John Lehmann
An Autumn Foreword
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The editor of The London Magazine from February 1954 to March 1961, John Lehmann published a brief foreword at the start of every issue. The one below appeared in the November 1954 edition of the magazine alongside work by W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Alberto Moravia, Cecil Day Lewis and more.
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Autumn for the mellow fruitfulness of the publisher, close bosom-friend of the bookseller, conspiring with him how to load and bless the author. … Or so it should be ideally, and perhaps it is only the rosy-tinting spectacles of memory that lead one to believe that it was like that once. Autumn, anyway, for the vast Export Number of The Bookseller, the publishers’ cocktail parties, the popular authors’ orgies of signing, the special window displays in the mightier bookstores, the literary competitions in the authoritative Sunday papers, the celebrities courted for their views on the best books of the season, and the reviewers wondering how they are going to write about three dozen books in two dozen lines.
This astonishing phenomenon, this bull market of faith and hope repeats itself regularly year after year. And every year it brings as its aftermath more disappointed ambition, more vows to change one’s publisher, more accusations of favouritism against literary editors and critics, more homicidal indignation with booksellers than satisfied vanity or solid cash. What is to be done about it? Who is to warn authors that they have as much chance of hitting the best-seller target as of winning the Derby and the Grand National together? For the fact remains, the fact that everyone knows and no one remembers, that too many books are published in this country and far too many of them expect to scoop the Christmas market. It all starts happily enough. Early in September the buyers in the bookshops, confident of boom, are busily scribbling out their first orders, the fortunate publishers’ representatives beaming to have got in so early. Later in October the edge is off the same buyers’ welcome: dubiously they predict that the great rush is bound to happen in a week or two, while they wonder whether they haven’t ordered too many books on gardening and cricket already. Fiction is out. Novelists complain sharply that it wouldn’t be so if their books had been properly advertised. By the middle of November there are scowls (except for the travellers in Enid Blyton) and a note of wheedling urgency creeps into the voices of publishers over the telephone. Book Society Recommendations are cynically ignored. Poets should be shot. What another escape story? By December the booksellers are screaming for mercy, or chasing out of their shops the still hopeful travellers with their last minute winners – unfortunately delayed at the binders.
What fun it all is, nevertheless. What would an author’s, publisher’s, bookseller’s life be like without this Autumn gamble, this Christmas dream, this willing suspension of disbelief in the face of all the facts? There are, too, the golden satisfactions: one reads one morning that the biography one has been waiting for for years has at last appeared, and is brilliantly reviewed; one’s favourite novelist comes out with a new volume in his triple series of trilogies; a travel book on the island of St Lucia with dazzling photographs whisks one away from the fog, the burst pipes, the coal crisis; perhaps even one’s own little book of verse has been chosen by the Poetry Book Society. Then there are the bumper numbers of the literary weeklies, and the devotee of The Times Literary Supplement, warned a week or two before, shuts himself up incommunicado to polish off the last articles in the Special French Writing Number, the Special Personal Preference Number and the Special American Writing Number, in order to face what’s coming with a clear conscience and in good heart. In the old days there was also likely to be a special Autumn Number of John O’London’s, and many will be the sadder this year for its absence. Reflecting on the fate of a long established and long loved journal that fulfilled a unique function in popularizing serious literature, now liquidated with drastic suddenness by its owners while its circulation was still reputed to be 50,000, my eye fell on this entry in Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas: ‘AFFAIRS (BUSINESS): Come first. The most important thing in life. Be-all and end-all.’ Flaubert, of course, was writing of a hundred years ago.
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John Lehmann was an English editor and writer who founded the most recent incarnation of The London Magazine: it has been published continuously since.
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