Double Deutsch

 

 

The novelist Isabel Colegate is best known for The Shooting Party, published in 1980, in part because of the film adaptation that quickly followed. Her first novel, The Blackmailer, has a more interesting claim to fame, a story from the small world of mid-century publishing that I believe she's written about before, but which I only discovered from the reissue published last year with a new foreword. . . .

Yes, as the title tells you, The Blackmailer involves blackmail: the brisk plot centres on a war hero's widow and the man who threatens to expose her late husband's true nature. Quite apart from the pleasures of the witty novel itself, though, are the author's opening remarks about the qualms of the publisher to whom it was first submitted, Jonathan Cape.

There, Colegate notes, the chief editor Robert Knittel became convinced that she had based one of her supporting characters, a publisher called Feliks Hanescu, on the well-known André Deutsch – "whom I never met". Cape declined to publish The Blackmailer and it appeared in 1958, under a new imprint set up by Anthony Blond, with whom Colegate had formerly worked as a literary agent. The TLS (for which Colegate would later write superbly) reviewed the novel positively, but did mention that it featured "some highly unlikely characters".

To Knittel, it seemed impossible that Colegate could have made up Feliks, however unlikely he appeared to be – this ambitious chap of Eastern European origin who wanted to be a "genius" but, failing that, settles for becoming a "personality", who "enjoyed scenes but preferred them to be engineered by, and centred upon, himself". Hanescu is of "Rumanian" origin and Jewish; Deutsch was of Hungarian origin and Jewish. Deutsch founded his own firm, Allan Wingate, in 1945, from which he was ousted a few years later; Hanescu sets up in 1945, only to be declared bankrupt eighteen months later. Both then establish their own firms.

To Deutsch's former partner Diana Athill, he was a "born publisher" – he once wrote an anonymous, worldly piece in the TLS about the perils that beset a young publisher:

"To the young man who has a few thousand pounds to play with and wants to become a publisher, it all seems so easy. Almost everybody, it appears to him, is writing a first novel or has a collection of short stories . . . Thus another new imprint is created, and as soon as it is heard of the unfortunate young man will be flooded with third-rate manuscripts from writers and agents. . . ."

Deutsch's supposed counterpart, meanwhile, gets back into business when his father dies, leaving him with, naturally, "a modest fortune":

"Feliks Hanescu had energy, talent, salesmanship, and an infinite capacity for remembering names. He also had, for the moment, a considerable unearned income. He soon acquired . . . a large clientele of ex-convicts, war heroes and deep-sea divers, who, greedily pursued by other publishers, came to him . . . partly because they had heard he was good at pushing sales, which was true."

All this was apparently enough to put Knittel in mind of Deutsch. Colegate told him, as she recalled in an earlier reissue of the book, that it wasn't anything so simple: "I don't think he believed me". The new foreword's implication is that a recognizable portrait of such a person was one reason, if not the only reason, for the book's rejection – and if so, this is a far cry from the current mania for fictions that are acknowledged variations on the themes of the authors' own lives, as in the tedious Outline by Rachel Cusk or the ongoing Neapolitan saga of the (pseudonymous) Elena Ferrante.

(Yet the 1950s was also the decade in which Anthony Powell began his Dance to the Music of Time, at least three volumes of which appeared before Colegate's book fell into Knittel's hands. So maybe I've misunderstood the significance of that accidental portrait of a publisher in The Blackmailer, which does indeed seem a reasonable enough likeness, but hardly a lampoon.)

It is tempting (because we are incurably nosey about this sort of thing?) to pin Powell's characters to their "counterparts" in real life – to match up X. Trapnel and his trappings with those of Julian Maclaren-Ross, for example, or Mona Templer's profile to that of Sonia Orwell, and so on. But this is to ignore Powell's own exasperation with critics who could not grasp the principle of composite characterization – that fictional characters in novels may be, as Colegate now puts it, "composites of people one has known or met, people one has read about or glimpsed on the bus, and oneself". 

So even if Colegate never met Deutsch, Blond had worked for Allan Wingate, his old firm, and, while she remembers being "incapacitated by shyness", it was Blond who would "venture out into the cut and thrust of the literary world, returning with tales which I suppose provided the material for the character of Feliks": "Feliks of course is a creature of fantasy but characters not immeasurably different could adorn the publishing trade in those days".

Perhaps this capacity for "invention as well as manipulation" lies at the heart of the matter: if you find it "hard to believe" that a character in a work of fiction could be just that, you might as well believe that Shakespeare couldn't possibly have been a relatively ordinary person with an extraordinary mind. And yet an impish muddling of the two seems to be exactly what imaginative literature requires of its creators. Colegate remembers how the "French troubles in Indo-China" made the news at some point, and there were possibly rumours about a siege and a "gallant officer" – perhaps it was then that the "soup of the stuff of dreams began to bubble. It bubbles less easily now that I am old, which is why I look back on The Blackmailer with a certain affection".

 

André Deutsch, 1962 © National Portrait Gallery, London