When Acorns Still Grew

Last week I popped into Penguin’s “pop-up” store in Waterstones bookshop in Piccadilly, which is open until the end of this month to celebrate the company’s ninetieth anniversary. It reminded me of long-ago days in the 1990s when I used to work for Penguin and then its imprint Hamish Hamilton, which was, until 1995, still under separate management. I was lucky enough at Hamish Hamilton to be able to work with and learn from some great writers, but one of the most important lessons came from a writer we turned down.

The purpose of our slush pile meeting, which was held every few weeks, was to “read” – but much more to reject and return – the unsolicited manuscripts that had accumulated since the last meeting. In theory, it should have been possible to find some excellent writing this way. In practice, it was a matter of stuffing envelopes with a standard rejection card after we had accorded the submissions only the most cursory attention. I suppose the unspoken assumption was that any real writer – whatever that’s meant to be – would have had the common-sense to get an agent.

The group attitude was one of disrespectful mockery. Occasionally someone would read out this or that gaucherie which we would laugh at (for me, this would often be after a day spent editing the gaucheries of the writers we were actually publishing). I think we all instinctively knew that what we were doing was wrong, but we were just too accepting of the system to call it out as we ought to have done.

So it was to the credit of our managing director that he circulated – with a note that we take due heed – this complaint letter from one of the unlucky people in our slush pile:

Dear Sir,

Years ago I used to spend my summers in a small seaside hamlet in Ireland. The only gathering place was a barnlike pub and in the evenings we would drift in: old, young, children, family groups.  There would be drinks according to age and taste, and sweets and crisps for the little ones.  Chat and argument were interspersed with singing and recitations.  Some voices were good, some terrible. Imagine a gap-toothed, leather-faced farm labourer spraying the three-day stubble on his chin as he tried to put over that which had touched him in school forty years before.

‘I see his blood upon the rose

And in the stars the glory of his eyes,

His body gleams amid eternal snows,

His tears fall from the skies.’

We were there for enjoyment and we rattled the rafters with song.  But when there was a solo item, whether song or recitation, whether it was from a soaring tenor or a hoarse-voiced crow, attention was paid.

If, in the middle of a pedestrian number, attention strayed and conversation rose, always the call was made from somebody – for there was no chairman – ‘Order! The singer deserves respect.’ Always. And always there would be agreement from somebody else. ‘A man’s best efforts deserve respect.’ Nobody ever demurred.

This basic decency and respect for the best efforts of others, a moral obligation self-evident to these struggling farmers and fishermen, I have found lacking in your organisation.

I phoned your office at a quarter to four yesterday afternoon to enquire about a submission (synopsis and excerpts) which I had made to you nine weeks ago.  I was put through to Administration where they had no record of it and passed me on to the Editorial department.  The lady there said that it should have come to her. But it wasn’t to hand.  She would find out about it and ring me back.  I waited until five o’clock.  By that time, when she hadn’t rung, I knew it would have been in the post by a quarter to five. It was. I received it back in this morning’s post.

Within the hour, after a nine weeks’ wait, my manuscript had been retrieved from the slush pile, glanced at perhaps (it would have needed very fast reading to do more than that) and consigned to the post.

Nobody asked me to write it or to submit it to you.  I know that.  I am aware that you are a commercial concern, not a charity.  And I am not complaining about the wait. That is the name of the game for an unpublished author. But such cursory dismissal with a printed card, which could as easily have been sent nine weeks ago! It displays a brutal indifference to the hopes and aspirations and hard work of another human being.

You are a director and it will not have been you who was so curt.  But it is your system and it is callously indifferent to the feelings and best endeavours of others.

A man’s best efforts deserve respect.

Soon after sharing the letter, the managing director was purged in a corporate shake-up, which ended the illusion that we were independent of the behemoth that owned us. While he went on to enjoy a successful career as an independent publisher, in the now empty office that he left behind, the file copies of our past books became available for plunder, and the wooden shield of our colophon sat abandoned on a shelf, its cluster of acorns no longer relevant to a business that now wanted every book to be an instant oak.

It was difficult not to feel a little wistful, especially if one had attended the party at Kensington Roof Gardens that, only a few years before in 1991, had marked our sixtieth anniversary. I remember chatting that evening to Yvonne Hamilton, the wife of the founder. She had written about her husband, Jamie Hamilton, in a little booklet for the occasion: “For all his need to compete with other publishers, he always observed and was distressed by the tendency of values which he respected – loyalty, friendship and fairness – to be replaced by financial considerations.”

Well, now it was financial considerations that had broken us down into an empty brand, the same fate of the other venerable old publishing houses that occupied the soulless tin-can of the Penguin building.

Very few of us could have imagined how much worse it was going to get. We were familiar with varying degrees of exploitation, of course, but no one then questioned the existence of the writers we published. The “Death of the Author” was still only a literary theory and not – as we stare into the maw of AI thirty years later – an apocalyptic threat.

Oh for those old days when acorns still grew!