Timewell Press £20 pp287
Best remembered for having banished Simon Raven to Deal in Kent, so that he could write his novels far from the fleshpots of London, Anthony Blond flourished at a time when small, insouciant publishers could make their way in the world, and the doings of his fellow-practitioners (Tom Maschler, Tony Godwin, George Weidenfeld, André Deutsch) absorbed the column inches now devoted to exponents of Britart. Publishing in the 1960s and 1970s was still a glamorous business, and Blond himself was one of its more entertaining embodiments.
Many publishers turn out to have private means, and Blond was no exception, being born into a Manchester Jewish family whose wealth was based on making underclothes for Marks & Spencer. After Eton, he went on to New College, Oxford, chosen on account of Eric Gill’s memorial plaque to three German graduates killed in the first world war. Although he numbered among his youthful friends Jimmy Goldsmith, John Aspinall and the sports-car-loving Alan Clark (who sounds as boorish and odious as expected), Blond has an engagingly romantic and idealistic streak, modestly combining with raffishness and worldly delights.
After a brief sampling of the family business, he set up as a literary agent, with Isabel Colegate as his typist and general dogsbody (he later published her novels). From there, he moved on to become a modishly inclined educational publisher before setting up shop as a general publisher with the portly Desmond Briggs. Now occupied by The Spectator, their offices in Doughty Street looked like one’s vision of a Pompeian brothel. As a publisher, Blond was colourful, courageous and generous with his authors. Burgo Partridge’s History of Orgies got him off to a flying start; his bestsellers included The Carpetbaggers, The Exorcist and Spike Milligan’s Puckoon. He also thought up the title for E F Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, although Briggs disputed this.
Like many independent publishers, Blond spent a good deal of time being bought up and starting anew. His private life, in the meantime, was far from dull. Blond is bisexual (“Who am I,” he wonders, “to ban half the world from my bed?”), and wives and boyfriends seem to have happily coexisted. His first wife was a Strachey: her father couldn’t decide whether to be “a rotter or a cad”, and was in prison for drunken driving when the wedding took place. Nowadays Blond lives rather more harmoniously, with his second wife, Laura Hesketh, in southern France.
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At some stage, Blond goes to a party in New York attended by Greta Garbo, T S Eliot and Eleanor Roosevelt, and finds himself “appalled and dazed by the banality of famous people”. Readers of his book may share such feelings. Blond is a witty and elegant writer, but although his stories are of the kind that might set the table at a roar during a bibulous dinner, they don’t survive transition to the page. However, he is a likeable and lively companion and earns undying gratitude for retailing Isaiah Berlin’s riposte when told that Lord Franks, the don and diplomat, was “all right when you crack the ice”: “What is the point if there is only cold water underneath?”.
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