A FRENCH TALE

The story begins at a meeting in Paris that took place early in 1988 with a young author called Elisabeth Barillé, after I had been introduced to her by the French cosmetic journalist Elizabeth Arkus. Elisabeth Barillé’s novel Corps de jeune fille was just then the latest literary sensation in Paris. She was Parisian born in 1960 and had gained degrees in English and Russian before becoming a freelance journalist contributing to Paris-Match, Depêche Mode, Femme and Geo.

She was currently literary editor of L’Eventail. I was entranced by her at our meeting. She had that kind of sexuality which disturbs the senses. I bought a copy of the book and started reading it on the plane back to London. It was a book I could not put down. Its appeal was more attuned to the avant-garde French reading public, but her use of language and the depth of insight into the human condition were impressive. I was determined that Quartet would publish an English version, even though certain expressions she used were going to be hard to translate into English without losing their nuances.

It told the story of twenty-three-year-old Elisa, audacious and sensual, who is accosted by a middle-aged writer in the Jardin du Luxembourg. She is intrigued and troubled by him after he seduces her and says he wants her to be the heroine of his next book. As he interrogates her on her childhood and aspects of her sexual awakening, the tone of the narrative darkens and they begin to play a game in which it is no longer clear who is preying on whom.

The French press had given the book some very positive reviews: ‘A revelation . . . unpretentious and direct . . . truly liberated,’ said Marie-Claire; ‘Gay, tender, biting, playful . . . written with enthusiasm and zest,’ said FranceSoir; ‘Vigorous, direct and lucid, sparing nothing and nobody,’ said Le Figaro Littéraire. The English literary establishment was more ambivalent in its reception of the translated version under the title Body of a Girl. It came as no surprise, however, for I had always been aware that its appeal here would be limited. It belonged to a genre that had that intrinsically cerebral quality more consonant with European culture. Clarence de Roch in Tatler chose to focus on the book’s erotic side. His opening paragraph set the mood of his piece: ‘There’s a brilliantly funny scene in Elisabeth Barillé’s first novel, in which Elisa, the heroine, brings her suitor’s amorous élan to an abrupt halt by staring at his exposed penis and describing it witheringly (literally so as it turns out) as looking “just like Cyrano’s nose!”’ Cara Chanteau in the Listener was rather more dismissive:

Jane Austen once wrote that in Emma she was planning a heroine ‘which no one but myself would like’: Barillé might, with a lot more justification, have said the same for Body of a Girl. It is a problem from which her novel never really recovers . . . [But] Barillé has a good and very fluent style; one could wish to see it employed on more searching subject matter. Perhaps the successor to Body of a Girl might be a little more sparing with the body and reveal rather more about the girl.

Janet Barron, for the Literary Review, found a degree of merit in the book, though she confessed that the use of some words made her blush:

I wouldn’t recommend reading some of this in public; try convincing the chap who’s peering over your shoulder that ‘fanny’ is a symbol of women’s liberation. Barillé takes the obsessions of male erotic writing and attributes them to her narrator Elisa. The result is often witty. Barillé has a sardonic sense of humour and Parisian bohemianism is given a sarcastic twist.

Rebecca O’Rourke’s reaction in the Guardian was especially damning:

Elisa’s sexual history contains much that is surprising and some that is shocking. It’s a joyless account, rehearsing without exploring the idea that women’s autonomous sexuality is the province of whores and sluts. The special secret Elisa keeps to herself is compulsive masturbation, fuel to shameful self-hatred. Britain often looks to France, impressed by the latter’s sexual freedoms and sophistication. Colette, Violette Leduc and Simone de Beauvoir made enormous contributions to women’s writing by pioneering sensual, erotic and sexual themes. On the evidence of Body of a Girl, this pre-eminence is now receding.

In late 1990, Quartet published Elisabeth Barillé’s second novel, Marie Ensnared. This time the author’s obsession with prostitution manifested itself even more clearly. The story had the same resonance as Body of a Girl, but in this one the heroine began to lead a double life. To summarize the plot, Marie and her husband Luc, a charming and talented architect, apparently make the perfect bourgeois couple. While he provides her with a life of comfort and security, she is his perfect companion and hostess to the cosy, if complacent, dinner parties that are the cornerstone of his success. Then Luc accepts a commission to build a vast palace in the Moroccan desert for a rich megalomaniac Aloui, whose escort is Nalège, a malicious manipulative call-girl. Marie becomes fascinated by Nalège’s lifestyle, seeing it as an emancipation from the trap of comfort that is her life with Luc. She becomes her understudy, but when Nalège sends her the obese, alcoholic Aloui, the arrangement ends in a disastrous surfacing of guilt and self-loathing, with Marie now the victim of male cruelty and her own emotional confusion.

When I read Marie Ensnared I strongly suspected that the book had an autobiographical basis and that Barillé’s fictional account was a clever way of expressing her own dark secrets. Barillé’s own explanation for her theme was that, ‘Eroticism interests me more than sex. It’s the staging of our sexual impulses.’ But in the view of Jane O’Grady in the Observer, ‘chic, pretty Marie’ was both ‘directing and starring in the film of her life, and Barillé’s slim novelette resembles a soft-porn movie minus eroticism’. Neither Body of a Girl nor Marie Ensnared made the impact I personally had anticipated.

Somehow they failed to catch the mood of the literary public in Britain. La différance was once again manifesting itself.

GOD CRIED

I had an uncanny premonition that 1983 would be a difficult year. So far my new career as a publisher had been bumpy but without too much discomfort. The controversies of the past twelve months had left my fighting spirit intact. My wife Maria maintained that I always courted trouble because basically I enjoyed adversarial combat. It was my way, she said, of reassuring myself that I was capable of defending what I felt to be right, whether ideological or political. There was an element of truth in that, I had to admit. I function at my best under pressure and relish the art of tactical manoeuvring. I never seek conflict for its own sake, and I would rather win a contest through debate or highly charged negotiation. To pit one’s intellect against that of an opponent and win is far more satisfying and morale boosting than entering into some vulgar spat that is undignified for both winner and loser. While I am prone to flare up at the least provocation, I try to leave matters to simmer down before I react.

The start of 1983 was benign enough. The attentions of the press seemed to become focused on Sabrina Guinness, who was causing a great deal of speculation following her appointment to head a book club affiliated with the Literary Review. The announcement of the launch party led to various cheap asides in the press questioning her suitability to run such an enterprise. The gossip writers had a field-day delving into her background and claiming she possessed the less serious attributes of a social butterfly. Some reported that she was presently engrossed in books to bring her up to the mark in her new job; others held more cynical views. Sabrina herself showed great reserve, refusing to let her feathers be ruffled by this onslaught of adverse publicity. She proved to have an impressive measure of resilience in coping with the situation and rose above it all with dignity.

Sabrina organized the launch party, which was notable for the rich mixture of people it assembled. The literati were there in force, alongside the gossip mongers who could not resist the chance of picking up more material for their columns. The usual crowd of book-event attenders chattered with delight as they circulated among the beautiful young women there to show their solidarity with Sabrina, whom they considered one of the gang. Roald Dahl, who reputedly never attended a publishing function unless it was to do with one of his own books, had responded to a personal invitation from Sabrina. He was there with his daughter Tessa, who had had a small part in The Slipper and the Rose, the film I had produced with David Frost.

Roald Dahl and I began our conversation with his asking me in which part of Palestine I was raised. He knew the country well, he added, having been stationed there as a fighter pilot with the RAF during the Second World War. Their target at the time had been the Vichy administration in Lebanon. When I told him my home town was Haifa, his face lit up. The mention of it brought back poignant memories, he said. He described how the Arab peasants would wave to signify good luck as the fighter planes flew over Mount Carmel on their outward sortie, and waved to welcome them back when the pilots made a safe return to base. As he was speaking a sudden thought shot into my mind. Quartet was about to publish a book, hard-hitting in its views, on Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Perhaps we could ask Dahl to write a piece about it for the Literary Review.

