Grub Street Irregular Read online

  Although some of the most interesting books of the last century were published by part-time writer-publishers like Leonard Woolf, John Lehmann and Alan Ross, publishing and writing call for very different attitudes and abilities, not easily combined in a single individual. Ernest Hecht of the Souvenir Press, who has remained in business longer than most, likes to quote Sir Stanley Unwin’s dictum that a publisher’s overriding duty to his authors is to remain solvent; effective publishers like Ernest, are, in the last resort, hard-headed if idealistic businessmen, and as such they are far removed from most authors and editors. As I discovered when researching my biography of Allen Lane, and as Tom Maschler’s ill-advised memoirs make plain, publishers are more interesting for what they do than for what they say or think; whereas writers and academics are prone to, and delight in, indecisiveness and ambiguity, priding themselves on their ability to see all sides of a question and to hold contradictory views at once, the businessman-publisher is, by comparison, uncomplicated, decisive and single-minded.

  But I knew nothing of this at the age of twenty-five. What I did know was that working as a minion in publicity departments, and then as a junior editor, was wretchedly badly paid, and that in order to keep afloat – and, in due course, to support a wife, two daughters and an endless procession of cats – I would have to supplement my earnings somehow; still more so since, unlike many of my contemporaries in publishing, I had no private means. I had only been working in publishing for a year when Petra and I got married, and shortly afterwards I began my double life as a reviewer, writing short, anonymous, hundred-word reviews for Michael Ratcliffe on The Times. I acquired my first byline when his successor, Ion Trewin, allowed me to give Peter Greave’s marvellous autobiography The Seventh Gate a full-length review after I had urged him to allot it more than a mere hundred words, and from then on I combined work as a publisher’s editor with as much reviewing as I could manage and acquire; and every month or so, feeling like a dealer in rubber goods or some kind of shady salesman, I would make my way to Gaston’s remainder shop off Chancery Lane with an overnight bag crammed with review copies, and take whatever he gave me with due deference and gratitude. When times were bad I wrote reports for paperback publishers and entries on molluscs and the countries of Eastern Europe for Reader’s Digest Books: a severe discipline in my case, since not only did the facts have to be checked and double-checked, but long sentences, parentheses and subordinate clauses were strictly taboo. I was becoming, perforce, a writer of a kind, and finding my way about the alleys and pubs of Grub Street; but I had no idea what, if anything, I wanted to achieve, and I felt almost claustrophobic with envy and admiration when I read (or read about) those authors who combined reviewing and articles with full-length books as well. Writing books was altogether different, and something I could never aspire to.

  TWO

  Rogues’ Gallery

  One of the disadvantages of having been to a rather humdrum public school is the occasional embarrassment of explaining where one went. Charles Sprawson is the only person I know who quizzes complete strangers on their schooldays, but every now and then a beaming Old Etonian of my own age will pop the question, hoping for the best and momentarily deceived by my fruity tones and superficial familiarity with his alma mater, gleaned from my researches into the life of Cyril Connolly, that most nostalgic and agonised of Old Etonians.

  ‘You won’t have heard of it,’ I reply, lowering my voice to a confidential whisper in case I am overheard and exposed to the world at large, ‘but I went to a place called Malvern.’

  ‘Marlborough?’ my questioner booms. ‘But that’s a splendid school. What house were you in? Did you happen to know …?’

  ‘No, Malvern,’ I say, making my voice as quiet but as clear as possible; at which a half-pitying, half-baffled look flits across his kindly features, and the conversation is swiftly hurried in a more wholesome direction.

  Part of the problem with being an Old Malvernian is that one’s fellows are a fairly undistinguished crew. Like Malvern, Marlborough in the old days seems to have been a fairly brutal, philistine school, but at least its more literary pupils had the consolation of knowing that John Betjeman, Siegfried Sassoon and Louis MacNeice had also suffered and survived. Malvern, by comparison, offered cold comfort. During my time at the school, the Old Malvernian most admired by the Governors, and held up as a model for us all, was an angry-looking cove called Sir Godfrey Huggins, who boasted bulging blue eyes, scarlet cheeks and a bristling grey moustache. (I have taken some liberties with the colour scheme, since the photograph of Huggins which hung in the place of honour in one of the school corridors was, of course, in black and white.) Huggins had risen to become the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, and when in due course he was made a peer, he assumed the title of Lord Malvern, in gratitude to his alma mater. One of the trains that ran between Paddington and Malvern, and points beyond, was named after him, and bore on either side of its boiler a curved metal plaque to that effect. A photograph of the train’s engine, some five feet wide, had been presented to the school in a handsome wooden frame and nailed up alongside that of the former Prime Minister, rubbing shoulders with former headmasters in gowns and mortar boards, and cricketing elevens dating back to the 1860s.

