This book is a Wine and Cheese Book Group choice, and when I picked it up, the coordinator lamented that it was a bit of a dud, and predicted that nobody would enjoy it.
Well, always one to be different, I did. Writing, publishing and bookselling is my old trade; 20th century British social and literary history is an enduring interest; and I’d read another memoir by this writer which was startlingly frank. She was a partner and editor at the prestigious imprint Andre Deutsch from 1952 to 1993 from its humble post-war beginnings, an editor at the top of her game and, as it turned out, a sucessful memoirist as well.
Athill adored her work, and her ‘eye’ was legendary. While some books were essentially well-written and needed mere suggestions and tweaks, occasionally there was major re-writing involved. But even that was a joy; ‘like removing layers of crumpled brown paper from an awkwardly shaped parcel, and revealing the attractive present which it contained’. The personal lengths to which she would go for her authors were also legendary. For instance, Jean Rhys (author of Wide Sargasso Sea, a re-imagining of Jane Eyre from the point of view of Mr Rochester’s mad wife), was an impeccable artist but an utterly incompetent (Athill’s word) adult human. The many interventions to try to ‘save’ Jean from herself make tragic reading. And what she put up with from V S Naipaul, one of Andre Deutsch’s prized authors! What an entitled, sexist, nasty shit! I’ve never read any of his books and now I never will.
Born in 1917, Athill lived and loved and worked in a world that was transformed – often radically – within her lifetime. I liked her rationale for writing Stet:
Why am I going to write it? Not because I want to provide a history of British publishing in the second half of the twentieth century, but because I shall not be alive for much longer, and when I am gone all the experiences stored in my head will be gone too – they will be deleted with one swipe of the great eraser, and something in me squeaks ‘Oh no – let at least some of it be rescued!’ It seems to be an instinctive twitch rather than a rational intention, but no less compelling for that. By a long-established printer’s convention, a copy-editor wanting to rescue a deletion put a rove of dots under it and writes ‘Stet’ (let it stand) in the margin. This book is an attempt to ‘Stet’ some part of my experience in its original form…
Reading Stet was like being at a long lunch with someone sparklingly intelligent but with no sense of self-importance or need to impress. I imagine myself sitting quietly, listening to the flow of literary shop-talk, gossip and beady-eyed observation, wishing it would never stop…