The title was God Cried and the author was Tony Clifton, a well-known and respected journalist who worked for Newsweek; his collaborator was Catherine LeRoy, a veteran French war photographer. The book described, in harrowing detail, by way of its words and pictures, the violence and destruction inflicted by the Israeli armed forces on West Beirut through shelling and bombing and the harsh realities of their occupation. Its title derived from a piece of Palestinian black humour circulating in the Middle East at the time, it being said that God had agreed to answer one question each from Ronald Reagan, Leonid Brezhnev and Yasser Arafat. The American president asked his question first, wanting to know when an American would become leader of the whole world. ‘In fifty years,’ said God. And Reagan cried. When God asked him why he cried, he said, ‘Because it won’t happen in my lifetime.’ Next it was the turn of Brezhnev, who wished to know from God when the whole world would be communist. ‘In a hundred years,’ said God. And Brezhnev cried for the same reason as Reagan. And when it came to Arafat, he asked God, ‘When will my people have a homeland of their own?’ And God cried.

Before I could broach my idea for a review from Dahl, I needed to observe the protocol between proprietor and editor and consult with Gillian Greenwood on whether she would agree. Hers was the last word editorially on what went into the magazine and the choice of contributors. I tracked her down in another corner of the launch party and put the question. She gave me the green light at once. Returning to Roald Dahl, I asked him whether he might be interested in writing such a review. His reaction was abrupt to the point of hostility. He received many requests from publishers to review their books, he told me, and never agreed to do one, irrespective of the book’s merits. He would certainly make no exception to the rule on this or any other occasion. Dahl could display a rather intimidating side if he was roused and I stood there dumbstruck. The earlier warmth of our conversation evaporated instantly. I mumbled a few meaningless phrases and retreated politely, under the pretext of not wishing to monopolize his company.

After recovering from the shock of this sudden embarrassment – not because of his refusal to write a review but because of the manner in which he had expressed it – I went to seek Tessa Dahl to protest at how I was mortified by her father. She was not in the least surprised to hear my tale, being quite accustomed to his brusque moods. Would she be able to persuade him to change his mind, I wondered, given his interest in Palestine? If we sent her a copy as soon as the book became available, she suggested, she would try her very best to cajole him into a change of heart. I held out very little hope of her succeeding, but sent her God Cried even so, just for its promotional value.

Hardly a week had passed before a letter from Dahl arrived enclosing a comprehensive review and informing me that he did not wish to receive any payment for it. I was thrilled until I started to read it, and then my spirits fell in semi-horror. It was couched in language unhoned by diplomacy and without the least regard for the art of gentle censure. Dahl was bold and unrelentingly scathing in his condemnation of Israel for its brutal opportunistic incursion, which had taken its army all the way to Beirut. I knew at once that publication of the piece would send the influential pro-Zionist lobby into a frenzy of rage. It was addressed to the editor of the Literary Review, and since the decision on whether to print it would have to be Gillian Greenwood’s, I passed it on quickly.

Gillian shared my concerns and we agreed we must first check it out with our lawyer, Michael Rubinstein, whose advice and suggestions would be pertinent since he was himself Jewish. To our utter surprise, Michael liked and approved of Dahl’s review. Apart from editing out a few of the more intemperate expressions, he urged us to publish it. The reason he gave was that criticism of Israel should not, when it was deserved, be silenced by those who chose to see only one side of the equation. Michael was a liberal and an ardent champion of the oppressed and dispossessed. His last words to Gillian and myself were: ‘Publish and be damned.’ We did publish; and we were damned.

The reaction to the review was far more extreme that we had anticipated. Apart from the overreaction of the Jewish lobby, the friends of Israel in the media became virulent in their onslaught on Dahl, myself and the Literary Review. The attacks came in from every side, even reaching a pitch where many journalists and politicians of high standing called for a boycott of the magazine and anyone connected with it. Every day something more vicious than the day before appeared somewhere, with accusations of anti-Semitism becoming more strident and preposterous as the campaign to discredit Quartet and the book gained momentum. Dahl did nothing to help matters by growing even more combative and being provoked into making outrageous, inflammatory responses. He was not in the least chastened by all that was being said about him. On the contrary, he expounded on his views and riled the press by being abrasive and dismissing their questions out of hand. There was no way of putting a gag on him and no point in asking him to cool things down. He had the bit between his teeth and nothing would stop him giving our adversaries all the fuel they could have wished for to keep their engines firing.

Time after time I was asked by the press to comment on one or other of his utterances and found myself at a loss for an appropriate response. He was still my contributor and I could not let it seem I was being unsupportive of his right to hold his own views. It was a difficult situation that had gone beyond control. Although we were fighting from the same corner, our temperaments and perceptions of how to get a grip on things were vastly different. In a way, he had dug himself into a hole from which he could not extricate himself without sustaining some damage. When the whole uproar began I had, in fact, been away for a break in Italy, visiting Lord Lambton, who had invited us for the first time to stay at his villa outside Siena. The holiday was constantly interrupted by the latest reports from London as the drama began to unfold. On the way back to England we travelled via Florence to meet Harold Acton. He had asked us to tea at his famous palazzo overlooking the city, and afterwards took us to walk in the extensive historic gardens, insisting on having his photograph taken with my wife. From that rarefied and civilized experience I plunged into the explosive turmoil back in London, generated, first, by the publication of God Cried, and secondly by the furore that was continuing over Dahl’s review. Rather than showing signs of blowing over with time, the row seemed to be gaining strength. The entire British press gave the impression of having ganged up to condemn us unjustly– given that in every dispute there are two sides to the issue.

To make matters even worse, Jeffrey Bernard, in his ‘Low Life’ column in the Spectator, went way beyond the bounds of decency by proposing that, as a retaliation for the sentencing of ‘a parched man’ to six hundred strokes by those ‘awful Arabs’ (referring to an event in Saudi Arabia), six hundred strokes should be inflicted on an Arab in London. He nominated me for this punishment as the boss of Quartet Books and possibly ‘the ugliest man he had ever met’. It was beyond comprehension that the Spectator should have published such offensive material, but the Mail on Sunday ferreted out a reason to explain ‘why the genial Jeffrey is lashing out at Naim in the Spectator’. David Skan, the writer of the short piece, speculated that it was ‘probably not unconnected with an encounter between Attallah’s Quartet book firm and Bernard, who was commissioned to write a book about racing. Deadlines were missed and the book never appeared. Attallah made Bernard repay the advance.’

Then out of the woodwork there came Paul Johnson, known for his Zionist sympathies, with a very trenchant article, again in the Spectator, that poured scorn on the Literary Review. Dahl’s article, said Johnson, was in his view ‘the most disgraceful item to have appeared in a respectable British publication for a very long time’. He could not actually recall anything like it. Moreover, he claimed, the Review was ‘controlled by a wealthy Palestinian who also runs Quartet Books’, adding that ‘the Literary Review has published anti-Israeli material before’. In the face of this I could not remain silent and sent a letter to the editor of the Spectator to challenge Johnson to substantiate his charges since he accused Dahl of a ‘reckless disregard for facts’.

Where horrendous loss of life and human misery is at stake, complaints of tendentiousness should be discounted. Johnson has no more need to apologize for the expression of his strong feelings that I have for accepting my editor’s decision to publish the expression of Dahl’s strong feelings in the Literary Review. Nor am I ashamed of my own strong feelings about the current appalling misfortunes of both the Lebanese and the Palestinians; for every comparably suffering Jew I feel no less strongly.

