BARBARA SCHWEPCKE TALK (31st March 2005)
In my mind there was a straight route from being a historian to becoming the publisher of the Life & Times series, which carries the presumptuous subtitle “Modern Library of Biography”. Let me try to explain why: the biography as a genre has a long history and tradition. It can well claim to be as ancient as any other written form. In German academia, however, it is considered the “Bastard der Wissenschaften” – zu populaer-wissenschaftlich fuer die Historiker, nicht literarisch genug fuer die Germanisten. For me personally, however, it is the obvious link between being a historian and a journalist, the two professions I tried my hand at before going into publishing; so when I ventured out of the Ivory Tower and became what my father condescendingly called “ein Tintenbube” it was the written interview, the portrait, the mini-biography, which not only tells something about the person interviewed, but also something about his or her background, which I liked writing the most. I never got enough room, though, in the papers I worked for, to do justice to the interviewees and it was out of this frustration that I asked for a year’s sabbatical – the term definitely borrowed from my time in the Ivory Tower and therefore completely misunderstood by my Editor-in-Chief – to write my first book “Toechter Asiens”, a collection of biographical essays on female political leaders in South Asia, who are all daughters of famous fathers. I never went back to being a gainfully-employed foreign-editor of a news magazine.
With a detour via being the publisher of Prospect and writing book number 2 (yes, you guessed correctly; another biography) I became commissioning editor at a famous publishing house, founded by two ladies in the late 40s, which had a long and distinguished tradition of translating and publishing World class literature – something very rare in the English book market. It was an honour to work for the Harvill Press, despite the fact it was struggling as so many independent publishing houses do, because of Harvill’s distinguished backlist of wonderful titles and Nobel-Prize winning authors.
Being responsible for all German and Dutch titles in translation published by Harvill – isn’t this a wonderfully idiosyncratic British combination? – it was during that time that I was working with a now very sadly missed author WG Sebald on Vertigo. Well, actually I was not so much working with him but pleading with him to let Harvill publish his next book(s). His agent had just brokered a phenomenal deal for him, which meant that after having published three books by Professor Sebald and having built his reputation in the English language market, Harvill had been outbid in an auction for the translation licence and Sebald’s next (and as it turned out final) book Austerlitz was going to be published by one of the big houses, which was able to pay much bigger advances to its authors. All Harvill could offer Professor Sebald at the time, was a lot of publishing tlc, a bi-lingual editor, who had just found him a new translator, who he was very happy with (not an easy thing to do as he was the founder of the Institute of Literary Translation). I remember that I gave up very quickly trying to persuade him to forego a six figure advance in favour of my dimples and we started talking about publishing in general and that the future of small, independent publishers depended on discovering a niche, on bringing something “new” to the ever more crowded market. Professor Sebald drew my attention to a series of short, well-researched, yet readable biographers, known as the “Rowohlt Monographien”. He was longing for a similar series to be available in English, which could become required reading for his first year comparative literature students. I tried very hard to persuade my boss to create this new series, but his mind was sadly already occupied with the fight for survival as an independent publisher, a fight which he lost afterwards when Harvill was bought by Random House.
Again I was presumptuous enough to think that I could do better myself and set out on my own. I knew (or at least I thought I did) that it would be risky, but I had a vision: to select from the vast Rowohlt Monographien series, which I knew well from my school days, those which I thought would work in the English language market and publish them myself. The first steps seemed deceptively easy and successful. I was able to secure the English language licence for Sebastian Haffner’s brilliant if short CHURCHILL biography, which had laid dormant (and undiscovered by Haffner’s English publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicholson), found a wonderful translator in John Brownjohn and a great scholar in my friend Peter Hennessy to write the introduction. The book was launched together with Professor Martin Geck’s BEETHOVEN at a concert, which Haus put on at St John’s Smith Square.
That was a little over two years ago. What have I learned in these two years? That accountants are like plumbers (calling their predecessors ‘cowboys’ and charging exorbitant amounts to ‘fix’ the mess left behind by them). That consultants should be shot on sight. That publishers need to know more about SAGE and Excel than Word or Quark. That sales reps should be paid only a commission and that I should have rented a basement office in Pimlico and started publishing from there!
