For a flavour of Mary-Kay Wilmers’s life, check out her friends. There is her
ex-husband, Stephen Frears, the renowned film director; she met him through
the playwright Alan Bennett at Oxford. She is “age-old” mates with the
novelist Hilary Mantel, who has just won the Man Booker prize, and has
published Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, VS Pritchett, Hanif Kureishi, Anita
Brookner and pretty much everyone else who matters from the great British
intelligentsia.
Yet the lioness at the centre of this pride is barely known outside it. She
has been at the London Review of Books for 30 years, and run it for 17. It
all feels cosy and self-consciously elite: a life of well-formed letters and
quiet glamour. We meet in her tiny, empty office, tucked away in a side
street in university London, with the ghosts of Bloomsbury hovering about.
It’s a fitting venue for a magazine with a tang of exclusivity and a talent
to annoy as much as to impress.
Wilmers, at 71, has a deft grey bob and exudes undated Jean Muir chic, with
good legs and flat patent shoes. She’s soignée, distinctive — and, she says,
“nervous” to be launching her own book after presiding for years over essays
on thousands of others. Meeting her in this cultivated haven, I find it odd
to think that the family history she has written begins with a key figure in
the Russian revolution being hacked to death with an ice pick while her
relative, the Soviet secret-service killer who planned it all, waited in a
getaway car.
Mary-Kay’s ancestors were well-connected. Dangerously so, in the case of
Leonid Eitingon, her grandfather’s cousin and an agent in Stalin’s feared
secret police, the NKVD. He dedicated himself to liquidating Stalin’s
enemies with such success that he was charged with masterminding the
assassination of Trotsky in exile in Mexico. It was the pinnacle of a career
that began with organising the annihilation of “counter-revolutionary”
peasants who opposed the commandeering of their produce after 1917 by the
new Soviet state. He travelled across the USSR, to China, Constantinople and
Mexico, carrying out some of Stalin’s murkier deeds in a supremely murky era.
It is all a considerable way from the LRB’s long, dense, finely wrought essays
about the court of James I, its puzzling poems, and the frank small ads
offering diverse sexual comforts to frustrated clever-clogs around the land.
Wilmers is friendly, accommodating and witty, but there’s an indestructible
confidence that comes from never having to worry about money. A sizable
fortune was bequeathed her by her father, the founder of a company that is
now a Belgian multinational; but it is her mother’s Russian relatives who
have drawn her into disinterring a disturbing past.
In writing about her family in The Eitingons: A Twentieth Century Story, she
has had some of the most fabulously compelling characters to work with as
they duck and weave their way through the excesses of the 20th century.
Leonid Eitingon wins his spurs eradicating kulaks after the Russian
revolution; Motty, the ebullient fur trader, “a man of great wealth and
great charm until his luck ran out and with it his wealth and most of his
charm”; and Max, the psychoanalyst, a friend of Freud’s who ended up
embroiled in a court case after the murder of a White Russian émigré general
in Paris.
Money and revolution are seductively entwined. One branch of the family, the
“Rothschilds of Leipzig”, made their fortune as kings of the fur trade.
Motty, the most engaging of the bunch, funded the Soviet Communist party in
exchange for a licence to keep trading fur, and the chance to stay out of
the hands of the secret police.
“You can do anything with the Bolsheviks,” he concluded, “if you have money.”
Later, in New York, under the watchful eye of the FBI, he wound up with a
turnover of millions, earning hard currency for Moscow so that the wealthy
women of Fifth Avenue could wear sable.
The young Mary-Kay once asked a relative what the family did during the
revolution. “We played cards,” replied Aunt Lola. However, Leonid took the
revolution to heart, adopting his Russian KGB name instead of his Jewish
birth name, Naum Isakovich. Not that this protected him from the anti-Jewish
purges in the end.
A disturbing inheritance, surely? “Yes. But there are also these incredibly
capable characters.” Does she have any preferences among her ancestors?