Johnson concludes his diatribe: ‘The most effective action the civilized community can take is for reputable writers to refuse to be associated with a journal that publishes such filth.’ Contributors to the Literary Review are encouraged to write freely within the law. It is not to be assumed that the editor or publisher necessarily agrees with all the opinions of the contributors. Or necessarily disagrees with any of them.

My letter was published by the Spectator on 10 September. Meanwhile Private Eye had muscled in to comment in their ‘World of Books’ of 26 August that I had struck again by publishing God Cried, and by running a review of the book in the Literary Review. They claimed the staff were unhappy with the piece Dahl had produced, but were forced to run it by me, the ‘Arab propagandist’. What had appalled them, they said, was the evidence of blatant anti-Semitism in the copy and how Time Out had published a slightly sanitized version of the review instead of doing their own. My response to Private Eye’s allegations appeared in their 9 September issue.

As Bookworm writes, I own through companies both Quartet Books and the Literary Review. Nevertheless, in no sense did I ‘force’ the Literary Review to publish the copy, nor was the staff ‘appalled [at] the evidence of blatant anti-Semitism in the copy’.

The suggestion that I am anti-Semitic is as absurd as it is mistaken. If being sympathetic to the Palestinians in their plight justifies condemnation of me as a ‘Palestinian propagandist’ then I will live with that. But it is a mischievous distortion of the meaning of propagandist – one who disseminates ‘information, allegations, etc., to assist or damage the cause of a government, movement, etc.’ (Collins). I am prepared to risk such abuse as Bookworm’s when I believe that the publication of a book may serve the cause of humanity. I trust the editor of the Literary Review to exercise her discretion in the same cause.

Running parallel to all this, a minor scuffle was set off when The Times ‘Diary’, under the heading ‘Chutzpah’, announced that I had entered God Cried for the three-thousand-pound H. H. Wingate Prize, which is awarded to an author who stimulates interest in Jewish affairs, when I knew very well there was scant prospect of the book winning. My reasoning in doing so was that it would at least give the judges the opportunity to look at the book and perhaps recognize the other point of view. The Jewish Chronicle came in to say that, for once, it agreed with The Times: it was chutzpah indeed, given the nature of the book and the intemperate language used by Dahl in his review of it.

Time Out was also dragged into the firing line for having published its abbreviated version of Dahl’s piece. The magazine was flooded with letters of protest and suffered a concerted attack from the media for having dared to publish the article. Philip Kleinman, writing in the Jewish Chronicle on 26 August, summed up the situation by threatening that ‘if Time Out can bash Israel, it may well be that some Jews might want to bash Time Out. It has a circulation of 65,000 and is heavily dependent on advertising, most of which could be placed elsewhere (What’s On, City Limits, the Standard).’ A few days later, in the Jewish Chronicle of 2 September, Kleinman picked up on a statement made by Mike Coren (himself Jewish) in the New Statesman to the effect that I had, as owner of the Literary Review, been put in a difficult position by Dahl’s article, since ‘not even the crudest Zionist could accuse [me] of antiSemitism’. Yet in Kleinman’s view, my remarks to Coren made it clear that it had been the proprietor not the editor of the Literary Review who had got Dahl to write the piece in the first place. According to Private Eye, he reported, the Review’s staff had been appalled by its anti-Semitism but were forced to use it.

On 9 September the Jewish Chronicle carried a letter from me responding to Kleinman’s article of the 2nd:

Sir – In Philip Kleinman’s article he referred to a report that the Literary Review staff were appalled by the anti-Semitism in Roald Dahl’s review of God Cried, but were forced by me to publish the article. I have already written to Private Eye pointing out that there is no grain of truth in this statement.

Because of the controversial nature of the article, we have published a number of hostile letters in the current issue of the Literary Review (September 1983). We believe a free discourse on such an important subject can only help to bring about a better understanding of the issue. May I conclude by saying that the killing of innocent people of any race, or creed, is a heinous act, and should be condemned by humanity as a whole.

The previous day, the 8th, The Times ‘Diary’ reported that Peter Hillmore of the Observer and their own Frank Johnson were on the point of heeding the call from Paul Johnson to boycott the Literary Review. Both had contributed to the current issue but neither of them was sure they wished to do so in future. Hillmore said he considered the article to be ‘plain, abusive antiSemitism which should never have been printed’, while Johnson said that ‘even by the standards of anti-Israel bias, this piece was above and beyond the call of duty. Gillian Greenwood, when asked for her reaction, said that other contributors to the magazine told her that nobody takes any notice of what Paul Johnson says in the Spectator.’

Back on 2 September, the Evening Standard reported how I had gone to the extraordinary length of removing from the masthead of the Literary Review the name of its poetry editor, Carol Rumens, in the wake of her having written a letter of protest about the Dahl piece in the magazine’s letter pages. She wished to dissociate herself from it, she told the Standard, as she thought the review inaccurate and inflammatory. It was a bad thing, she added, when the proprietor of a magazine identifies too closely with the views expressed in it. Presumably I had removed her name because I was embarrassed that an employee of the magazine (albeit a freelance) should have criticized any of the magazine’s contents. ‘But at least,’ she said, ‘he’s printed my letter.’

Again on 2 September, William Hickey of the Daily Express informed his readers how an almighty row had blown up in the world of literature, featuring spooky writer Roald Dahl and right-wing columnist Paul Johnson, who was calling for a boycott of the Literary Review. When asked to comment on this, ‘Mr Attallah dismissed Johnson’s call for a boycott by saying: “What do you expect from a man who changes his politics as often as I change my shirts! He has no credibility as far as I am concerned.”’ But then the Express claimed in the final paragraph that I had bowed to a swarm of protests by agreeing to publish a number of letters putting the opposite point of view. The paper agreed to publish a letter from me in reply under the heading ‘Unbowed – a free forum for and against Israel’:

Sir – William Hickey highlights the fact that, following the review by Roald Dahl in the Literary Review, published by my company, of the book God Cried, about the 1982 Lebanon crisis, columnist Paul Johnson has called for a boycott of the Review.

The Literary Review provides a forum for the free expression of opinion, and I would not expect reputable writers to refuse to be associated with the journal merely because it has published strongly expressed anti-Israel views by Roald Dahl. William Hickey is, however, wrong to say that I have ‘bowed to the swarm of protest’ over Dahl’s anti-Zionist piece.

Letters putting the opposite point of view to Dahl’s have been published in the September issue of the Literary Review because that is precisely in accordance with its policy.

As the row continued, Sebastian Faulks wrote in the Sunday Telegraph of 18 September about what he called ‘a publisher under bombardment over an anti-Jewish book review’. The overall thrust of his article was, in my opinion, objectionable on many fronts. He called the review by Dahl anti-Jewish when it was no such thing. Admittedly Dahl used very strong terms in his condemnation of Israel for invading Lebanon and maltreating the Palestinians, but it was nothing more, nothing less. I also felt angry about what I felt was a misrepresentation by Faulks of the whole issue, not only where it concerned me personally but also for his evaluation of Quartet as a publishing house. The Sunday Telegraph agreed to publish a letter from me in reply under the heading ‘A publisher’s policy’:

While it is unnecessary to take issue with the sillier aspects of Sebastian Faulks’s article on myself, I would question his dismissal of our publishing programme as celebrity orientated, erotic and propagandist.

Quartet have some 300 titles in print. Less than 20 of these deal with the Middle East, of which 11 are concerned with the literature, folklore and anthropology of an area whose cultural influence on European civilization has been shamefully neglected. At present we have nine photographic books on our list, and for your journalist to dismiss the talents of Helmut Newton, John Swannell, Deborah Turbeville and Angus McBean simply as ‘erotic’ is philistine to say the least.