  Altogether more interesting, but less widely advertised within the grounds of the school, were James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s paranoid master-spy, and Aleister Crowley, the bald, pop-eyed black magician who liked to be acclaimed ‘the wickedest man in the world’ or ‘the Great Beast’, and spent much of his time frolicking with naked handmaidens and sacrificing goats in a deserted monastery in Sicily. C.S. Lewis was a balding sage of a more reputable variety, but although he was an old Oxford friend of Mr Sayer, the Senior English Master, he had blotted his copybook by ridiculing Malvern (referred to as ‘Wyvern’) in his autobiography, Summoned by Joy.

  Curiously, for such a philistine and sports-mad school, minor literary men loom larger than games players among the old boys of interest. Raymond Mortimer, a most unlikely Malvernian, hated the place and moved on as quickly as possible to Balliol, Bloomsbury and the Sunday Times; John Moore, an affable old countryman who looked as though he should have worn a tweed fisherman’s hat, smoked a pipe and spoke with an Archers accent, was much admired in my childhood for his novels set in a country town based on nearby Tewkesbury, and was involved in setting up the Cheltenham Literary Festival; Sir John Wheeler Bennett was well known in his day as an urbane and well-connected historian, diplomat and, no doubt, secret service agent; Humphry Berkeley, a former Tory MP, wrote The Life and Death of Rochester Sneath, which must be one the funniest books ever published, with the bonus of drawings by Nicolas Bentley. Younger Old Malvernians, or so I’m told, include Jeremy Paxman, James Delingpole, Giles Foden and the historian Dominic Sandbrook.

  But the one who intrigued me most was a shady-sounding Irishman called Derek Verschoyle, who like me was not only a Malvernian but had then gone on to Trinity College, Dublin: he had also had dealings with André Deutsch, and had been a friend of Alan Ross. I first heard of Verschoyle nearly thirty years after I had left school, when I began to contribute to the London Magazine, and what Alan Ross told me about him tickled my interest in long-forgotten publishers and minor literary men. Like all the best anecdotalists, Alan liked to tell the same stories, suitably embellished, over and over again; and Verschoyle was one of the figures who regularly resurfaced. I don’t think Alan knew much about his background, but I later learned that the Verschoyles were of Dutch origin, and had settled in Ireland in the seventeenth century. Hamilton Verschoyle had given up the Bar for the Church, eventually becoming the Bishop of Kilmore, and had been admired by Queen Victoria who, spotting him riding in Rotten Row, declared him to be the best-looking man she had ever seen; his son, Frederick, spent most of his life in the west of Ireland, dreaming of his undergraduate years at Cambridge and recalling how he had once played cricket for the Gentlemen of Kent.

  One of three children, De
rek Verschoyle was born in 1911. His father, an engineer, wrote scientific books and was the inventor of a hand-operated lathe known as the Verschoyle Patent Mandrel, and the family divided its time between London and Tanrago House in Co. Sligo. Derek Verschoyle’s fifth and final wife, Moira, remembered meeting him on a family holiday in Kilkee, on the west coast of Ireland. ‘I had noticed him before,’ she wrote in a memoir, So Long to Wait, ‘because I always noticed colours that were pretty and that looked satisfying when put together, and he was always dressed in lovely mixtures – pale green shirts and dark green trousers, or two shades of blue, and I had seen him once in a primrose shirt that looked simply beautiful with his red curly hair.’ She noticed too that he was ‘very, very neat and tidy and wore a tie, and his shirt had a proper collar like a man’s with a pin in it. He had a nice square face with freckles and he smiled at me, but I didn’t think he could be much fun to play with if he was always going to be so tidy.’ Years later she would have ample opportunities to discover whether or not he was fun to play with, but in the meantime his mother told her that ‘He has been delicate, and he needs a little rough treatment.’

