Talk to any writer published by Faber and Faber, and after a while they start
using another F-word to describe the publishing house. “Over the years I
myself have had a strong sense of a family,” Seamus Heaney says.
In the early days T. S. Eliot, an editor and director, lived in a modest flat.
So he would go round to the home of Geoffrey Faber, the founder, to take a
bath. Sometimes he would draw doodles for Faber’s son, Tom, who was one of
his godchildren. Those doodles eventually grew into Old Possum’s Book of
Practical Cats.
One morning in 1957 Eliot took the theme of kinship a step farther, by
marrying his secretary, Valerie Fletcher. This came as something of a
surprise to everyone else at Faber. As office romances go, Eliot’s must rank
as one of the most discreet. Rosemary Goad, another secretary who shared a
room with Valerie, says that nobody had an inkling that a romance was
blooming between her fellow typist and the literary giant. “Afterwards we
realised the evidence had been there, but we had no idea. He had a fearful
buzzer and he used to buzz for Miss Fletcher. But it was all terribly
formal: ‘Miss Fletcher’, ‘Mr Eliot.’ ” It only emerged afterwards that he
had been meeting her every night at the Russell Hotel and showering her with
red roses.
“We came in one day and they had eloped and got married that morning. A note
had been left for Geoffrey. We were all absolutely gobsmacked.”
Today, as Faber celebrates its 80th birthday, half the company remains in the
hands of the Faber family and half belongs to Valerie Eliot. Goad, who is
the same age as the company, is retired, but still edits the inexhaustible
P. D. James.
Eighty years ago the paperback didn’t even exist and there was no mass
publishing industry. Today the sales value of books in Britain is £1.8
billion and Faber, a small publishing house, has an annual turnover just shy
of £16 million and a market share of about 2 per cent. Eliot’s The
Waste Land may have shaken the literary world when it appeared, but that
was a pretty small world consisting of the readers of The Criterion
magazine and then limited-edition print runs. Faber and Gwyer, the
forerunner of Faber and Faber, produced an edition because it was out of
print. Today, we hear the death knell being sounded by some for the printed
book, but 237 million volumes were sold in the UK last year. Heaney’s last
collection, District and Circle, sold close to 50,000 copies in
hardback.
Many of the decisions that shaped the Faber story and, in turn, the literary
history of the past century, were taken at an octagonal, solid oak table in
a room at Faber’s first and most famous address: 24 Russell Square, in
Bloomsbury. It was around this table that Eliot and the gentlemen editors
gathered to discuss aspiring poets, novelists and playwrights who were to
become giants of the literary landscape.
Heaney may be one of 11 Faber writers to have become Nobel laureates, but he
chuckles down the phone as he recalls how he was once the anxious young
writer awaiting the deliberations of the book committee. When he received a
letter accepting his first book “it was like getting a letter from an
unearthly address. ‘24 Russell Square’ was written on the back of all the
books. You didn’t quite associate it with the ordinary realms where you
lived yourself.”
At the book committee meetings, once the drinks tray had been round (Eliot
liked a dry Martini) lunch was served and then conversation would turn to
the dog-eared manuscripts of the likes of Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Philip
Larkin, Samuel Beckett, William Golding, James Joyce and Derek Walcott.
The table still exists, in the archive office at Faber’s new headquarters in a
bright restoration of a Grade II listed Georgian building opposite the
British Museum. It is not there purely for display, a relic of the golden
age. It is a working piece of furniture, as the newish coffee mug marks will
attest. At Faber the past is always part of the present.
The birth of Faber and Faber was trumpeted by a 1929 catalogue with Siegfried
Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man on the cover. Geoffrey
Faber was a fellow of All Souls, who liked hunting, shooting and poetry. He
worked for Oxford University Press before the First World War and then in
the family brewing business before his wife, objecting to the stench from
the brewery where they lived, told him to find a new career. He went into
partnership with a Lady Gwyer, who had inherited a scientific publishing
business, as Faber and Gwyer. When he bought her out he added a Faber in
place of her name. In reality there was no other Faber, but reputedly he was
advised by Richard de la Mare, the father of Walter, the poet, that “you
can’t have too much of a good thing”.
The American-born Eliot, a former banker, joined Geoffrey Faber in 1925. He
already cast a very long shadow over the cultural landscape, courtesy of a
few little verses such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The
Hollow Men, on top of The Waste Land. He continued as a director
until his death in 1965. He was, and remains, a towering presence at the
house.
