The man who dared publish Lolita
JEREMY LEWIS on the great networker Lord Weidenfeld, who has just turned 96
IT’S NOT OFTEN that one comes across a 96-year-old who goes into the office several times a week, attends meetings and arranges business trips to Berlin and New York. George Weidenfeld looks frailer and more benign than he did in his heyday, but he remains alert as ever, still persuading visitors to his book-lined flat on Chelsea Embankment or his office near Blackfriars that they should write for his publishing firm.
Weidenfeld has been in the news recently for the charity he set up to help Christians who are being persecuted in the Middle East: a small way, he tells us, of paying back those Christians – Quakers and Plymouth Brethren – who helped him when he arrived in this country as a penniless refugee from Austria in 1938. He is one of the last survivors of an extraordinary group of German and Middle European Jewish emigrés who revitalised British publishing after the war, and included André Deutsch, Paul Hamlyn, Peter Owen, Walter Neurath of Thames & Hudson, Max Reinhardt of the Bodley Head and Ernest Hecht of the Souvenir Press; and if Robert Maxwell was the rogue elephant among them, Weidenfeld was more akin to an urbane and infinitely well-connected Renaissance cardinal. But whereas Maxwell swiftly acquired a flawless BBC accent, Weidenfeld still sounds unmistakably Austrian.
Weidenfeld worked for the BBC during the war, monitoring German broadcasts: he was famed for his perfect imitations of Hitler, and wrote a book for John Murray about Goebbels’s propaganda methods. After the war he founded a short-lived magazine called Contact, edited by Philip Toynbee: but his real ambition was to be a book publisher, and Contact provided a means of circumventing the postwar paper quota. Their first book, enticingly entitled A New Deal for Coal, was by Harold Wilson, who later ennobled his publisher. Marcus Sieff – whose daughter became the first of Weidenfeld’s three wives – suggested that he should publish a series of children’s classics exclusively for Marks & Spencer: among the authors writing for the series was the young Antonia Fraser, all of whose subsequent books were published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Nigel Nicolson – a Tory MP, a writer and the son of Harold – provided invaluable contacts, and their firm was set up in 1949. Weidenfeld almost immediately took a year off to work for Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel: Israel would always loom large in his life, and Israeli politicians would regularly be published by the firm, alongside their British, European and American equivalents, including de Gaulle, Adenauer, LBJ and Weidenfeld’s old friend Henry Kissinger.
Weidenfeld often claimed that 1953 was his annus mirabilis, in that he published books by Isaiah Berlin, Rose Macaulay and Cyril Connolly, but it was his publication in 1959 of Nabokov’s Lolita that really put the firm on the literary map. No other publisher had dared to take it on for fear of prosecution for obscenity – Graham Greene, then on the board of the Bodley Head was, to his intense irritation, overruled by his fellow-director J B Priestley – and the novel went on to sell in its tens of thousands.
Weidenfeld did not always endear himself to the Jewish community by publishing books by and about Nazis, including, most famously, the memoirs of Albert Speer; nor was he a popular figure in the clubbish world of London publishing. This was not simply a matter of old-fashioned anti-semitism, though that played a part. London publishing liked the idea of the gentleman publisher who was also a tradesman, albeit of a superior kind: but whereas his old sparring partner André Deutsch, as I well remember, happily immersed himself in the nuts and bolts of the trade, dealing with literary agents, booksellers, printers, binders, paper-makers, literary editors and libel lawyers, Weidenfeld left such matters to his colleagues, preferring to concentrate his attention on politicians, newspaper editors, press barons, opera singers and grandees of every shape and size. London publishing is a bibulous trade: George – as I feel I can call him by now – is a teetotaller, sipping tea with a slice of lemon from a tall glass in a filigree holder, but the champagne flowed at the star-studded parties for which he soon became famous, at which Cabinet ministers and Oxford dons rubbed shoulders with loyal and long-standing friends and authors such as Paul Johnson, John and Miriam Gross and members of the Longford family.
Weidenfeld may have haunted the stratosphere, much to the irritation of his envious, earth-bound competitors, but he did so to great effect. He was, with Thames & Hudson and, at a less elevated level, Paul Hamlyn, a pioneer of the co-edition, whereby it became possible to commission and publish heavily illustrated works not only by selling the rights to publishers in Europe and America but by sharing the printing costs with them as well, only stopping the machines to change the black plate when moving from one language to another. He has little time for literary agents, on the grounds that he is better at selling rights than anybody else, while many of the books he has published have been suggested by him. Known to readers of Private Eye as Lord Popeye, George is a networker sans pareil: David Astor of the Observer, whose biography I have recently completed, had little interest in publishers and was never a close friend – they fell out back in the
1940s – yet George is the one publisher whose name regularly features in Astor’s desk diaries.
George’s lifelong interest in history was reflected in books by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Eric Hobsbawm, Andrew Roberts, Martin Gilbert and Keith Thomas. His novelists have included Edna O’brien, Saul Bellow, J G Farrell and Mary McCarthy; he has published Harold Evans and Richard Dawkins, Daniel Barenboim and Cecil Beaton, to name but a few. Best of all, in my opinion, were the wartime diaries of Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor from Dresden who miraculously survived the horrors of Nazism and the bombing of his home city. Weidenfeld published the first volume in 1998, by which time most of his publishing contemporaries had long since quit the scene.
George always says that he has three loyalties: to Britain, to Israel and to the German-speaking world. He still writes a column for Die Zeit, and is not shy about offering advice to Angela Merkel; his enthusiasm for Europe and for politics is reflected in the Weidenfeld Scholarships at Oxford and the role he played in setting up the university’s Blavatnik School of Government.
Few publishers are remembered beyond their lifetimes, though their names may linger on the title pages of books published by, for example, Jonathan Cape or George’s old enemy Hamish Hamilton, both of which, like Weidenfeld & Nicolson itself, have long been swallowed up by conglomerates. Victor Gollancz and Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, are exceptions to the rule, and George Weidenfeld looks set to join them: partly because he features in the writings of his contemporaries – most memorably, if most painfully, in the waspish memoirs of Barbara Skelton, the sultry femme fatale who left Cyril Connolly to become the second Mrs Weidenfeld, hated the publishing life and quickly jumped ship – but chiefly because he was, and still is, a truly outstanding publisher.