“Definitely Max the psychoanalyst. I feel I know him better.” She
volunteers that she herself is in therapy. “I don’t go the full Freudian
way. But it’s good to have someone to talk to without needing to care what
they think of you.”
In describing the horrors of the period, Wilmers adopts a noncommittal tone.
Of Leonid’s homicidal career she says: “He was a believer. Once you’re in
the business of killing, you kill.”
To this day the killing of Trotsky is shudder-inducing. Leonid was clearly
proud of the assignment, the peak of his secret-police career. He spent
months grooming the Soviet agent Roman Mercader to carry it out. In 1940,
Mercader, a Spaniard, posed as a writer who wanted to impress Trotsky and
brandished the fatal ice pick in the study of Trotsky’s house in Mexico
City. His victim, Mercader recalled, “let out a long, endlessly long
‘aaaaa’”. Trotsky’s wife saw his glasses fly off, his
blue eyes glittering, and “blood, blood everywhere”. Guards burst in and
grabbed Mercader. When he failed to reappear, Eitingon fled in the car.
Trotsky died 26 hours later.
For all his gratitude to Leonid, in 1951 a paranoid Stalin had him arrested
and he was charged with high treason. In prison he was brutalised and
reduced to a toothless, shaky wreck. After Stalin’s death in March 1953,
Leonid Eitingon returned home. His release and reinstatement were ordered by
Lavrenti Beria, the former head of secret police, but Beria in his turn was
executed, and on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev, Eitingon was once more
incarcerated: he would remain behind bars for 11 years, emerging only in
1964. He promptly took a new mistress and set about begging for his
rehabilitation, which came posthumously, under Mikhail Gorbachev.
At Oxford Wilmers went out with Tim Binyon, who had been a wartime Russian
interpreter and later became a don at Wadham and the author of a biography
of Pushkin. Through him she met Alan Bennett, one of the most important
friends in her life, who recalls her moving into the Randolph hotel for the
duration of her finals. “Outside the novels of Nancy Mitford or Evelyn
Waugh,” Bennett says, “I had never come across anyone who behaved so
confidently or in such a cosmopolitan fashion.” The pair were even, as he
puts it, “spuriously affiancéd” for the purpose of going to parties, and
were invited to dinner at Downing Street by Harold Wilson.
After Oxford, she became a secretary at the publishers Faber & Faber. She
typed up TS Eliot’s letters and was “disappointed” that he used the
words “gracious” and “courteous”. “He was a
great poet! I didn’t think he should be using language like that!” And she
once caught him holding hands with his wife, Valerie: “Outrageous! They were
far too old!” She famously said “bugger!” in front of Eliot, then rang a
colleague in a panic about losing her job. “I thought at least you’d have
said ‘f***’,” said the friend. She does use the word, with that delicious
frisson people of her era adopt. Her son Will once told her he had cheated
on his girlfriend and been dumped. “I don’t see why people make such a big
deal out of f***ing,” she sighed.
Wilmers was brought up in New York and educated in Belgium, but her manner is
reminiscent of the grand salons of the Upper East Side. She takes every
question very seriously — lots of pauses and fluttering movements with her
elegant hands before she answers even the simplest thing. Editorially,
though, she’s utterly hands-on, cultivating a distinctive set of British
writers and transatlantic debates. Bennett invariably gives her the
exclusive of his annual diary, and Hilary Mantel publishes her occasional
literary memoirs in the LRB. New writers such as James Wood and Andrew
O’Hagan have emerged through its pages.
She joined the LRB at its inception in October 1979, under Karl Miller. The
publication — she calls it “the paper”, as if it were an ocean-going
broadsheet — had lived “marsupially” inside The New York Review of Books,
and first hit the newsstand in the 1979 Winter of Discontent, when the Times
Literary Supplement was one of the titles crippled by strike action. The
poets Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney were on the cover. The relationship with
the TLS is like a delicate sparring match between well-brought-up rivals.