Goad joined in 1953. “I couldn’t really believe it coming up in the lift with
him. He was a big figure. His reputation was at its height but he came into
the office every day. Amazing,” she says of Eliot. “He worked ordinary
office hours and took part in all the activities.” His name is to be found
in the directory of fire-watching duty at the premises during the Blitz.
“He was a very elegant figure. Smart suits, beautifully polished shoes. Very
tall and slim and good-looking. In one or two of the photographs he looks
quite sexy. Hair rather wild, hooded eyes.”
While he was always very polite, he got very cross with secretaries if he
overheard them swearing. “He was quite austere. He could be quite alarming.
We were all greatly in awe of him.” She recalls an occasion when she and
Valerie were racing to type up copies of Hughes’s The Hawk in the
Rain. “We were sitting on the floor sorting these and he came in saying
‘Haven’t you finished yet?’ ” But Goad says that office life was fun with
Eliot. “He had a very, very dry sense of humour. He could be very funny. He
would say things like ‘Grave news from Cornwall’. And you’d wait. ‘A. L.
Rowse is writing his memoirs.’ He was very good at one-liners.”
Eliot’s first marriage had been unhappy and his wife, Vivienne, died in a
mental hospital in 1947. Goad believes that his second marriage
“rejuvenated” him. “She saved him. He was happy, quite skittish for a
while.”
Despite his literary status, Eliot loved the nitty-gritty of publishing. He
churned out advice to other writers and was a regular at Wednesday book
committee lunches.
For decades it was all men round the table. Goad eventually became a director,
in the late Seventies, but started off taking minutes and when lunch was
served had to leave the room and eat her meal from a tray outside the door.
“It was terribly misogynist in many ways,” she says. Once the company had
been regaled with Eliot’s sometimes hilarious, often devastating, book
reports, decisions were taken on who to accept and who to reject.
Robert Brown, the Faber archivist, is a friendly and helpful fellow, padding
around the stacks in socks and sandals. He is a little nervous about having
a journalist in his sanctum and jealously guards a box file marked “magic
file”, and carries it with him wherever he goes. I am the only one in the
Continued from page 1 room, but I try not to take it personally. He places
on that magic table the sort of ordinary-looking ledger that Eliot might
have brought with him from Lloyds Bank. Inside, the creation of literary
careers is recorded plainly in handwritten columns. Just one page in 1944
records that a first novel by Philip Larkin and a poetry collection by R.S.
Thomas were “rejected”, although both went on to become famous Faber poets.
On the same page W.H. Auden’s collection For the Time Being is recorded as
“accepted”.
Eliot’s book reports could be deadly. He noted that a French novel had
been compared by the author’s agent with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “which
only shows what barbarians London literary agents are”. A report of a book
on the Bhagavad Gita concludes: “I am paid to PREVENT as many books from
being accepted as possible.”
His judgment was pretty sound. One memo to emerge from the “magic file” was
written to Eliot in 1957 by the longstanding director Charles Monteith. Of a
young poet’s book he writes: “The quality seems to me very uneven; but I
think there’s some interesting poetry.” He suggests the writer is not ready
yet but he might be worth a letter of encouragement. Across the bottom of
the memo, which is headed “The Hawk in the Rain: Ted Hughes”, Eliot has
scribbled his contrary view: “I’m inclined to think we ought to take this
man now.”
Tom Stoppard, who has been with Faber since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
Dead was published in 1966, says that even before he had written anything
publishable he “would stand in Russell Square wondering which window was
Eliot’s”.
It would be far from accurate to give Eliot all the credit for Faber’s
success. Monteith discovered William Golding, whose Strangers from Within
had been rejected by 20 other publishers. He rescued it from the slush pile
and overruled the professional reader’s report that described it as an
“absurd and uninteresting fantasy . . . rubbish and dull. Pointless”. The
first chapter was cut, the title changed to Lord of the Flies. The novel is
the biggest-selling work Faber has published.
Faber’s image has sometimes been dusty but in reality it has often been at the
forefront of change. Paperbacks were championed from 1958; plays took off in
the 1960s with John Osborne, Beckett, Joe Orton, Peter Nichols and, of
course, Stoppard.
Stephen Page, Faber’s CEO, who arrived from HarperCollins in 2001, says he
wasn’t brought in for his reading of Auden but for his commercial knowledge.
