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Faber & Faber: The Untold Story review: how literary history was made – by mistake
![Faber & Faber has published books by Paul Auster, Tom Stoppard and Sylvia Plath](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2019/06/06/faber-books_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqeo_i_u9APj8RuoebjoAHt0k9u7HhRJvuo-ZLenGRumA.jpg?imwidth=680)
This dive into a great publisher’s archives reveals mistakes, luck and near-ruin, finds Duncan White
In November 1925, having recently become chairman of the publishing house Faber & Gwyer, Geoffrey Faber proposed that his new firm publish Elnovia, a satirical novel about the state of contemporary fiction. There were two problems with this proposition: 1) Elnovia was not very good; 2) Geoffrey was its author. Seeking to assuage the anxiety of his colleagues, Geoffrey boldly offered to take on any losses his novel might incur. The reading public – bastards all – refused to recognise Elnovia’s qualities, and three years later, Geoffrey was forced to plead with the Faber board to relieve him of his obligation: covering his own novel’s losses threatened him with financial ruin.–
The tale of Geoffrey’s folly is recounted in the opening pages of Faber & Faber: The Untold Story, and it is enough to give one pause. After all, what is the book in hand? A history of Faber & Faber? Published by Faber & Faber? Written by a Faber heir? It is rather tempting to suggest that Geoffrey’s self-regard was baked into the firm itself.
Mercifully, this book is more than self-serving corporate history, and that is largely down to Toby Faber’s light touch. Drawing from the Faber archives, he presents the history of his grandfather’s firm through a series of excerpts from letters, using only sparing notes and short introductions to each section to provide some context. The result is a kind of epistolary history that has the considerable advantage of letting us hear from the authors in their own voices, whether it is Samuel Beckett trying to get “ballocksed” and “arse” past the censor, or James Joyce grumbling about the way “Feebler and Fumbler” were publicising excerpts from Finnegans Wake.
The most compelling of those voices belongs to TS Eliot, who was recruited as an editor by Geoffrey and was responsible for building the firm’s literary reputation. It was down to Eliot’s offices that Faber signed up so many great writers of the modernist period, including Djuna Barnes, Louis MacNeice, Ezra Pound, Joyce, Stephen Spender, and, in Eliot’s words, “a boy named Auden”. With such a reputation established, ambitious young writers flocked to Faber over subsequent decades, including Lawrence Durrell, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Sylvia Plath. Reading Eliot’s correspondence with these writers, his internal reports and his catalogue copy is never less than fascinating.
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You don’t build a literary canon without a healthy sense of entitlement, however. Ideas of literary and social distinction often overlapped, and it is astonishing just how snobbish a world this was. In the early Fifties, the board realised they needed to appoint a new editor, but worried where they might find someone with the requisite qualities. A chap called Charles Monteith was considered, but concerns were raised that while he had “flair”, he lacked “taste”. Eliot assured Geoffrey that, although Monteith was “no doubt plebeian”, he did not find him “common” and would have been surprised to hear him described as “vulgar”. This plebeian Monteith was a fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford.
While the preferred candidates for new jobs tended to be either old pals or the sons of the incumbent, it is clear that without fresh blood the firm would have succumbed to stultifying insularity. One of Monteith’s first contributions, when he was finally given a chance, was to realise the quality of a manuscript he plucked by chance from the reject pile. Ignoring the notes of the reader (“absurd and uninteresting… rubbish and dull”), Monteith saw the potential in what became William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
Still, for every success, there were missed opportunities, most striking of which was the decision of the editorial board to reject George Orwell’s Animal Farm in 1944 for fear of upsetting Britain’s Soviet allies. As Toby Faber points out, this also meant that Faber & Faber missed out on publishing Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Despite these mistakes, the Faber editors always placed more emphasis on “reputation-makers” than on “bestsellers”, and they were remarkably successful in bringing out books that have lasted the course. In many ways, this should be a heartening story: how an independent family publisher with high literary standards survived and thrived by catering to a readership that wanted something more than disposable fiction. For someone who loves literature, it is a consoling thought. The truth, though, is that Faber & Faber got lucky.
At Geoffrey Faber’s memorial service in 1961, Eliot saluted his friend for his willingness to publish books that he knew would fail in the marketplace. “If they were good enough,” Eliot said, “they were worth losing money on.” The reason this was possible was that other parts of the business made money. In its early days, Faber was propped up by the income generated by the Nursing Mirror, which was eventually sold to rescue the firm. Even when Faber rejuvenated itself in the Eighties by publishing Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi and Milan Kundera, among others, it was only possible because of the royalty income from the musical Cats, for which Eliot had written the lyrics. If these letters reveal an untold story about Faber & Faber it is that, as a literary publisher, it has succeeded in spite of itself.
Faber & Faber: The Untold Story by Toby Faber is published at £20. To order your copy for £16.99 (20% off) call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop