all others, which marked the house of Cape all through the 'twenties and 'thirties, somehow ebbed away in the 'fifties and then was re-created by a new generation in the 'sixties to make the firm once again one of the dominant forces in the 'trade' (as opposed to educational) side of British publishing.
T. G. Rosenthal is Managing Director of Seeker and Warburg
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