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John de Falbe on Harvill Press, Leopard series - Slightly Foxed Issue 13

Riding the Leopard

The more you read, the more you realize you want to read, for each book generates a further reading list. Only occasional readers imagine that reading is a matter of working through a list of classics, like moving a pile of logs. The rest of us know that every ‘classic’ multiplies infinitely into minor classics, frivolities and squibs. You cannot possibly read them all now, but you know you want to read them one day. Some of these you will buy and, although they may remain unread, they contain a promise of future pleasure and their company alone helps sustain an idea of yourself, and of the world.

Looking along my own shelves I find that a high proportion of the books there, both read and unread, were published by Harvill Press. This was the name – based on a combination of their surnames – given to the imprint set up in 1947 by Manya Harari and Marjorie Villiers, who had worked side by side on the Russian Desk in Intelligence during the war. They began with the specific intention of rebuilding cultural bridges lost during the war, especially those between Russia and the West. In 1958, the year Harvill was absorbed by Collins (later to become HarperCollins), they published Doctor Zhivago (translated by Manya) and Lampedusa’s The Leopard.

Christopher MacLehose, who was to become Harvill’s genie, took charge in 1984 and, thanks to a group of private backers, brought the imprint to independence again in 1995, after it had been jettisoned by HarperCollins. But the sums didn’t add up, and in 2005 the list was incorporated into the Random House group and yoked to what had been Secker & Warburg as HarvillSecker. Last year MacLehose left to join a new publishing venture, Quercus.

In 1991, under MacLehose’s aegis, Harvill published the first in the ‘Leopard’ series, the centrepiece of one of the great publishing ventures of our age. Edited by the Russian poet Oleg Chukhontsev – who was ostracized in 1968 for his poe

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The more you read, the more you realize you want to read, for each book generates a further reading list. Only occasional readers imagine that reading is a matter of working through a list of classics, like moving a pile of logs. The rest of us know that every ‘classic’ multiplies infinitely into minor classics, frivolities and squibs. You cannot possibly read them all now, but you know you want to read them one day. Some of these you will buy and, although they may remain unread, they contain a promise of future pleasure and their company alone helps sustain an idea of yourself, and of the world.