  No doubt rough treatment was in plentiful supply when he was sent to Arnold House prep school in north Wales, where he ended his days as head boy. Evelyn Waugh was then briefly employed at the school, and outraged the more conventional masters by turning up for work in baggy plus-fours, an ancient tweed jacket and a rollneck sweater. Verschoyle later claimed that Waugh taught him to play the organ, despite having no knowledge of the instrument himself, and some say that the head boy provided a model for the precocious and worldly Peter Best-Chetwynde in Decline and Fall: in later years he employed Waugh as a reviewer for the Spectator, and lent him his flat in St James’s Place in the summer of 1943. After leaving the model for Llanabba Castle, Verschoyle went on to Malvern: he reached the Classical VI, became a house prefect and a lance-corporal in the Corps and, according to the Old Boys’ Register, was ‘prox. acc. of the English Essay Prize’ before leaving for Trinity College, Dublin in 1929.

  Not long after leaving Trinity he resurfaced as the theatre critic of the Spectator. A year later, in 1933, he was made the magazine’s literary editor. According to Diana Athill, who had it from her father, he kept a .22 rifle in the office in Gower Street, and would occasionally fling open his window and, his feet propped up on the desk, take potshots at stray cats lurking in the garden or on the black-bricked wall beyond; but however unpopular he may have been with Bloomsbury cats, his convivial, heavy-drinking ways recommended him to his colleagues. He became particularly friendly with Peter Fleming, who was also on the staff, and beginning to make his name as a glamorous and fashionable travel writer, and with Graham Greene. With Fleming he co-edited Spectator’s Gallery, an anthology of essays, stories and poems from the magazine, published by Jonathan Cape in 1933, and through him he got to know the publisher and man of letters Rupert Hart-Davis. When, some years ago, I wrote to Hart-Davis to ask what he remembered of Verschoyle, he replied that he could recall absolutely nothing about him even though he had been the best man at Verschoyle’s second wedding; he told his son Duff that Verschoyle had been ‘an absolute shit’, but Duff’s biography of Peter Fleming includes a pre-war photograph of a white-clad bounder waiting his turn to bat for a team that included Fleming, Edmund Blunden and Rupert Hart-Davis, then an energetic editor at Cape.

  Like Fleming before him, Verschoyle employed Graham Greene as a fiction reviewer, and then as a film critic. Greene, who eventually succeeded Verschoyle as the Spectator’s literary editor, commissioned him to write the essay on Malvern in The Old School, a collection of essays he edited for Cape in 1934 in which Auden, Greene, Stephen Spender, Harold Nicolson, Antonia White, L.P. Hartley, William Plomer, Elizabeth Bowen and others looked back on their schooldays with varying degrees of affection, ridicule, amusement and disdain; maddeningly, Verschoyle’s contribution sheds no light on the school itself or his time there, and although I have read it several times, I have no idea what – if anything – he was trying to say: it is even less revealing than the photograph in the Fleming biography, which gives one little impression of what he looked like.

  Verschoyle is said to have published a book of poems in 1931, but I can find no record of it in the British Library Catalogue. Like many of the best literary editors – and all the best publishers – Verschoyle was no writer himself: his literary ambitions may have included editing and introducing The English Novelists: A Survey of the Novel by Twenty Contemporary Novelists, published by Chatto in 1936 and including Greene, Louis MacNeice, V.S. Pritchett, Edwin Muir, H.E. Bates, Peter Quennell and Elizabeth Bowen among its contributors, but that was about as far as it went. According to Alan Ross, he was ‘an impresario rather than a journalist by nature’: he was forever pondering the plays, poems and memoirs he planned to write, but ‘the gin bottle used to come out at an early hour, so I imagine Derek belonged to the company of those who took the wish for the deed’. But if he failed to advance his own career as a writer during his time at the Spectator, he may well have made contacts that would prove useful to him as a spy or double agent: the magazine’s editor, Wilson Harris, was an old-fashioned Tory, but those writing for the Spectator included Graham Greene, Goronwy Rees, later to be implicated in the flight to Soviet Russia of his friends Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt, whom Verschoyle enlisted as the art critic.

