One evening, a fellow employee at the BBC, George Weidenfeld, brought a 26-year-old Hungarian, Andre Deutsch, to a party she and her flatmate were giving.After a brief affair with Andre, they decided they were better as friends. Andre set up Allan Wingate (he was advised not to use “Deutsch” so soon after the war) and Diana was pulled in as editor, advertising manager and packer. They started with too small a capital, and soon had to search for backers to rescue them. Two of the backers wrested control from Andre, and he left to start another house in 1952 – Andre Deutsch. This time, by selling a serial deal for £30,000, they launched on a sound footing, though this did not end Andre’s legendary meanness. Envelopes had to be re-used, lights switched off, and woe betide an editor who paid an advance to a poet.”Those were the days before the independent publisher lost out to the conglomerate in the battle over buying books.
To begin with, Andre could go over to America, find something very exciting and make what appeared in those days to be a huge bid and snatch it from under people’s noses. When we got Norman Mailer’s An American Dream, Andre swooped on it and paid £25,000, which was a staggering amount for a novel then.”That side of publishing began to die out on us, and we had to fall back on what else we were known for, which was good books by lesser selling writers. And those got harder and harder to sell.”In the end, someone at the editorial meeting had to ask how many copies a certain novel would sell, and the answer was “about 600″. This for a book that would have paid its way a few years earlier.
The reason, she thinks, is that other forms of entertainment had become so accessible. People who really adored books went on buying them, but there were not enough of them.Before the decline of Andre Deutsch as publisher, there were great editorial moments. In the second part of Stet she writes about her relationship with the authors she edited With Jean Rhys she entered the role almost of carer. Her friendship with Brian Moore foundered when she tentatively criticised the way he dumped his first wife – soon after, Moore dumped Deutsch.