Page, 44, snappily dressed in black, says that Faber “exists to be the
champion of certain agendas that are not easily absorbed into the modern
commercial universe. So much of it is in the detail of everything, making
careful judgments: where does a literary novel sit in the market? How far
into the mass do you go?”
The company, like everyone, is busy thinking digital. More than 100 e-books
have been published. But Page says we are “in the foothills” of the digital
promised land. “I am a great fan of the coming thing. The juggling act is
that the coming thing is not quite here yet.”
Page arrived three years after Hughes died and says: “It was in the air still
the shock of him not being around. There was a feeling of the ghosts in the
corridor. They turned into a living presence; there is a conversation all
the time about the work of these people.”
Kazuo Ishiguro says: “It’s almost like a national responsibility if you’ve got
that poetry list. It’s like people who inherit stately homes. It’s a bit of
a burden but something you have to live up to and you don’t have a choice.
That means the identity of Faber has to be high literary ambitions. That
backlist is almost like a conscience.”
Paul Keegan, the current poetry editor, is charged with devising new ways to
exploit the backlist while also finding new poets.One such voice is Daljit
Nagra. Born in Britain to Indian immigrants, he did not learn English until
he went to school. He didn’t take O levels but studied A levels at night
school, read English at Royal Holloway and became an English teacher. He
writes wittily about the immigrant experience. “I was surprised that Faber
took my book with broken-up language, phonetic spelling and grammatically
getting things wrong. I said I wanted to keep my style as it is, and they
were fine about that.”
Nagra says that when Page told him to think of the company as a family, “I
found it quite frightening, coming from a very dysfunctional family . . .
But I found they are a family; like a lot of counsellors or therapists. Very
gently spoken.”
Today he is so busy with poetry that he teaches only two days a week. While we
are chatting an estate agent calls. He is upsizing from a two-bedroom flat
to a threebedroom house. “Poetry pays,” he says.
Heaney is optimistic about the state of his art. “The actual presence of
poetry in the culture is very strong,” he says. Faber has “husbanded poetry.
They don’t swank it. They husband the art, they husband the writers and they
are faithful to the mystery of the thing.”
P. D. James is proud to be Faber’s longest-serving author, at almost 50 years.
She is now thinking about her next novel. “If I get inspiration I shall be
90 when I’m writing it. I’m wondering whether it’s wise to get any
inspiration, frankly.” She praises the care in editing and recalls Goad, her
editor, removing a description of a stained-glass window from one of her
novels. However, the author managed to sneak it successfully into the next
book.
With Red Riding on television and The Damned United, the film of his novel
about Brian Clough, in cinemas, David Peace has been catapulted into the
premier league this year. Peace moved to Faber after starting with the
small, independent Serpent’s Tail. He worries at the way that booksellers
push a handful of bestselling titles. “My first book was published only ten
years ago and I got something like £750 for it. I think in the first year it
sold less than 1,000 copies. I’m not sure now if that book would be
published and that’s quite sad.”
Ishiguro, who is to help out with some creative writing courses at the new
Faber Academy, laments the pressure to sell: “I come across young writers
talking about sales figures more than my generation ever did.” The strength
of Faber, he thinks, is its independence and its size. “It’s small enough
for everyone who works there to feel some investment in all the books. If
you get much bigger then publishing houses tend to slip into factions. You
get people who are wishing certain books to fail because they are vying for
the publicity budget or the design budget.”
Back in 1936 T. S. Eliot wrote a memo to Geoffrey Faber outlining his anxiety
about his own work. “I am more and more doubtful of my ability to write a
successful book of this kind. There seem to be many more ways of going wrong
than going right.” That project became Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
and one of the biggest Faber cash cows since Cats came to the stage.
Fittingly, the 80th birthday will be celebrated with an edition this year,
illustrated by Axel Scheffler, of Gruffalo fame. Stand by for a new
generation of Faber ffans.
For their 80th anniversary Faber & Faber have published a set of 10
classic first novels with vintage paperback jackets, and a collection of six
specially designed harback poetry editions. We have five sets of each to
give away for free. Email bookscomp@thetimes.co.uk with the answer to the
following question: what was William Golding’s original title for Lord of
the Flies? Put “poetry” or “novels” in the subject-line to indicate your
prize preference, and include your name, address and telephone number. The
first five correct entries drawn in each category will win. One entry per
person. Entries must be received by 10am on Wednesday May 20. The books,
which retail at £8 each, are available to buy from 0845 2712134 or
timesonline.co.uk/books