To describe as ‘not serious’ an imprint that publishes Jessica Mitford, Lillian Hellman, Cesare Pavese, ‘Multatuli’, Fleur Cowles, Shusaku Endo, Robert Kee, Anaïs Nin (to name a few), and whose autumn list includes Celia Bertin’s Marie Bonaparte, Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Emperor and Sue Davidson Lowe’s monograph on her great-uncle, Alfred Steiglitz, rather hints that Faulks and his star-witness, Giles Gordon, might have other reasons for the sneers and innuendoes in the article. Moreover, it would seem a curious strategy for a publisher intent on ‘forcing his way into the establishment’ to publish Paul Robeson’s political writings, Jeremy Seabrook’s blistering attack on the inhumanity of unemployment, James Avery Joyce’s plea for arms reduction or Ralph Miliband’s socialist tract. Our list speaks for itself and we remain, whatever Faulks and Gordon may say, an independent radical publishing house. And make no mistake, there are all too few of us left.

The Sunday Telegraph had printed my letter, but in line with Private Eye practice it gave the last word to Sebastian Faulks, who said:

I wrote that Quartet has published a ‘wide variety’ of books but that its ‘hallmarks’ (i.e. those books with which it is most clearly and commonly associated) were ‘pro-Palestinian books on the Middle East, collections of erotic photographs and volumes by English establishment figures’. I can still see no reason to modify that description either in respect of the ‘variety’ or of the ‘hallmarks’.

My reaction at the time was that Faulks’s riposte to my letter was ungracious if not bordering on the bloody-minded. I felt he could have been more conciliatory in the circumstances. More of a reasonable tone was sounded by Alexander Chancellor in the Spectator on 10 September when he suggested that the civilized community should suspend its boycott of the Literary Review on the grounds that we all publish rotten articles from time to time and that he ‘felt a little sympathy for Miss Greenwood’s employer, Naim Attallah, who happens to be of Palestinian origin’.

Despite the fact that during the summer he was the object of vulgar abuse in the pages of this paper by Mr Jeffrey Bernard, he wrote a most gentlemanly letter to the Spectator in reply to Mr Johnson’s attack. The letter was gentlemanly because it failed to point out that Mr Attallah is not the sole proprietor of the Literary Review. A chunk of it is owned by the Spectator’s revered proprietor, Mr Algy Cluff.
In the end, as the row continued for weeks, it became tiresome, with the same points being laboured over and over again, irrespective of which side they were fired from. I was then challenged to speak to the Jerusalem Post, an opportunity I willingly welcomed, for I had nothing to hide or be ashamed of. Their feature article, which covered the whole saga, included a short discourse I had with the newspaper, which prefaced our conversation by saying that neither I, nor the editor of the Literary Review, nor Dahl himself had the slightest regrets about the article. It went on to describe how I had been born in Haifa in 1931 but since 1949 had been living in England, where I had become a publisher. My last visit to Israel was six years before when my father died and I had never had any flair for politics.

I did not deny the fact that I was opposed to Zionism and had great sympathy with the Palestinians in their plight for statehood, but was adamant that I never used the magazine to push my own views. The editor decided what to publish, but in cases where an article might cause controversy, then consultation between editor and proprietor was the norm. I also rejected the charge that the article was anti-Semitic, despite its strong language. ‘If I thought it was, I would not have published it. I’m the last one to talk about anti-Semitism. The Arabs and the Jews are both Semitic people.’ In any case, I told my interlocutor, a healthy debate is far better than resorting to violence. It is an essential part of democracy that people should be free to express their own views. Gillian Greenwood was of the same opinion. She said that a contributor to the magazine should be allowed to express his view and confirmed that she had no regrets about publishing the review in question.

The scale and persistence of the Roald Dahl controversy perhaps deflected some attention from the book itself, which had been the reason for the original upsurge of indignation. When God Cried was published in the United States, its fate was rather different. It was virtually ignored at every level by book editors and reviewers as if it did not exist. The well-known Jewish columnist and blues historian, Nat Hentoff, wrote an article around this phenomenon that was published in Voice on 14 February 1984. ‘Have you forgotten that summer in Beirut so soon?’ he asked in his headline, referring to the 1982 massacres of Palestinians at the Sabra and Chatila camps, carried out by the Christian Phalangist militia with the connivance of the Israeli authorities during their invasion. He juxtaposed two quotes on the Lebanon adventure, the first from the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, when he said, ‘Never in the past was the great Jewish community in the United States so united around Israel, standing together’; the second came from the respected Israeli diplomat and politician, Abba Eban: ‘Beirut for us was like Moscow for Napoleon, a place you’d wished you’d never been.’

‘There is a rage in the book, and shock,’ wrote Mr Hentoff, ‘and much beauty in the faces of the children. I do not know of a more frightening book published last year.’ It had been published by a company owned by a Palestinian Arab. ‘Aha you say. This must be propaganda.’ But then he asked whether, if you took up a strongly pro-Israel book, you looked to see if its publisher was Jewish. ‘Yes, I guess some of you do, just as some of you will dismiss this book without looking at it because who can trust a Palestinian? That kind of dumbness cuts across ideological lines, and there’s nothing to be done about it. I hope some of the rest of you will judge God Cried on its own.’

It was not surprising that Tony Clifton’s prose should have been raw, like some of his memories. It had been ‘one hell of a bloody, brutal siege of Beirut’. There was the story of an editor on the New York Times who cut the adjective ‘indiscriminate’ from the dispatch of a correspondent reporting the bombing – because he found it hard to believe. ‘But . . . the Israeli planes . . . did not give a good goddamn what they hit. The apologists for this most shameful operation in the history of Israel – and many Israelis see it as criminal – can’t have it both ways. If there was only precision bombing, why were clearly marked hospitals hit? Repeatedly.’

Hentoff conceded that Arafat and the PLO hierarchy had interspersed themselves among civilians and that it was possible that some of them took shelter in hospitals for the mentally handicapped, ‘one of which was bombed five times’; but even so, how could it be worth the cost to ‘kill the maimed, the halt, the blind, kids, anything that moved? What would have been worth this terrible price in Israel’s first war that was not one of defence?’ ‘All atrocities should be written about with rage,’ said Hentoff, coming to the fundamental point. ‘But no one writer has space for all, and I choose Beirut because I am Jewish and feel kinship with those in Israel who do not want Jews, anywhere, to forget what happened in Lebanon in the summer of 1982. Lest it happen again under Jewish auspices, including the support of American Jews.’

Nat Hentoff, writing in America, had finally thrown into relief the meretricious judgements made on God Cried by such a large and influential section of the press in Britain.

A MISSED OPPORTUNITY – OR WHAT..?

In the 1980s, Quartet’s New York office begun to publish more titles specifically for the US market. The office was managed by Marilyn Warnick who was more and more on the watch for likely books emanating from local contributors. Her most recent discovery was the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who was attracting attention not only for his outstanding talent but also because of some of the subjects he chose to photograph. He was already revered and loathed in equal measure. Everyone agreed, however, that with his unique but disturbing style he ranked among the best photographers of his generation. He pushed degeneracy to extremes and stretched the boundaries of homoerotic imagery to a level of debauchery that was wilfully shocking and unashamedly revolting.