They compete for super-literate readers and the big names they revere. But
they also complement each other by expanding a niche market — and it’s not
such a bad niche: the LRB sells 48,000 copies, many of them in the US.
When The New York Review of Books withdrew a big chunk of financial support,
Wilmers stepped in with her own money. “It was a bit of a schoolgirl
fantasy,” she says dismissively. For 17 years she’s been the majority
shareholder, as well as editor, but awkward silences ensue when I ask about
her share of the business. She’s of the old school, which, having money,
prefers not to talk about it.
Andrew O’Hagan, who went on to become a contributing editor at the LRB,
recalls turning up for an interview in the old offices at Tavistock Square.
The experience, he says, was “terrifying”: “They all smoked in those days
and were jammed behind desks with papers falling off them and incredibly
intense.” There’s no such thing as an editorial meeting, just, says O’Hagan,
“free-floating anxiety sessions about what to put in it”. Still, Wilmers
ranks as a fearsomely demanding editor: “She can’t bear a lazy
sentence or secondhand metaphor. She’s tireless in her commitment to the
paper.”
“Most editors are interested in you short term, as a contributor,” says
Mantel. “Mary-Kay is also interested in you long-term.” Mantel calls her “a
presiding genius”, a view shared by many LRB writers, who subscribe to the
genteel personality cult of calling her “MK”. Her put-downs are
collectables. An under-par essay elicits the query: “Did you find him pretty
uninteresting or were you just short of time?” For a long time, the
hub of Wilmers’s life was her house at 60 Gloucester Crescent, a
street in Primrose Hill that was inhabited by writers fortunate enough to
combine serious status with serious income. Alan Bennett, Michael Frayn and
Claire Tomalin were neighbours, and all wrote for the LRB. Bennett says the
place was “always full of people coming and going and conversation, all at
the same time on a hundred subjects”. I ask her how Bennett first
struck her, long before he reached national-treasure status. “Funny,
miserable — like he is now,” she says. It’s clearly a key relationship for
them both. He calls me back to tell me it was Mary-Kay who pushed him to get
his play about Anthony Blunt, A Question of Attribution, put on at the
National Theatre. “She can see very clearly what writers need.”
He was the matchmaker in her marriage to Frears. “I’ve found a man for you to
marry,” he said. She says it was a “Sixties thing” that she didn’t really
expect to last. Frears writes in a series of 70th-birthday tribute essays:
“She does make me laugh, when she’s not making me senseless with rage.”
Within a few years it was over, and no other lasting attachment appears to
have formed.
They can’t have been easy years — she had two young sons by Frears. One, Sam,
now 38, has Riley-Day syndrome, a distressing condition affecting the
nervous system, and is partially sighted. Friends say she fought hard to
find the right medical treatment in his youth. “She kept him alive,” says
one. It’s the one point in our conversation when she seems genuinely moved:
“Before that, people thought I was pretty spoilt. I think they looked
more kindly on me after that.”
In principle she doesn’t like the private-school system. Yet she volunteers
that she sent Sam to the fee-paying University College School in Hampstead.
“I took the decision that I couldn’t offer my son the extra support he would
need at home if he didn’t go there.” When I ask Andrew O’Hagan
what LRB readers are like, he says: “Over-read and undersexed.” This would
appear to be borne out by the small ads. Wilmers sighs at the mention. “I
don’t read them. No, don’t say that! I mean, I’m aware of them but they’re
not really my thing.”
Oh dear, how can she live without “Two males, Brighton, one reads, one writes,
looking for rough trade” or “Inveterate, pelagic marmalade-maker seeks help
committing future acts of parsimony”? Let alone a singles night at the Freud
museum.
Firmly aimed at a centre-left university-educated elite, the LRB is far better
as a sceptical vehicle of ideas than as a prescription for change.
