Stet: An Editor's Life
Diana Athill
Grove Press, 2002
U.S. trade paper, reprint
ISBN 978-0802138620
256 pages; $13.00

After reading the wonderful Instead of a Letter: A Memoir (reviewed here), I found Stet: An Editor's Life to be a letdown. Diana Athill’s memoir of her time working for Andre Deutsch in two different publishing houses (including his eponymous venture, which lasted much longer than his first attempt) seems strangely impersonal. It also contains little of the poetic writing I so enjoyed in Instead of a Letter. Surely publishing can’t be so devoid of marvelous conversations and fabulous books, especially not in the days immediately following World War II; but if it isn’t, Athill keeps it mostly to herself. Despite the distancing effect of Athill’s choices in writing this memoir, however, the book is still worth reading for its picture of a time gone by, and one that may never return as self-publication and internet publishing replace an editor’s pen and a publisher’s book design.

The book is divided into two sections. The first concerns Athill’s career in publishing, which lasted more than fifty years. Athill fell into this career rather than seeking it out, and seems to have enjoyed every minute of it, despite the fact that she never made any real money as an editor. Of particular interest to me is that Athill always insisted on having a balanced life despite her commitment to her work:

I betrayed my amateurish nature by drawing the line at working outside office hours. The working breakfast, and taking work home at weekends – two activities regarded by many as necessary evidence of commitment, both of them much indulged in by that born publisher, Andre Deutsch – were to me an abomination. Very rarely someone from my work moved over into my private life, but generally office and home were far apart, and home was much more important than office. And whereas I was ashamed of my limitations within the office, I was not ashamed of valuing my private like more highly than my work: that, to my mind, is what everyone ought to do.

Athill instinctively knew what it takes many (including me) half a century to realize. Perhaps, however, it is this distancing, this separation of private life from publishing life that makes this book seem so unemotional; Athill loved her work, but as an intellectual pursuit, a means of making money so that she could live the rest of her life. Still, it is fascinating to read, for example, about Andre Deutsch’s disastrous error in offering Philip Roth only a small advance for When She Was Good, and thereby losing him to another publishing house just before he wrote Portnoy's Complaint. Publishing seems so full of “if only” stories, much more than most business pursuits.

The second and more interesting part of the book concerns particular authors with whom Athill worked closely. I’ve heard of Mordecai Richler and Brian Moore, though I’ve not read their work, but Alfred Chester and Molly Keane are completely new names to me. Athill writes so well of these individuals that one wishes to seek out their work. I especially want to try Keane’s Good Behaviour, a black comedy that seems to have matched the black comedy of Keane’s life.

Athill’s chapter on Jean Rhys is the germ of what could become a fascinating biography of that writer, but I suspect Athill has no interest in it. Rhys is the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, a tale of Mrs. Rochester (of Jane Eyre fame) when she was a girl living in the West Indies, long before she was consumed by madness. The book is a masterpiece, but Rhys’s life, alas, was not. Rhys’s struggle with colonialism on Dominica, a very small Caribbean island nation mostly forgotten by the world, was only replaced by her struggle with England, which failed to meet the expectations she was raised to cherish. Her life ultimately fell into such ruin that she lived in an unheated single room in a small bungalow in Cheriton, one of a row of one-story shacks, “crouching grey, makeshift and neglected behind a hedge which almost hid them. They looked as though corrugated iron, asbestos and tarred felt were their main ingredients, and if I had been told that I must live in one of them I would have been appalled.” Yet from this squalor came Wide Sargasso Sea, the novel that probably saved her life. It’s a fascinating story.

Athill’s discussion of V.S. Naipaul is similarly full of interest. In telling his story, Athill remarks on how unfair publishing can be:

It is natural that a writer who knows himself to be good and who is regularly confirmed in that opinion by critical comment should expect to become a best-seller, but every publisher knows that you don’t necessarily become a best-seller by writing well. Of course you don’t necessarily have to write badly to do it: it is true that some best-selling books are written astonishingly badly, and equally true that some are written very well. The quality of the writing – even the quality of the thinking – is irrelevant. It is a matter of whether or not a nerve is hit in the wider reading public as opposed to the serious one which is composed of people who are interested in writing as an art.

(My emphasis.) What better explanation for the likes of Danielle Steele and Dan Brown can there be? And yet, this truth can make life a hell for an author like Naipaul, who became always “displeased with the results of publication, which filled him always with despair, sometimes with anger as well.” It could even blind him at times, as when he insisted that Foyles, a wonderful bookstore on Charing Cross Road, didn’t have a single copy of his latest book, just published, in stock. Deutsch and Athill walked Naipaul to the store and found two piles of six copies each on the table marked “Recent Publications.” Deutsch remarked later that Naipaul seemed to be even more upset at “being done out of his grievance” than he had been originally at the thought that his book wasn’t displayed. All of this seems to make Paul Theroux’s memoir of the man, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, seem less outrageous and more likely true.

I remain eager to read Athill’s other books, especially After a Funeral and Somewhere Towards the End. I suspect that those books, dealing as they do with Athill’s personal life, will likely contain more spirit and poetry than does Stet. Athill has a writing style that carries you along as on a tidal river, flowing gently from anecdote to quip to sad story without a snag, so that even when the poetry is absent, her writing still moves you on enjoyably. Stet is worth reading, if only to form a more complete picture of the woman who has set her life down in books.