Marilyn took me to meet Mapplethorpe in his studio cum apartment in the Bowery. With Quartet having become internationally known for publishing plush photographic books, we both had it in mind that he could be a natural addition to the list. We found him oddly dressed in leather gear, with such fetishistic sex-aids as dildos, chains and whips strewn around his living area. The walls were covered with amazing photographs of young men and women in bizarre but powerful poses. The atmosphere was disturbing and I felt slightly uncomfortable until he led us into an adjoining room to show us some of his exquisite photographs of flowers. By these I was totally enchanted, affected by their beauty and the magic they seemed to generate. There was no doubting that they were masterworks and their creator a genius. I began to warm to him and to feel a growing optimism about the chances of landing him as a Quartet author. He said that he had photographed Rebecca Fraser – who he knew worked at Quartet – when she was in New York, and offered me a signed print. Thus the meeting ended on a positive note as we agreed to think about the most suitable terms for a future collaboration.

After this first encounter I was feeling quite excited about having his name on the list of famous photographers we published. It would add to our prestige, especially in the United States. On my next trip to New York, a couple of months later, I went to see him in the Bowery again. His place was still as cluttered as before with sexual contraptions of every imaginable kind, some of them with sado-masochistic connotations. Again I felt distinctly uncomfortable and had to struggle to maintain an appearance of relaxed unconcern. Robert was as outrageously dressed as usual, all in black leather, and although he lacked a whip he seemed as threatening as if he had one. We exchanged pleasantries and then went straight to the heart of the matter. He would not mind being published by Quartet, he said, but he would have to insist on a large advance against royalties and total editorial control over what appeared in the book. The size of the advance he specified would have been difficult for Quartet to raise, but not impossible; his second demand was another matter. Total control would have been unacceptable under any conditions. My instincts told me that his choice of photographs was likely to be so reprehensible as to make any collaboration between us impossible.

When he had to leave the room to take an urgent telephone call, I wandered into another room that he used to exhibit some of his latest work. There I was brought to a standstill by a series of photographs of fist-fucking so shocking that I experienced a surge of physical nausea. The graphic images were so horribly inhuman and alienating that surely they could only appeal to psychopathic personalities. I darted back to where I had been sitting when he went to answer the phone and tried to regain my composure. When he came back I said I would consider the terms he suggested and made my exit without further ado.

I never saw Robert Mapplethorpe again, nor did Quartet ever publish any book of his. He died of the ravages of AIDS a few years later and was hailed as the most accomplished photographer of his time. His fist-fucking photographs were exhibited in New York amid a barrage of controversy. Today there are collectors worldwide of his photographs, which sell at auction for great sums of money.

A RUMBLE FROM THE JUNGLE

Of the many photographic books I published, Jungle Fever retains a special place in my heart. Its publication in 1982 precipitated a whirlwind of controversy. The first published collection of photographs by Jean Paul Goude, then unknown to most Englishmen (and women come to that), its cover featured a naked Grace Jones (also then unknown in this country) as a caged creature, her sharp glistening teeth eager for the kill. Across the top of the cage was a notice that read: ‘Do not feed the animal’.

The feminist lobby condemned it as the most humiliating and demeaning portrayal of a woman ever published. It could perhaps also have been said to be the most extraordinary portrait ever of a woman by her lover; the artist asserted that it was he who had caged the beast. Some years later Jean-Paul was quoted as saying of their relationship, ‘I was Svengali to Grace’s talent. As long as I seduced her, and she was in love or infatuated with me, I could do anything I wanted with her creatively, because I was constantly admiring and paying tribute to her. It all ended dramatically when she felt I had started to love the character we had created more than I loved her.’

They remained friends, but he regretted the way the relationship had, in his view, ended prematurely, the crunch having come when Grace read the chapter he wrote about her in Jungle Fever. She was ‘so angry and felt so betrayed that we couldn’t go on. Creatively, it was just impossible.’

Jungle Fever was a dazzling trawl through the international underworld of beauty, humour and eroticism. Jean-Paul Goude, the uninhibited graphic genius behind the manipulated images, was once aptly described by Esquire magazine as ‘The French Correction’. Through his surrealist-influenced techniques, placed at the service of high-profile advertising campaigns, the public probably became more aware of his work than of his name. In many ways, he was always ahead of his time, going beyond kitsch to produce new configurations of images to stretch the imagination afresh.

His aim was to make nature conform to his fantasies, as the collection in the book illustrated. Besides Grace Jones, it included Kellie the Evangelist Stripper, Sabu, Gene Kelly, Zouzou, Little Beaver, Judith Jamison, Russ Tamblyn, Toukie, Radiah, the Sex Circus of Eighth Avenue and the nocturnal flore et faune of 42nd Street. The only thing these disparate fantasies had in common was Jean-Paul Goude, but even so, as the blurb explained, they formed ‘a very special community: they have been made perfect to fit the world as Goude wants it to be – there are stilts for Radiah, a new ass for Toukie, a crew cut for Grace Jones’. To give an adequate account of Goude’s artistic range, his ‘work must be considered that of a painter, photographer, sculptor, musician, dancer, couturier, stage director and set designer – all of these and none of them. “To say the truth,” Goude says, “I see myself as an artist who uses the best means available to get a point across. What comes first is the necessity to communicate ‘my world’. Through the use of different media, I am able to show what to me is important.”’ He scornfully dismissed a plastic surgeon who refused to follow his design for a girlfriend’s new nose. ‘“After all, I am an artist,” Goude says. “What does he know?”’

It was the ultimate effect that concerned him: ‘the extension of a limb, the padding of a flank, a nip here and a tuck there – and suddenly the fantastic people and places of Jean-Paul Goude have become his forever and hopefully the reader’s too’. Jungle Fever sold extremely well, and was destined to become a collector’s item. Copies can now sell for hundreds of pounds on the Internet.

PUBLISHING A CLASSIC

Hashish was a sumptuous and strikingly beautiful book production with stunning photographs by Suomi La Valle and a text by John Julius Norwich. Hashish had long been in use in the Middle East before it was discovered by the European literati of the nineteenth century. It had become part of the alternative culture of the 1980s, being praised and vilified in equal measure, the controversy over the relative benefits and harm done by its pharmacology continuing to the present day. Aside from the arguments, hashish was and is a means of livelihood for many people in Nepal and Lebanon. Suomi La Valle had gained the trust of the peasants who cultivated the plant, Cannabis sativa, and taken a series of astonishing photographs. John Julius Norwich, who had lived for three years in Lebanon, wrote about it with deep scholarly knowledge and level-headed lucidity. As he said:

My own purpose will be to try to put this extraordinary plant in its historical and literary perspective: to assess the effects – political, cultural and even etymological – that it has had over the two and half thousand years or so that have elapsed since its peculiar properties were first discovered; and finally perhaps to remove at least some of the mystique that – among those who have no direct experience of it – has surrounded it for so long.

The Standard reported how John Julius Norwich had tried hashish when he was with the British Embassy in Beirut in the early 1960s, smoking the stuff through a hubble-bubble at the home of a Lebanese high-court judge. ‘I puffed diligently away,’ he recalled, ‘but the incident made little lasting impression.’ My own experience was similar, though in a different environment. I enjoyed it at a certain stage of my life, but was never dependent. It was a passing phase, like some others one enjoys in the heyday of youth. There are those – mostly politicians – who have problems admitting they ever indulged. Others of us have the courage and honesty to admit it, acknowledging it as a step on the way to becoming more sophisticated and complete human beings. The party for Hashish was attended by a less predictable mixture of guests than usual. Its risqué aspect attracted a wider circle than the normal crowd of book-launch attenders. Suomi La Valle’s wife, being the owner of an exclusive fashion boutique called Spaghetti in Beauchamp Place, Knightsbridge, invited elements from the fashion industry who were not unfamiliar with ‘the weed’ and its uses. They joined the motley company of beautiful people who were intent on not being excluded from an event tinged with notoriety because of its subject matter. Leonard Bernstein, new to the London party circuit, was there too. So was the more familiar figure of BBC Television’s weatherman, Michael Fish, seen deep in conversation with the model Marie Helvin; which only went to show that modelling and weather forecasting might have more in common than is generally supposed. Hashish sold quite well, though it never achieved the figures we hoped for. We were definitely dealing with a book ahead of its time and lost out as a result. After the original print run of thirty-five thousand copies was either sold or remaindered, the book was never reprinted, and like various other Quartet titles it has become a collector’s item. Whenever copies in good condition surface today, they are sold at a high premium. Hashish has become a cult book throughout the world.