Enthusiasms are literary, never political. Wilmers says she is “captivated
by the left but not of it”. “I’m not tribal enough to be old Labour,” she
says, “but the things people believe in — equality, better conditions for
the poor, good state schools — these are good things to believe in.” Tories
do appear in the paper: Simon Jenkins, the late Ian Gilmour, Ferdie Mount…
But they are grandees. The contemporary centre right doesn’t get much of a
look-in, which irks critics, who point to its (modest) Arts Council funding
and complain that it should show more balance.
“The most sensitive area,” says Ross McKibbin, an Oxford don who writes on
politics for the paper, “is undoubtedly the Middle East, where you couldn’t
say there is much balance.” Wilmers herself says that her customary
ambivalence doesn’t extend to Israel: “I’m unambiguously hostile to Israel
because it’s a mendacious state. They do things that are just so immoral and
counterproductive and, as a Jew, especially as a Jew, you can’t justify
that.”
“My people”, as she calls fellow Jews, “have a responsibility”: “I feel a
particular right to speak out on this because of my background.” In
August she ran an essay headlined “Zionist Terrorism”. What about
Palestinian terrorism: does that get a look-in? “Everyone knows about that,”
she counters. “I just think we get worked up about the wrong things, and
there is more wrong on one side. What Cherie Blair said about being a
suicide bomber if she’d been brought up in Gaza, I can absolutely see that
point.”
She triggered a fully fledged transatlantic row when the LRB ran a piece in
2006 by two academics, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, claiming that US
foreign policy was in the grip of an “Israel lobby”. The accusations of
anti-semitism, she firmly believes, are intended to forestall criticism of
Israel. So has she been to Israel to see for herself? “Briefly, a few years
ago. I had some interesting conversations.”
Critics talk of an ingrained bias. It is really the bias of the senior common
room, not as raucous as that of the banner-wielders, but just as
unquestioning. I ask if she’s convinced by the left-wing lawyer Gareth
Pierce’s recent claim that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was framed for the
Lockerbie bombing — after all, Geoffrey Robertson, another eminent
human-rights lawyer, has come to precisely the opposite conclusion.
“Absolutely, ” she replies. “Aren’t you? Gareth is very good with facts.”
Inconvenient counter-facts, it seems, can end up squashed under those neat
patent pumps. When she’s sure she’s right, she’s immovable. The
events of 9/11 gave the LRB a new lease of life as the place for critical
engagement with the West’s responses. A shrill piece by the Cambridge
historian Mary Beard likened acts of terrorism to “extraordinary bravery”
and brooded on the feeling that “America had it coming”. In
response, Marjorie Perloff of Stanford led a boycott of the LRB among US
academics, saying: “Perhaps this is why academics are now so poorly regarded
by the rest of the population.” A less nuanced blog said that the writer
would like to “shove the [LRB’s] loony left faces in dogshit”.
David Marquand, the political historian and principal of Mansfield College,
Oxford, also had a row with Wilmers seven years ago, when he submitted a
review that claimed “Blair’s handling of the post-September 11 crisis was
impeccable”.
She replied: “I can’t square it with my conscience to praise so wholeheartedly
Blair’s conduct since 11 September… I hope you don’t think I’m being
doctrinaire or incomprehensibly convoluted.” Convoluted? Certainly not: she
simply pulled the piece.
Marquand was “ utterly shocked” at the perceived censorship. “In hindsight her
judgment was more correct than mine about Blair and 9/11,” he admits, “but
it’s a curious view that she is entitled to make contributors toe a line. I
think she regards the paper as an extension of herself.”
The hand-fluttering suddenly stops and Wilmers turns fierce. “Do you think all
this would have been said about a male editor? There was a piece in The
Independent that started, ‘How dare she do this?’ I mean, say that to
William Randolph Hearst!”
The comparison is illuminating. Not many publishers of literary journals would
compare themselves with the ultimate media magnate.
“There’s a lot of steel in Mary-Kay,” says Alan Bennett. And so there is.
The Eitingons: A Twentieth Century Story (Faber, £20) is out on November 5.
It is available from BooksFirst at £18, inc p&p. Tel: 0870 165 8585
Your Comments
Order By: