A Bite of the Apple Read online

  A Bite of the Apple

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

  © Lennie Goodings 2020

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  First Edition published in 2020

  Impression: 1

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  Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019948626

  ISBN 978–0–19–882875–4

  ebook ISBN 978–0–19–256390–3

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

  Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

  To John, Amy, and Zak,

  and to all Virago women and men

  Contents

  Preface

  part one

  A New Kind of Being

  1. First Bites: The Early Years

  2. Setting the World on Fire

  3. The Acceptable Face of Feminism? Why Not!

  Part Two

  The Books

  4. The Virago Modern Classics

  5. ‘Fuck the Patriarchy!’: Non-fiction

  6. What Stories Can Do: Fiction

  Part Three

  The Politics: Office and Otherwise

  7. The Dramas

  8. Disrupting the Old Stories

  9. Beyond Borders

  10. Up, Down, and Up Again

  Part Four

  The Power to Publish is a Wonderful Thing

  11. The Intimacy of Editing

  12. Does Any Other Successful Publisher Get Asked Constantly If They Are Still Necessary?

  13. Why Can’t a Man Read Like a Woman?

  14. Giving and Taking Courage

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  Soho, London, early evening, late 1970s, and the sounds of Friday-night revelries rise up to our window on the fourth floor in Wardour Street where I’m still working my way through piles of paperwork in the Virago office. I am not alone. We do everything ourselves in this company—including the dusting and vacuuming of our one largish room and small kitchen/bathroom—and it is Carmen Callil’s turn to clean. If it’s your week you can come in on Saturday or stay late after work on Friday. Carmen is vigorously polishing one of our three telephones. I am just twenty-five, Canadian, new to Britain, and in awe of this formidable woman, but as there are only two of us in the office I feel emboldened to ask: ‘Why did you start Virago?’ She looks up and, without missing a beat, replies, ‘To change the world, darling. That’s why.’

  I know I am in the right place.

  I am a fervent believer that books can affect, even change, lives. It was a memoir about bookselling that partly drew me to Britain to begin with. 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff—funny, sharp correspondence between a girl from the new world and older gentlemen in a London bookshop—had been one of my favourites as a young woman. (Satisfyingly, now a Virago Modern Classic.) Before I arrived in London in 1977, I felt I already knew the redoubtable Foyles and the famous street of second-hand bookshops which threaded its way from Oxford Street to Trafalgar Square. I longed for a relationship with London and its booksellers and publishers.

  Clutching a temporary working visa, shrugging off the new-to-me idea that I was a slightly inferior character from the colonies who, as the immigration paperwork had it, ‘understandably wants to visit the mother country’, I packed my bags. I was not long out of university, had travelled to the west coast of Canada, where I had worked in a bookshop, and back to my home near Niagara Falls. Now, at last, I would go to London. I bought a round-trip air ticket and told myself and my family that I would stay for one year to try anything and everything and then head home, probably to Toronto, to get a proper job.

  Over four decades later, still in London, married to an extraordinary man who has lived the Virago story with me, and now with two grown children, I write this book about Virago, the feminist press.

  A Bite of the Apple is part memoir, part history of Virago, and part thoughts on more than forty years of feminist publishing. I consider myself so very lucky and privileged to be part of Virago. I have tried to be straight and not shy from awkward and painful times, as well as to tell of the truly great ones. At times the conflicting demands of the press have nearly capsized our ship but, to stretch that metaphor just a bit further, the Viragos—by whom I mean authors, founders, staff, and our readers—were always going to rock the boat. We always meant to disrupt, to make a difference.

  This is not an aggrandizing hagiography, though I remain deeply indebted to and impressed by the authors and staff who have made Virago what it is. There are some pretty fabulous women who deserve to have their praises sung.

  What I love about publishing is that no matter how sophisticated, how technological, how digital our industry becomes, one fact remains: publishing still comes down to one person telling another, you must read this book. Publishing is driven by that passion, conviction, and excitement.

  You also need courage to publish and, certainly, to write. To write this book means taking risks, which makes me feel a deep empathy with my authors. I am highly aware of laying claim to a story that so many have witnessed and participated in. Even as I try to be honest and represent myself and others, I am, of course, editing, deleting, and leading readers to believe that what I saw, what I thought, and what I think is the truth. That both humbles and scares me.