REMEMBERING THE PARTY

One of the devices I used in Fulfilment & Betrayal was to ask many of the people who had once worked for me to remember their experiences, which I filtered throughout my main text to add colour and another perspective to my narrative. One which I liked very much was written by the now renowned theatre critic for the Observer:

The Nine-Month Party by Kate Kellaway

Working at the Literary Review as deputy literary editor was as near as any salaried job could come to being paid to attend a party. It was a party which lasted, for me, for nine glorious months, ending in April 1987. When I left, I remember reflecting that parties, after all, cannot be expected to last for ever. At the Literary Review’s light, airy offices on the first floor of Beak Street, Soho, there was an endless supply of books and of nice people willing to review them for a tiny wage. Bron Waugh (contrary to everything I had supposed before I worked with him) was the most charming colleague. I was devoted to him. Bron feared boredom. Jokes were not optional adornments. They were necessary. He was seriously frivolous. It was essential to find life amusing. And we did. ‘You are looking a little off colour,’ I remember him saying to me one morning, at eleven o’clock, correctly diagnosing a broken heart and opening a particularly fine bottle of pink champagne.

It was not a problem that I was a Guardian reader or a Labour voter. Nor was it disconcerting to him that I had recently returned from teaching English in a township school in Harare, Zimbabwe. Bron loved difference, dissent and edge, and was heartened by the possibility of an argument (I must have disappointed him by not arguing enough). We agreed about more than I would ever have thought possible. We were in accord about everything from literary style to broad beans, although, as always, he was ready to be more dramatically emphatic than I was. (‘There is no one in the world who doesn’t love broad beans.’) Bron was as loyal as the day was long. But the day wasn’t long at all. Sometimes it had more or less finished by midday, helped on its way by lunch. (Fish was a favourite as Bron used to insist it was ‘good for the brain’.)

Reviewers dropped in throughout the day, often unannounced, to help themselves to a novel or just to gossip. Bron would pick up the phone and charm the grandest people into reviewing the most unlikely books. He was never afraid to ask. He was ruthless with his editor’s red pen, especially after lunch. I picture him sitting in a swanky leather director’s chair (I loved those chairs of ours) and pronouncing: ‘There is nothing in the world that cannot be improved by cutting.’

He was right. Sometimes, I wanted to do more than cut. I wanted to kill. But when I was offended by some bigoted review Bron had commissioned, or when he had asked some pretty girl he’d met on a train whether she’d like to review a novel (as happened more than once) and the result turned out to be unprintably banal, I learnt not to say too much. Bron would brighten if I sounded indignant. The most effective thing was to yawn. Whatever happened, we must not bore our readers or ourselves.

If the Literary Review was a party, then there were were two hosts: Bron and Naim Attallah, the magazine’s owner. Naim was a tall, handsome, improbable presence. He wore beautiful suits and cut such a dash that he looked more as though he were about to sponsor, or even take part in, a Merchant Ivory film than to bother himself with a literary magazine. Not that ‘bother’ was a word that suited Naim in any way. He was mavellously calm. I was grateful and amazed at his charming way of welcoming me from the start, with a twinkle in his eye, before he knew anything much about me – there was gallantry in this. He had tremendous warmth – something I can never resist. He was not a flirt, though. There was no banter, thank goodness. But there was a sympathetic intelligence and, I think, a great wish to please. I remember being presented by Naim with a small, stylish black and gold Asprey watch. I adored it. But I worried faintly that it might be some sort of bribe, then felt ashamed of the thought. It was nice to be spoilt – and an unfamiliar feeling – although, like my time at the Literary Review, the watch didn’t last for long. Its time ran out. But Naim was nothing if not generous.

Naim has a reputation for being a ladies’ man and this was something Bron relished and liked to discuss. I remember the endless jokes in the Literary Review’s offices about the beauty of the girls with whom Naim worked at Quartet. I remember vividly feeling daunted by their languid glamour – some of them definitely, I remember thinking at the time, looked too beautiful to work.

But then glamour was Naim’s thing. He had a flair for decorous, delicious literary lunches too. Looking back on those lunches now, I think invitations should have been extended to struggling writers only, to those starving in garrets. They would have speedily recovered, although it might have taken the edge off their literary hunger. These lunches were as unexpected as Naim was. I remember Germaine Greer coming to one of them – charmed, I like to think, against her better judgement by Bron or Naim; or most likely by both of them. Naim contributed hugely to the sense that our purpose in life was to enjoy ourselves.

People used to assume that Naim must have an editorial stranglehold on the magazine and be breathing down Bron’s neck, instructing him to have reviewers rave about all books published by Quartet. This was not the case at all. I don’t remember any editorial interference whatsoever from Naim – although I guess that if he had been consulted, Naim might have been on Bron’s side in encouraging reviews written by the pretty girls encountered on trains – the Railway Children. But then, if I’d protested or appealed to him, it would have been difficult for Naim to take sides. My impression was that he was a man who would wish to shy away from conflict. He was a benign influence, in every way.

Bron used always to talk as if he wanted to please Naim – he would make it sound like a joke. But he meant it. Bron started many of his sentences with the words: ‘The sad truth is . . . ’ The ends of most sentences that started in this way were funny. The ‘sad truth’ was that Bron was unapologetically nepotistic. It was a matter of loyalty. And loyalty was something Naim and Bron had in common. Naim would not have dreamt of asking Bron to look favourably on his own books. But had he been the sort of person to insist on a good review, Bron would have been absolutely and robustly corruptible. The truth – sad or the reverse – is that Naim must have known he did not need to ask.

Bron liked to shock, even in small ways. He once told me that if you had not read a book, you should always praise it when reviewing it. I couldn’t believe that he was owning up to not reading some of the books he reviewed. I later came to regard the words, ‘She writes like an angel’, when they issued from Bron’s pen, with particular suspicion. The extraordinary thing was that the party atmosphere at the Literary Review did not prevent a magazine from appearing every month. I like to think that instead it made the magazine what it was: entertaining, generous, unpredictable. Much of what Bron did, he did only to annoy because he knew it pleases. Meanwhile Naim allowed the party to go on, and for that everyone involved will continue to thank him.

REMEMBERING BEASTLY BEATITUDES

The actor Patrick Ryecart had acquired stage rights from J. P. Donleavy for his novel The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, and was looking for a backer. Patrick’s links with my family went back some two decades to the time when he lived in Haifa as a young boy, his father having been the Anglican vicar who looked after the British community. Whenever his parents had to travel to visit their flock in the Holy Land, his mother would leave him at my parents’ house, where my little sister had the task of minding him. Being already in England by then, I only heard about him at that stage, but we did finally meet and become friends a year before his marriage to the Duke of Norfolk’s daughter Marsha.

Given the childhood connection, I felt a certain obligation to back Patrick’s project as a sign of solidarity; though I also had high hopes that this time round we could be on to a winner. The plot told the story of Balthazar, ‘the world’s last shy, elegant young man’, who as a zoology student at Trinity College, Dublin, meets up with an old school friend, Beefy, who is studying for holy orders but not averse to amorous adventures. When their student careers come to an unholy end, the pair decamp to London, Balthazar to search for true love and Beefy to find a rich wife. I sought the advice of another friend, Howard Panter, and we agreed to collaborate on the play’s production.