Instead, the international corporate HQ of Haus Publishing Limited is in the upstairs study of my parents’ Chelsea flat and every new supplier charges Chelsea prices, i.e. puts a naught on their quote when they read the postcode. Haus Publishing consist of my editorial director (a very fine and patient friend, I brought with me from Harvill) and four computers, one of them occupied by a long line of “free lancers”, who come in when they can spare the time and I the money. My guest-room has been turned into a mini-office for my faithful Peruvian help, who took accounting classes and now runs the office and keeps the books – except for salaries, PAYE and NIC, which are calculated by a firm in Wales.
This team was recently joined by a third member, who brings 20 years of experience in pr with her. The whole team is made up of multi-taskers, i.e. when the catalogue has to be mailed the publisher joins the editorial director, the public relations manager and the office manager sitting on the floor stuffing envelopes. This is possible in the UK – it would be impossible in Germany: Regulations would limit my endeavours at every step of the way. It would be impossible to run a publishing house with even three employees in Germany, because the “Lohnkosten” would be impossible to meet on the small profit margin which is left to be publisher at the end of the day (ie after trade-discounts, plant costs and royalties are paid to name just a few items in the calculation which is done for each book).
It takes about a year from commissioning a book to its publication. I am very proud that Haus now not only translates titles from the Rowohlt Monograph series, but it also commissions new titles and I am even more proud that authors (and their greedy agents) now come to me with ideas and proposals. A deadline is agreed (and rarely kept!), the manuscript has to be edited, re-edited, pictures have to be found at an affordable price, text and integrated pictures have to be typeset, proof-read, and – because I have set very high standards for the Life & Times series – an index has to be compiled.
I also created a rod, which I am now beating myself with: I invented a chronology in the image of the “Kulturfahrplan”, which sets the life of the individual and protagonist of the biography in the context of his or her time – hence the name of the series.
And I adopted a layout, which is very reminiscent of a layout of a new magazine. I now have in my books what we call sidebars inserted in the text and set in a different colour (in most cases red), which take the place of footnotes, glossary terms and other additional information, which would interrupt the flow of the main text. From the beginning I knew I had to offer something new – well this is new: the Life & Times series must not only tell the story of the subject portrayed and tell that story in an accessible way (suitable for students and the general reader), but also the story should be presented in an innovative way, a layout that “catches your eye”, illustrated in colour and printed on good paper (115gms coated art paper) and sold at an affordable price. I think it is more interesting to read the story of somebody outstanding, if it is set against the background of his or her times, if you not only get the life story but also an introduction into the surroundings and atmosphere they lived in and were formed by.
And then there is something else, which is different “new” about Life & Times biographies: they are short!
Disraeli said “Read no history, nothing but biography, for that is life without theory”.
Let me tell you some of my thoughts on biography in general. There are two ways of writing a biography: the “literary” one that portrays a person by trying to read his or her mind and by being as explicit as possible about all private peccadilloes, seeing as a key object the enchantment of the subject’s reputation.
This begs the trend of school biography writing influenced by the sociology of the so-called post-modern world, lacking in imaginative insights and substituting them with “pure information” – and lots of it! – scholarly monuments, to be critically acclaimed and I suspect skimmed by us lesser mortals. They are all works of art, written by modern biographers with ambition and serious (academic) credentials and are very rarely short ones. This is not meant to denigrate these biographers – please, no misunderstandings! The boom of the last 20 years has done an enormous amount for the quality of the research which goes into biographies, and there is no doubt in my mind that the best half a dozen published each year compare favourably with all but a handful published a generation ago. Both scholarship and scholarly apparatus of the contemporary biography writer have improved, source-based data are now more readily available. The publishing idea behind these books is to convince the serious intellectual as well as the ambitious or interested reader to place a biography on his/her reading list, their list of Christmas presents (where it may be even more desirable when the cover design is artful and appealing) or even on their coffee table.
But will this trend continue indefinitely as our pockets get deeper and on the other hand the appetite for big, solid meticulously researched non-fiction grows? Common sense suggests this. “The reader” was always given the conservatism. As he has been reading biographies since the earliest of times, whether you look to Hittite and Chinese inscriptions as the predecessors of modern biographies or start with Plutarch, writing about the lives of heroes and villains, I think it is a fair assumption that the biography is here to stay. But in what form? Where is the trend heading?
I think, however, there is a new trend which is heading away from the Victorian “tome” and towards the sleeker version of this ever-popular genre, called biography. A good example is the publishing phenomenon, which shook the biography scene and has changed it beyond recognition: Longitude which despite its name was anything by a long biography.