Looking along my own shelves I find that a high proportion of the books there, both read and unread, were published by Harvill Press. This was the name – based on a combination of their surnames – given to the imprint set up in 1947 by Manya Harari and Marjorie Villiers, who had worked side by side on the Russian Desk in Intelligence during the war. They began with the specific intention of rebuilding cultural bridges lost during the war, especially those between Russia and the West. In 1958, the year Harvill was absorbed by Collins (later to become HarperCollins), they published Doctor Zhivago (translated by Manya) and Lampedusa’s The Leopard. Christopher MacLehose, who was to become Harvill’s genie, took charge in 1984 and, thanks to a group of private backers, brought the imprint to independence again in 1995, after it had been jettisoned by HarperCollins. But the sums didn’t add up, and in 2005 the list was incorporated into the Random House group and yoked to what had been Secker & Warburg as HarvillSecker. Last year MacLehose left to join a new publishing venture, Quercus. In 1991, under MacLehose’s aegis, Harvill published the first in the ‘Leopard’ series, the centrepiece of one of the great publishing ventures of our age. Edited by the Russian poet Oleg Chukhontsev – who was ostracized in 1968 for his poem about Ivan the Terrible, which suggested that treason is a just repayment for tyranny – Dissonant Voices: The New Russian Fiction is an impressive gathering of contemporary Russian literature in translation. Apart from a statement on the jacket that this is ‘an occasional series presenting the best of contemporary literature in translation and in English’, there is nothing to indicate any broader purpose. It looks more like a statement of intent. Turning the Page: Essays, Memoirs, Fiction, Poetry and One Sermon, the second ‘Leopard’, published in 1993, is edited by MacLehose himself. Its title, taken from Nadine Gordimer’s opening essay, seems to indicate a subtle shift in purpose for the series. In his preface, MacLehose declares that it ‘concerns itself with the political struggle of writers, their lives and work, and with aspects of the work of publishers’. He also points out that the use of the leopard as emblem and title of the series ‘is a tribute to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’. This is interesting for two reasons. First, it makes a deliberate connection with Harvill’s original publication of The Leopard. Second, most people would be surprised by the implication that The Leopard is political. What is its message? And what is the message of this second volume? With contributions ranging from a memoir by Richard Ford to translations of poems by Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam and an essay on typography by John Ryder, the contents are too diverse to sustain any message. The implicit point is the importance of excellence, and that excellence depends on independence. Since independence depends on politics, it may be said that all excellence is innately political by virtue of its independence. So the ‘Leopard’ series is political because it celebrates independence and excellence. It should therefore not entirely surprise us that Lampedusa’s novel, a supreme expression of intellectual independence, had a political reaction. The third ‘Leopard’, Frontiers (1994), ‘is devoted to frontiers, both tangible and abstract’. The agenda is set in a superb essay by the Italian writer Claudio Magris, ‘Who Is on the Other Side: Considerations about Frontiers’, in which he discusses the relationship between borders and identity. Writing at a time, and close to a region (the former Yugoslavia), in which border disputes were producing genocide, he makes clear also that there are good reasons why individuals need borders. ‘The border constitutes a reality, it provides contours and outlines, it constructs the individual character . . . The frontier is form and thus it is also art.’ The volume also contains essays, fiction and travel pieces from a huge range of writers, from Andrew O’Hagan to Sartre; from the Dutch writers Cees Nooteboom and Harry Mulisch, to the Nobel Prizewinning Portuguese writer Jose Saramago. It was 1999 before the next ‘Leopard’ appeared. Bearing Witness ‘embraces the work of outstanding writers from all over the world’. Again, the breadth is remarkable. As with the previous two issues, there is a defining essay at the start. It is a portrait of Leopold Labedz who, between 1956 and 1989, edited Survey, a quarterly on East European and Soviet affairs, publishing evidence of deceptions and violations of human rights and bearing witness to ‘the activity of individuals who called, with immense personal courage, for freedom within a totalitarian state’. The essay’s author is Jenefer Coates, who edited Survey after Labedz and helped establish Index on Censorship. While not overtly political or related to literature, it bears the MacLehose stamp: here is a piece of writing that he believed ought to be given a stage. This volume also includes a new translation by Peter Norman of Pushkin’s ‘The Bronze Horseman’; a photographic essay about Burma by Robert Mort which draws attention to some of those who have suffered under the military junta; an extract from a biographical essay on Keats by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar; an essay on the sea by Jonathan Raban; stories by the great contemporary Spanish writer Javier Marías and the superb but still mysteriously little-known American author James Salter. And much more. It is a marvellously rich brew. The two last ‘Leopards’, An Island of Sound: Hungarian Poetry and Fiction before and beyond the Iron Curtain and The Norwegian Feeling for Real, were published in 2004 and 2005. The final volume was the last book to be published by Harvill before it was taken over by Random House. Like the first ‘Leopard’, these last are more specialized, but they remain true to the seriousness of Harvill’s endeavour – to provide an outlet for foreign literature to the English-speaking world, and to enrich the literature available to us in this country. So powerful and energetic are the connections that Christopher MacLehose has forged through literature during his twenty years at the helm of Harvill that it sometimes seems the point at which all roads connect or intersect. We are hugely indebted to him for our knowledge of the Russian literature of the last hundred years: Mandelstam, Pasternak, Bulgakov, Grossman, Platonov, to name just a few. But he has also been an important conduit for work from the rest of Eastern Europe. Just looking from where I sit, I see books by Andric and Selenic from Serbia; Hrabal and Lustig from the Czech Republic; Kurkov from the Ukraine; Herling, a Pole; Kafka, Perutz, Ginzburg. It comes as a surprise to see that certain books on my shelves were not in fact published by him. And it is not only Eastern Europe. MacLehose also published W. G. Sebald, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Javier Marías, Jose Saramago, Haruki Murakami, Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell, C. K. Stead, Ismail Kadare, Yasar Kemal . . . The roll-call is stupendous. The range of his publishing testifies to the vitality of his curiosity and rare sensitivity to literary currents. But MacLehose is no mere literary impresario, as anybody who has been edited by him will confirm. A page of manuscript one had thought clean is returned covered in marks and loops and arrows. The word ‘lopsided’ was used forty pages back. Does the author intend this repetition? The structure of a sentence has been duplicated and one of the two might be turned round; an adverb may be dispensed with; the logic joining one phrase to another is not clear; the reference to a Nordic God is inaccurate. He does not tell his authors what to do or think: divining their intentions, he nurses them towards fulfilment. And on the back of the page is a scrawl to a traffic warden: ‘In chemist. Back in 2 mins.’ No wonder the man is in the chemist. He never stops. Although being read so critically may at first be unsettling for a writer, in the end it can only be uplifting. It validates their enterprise, and it is inspiring to find that a publisher’s taste and vision are founded on this bedrock of textual attention. And MacLehose’s concern with detail applies not only to the text but also to a book’s layout, printing and jacket. Such rigour is rare now in publishing, though it’s a moot point whether this is because it doesn’t exist or because it isn’t sufficiently valued. Perhaps publishers are afraid of it, because those who possess it expose their brethren as pure marketeers, reeds in the wind. It is very sad that Harvill foundered, but one of its great strengths was that it tried to operate within the mainstream of commercial publishing rather than on the grant-maintained fringes. Its books were not the product of a small press feeding a marginal interest, but of an immensely knowledgeable publisher who believed, unapologetically, that they should and would be read. They were intended to reach their readership under their own merits, without the taint of worthiness. Christopher MacLehose’s achievements as a publisher, exemplified in the ‘Leopard’ anthologies, should be prized as a major contribution to our cultural life. It will be interesting to see what happens now with Quercus.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 13 © John de Falbe 2007


About the contributor

John de Falbe has been selling books at John Sandoe’s in Chelsea for 20 years.

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