Patrick was to play the part of Balthazar opposite the Shakespearian actor Simon Callow as Beefy, so we began with the advantage of a strong cast. I also found myself hitting it off well with J. P. Donleavy, despite his reputation for being a tough negotiator who could adopt an inflexible attitude once he got a bee in his bonnet. He was good company and we became friends as a result. The promotional campaign began a few weeks before the play opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre, spearheaded by Theo Cowan as a newly joined member of the Namara Group.

I took overall control of the publicity machine and pulled out all the stops. Laura Sandys, the sultry youngest daughter of Lord Sandys, who was barely seventeen when she came to work for me, joined forces with a gamine young lady, not much older, called Serena Franklin. Together they went around the West End in a yellow jeep, wearing T-shirts that bore the logo, ‘I Love Balthazar B’. They were an instant hit with the media and were chased everywhere by every member of the paparazzi brigade in town. As far as exposure was concerned, we won hands down, and the play opened with excellent reviews.

Unfortunately it was a dark period for West End theatres in general. We hoped to keep it going by word of mouth, for there was no doubting the play was a crowd-pleaser once we managed to get them inside the theatre. For the next six months I did not miss a single night’s performance, counting the audience in like sheep. I stood in the lobby watching people as they arrived, always hoping for a last-minute surge before the curtain went up. I became a fixture, almost part of the furniture.

As the performance began, both Patrick Ryecart and Simon Callow would instinctively look at the box where I sat to assure themselves I was there. Sometimes I was rewarded with a wink from the stage – their gesture of appreciation. With steely determination we gradually managed to improve ticket sales, but Simon Callow had a previous commitment that he could not postpone. His run in the play had to end and a replacement needed to be found very quickly. It was no easy task. We racked our brains for inspiration, when suddenly a mad idea came into my mind. I was very friendly with Billy Connolly and Pamela Stephenson, who were regulars at my parties. What about Billy Connolly taking over Simon’s role as Beefy? He had a tremendous following and his popularity would surely ensure a box-office bonanza.

But he was not then known as the actor he showed himself to be later, and his act as a comedian was based on his brilliant ad-libbing. Taking on a stage role was a different proposition altogether, requiring discipline in memorizing and sticking to the script. Could he do it, would he do it? And if he would, what were the chances of his being able to prepare himself in such a brief period of time? I invited him to lunch at Namara House, where my excellent cook, Charlotte Millward, an adept in the art of gastronomy, was the envy of the town. For Charlotte food was the spur to creativity, and her inspired invention and improvisation knew no bounds. She could offer avant-garde cuisine to equal that of any famous chef in the metropolis.

Disconcertingly, Pamela Stephenson had by then performed a miracle on Billy and he was a reformed character. Not only had she stopped his drinking, she had also turned him into a vegetarian. Charlotte, undaunted, arranged a sumptuous meal made exclusively of vegetables, and was greatly flattered when Billy sought her out in her kitchen, asking for some recipes. The lunch went well, and although Billy was astounded by my proposition, he did not turn it down flat. Having seen the play and liked it, he was very keen but doubted his ability to rise to such a serious challenge. He promised I would have his answer within a few days. Instead of just waiting for it, however, I telephoned Pamela, asking her to urge him to say yes. Her reaction gave me a heartening boost, for she felt sure that this could be for Billy a good career move.

He went into rehearsal almost immediately, though there was one remaining hitch. Because of a previous commitment he could do it for only a few weeks. This being better than nothing, we readily agreed. The casting of Billy as Beefy turned out to be inspired. He took the part in his stride and if ever he forgot his lines fell back on his variety-act technique of improvisation. There was one seduction scene where he had to rip a girl’s knickers clean off, a manoeuvre which dear Simon Callow could only approach with fastidious distaste. Billy, by contrast, tackled the task in a state of heightened heterosexual excitement and performed it with such relish that sometimes he used his teeth as well as his hands. The crowd howled with approval and loved every minute of his antics, not all of which were strictly in the script. They caught the bawdy spirit of the piece, however, and with his manic exuberance Billy never failed to bring comic genius to each performance.

The play took on a new lease of life and the queues outside the theatre went round the block, with people hoping either to get tickets or catch a glimpse of their hero. If only Billy had been able to stay on for a few more weeks, then the new capacity audiences would have turned the play into a smash hit in every sense. As it was, it ended up with a good run and earned me the respect of theatre folk for my tenacity and resolve in not being easily dismayed by the capricious nature of theatre. There were other bonuses. During those few months when I stood every evening in the lobby of the Duke of York’s Theatre I encountered a host of people. They would come up to me to talk, and introduce me to whomever they were with.

Two meetings in particular were significant. The first was with Sophie Hicks, today a successful architect but then an up-and-coming girl about town who worked at Condé Nast on Vogue; the other was Nigella Lawson, a student at Oxford who was up in London to see the play. Sophie in turn introduced me to Arabella Pollen, an ambitious and rather delectable young beauty of eighteen who, with my backing, would become Princess Diana’s favourite fashion designer. Nigella, with her persuasive charm and expressive good looks, secured from me a written undertaking to employ her at Quartet after her graduation from Oxford in a year’s time.

A WONDERFUL GESTURE

By the end of September 1984, I had made my peace with Carol Rumens, the poetry editor of the Literary Review, who had left because of her strong disapproval of Roald Dahl’s review of God Cried [see my blog 3 September, 2010]. I was utterly moved when I discovered that a poem she had written about the Arab-Jewish conflict was dedicated to me. It appeared in the New Statesman in their issue of 30 September. The poem, which was a cry for peace, was so beautifully worded and full of sympathy for both Jews and Arabs, that it deserves today, as it did then, as large an audience as it can reach. It is as relevant now as it was at the time and I am proud to include it in full.

Carol Rumens
A NEW SONG
(for Naim Attallah)

‘Thou feedest them with the bread of tears, and givest them tears to drink in great measure.’ (Psalm 80)

Silence of old Europe
Not even the Shofar
Can utter: Maidenek,
Mauthausen, Babi Yar –

Death of the innocent being
Our speciality,
Let us add Lebanon’s breaking
Sob to the litany.

So many now to mourn for,
Where can the psalmist start?
Only from where his home is
And his untidy heart.

We pluck our first allegiance
With a curled baby-hand
And peer between its fingers
To see our promised land:

Yours on a hillside clouded
With olives; mine a cot
In a London postal district,
Its trees long spilled as soot.

On a late wartime morning
In Northern Europe, my
First breath seems implicated
In yells of victory.
But it’s the quieter voices
That keep on trying to rhyme,
Telling me almost nothing
But filling me with shame.

Germany in the thirties
And half my family tree
Bent to an SS microscope’s
Mock genealogy.

Duly pronounced untainted
For his Aryan bride,
My uncle says it’s proven,
There are no Jews on his side.

Ancient, unsummoned, shameless,
The burdens of prejudice –
All through my London childhood
Adults with kindly eyes

And sharp throw-away phrases
Like bits of shopfront glass
(Grandfather: ‘He’s a schneider’ –
Frowning and treadling fast.)

Later, the flickering movie:
Greyish, diaphanous
Horrors that stared and whispered,
‘God has forgotten us.’

Oh, if our unborn children
Must go like us to flame,
Will you consent in silence
Or gasp and burn with them?

It is so late in the century
And still the favourite beast
Whines in the concrete bunker.
And still the trucks roll east

And east and east through whited
Snowfields of the mind
Towards the dark encampment;
Still the Siberian wind

Blows across Prague and Warsaw,
The voices in our head
Baying for a scapegoat:
Historians gone mad,

Thugs on a street corner,
The righteous Gentile who
Pins Lebanon like a yellow star
To the coat of every Jew.