Without committing publishing blasphemy I think there are only very few writers such as Roy Jenkins, Nicholas Shakespeare or Antonia Fraser, who should really be allowed to write “long”. Too many writers try to illuminate every hidden corner of their subject’s life and try to follow their patron Saint Michael Holroyd, whose intense scrutiny of George Bernard Shaw yielded four volumes and 2,000 pages from a decade’s hard labour. Which is wonderful, so long as readers of such far-from-brief lives can match his highest standards of genteel leisure and unearned income. The trouble with the boom in heavyweight biography is that it has coincided with a fragmentation of shared public knowledge; not to mention a feeling of time-famine in modern society. As the pace of change accelerates in society and education, fewer and fewer adults will know what “every school child” allegedly once did. That was what Professor Sebald meant, when he planted the idea of the Life & Times series in my head. These biographers are meant as little “Kultur Bausteine”, which placed together will build a Haus of our common culture, but are meant for an era of time-famine.
Biographies in general appeal to people who get impatient with mere fiction – perhaps it is Protestant self-improvement and voyeurism wrapped into one – as one brilliant and now sadly departed biographer, Ben Pimlott put it, but there is no doubt about it: Biography is popular.
My rant against the Victorian tome and the academic monument is not a plea for a return to the “evocative” or “atmospheric” biography, placing intuition above research, but the general reader does not need 500 endnotes or endless pages of references. He or she wants to read books, where every telling phrase and every word counts. That is why Sebastian Haffner’s CHURCHILL can withstand every comparison with much longer biographies or as the Times Literary Supplement said in the review of the first biography in the Life & Times series: ‘One of the most brilliant things of any length ever written about Churchill’. These are the kind of books I set out to publish and I have become a very strict task-master of my authors. The scope of biographical writing in skilled hands and the insight it can offer into the human condition and into the times the individual subject matter lived in, is limitless and publishing these kind of biographies is very exciting.
Biography operates within tight rules: attention to accuracy and recognition that there is no such thing as a “true” biography.
Let me quote from Ben Pimlott’s last essay: “However scrupulous the research, nobody has access to another’s soul, and the character on the page is the author’s unique creation. One aspect of creativity is the subject-in-context and it is this that makes the complaint [against biographies] about over-emphasizing the role of the individual so off-beam. Indeed, far from underplaying social factors, the good biography is flexible, making unexpected connections across periods of time and including unexpected essays on topics which but for the involvement of the subject, might never get written about at all”.
That is just what I do intend to achieve with the sidebars, giving contextual information about situation and characters referred to in the text. Or what was the reason for devising the format of our chronologies in order to inform the reader what happens simultaneously in history and culture. In other words the Life & Times series tries to live up the high standards set by the master biographer Pimlott, without inundating the general reader with too much information. The great artists amongst the biographers are selective. That selection makes their work unique and readable. That selection is like the recognizable brushstrokes of a painter and that is also what a good biography can be compared to: a good portrait. It shows a vivid likeness in his or her milieu and says something about his or her philosophy of life. It does ask questions of the viewer as well as answering them from the very personal point of view of the artist, the great biography writer.
To conclude, you might ask me, how I choose my subject matters. They should have shaped the time they lived in, made a unique contribution to history. Ann anniversary is always a good prompt for a new biography to be published. But the main prerequisite for getting onto the Life & Times list is that you have to dead. The most popular book I ever commissioned and which is now making Random House even richer was a novel by Audrey Kurkov. It is a very black, but brilliantly funny portrait of post-communist Ukraine, where a starving author accepts the offer from a newspaper to write obituaries about the new movers and shakers of the new society. The job pays well and keeps him and his pet penguin well fed. The only problem, he confesses to a new-found buddy over several vodkas they consume sitting around the kitchen table, with Micha, the penguin in attendance, the only problem is that these new movers and shakers are very much alive. Our author’s new friend asks him to identify one obit he has written and is particularly proud of, but which is gathering dust in the drawer of the new paper editor. The next morning the individual is found dead and Micha, the Penguin …..I am not going to spin the story any further. Please read it yourself.
I hope you can understand now that I prefer to publish biographies of dead people. I hope I can find more dead people, whose story will interest my readers and that I will continue to be lucky enough to find authors to write them according to my principles of the Life & Times series.