  Shortly before war broke out, Verschoyle married the willowy, elegant Anne Scott-James, who went on to become a well-known journalist, the mother of Max Hastings, and the wife of Osbert Lancaster. He had taken a cottage in Aldworth, the village in the Chilterns in which Richard Ingrams now lives, and used to invite her down for weekends. ‘In that summer of 1939 there was a fair amount of false emotion in the air,’ she wrote in her autobiography: Verschoyle left almost immediately to join the RAF, working in Intelligence, and ‘later, when we were divorced, it was as though it had never happened’. When I asked her to elaborate, she said she would rather not: ‘although Derek caused me a lot of anxiety one way and another’, she bore him no ill will after all these years; marrying him had been a ‘big mistake’, but she hadn’t had the nerve to back out of it. He had, she went on, ‘made a lot of mischief in his time’, but when, years later, they met occasionally, ‘all his spark had gone, and it was quite heavy going’.

  I have no idea what Verschoyle’s war record amounted to, though he is said to have risen to the rank of wing commander; he was also enlisted by MI6, along with Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge. In Coastwise Lights, the second volume of his autobiography, Alan Ross suggests that Verschoyle was somehow involved with a Partisan unit in Rome as the Allies fought their way up the spine of Italy. As such he was forever requesting his superiors in London to send out large sums of money to fund a particularly useful and well-informed secret agent. The information supplied by this mysterious agent was so valuable that it was decided to send out a senior officer to investigate: the senior officer chosen was Verschoyle’s old colleague and drinking companion Goronwy Rees, who soon realised that the secret agent didn’t exist, and that all the information being fed back to London was guesswork on the part of Verschoyle. Alan, who was a good friend of both men, reckoned it was a case of putting a thief to catch a thief, and that once the matter had been sorted out they felt free to spend their time carousing. Bald and with a ‘pinkish complexion’, Verschoyle was, Alan recalled, ‘dapper in appearance, though slightly moist and shifty about the eyes’, and ‘an entertaining fantasist with as little concern for the truth as his friend and contemporary Goronwy Rees’.

  The war over, Verschoyle stayed on in Rome, and was the First Secretary to the British Embassy from 1947 to 1950. Theodora FitzGibbon, a colourful chronicler of post-war bohemian life in Chelsea, met him at the time, and remembered in her memoir Love Lies at a Loss how he invariably brought with him a bottle of wine or gin provided by Saccone & Speed, the wine merchants who in those days supplied British embass
ies with their every need. He was, she recalled, ‘very mondaine and charming, with an unusual face of regular features, a very attractive face and smile. His manners were impeccable, putting people at ease immediately.’ He spoke without seeming to open his mouth, and ‘talked in a lightly muffled voice on a variety of subjects – sometimes, as I was to find out later, Irish-fashion; that is, he tended to please rather than be factually correct. His walk was quick, but with a gliding motion; one almost felt he could disappear at will. His manner too was sometimes guarded, to cause one to think that his life held many secrets.’ He was always very secretive about his work, but one day he asked her if she would do a ‘job’ for him: she was to go to a particular café, carrying with her a walking stick as a means of identification. She went along to the café every day for a week, walking stick in hand, but no one ever approached her or contacted her in any way. At the end of the week she reported back to Verschoyle, who nodded in an appreciative way, told her she had done very good work, and paid her as agreed.

  According to the spy writer Nigel West, Verschoyle’s activities as a secret agent took a more dramatic and sinister turn in 1947, when he was involved in an MI6 plan to blow up ships carrying concentration camp survivors to Palestine. Ernest Bevin, as Foreign Secretary, was determined to reduce the flow of Jewish refugees for fear of aggravating Arab sensibilities, and Count Frederick van der Heuvel, the head of MI6’s Rome station, was ordered to set the plan in motion. The man in immediate charge of the operation was Colonel Harold Perkins (‘Perks’), a legendary figure who had worked in the Polish section of SOE during the war, and would, the following year, work closely with David Smiley in an abortive scheme to land anti-Communist Albanians in their homeland as part of an attempt to subvert the regime of Enver Hoxha: all of them were rounded up and shot within hours of their landing after Kim Philby, then working for the Foreign Office in Washington, had tipped off the Russians, who had in turn alerted the Albanian authorities. Among those enlisted by Perks to prevent the Jewish refugees from reaching Palestine was, West claims, Derek Verschoyle. Posing as Adriatic cigarette smugglers, he and another MI6 operative were told to attach limpet mines to the hulls of the rusting and overloaded ships bound for Haifa from Trieste. The whole wretched story eventually inspired Leon Uris’s bestselling novel Exodus: and, in retrospect at least, Verschoyle seemed an improbable figure to find in a frogman’s uniform.