  One of my favourite kinds of book is one that doesn’t quite fit neatly into categories and it turns out that’s what I have written too. I have followed the chronology of the press and try to represent the enormous breadth of the Virago titles published over these years, set against the background of the march of feminism, but I also segue into thoughts on editing, on post-feminism, on reading, on breaking boundaries, and at times I fast-forward or think back. The chronology might lose you at times but that’s okay, even understandable: we’ve had ten different offices and seven different forms of ownership. I have had four different jobs: Publicity Manager/Director, Marketing Director, Publisher, and now Chair. Over these years probably close to one hundred women have worked at Virago and we’ve published nigh on 4,000 titles and just over 1,000 authors. That’s a lot of history. But I am not trying to capture every detail; what I want to portray is how it felt to be there. So it’s a hybrid book.

  I have come to see that the connecting thread of this book is tension. Tension, though uncomfortable at times, is not necessarily bad: it makes creative sparks and even maddening constraints can be productive. Vira
go lives within the tension between idealism and pragmatism; between sisterhood and celebrity; between art and commerce; between independence and being owned; between behaving independently but for over twenty-five years being part of a conglomerate; between watching feminism wax and wane and then become popular again, while at the same time knowing so many of the battles are still to be won; between being modest and yet aware of one’s power; between trying to do good in the world and sometimes failing. Tension does seem to be an integral part of change.

  There is no doubt that I too have my own tensions: I have made foes as well as friends, mistakes as well as good choices, and I have taken unpopular decisions. I also have power—at some times more than at others in this career of mine—and it is not without challenge to try to handle that intelligently and generously. But it’s important that women have power. Women’s former lack of the power to decide what was published is at the very heart of Virago, our raison d’ȇtre.

  I also find, somewhat to my surprise, that on the other side of this daring to record these times and thoughts is the deep pleasure of shaping a story, giving an experience a narrative. I have learned that I love to tell the stories. Marilynne Robinson says, ‘writing takes you inward, seeing what your mind contains’, and I discover that she’s right.

  A Bite of the Apple is my memories of these decades. Virago has been a life-changer for me.

  But certainly not only for me.

  PART One

  A New Kind of Being

  ‘The sense of limitless freedom that I, as a woman, sometimes feel is that of a new kind of being’

  Angela Carter

  Chapter One

  First Bites

  The Early Years

  When I got a part-time position at Virago in 1978, I wouldn’t have had the brazen hope then that I would become the Publisher, but I did know that I had found my home—once, that is, I caught my breath after toiling up the five steep flights to the one-roomed Virago office.

  It was a heady time for feminism at the end of the 1970s, though not in ordinary offices and businesses, and certainly not in the boardrooms. Virago set sail in those winds.

  My first publishing job had been in another tiny office, on Maiden Lane in Covent Garden where three of us—male owner and two women—worked. It was an independent publicity company set up in the wake of the relatively new idea that books could be actively promoted beyond the review pages and, particularly, the stories of authors’ lives and personalities could be told to sell their books. When I first arrived in London I had a floor to sleep on in a Canadian friend’s bedsit in Swiss Cottage for a few weeks before she went back home, and one contact in London: another Canadian, a woman I hadn’t met before, who is the sister of a man I knew at university and was a publicist at William Collins publishers. She showed me an ad she had just prepared, noting, with laughter from us both, that only recently had she been allowed to include the cover price in the advert; before that it had been thought vulgar to mention that books cost money. Publishing was a gentleman’s profession in so many ways. And it was so . . . imperial. I was often asked, slightly sneeringly, or at least with some disbelief, about Canadian culture. Margaret Atwood picked up the same feeling in the 1970s: ‘In England, then, being Canadian was sort of like being cross-eyed, only less interesting; most people would gamely pretend not to notice, or throw you a look of pity and then swiftly escape to talk to someone else.’ Atwood’s rise to fame was a mercy to us Canadians abroad.

  In my job at the publicity company, the boss sat in the front room overlooking the street and I and the other woman pounded electric typewriters in the back room. Or rather, my colleague, Fiona Spencer-Thomas, did; I, having seriously exaggerated my typing skills, tried to do most work on the telephone. My first book tour around Britain was with the Australian Colleen McCullough for her bestselling novel, The Thorn Birds—ironically, now a classic on the Virago list. Soon after, I worked on the paperback of Robert Lacey’s Majesty, his biography of the Queen. My boss believed (correctly) that in order to nab the media’s attention we needed something eye-catching, so for nearly two weeks Robert and I travelled the length and breadth of the UK, to radio and television interviews in a chauffeur-driven Phantom IV Rolls-Royce—just like the Queen’s, apparently—discussing, at my initiative, left-wing politics while sipping whisky from crystal tumblers.

