PUBLISHER
by Tom MaschlerPicador £20 pp294
Tom Maschler is not prone to false modesty. He states frankly that when he was chairman of Jonathan Cape it was the best literary publishing house in Britain. “We had the best authors, the best promotions and our production was the best.” In one of the many photographs of himself that grace this memoir he wears a T-shirt identifying him as “the world’s greatest publisher”. Others show him posing with the rich and famous, but in one, taken on the eve of the 1995 Booker prize, he is holding up a 65-kilo tuna, caught while Maschler was cruising in the Indonesian ocean. You cannot help feeling sorry for the fish. It probably had little interest in books, and it was sheer bad luck that it swam into the great publisher’s orbit. All the same, it provides an apt emblem for Maschler’s career, since landing big fish has mattered to him more than anything else, and his book is laid out as a series of labelled sections, each devoted to a single well-known author from the Cape list.
There is no denying that it is an impressive haul. Cape introduced Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Tom Wolfe and Kurt Vonnegut to British readers. Doris Lessing, John Fowles, Arnold Wesker, Roald Dahl, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Martin Amis also became Cape authors during Maschler’s reign. So did Salman Rushdie, although he defected when Penguin outbid Cape for The Satanic Verses — a lucky break for Cape, given the whirlwind it stirred up. With a cast of this distinction, Maschler’s book should have been the literary event of the decade, providing intimate insight into the shaping spirits of contemporary literature. Instead, it is an embarrassment. He keeps telling us what scintillating talkers his authors were, yet he records virtually nothing of what they said. Arthur Miller’s “conversation flowed”, he remembers, but the only detail that sticks in his mind is that he had big feet. David Hockney, he assures us, was “always ready to talk seriously about art”, but not a single remark comes our way. Was Maschler, you start to wonder, deaf? He admits, fairly late in the book, to being hard of hearing. Maybe the handicap was long term.
Another problem is his style, which, for someone who has honed his wits on the foremost penmen of the era, is strangely ponderous. The Frankfurt Book Fair, he tells us, “takes place in Frankfurt, so that if I wish to attend, I am obliged to go to Germany”. Quite so. It is as well to get these things straight before you start out. His comments about books are uniformly banal. Of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children he reveals: “the novel belongs firmly to the literature that has been called ‘magic realism’ ”. Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot “is both highly original and extremely entertaining”. Apparently, when Barnes gave a dinner party for Maschler it was noticed, halfway through the meal, that the host had disappeared, and he was found fast asleep in bed. It is a reaction to Maschler’s company that readers of this book will readily understand.
However, although he betrays no interest in ideas, his attention to the inner man is earnest and thoughtful. A surprising proportion of his book is about seeking refreshment. Staying with the publisher Bob Gottlieb in New York he wakes to find there are no eggs in the house, and has to make two trips to the deli to assemble the ingredients of a satisfactory breakfast. Dining with Heller, the sight of a single bottle of wine on the table alarms him, and he seeks Heller’s permission to go out and buy a few more. A meal he fondly remembers is with Philippe de Rothschild: “I have never before (or since) had the opportunity of consuming so much great wine, and totally regardless of cost.” With Fowles, on the other hand, he notes gravely that they are being regaled from a bottle of supermarket plonk, while on a calamitous evening with Isaac Bashevis Singer he finds himself trapped in a restaurant where water and apple juice are the only drinks served. His gastronomic enthusiasm leads to a breach with the critic George Steiner. After chairing a lecture given by Steiner at Hay-on-Wye he drives to a restaurant 20 miles away for dinner. Steiner, in the car behind, keeps flashing him down and demanding how much further there is to go. At the end of the evening he opines sharply that to drive so far for dinner is a sign of “mental derangement”. This seems a harsh judgment, but Maschler’s interest in food did once, he tells us, endanger his life. Stuffing himself with chicken tikka at a party for Rushdie, he got a bone lodged in his throat and had to be rushed to hospital.
Celebrities are his other passion. Just getting into their vicinity is cause for excitement. At a circus, he once sat near Princess Grace of Monaco and Charlie Chaplin. He managed to get himself photographed with Muhammad Ali, caught a glimpse of Cecil Beaton from an upstairs window, and almost met Yves St Laurent. Most joyfully of all he was at a party attended by Princess Diana, and saw her give his mother-in-law a “magical smile”. No doubt the psychologically inclined would read all this as a sign of insecurity. But from the little we learn of his early life he seems to have been remarkably self-assured even as an adolescent. After public school he gained a place to read PPE at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. But when he interviewed the college principal he got the impression that the man had admitted him only because of his brilliance at squash and tennis. So he renounced university and hitch-hiked round America instead. Keen to spend a summer on a kibbutz in Israel, he wrote to Ben-Gurion, the prime minister, asking him to facilitate his passage out. When he joined up for national service in the RAF, he was appalled to find himself doing drill and digging trenches with the other recruits. For someone of his quality these pursuits were “intolerable”, so he went on hunger strike. When the sergeant remonstrated, “I spoke quite softly and asked him kindly not to shout”. He was sent to a lunatic asylum for three weeks, then discharged as unfit.
It must be added that Maschler has clearly stirred warm and deep affection in many of his authors. When, in the late 1980s, he suffered from clinical depression, he received loving, supportive letters, which he reprints, from Lessing, Dahl and Vonnegut, among others. The only surprise is that, with so many friends in the literary world, none of them persuaded him not to publish this book.
Available at the Books First price of £16 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
READ ON...
websites:
www.publishingnews.co.uk
Guide to what is happening in British publishing
