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The editor has the final say
By David Sexton Last updated at 00:00am on 14.08.00 
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STET: " a word or a mark indicating that certain deleted typeset or written matter is to be retained ... L,lit.: let it stand." Stet, then, is a marvellous title for a memoir - and Diana Athill's account of her life as a publisher and the writers with whom she worked fully lives up to it.
Diana Athill is the mistress of a cool, seemingly careless style. "All this book is, is the story of one old ex-editor who imagines that she will feel a little less dead if a few people read it," she says, which is about as throwaway an offering as it is possible to make. This casual manner seems to suggest that, since none of these events has much currency any more, she might as well tell the truth about them as simply and directly as she can. But she's a good deal less artless than she pretends. Stet - like her previous memoir about a failed writer who committed suicide, After a Funeral (reissued in paperback by Granta at £6.99) - is a fine construction, not a naive blurt. The d?sinvolture is wholly deliberate.
Diana Athill met Andr? Deutsch during the war, when they were both 26. They had a brief affair, spending "a dozen or so nights" together, which she claims hardly to remember now. "I felt that I could have enjoyed making love with him if he had been more enthusiastic about making love with me ..." But they ended it as friends. When in 1945 Deutsch began his first publishing house, Athill soon joined him and they worked together until Deutsch sold his firm to Tom Rosenthal in 1984. Athill lasted only two years under the new regime and she found retirement a happiness.
Over the years, Deutsch published, and Athill edited, many good writers, from Norman Mailer to George Mikes, John Updike to Geoffrey Hill, Gitta Sereny to VS Naipaul. One author she did not edit, she reveals, was Myra Hindley, after meeting her. "I did not think that this woman, if she compelled herself fully to acknowledge what she had done, would be able to grant herself pardon." There is considerable steel behind all her judgments. In the second half of the book, Athill describes, with a strange combination of amiability and mercilessness, the main writers with whom she worked. Somehow the women, Jean Rhys and Molly Keane, fare best.
Athill fell out with the novelist Brian Moore after he had left his first wife Jackie, for his second, Jean. Moore then removed his books from Deutsch, writing Athill an offensive letter, "in what appeared to be a fever of self-righteous spite against the woman he had dumped". She felt she had lost him twice over, "first as my friend (and that was very painful), then as himself. That letter could not have been written by the man I had thought Brian to be," she rules. Even more remarkably, she says that in old age, much of one's past seems "explicable and even commonplace ... Perhaps I should be grateful to Brian for having done something which still gives me a jab of genuine dismay." After a Funeral is also a pitiless account of a man's undoing, one remembers with unease.
Another author given this deadly treatment is VS Naipaul. Naipaul suffered considerable depression about the reception of his books. "They impress, but they do not charm," says Athill, for all the world as though it were a bland comment. She found him hard going in person too: "The truth is that, as the years went by, during these post-publication glooms, I had increasingly to force myself into feeling genuinely sorry for him, in order to endure him." It's an astoundingly hard remark on both parties.
In her Postscript, Athill says that publishing has changed - "reading is going the same way as eating, the greatest demand being for the quick and easy" - but she's not too distressed about it. The "common desire" has always been there. It's just that until recently the trade had remained under the grip of her own upper-middle-class caste - to which she assigns both Angela Thirkell and Virgina Woolf, by the way - and the desire had not been well catered for. As it is, there remains enough of the yeast of intelligence about "to leaven the mass just enough to keep us going". She is herself, as she well understands, a spark of that intelligence, and Stet is proof of it.