Silences of old Europe,
Be broken; let us seek
The judgement of the silenced
And ask how they would speak.

Then let the street musician
Crouched in the cruel sun
Play for each passing, stateless
Child of Babylon

Conciliatory harmonies
Against the human grain,
A slow psalm of two nations
Mourning a common pain –

Hebrew and Arabic mingling
Their single-rooted vine,
Olives and roses falling
To sweeten Palestine.

REMEMBERING THEO

A few people I have known linger in my memory. I still love them and miss them. Someone very special was the showbiz legend, Theo Cowan.

In September 1981 my links with show business were strengthened when I quietly acquired the controlling interest in one of the best established theatre PR agencies in the West End. This was Theo Cowan Ltd, which had recently changed its name to Cowan Bellew Associates. Theo was a legend who had founded his company some sixteen years earlier after working as the publicity supremo of the Rank Organization in its heyday in the film industry. During that time he enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, entertaining the stars and earning himself the reputation of a ladies’ man. At one time he had a close relationship with Margaret Lockwood and it hit him very hard when they broke up. In the 1950s he helped to groom the likes of Diana Dors and Joan Collins.

Theo was responsible for launching A Little Night Music, Company and Fiddler on the Roof, and much more. Theo’s most famous clients included David Niven, Dirk Bogarde, Michael Caine, Peter Sellers, Jenny Agutter and Jeremy Irons, as well as a host of Hollywood stars, among them the veteran actor Joseph Cotten. The firm was without doubt the absolute doyenne of British showbiz PR. Theo had worked with some of the greatest of the Hollywood greats, including Bette Davis; and Laurie’s clients had included Robert Mitchum and James Stewart. In the mid-1980s, the roster still included Channel 4 Television.

On 13 September 1991, Theo died in his office at Namara House at the age of seventy-three. It happened just after lunch when, following his usual custom, he had taken a snooze for half an hour in his favourite chair opposite his long-time friend and assistant Jane Harker, with whom he shared his desk. That same morning Theo had been to see me at Regent Street to discuss various issues that were pending with regard to Namara Cowan. He was jolly, and as usual kept me au courant with what was happening in our show-business arm. We were then in a difficult period compounded by Theo’s generosity in giving ample time to many of the famous stars he represented without receiving a commensurate return for his services. He wanted my reassurance that my support would continue till the dawn of better days, which we were likely to see soon. He left my office happy and reassured, and reported the gist of our conversation to Jane Harker before settling for his forty winks. When it was time for him to wake up, his staff shook him gently and he keeled over, quite dead. He had departed peacefully, having ended his journey discreetly, just as he would have wished. Theo was a legend in his own lifetime. He was judged by his peers to be the best and, as The Times said, was admired by stars and scribblers alike. For more than four decades he projected or protected an élite stable of clients. In his letters to his clients, continued The Times, ‘he would usually sign himself “Beau-nosh” – a reference to his prodigious enthusiasm for food of almost any description. “A legend in his own lunchtime,” they would joke.’

The Daily Telegraph remarked that ‘the supreme publicity agent was himself something of a mystery’:

his public persona was universally loved, his private one hardly known. His life, it appeared, was his work; and the discretion which his clients valued was never applied more rigorously than to himself. Women adored him as much as he loved them, but he never married. It was known that he had nursed a special tendresse for Margaret Lockwood, and in the actress’s reclusive years he was the only man who could break into her isolation.

Dirk Bogarde added his personal tribute, addressing Theo’s departed shade directly with his memories of the many years they had got through together with ‘good movies, bad movies, and here and there a reasonably respectable one’. Theo had always been there on the journeys all over the country:

Red carpets and station-masters in top hats. Black ties and eternal dinners with Mayors. Day after day from one city to another. You and me. Everything planned like clockwork, ready on time, never once late, not even the train . . . Discipline you taught; patience, humility and tact. You did amazingly well by doing not what you were engaged to do – keeping me away from the worst excesses of the popular press. Keeping me ‘out of’ rather than ‘in’ the public eye for which I will ever be grateful. Those subtle warnings about X and Y who might look kind but couldn’t be trusted with a fly-swat or a feather duster. The ‘killers’ of their time. How frightened we all were of them! But it was you who said: ‘What they say today you’ll eat your chips from tomorrow. Remember that through your tears.’

Like most of those who were well-acquainted with Theo, I can never forget him. His presence alone was a joy. At parties he knew most of the guests and his popularity was something uniquely apparent. For a number of years my wife Maria and I, accompanied by our son, went to the film festival at Cannes to be looked after by Theo, where he was king of ‘The Croisette’. We attended many film premières and were treated regally by everyone we encountered for being merely in his company. Together we raided all the famous restaurants in town and the surrounding hills. It was truly a memorable experience to watch Theo as he devoured one after another of the exquisite dishes he could not resist even after being fully satisfied. I miss him often for his wise counsel, but even more for his kindness and generosity of spirit.

The memorial service for Theo was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields. It was conducted by the Reverend Albert Watson: a most moving occasion with figures from the world of entertainment there in force to pay tribute to one of the best loved publicity agents of his generation, whose popularity among the show-business fraternity was unparalleled. Readings were given at the service by Joss Ackland and Jeremy Irons, while tributes were paid by Donald Sinden, Michael Parkinson and Jenny Agutter, who also read warm appreciations from some who could not be there – Joseph Cotton, James Stewart, Lillian Gish and Barry Cryer. Ron Goodwin introduced a recording of Peter Sellers reading ‘Help’; Petula Clark sang ‘I’ll See You Again’; and Larry Adler, accompanied by Roy Budd on piano, played the theme music from the film Genevieve. Other music was provided by a jazz band made up of Mr Budd with Ian Christie on clarinet, Richard Willcox of BBC Light Entertainment on trombone, Mike Wheeler of Rank Film Distributors on double bass, Bryan Jones on trumpet and Lon Sanger as vocalist. The organist was Mark Stringer and the whole congregation joined in singing ‘On The Sunny Side Of The Street’ and ‘When You’re Smiling’.

In fact it turned out to be more of a gig than a memorial service, but that was the way Theo would have liked his life celebrated, with the merriment that was his hallmark. The ceremony was a joyous interlude for remembering a man whose legacy was laced with good memories. I left the church and went out into Trafalgar Square with feelings of mixed happiness and sadness. Theo was no more, but his unobtrusive shade would always remain with those who had had the privilege of knowing him.

CALL HIM FOR WHO & WHAT HE IS!

I wish someone would have the courage to tell me why most of the newspapers, with the exception of the Observer, Guardian and Daily Mirror, seem determined to back Boris Johnson. His treatment of those senior members of his party who challenged his views, the increasing deluge of sexual misdemeanors which are beginning to surface would, in normal circumstances, have made his continuing as Prime Minister a shameful and destructive act of lunacy.

But these are no longer normal circumstances. We face perhaps the gravest crisis to our country by crashing out of Europe since Dunkirk. Are we by any chance no longer in the frame of mind to differentiate between political chicanery and those good traditional values which made Britain a leading figure in world affairs? No longer are we the envy of most nations whose standards we would criticize in the past for undemocratic principles and lack of human dignity. Indeed, we seem to have become a laughing stock. Read the foreign press if you don’t believe me.

We seem no longer interested in appreciating the concept of truth in favour of a personal power craze which knows no boundaries. The government is made up mostly of second-rate politicians whose sole motive is to keep the Prime Minister in power, come what may. I fear for the future and pray that somehow despite all the odds against us, we eventually wake up and miraculously return to our roots of rectitude. We must banish the hysteria of Brexit for the benefit of the whole of Great Britain.

We must unite the nation to survive the vicissitudes of time, as the prospect of internal strive loom high. That can never happen while Johnson and his cronies remain in charge.