THE WRITE STUFF

Diana Athill remembers working for André Deutsch in the early 1960s

WE TOOK THIS PHOTOGRAPH for fun, from the first floor of our offices on Great Russell Street; I’d been working for André Deutsch for about a decade by then. The firm had the whole house. My office was small, and at the back, but it was quiet, which I liked. We held lunches for authors in the attic. Nice lunches. And there were literary occasions to go to – quite glamorous, really.

We were a young firm and to begin with we had far too little money, always on the verge of collapse. André would have to rush out and find someone who was dying to be a publisher and prepared to put money in to be a director, which was a disaster. Finally, things settled and we got rid of them. From then on, it was only André, Nick [Nicholas Bentley] and me.

André was a Hungarian who came over to England just before the war. Initially, he was put into an internment camp, but he met someone there who gave him an introduction to the book world when he came out. He took to it like a duck to water.

I met him at a drinks party – my own flat-warming. We were always having little love affairs back then and my flatmate was having a fling with [the publisher] George Weidenfeld, who brought André. He and I became friends. One day, he said, ‘I’m going to start a publishing firm.’ And I said, ‘How lovely, dear,’ thinking he might as well say he was going to win the football pools. What I didn’t realise, then, is that if André said something, he did it. He was so positive.

Nick had come in to illustrate, but he also worked as an editor and was very pedantic. I used to have to go through things, though, because he would be so upset by a split infinitive that he wouldn’t notice that the author had called a character Bob on page nine and Guyonpage34.

Women were taken advantage of, terribly. The thing is, it was such a fun job that one put up with it. One certainly put up with less pay. I mean, André had a house, and I never had anything more than a flat. And he had at least 12 very good suits and a very nice car, years before I forced him to get me one. He kept trying to persuade me that it was very chic to have a horrible little French car, and I said, ‘That is not very chic and I am not going to have it.’ Even then, all I got was a Beetle.

I wrote two books of my own during that time and published one. But I was so busy, I didn’t envisage having a life as a writer. I’m not really a writer now, I’m an autobiographer. It just happens I’ve a gift for that. I write in the evenings – I’m a night owl, so that is when I feel most awake.

To celebrate my 100th birthday, my favourite nephew, Phil, who has taken on the task of being my son, is throwing a party – tea with champagne. The thing is, I’m very deaf now and with a lot of background noise I can’t hear a word, so I will be sitting with a fixed smile, playing with my toys in the corner.

My advice to that young girl in the photograph would be to have as much fun as possible. I spent my time at Oxford having a

Diana Athill with André Deutsch (centre) and Nicholas Bentley, outside their office in Bloomsbury

Women were taken advantage of – but it was such a fun job that one put up with it

lovely, frivolous time. In fact, I was extremely idle. My tutor would say, ‘You’d better have a think, Miss Athill. You ought to get a First, but if you go on like this, I don’t think you will.’ And I would go away, crossly, and do a bit more acting or something. I got an extremely bad degree but it was worth it: three years in a beautiful place that you feel belongs to you, having the time of your life, is absolutely worth it.

— Interview by Lucy Davies Diana Athill is the author of many books: A Florence Diary (Granta, 2016) is her latest. She turned 100 on Thursday