Without the Author Knowing

Today I want to examine briefly three books we’ve published which are very different but share one very important feature: they were by authors who were dead and had never been published in that particular way before. I will also consider the particular problems and emotions that come with this kind of publishing. We have published many more books by authors who are now dead, but their books were published during their lives – often in a prolific manner – and in our case all such books were first-time translations into English.

The first book is Three Kinds of Kissing, whose tragedy is raw because the author died just three years ago. Helen Lamb knew that she was dying of cancer and was working on the manuscript right up until the end – heroic dedication to her art and she did an excellent job. The book is beautifully crafted and a highly satisfying read.

Publishing such a book feels like a great responsibility, but there is the joy of fulfilling a strong desire felt by someone who has left this world.

The fact that they are not here to know of this event adds a countervailing dose of melancholy. If works of art are our intellectual children, then every time someone reads this book a part of her is revived.

The plotting, the psychological insight, the humour and the narrative techniques are the reasons why I rate this book so highly, but I am also in awe of the convincing way she portrays early adolescence, which I think must be one of the most difficult things in fiction. I asked our brilliant cover designer Mark Mechan to go the extra mile – and that usually means a wrap-around cover. These are particularly hard to do as they involve not only five images that have to work on their own (two flaps, the front cover, the back cover and the spine), but also all five images together as a single image. In her lifetime, Lamb published her own collection of short stories, Superior Bedsits, and a collection of her poetry and Magi Gibson’s, Strange Fish.

The next posthumous work, Against Miserabilism, was equally tragic – perhaps more so because David Widgery died aged forty-five as against Lamb’s sixty-one years – though his death is more distant in 1992. In my introductory lines, I had to tie myself in knots because this book is not entirely new: it is a collection of writings for a variety of publications, some of which had been brought together in previous collections. The innovation was that this edition was selected by its editors and divided up into subject matters introduced by leading figures of the left who wanted to keep Widgery’s name alive on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. It should also be pointed out that Widgery published six books during his life.

He was in fact a hyperactive doctor, political activist and writer. Though for some time I lived in London in not entirely separate circles, I never met him, but I did hear of him and he had a reputation for a certain charisma. This was before my sister rang me from Bradford and told me that she had passed a wonderful evening drinking and chatting with one David Widgery. She was a hard-drinking, feminist, lesbian and Marxist painter who had been very active in setting up Women’s Refuges in the early seventies – and not without a degree of charisma herself. It does not surprise me, particularly now I’ve read this book, that they hit it off so well. She told me an indestructible falsehood – namely that he was the nephew of Lord Widgery who was famous for being the judge who oversaw the first whitewash on Bloody Sunday. I now know from having met his widow and editor that there is not a word of truth in this story, as he came from a working-class family in London’s East End, and this myth irritated him a great deal. I think that rumours can be as hard as diamonds if they align with a narrative that people want to believe in, and I have no doubt that many on the left got some pleasure from the idea that a rebellious close relation was upsetting the otherwise privileged tranquillity of the noble Whitewasher-in-Chief.

I’m sure that Widgery’s potent and refreshingly undogmatic ideas will once again gain traction in the world we’re going into; my sadness is that we have unlearnt so much that we have to start almost from scratch.

Finally, Essays on Life by Thomas Mitchell, Farmer, which was written just before the First World War, has no tragedy attached to it at all. In fact publishing this book was a process of unalloyed joy for several reasons. When you translate, publish or write a book, it is good to feel that you see things slightly differently afterwards.

And this book taught me things not so much because of the author’s arguments themselves, but because I had to research his sources and they were ones I’d never heard of.

For instance, I had never heard of James Abram Garfield who was an abolitionist, as are all the Americans he cites. Garfield belonged to the left of the Republican Party which understood that the abolition of slavery would change nothing unless the plantation land was divided up amongst the freed slaves. How right they were. He was elected President of the United States, but unsurprisingly he was assassinated a few months into his presidency. This little bit of information made it easier for me to understand Lincoln, the extraordinary and historically credible film (complete with American accents of the time) which dealt with this problem. Lincoln had to convince his left wing and, on the basis of that old but not always fallacious argument over the importance of unity, he won them over. Hindsight has proven that they were right and he was wrong, as recent events have underscored.

This slim volume is a glance into a forgotten world and it could not have been written following the war that exploded just a few months after the last essay was written. It is quite possible that it was the war which brought his writing to an end. The pre-war world was not a good one: the rot and destruction caused by colonialism was causing irreparable damage to humanity and the planet just as neo-colonialism does today (this is apparent in such novels as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Stevenson’s South Sea Tales and Tolstoy’s Resurrection, to name a few), but in a corner of Aberdeenshire and many other rural parts of Europe (though not all – not even the nearby West Highlands) it was possible to believe that there was a degree of equilibrium in the world – even a modicum of progress. Mitchell, who lived to eighty and died in 1950, left no trace of how his ideas evolved but it is clear that he was a profoundly decent man with an active mind. In the introduction I assess his work more fully than I can do here.

Jamie Bing said that publishers should never expect gratitude from the authors they publish, but if they do then they should be very grateful. I think that this sums up the relationship very well. And I too am very grateful to the few who are grateful, but of one thing I’m sure: if Mitchell had lived to the age of one hundred and forty-four to see his book published, he would have been very grateful, but in an appropriately measured manner. I doubt that he would have danced around the room or clapped me on my back. And still less would he have been subservient. I would encourage anyone to read this book which is both individual and typical of something very specific to our Scottish past.

The lack of the author does always have its own problems. Today when publishing is no longer the source of wealth and influence it once was, authors are expected to self-publicise to some extent. The publisher arranges a few events, but beyond that authors have to do a bit of work themselves. Poets are particularly proactive because bookshop sales are rarely going to be significant. They have their own networks, and are more collegiate than your average novelist. Launching a book without the authorial presence is a little like being at a birthday party without the person whose birthday it is. There is a sadness to it. In the case of Essays on Life, no launch was possible but it has been much more successful than I had imagined and in spite of getting no funding, it definitely paid its way and, having just read a few pages of this, our first posthumous work (2014), I put it alongside the other two as something I am very pleased to have published.

Allan Cameron, Glasgow, July 2020