  The boss was only about three years older than Fiona and me but it was not uncommon for him to interrupt us and bellow out from his front room, ‘Coffee please!’ When I once suggested that if he didn’t have a guest and he wanted coffee he might come out and make it for himself and even offer us some, he paled; alarmed, he asked, ‘Are you communist? They always want to share everything.’ When I saw him after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, he rubbed his hands in glee and greeted me with, ‘Ah, the socialist . . .’

  I was a young woman with a head full of literature, waking up to feminism and thrilling to the change in the air. It felt like the time to look for another position.

  22 May 1978

  Dear Ms Callil,

  After ten months with one of the most successful publisher’s publicity companies I am convinced by the power of the media in the task of exposing books to the public and the booksellers . . . your co-operative too uses free media time effectively. Even though your group adopts an alternative approach to publishing, it must sell its goods in the traditional market place; if your message through your books is to reach people other than the converted and already aware sector of the population—sales, advertising, and media must be employed . . . I wish to employ this learning towards a better end.

  It is for this reason that I am writing to you to see if there is any outlet for my energy, interest and experience. Although full-time involvement would be ideal, I am just as interested in working with you on a part-time basis. It is important for me to feel honestly enthusiastic about the books that I am promoting and the environment in which they are produced. These requirements I see reflected in your co-operative and book list . . .

  What I would appreciate is the chance to meet with you and discuss some of the ideas I have about free publicity for your books and the same meeting would give me the welcome chance to learn more about the Virago Co-operative.

  Yours sincerely,

  Lennie Goodings

  This stiff, earnest little letter was answered with one that put me quickly right, but also gave me a small opening at which I jumped.

  9 June 1978

  Dear Ms Goodings,

  I was interested to read your letter, though I think you are under a bit of a misapprehension about our company. We are not a co-operative but a limited company and we operate in a normal business way.

  However, I would be interested in talking to you about your promotional experience, and in fact we do from time to time need freelance help with publicity and promotion. Perhaps we could meet for half an hour within the next month to talk about what you do and what you could possibly do for us?

  Yours sincerely,

  Carmen Callil

  Virago’s small rooms in Wardour Street, on the edge of Soho, were near the then seedy Leicester Square. Number 5, a tall, narrow Victorian building, had a pinball arcade on the ground floor, a ‘gentlemen’s club’ on the first, other closed doors on the third and Virago perched at the very top. A small corridor for storage and a photocopier led into one largish working room facing the street, with a nook that held a fridge and counter space. At the back there was a tiny room with a sink and a loo, and a window out of which we could climb to sit on an asphalted roof and, after making me a sandwich, having learned I hadn’t yet eaten, that’s where Carmen interviewed me. Quick and intense, she discovered that I didn’t know quite as much about publicity as I had claimed, but what I did have was new-world confidence (or naivety). I suspect she, being from Australia, recognized a fellow colonial not bowed by British traditions. She declared I had ‘clout’ and on 1 August 1978 offer
ed me a freelance job: ‘For the sum of £200, you will work on the promotion of Make it Happy [What Sex is all About] by Jane Cousins as follows. First of all, you’ll prepare a promotion outline including Jane Cousins’s proposed tour of the UK; you’ll also work on the possibility of her talking at teachers’ centres and teaching colleges sometime around or after publication.’ I was also to spend two weeks full time, ‘tying up Jane’s tour . . . and if possible, and there’s time available, during those two weeks you’ll also work on Patti Smith’s Babel and anything else that comes to hand’.

  I learned that Virago really was not a collective, nor egalitarian in the way business decisions were taken—certainly not. It was run with a firm, hierarchical grip on finances, schedules, staff, and detail by Carmen Callil, Managing Director, in conjunction with Ursula Owen, Editorial Director, and Harriet Spicer, Production Director, but it did have a most generous attitude towards sharing things like tea- and coffee-making—and cleaning the office. Important, for me, was that its books were real and exciting: about the ideas and the passions that were coming up from the streets, in collective houses, in consciousness-raising groups, in feminist history workshops, in political rallies, Spare Rib, and other feminist magazines and newsletters. Virago books were part of the movement that would utterly alter women’s place in the world.

  Virago was founded in 1973, a dramatic time of political change, with the Western world on the cusp of power shifts: Britain entered the European Economic Community (EEC); the trade unions held the country to account, with strikes and a three-day working week; the Watergate investigation was about to bring down President Nixon and forever challenge the idea of the integrity of political office; the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders); it was three years since the Equal Pay Act of 1970 and just two years away from the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975; and in a tennis match billed as the ‘Battle of the Sexes’, Billie Jean King accepted a challenge from Bobby Riggs. The female sex won.