Livia Gollancz 1920-2018.
A personal memoire
Gwen Moffat 1924 -
She was
one of the first women to head a publishing house. She established a crime list
that included le Carré,
Sjowall and Wahloo and many members of the CWA. Those not pushing up the
daisies will remember her, some fondly, but the odd dissenter no doubt
harbouring lingering vestiges of righteous fury.
On
reading the lengthy obituaries last month people who didn’t know her suggest
that she must have been difficult to get on with. In fact she could be hell. But
fifty years ago life was different: courteous, harsh, highly emotional, old-fashioned
pockets of the literary world harking back to the twenties. Livia herself was a
splendid Luddite, cleaving to her manual typewriter when her staff had changed
to electric machines, but then this was in the days when even a steam telephone
was still a tool struggling novelists could do without until the royalties reached
a point where they paid the bill.
The
offices of Gollancz were in a tall Dickensian house near Covent Garden. Preliminary
discussions would be held here, in the glorious clutter of Livia’s personal
space; in-depth problems would be sorted at her Chiltern cottage. I never saw
the hills: a country weekend was for work not fun.
She represented
not one, but two milestones in my life. I had written a book on conservation –
too prescient for the sixties, my current publisher turned it down. Livia took
it and asked for a crime novel. I didn’t do fiction. Then she met me at a
climbing club dinner and, probably drunk, she wore me down. I wasn’t easy prey
but Livia was a persuasive predator. And she had seen that our common bond:
mountains, were the perfect theatre for murder. So I wrote it and before she accepted
it I was hooked and halfway through the next.
She
edited all my books with Gollancz, mostly crime novels with a notable
exception. I was to run into a bad patch in too short a time, culminating in
the death of my climbing partner. Halfway through a novel I stalled. So Livia
sent me along the California Trail to write a book about nineteenth century
pioneers opening up the American West. It was an inspired commission. It saved
my sanity, it produced a happy tribute to a legion of indomitable women, it was
a milestone.
She
designed the covers of my books, occasionally departing from the plain yellow,
black and magenta of the crime list. In the case of non-fiction there could be
ructions for no one can be so bloody-minded as an author about the cover of a road
book – no one except Livia. We could fight like cats, each convinced she was
right, neither conceding. No one won, we both lost. I would walk out, come
back, give her more crime. I would get better terms elsewhere, might be wined
and dined, flattered and cossetted but there wouldn’t be the bond, the crazy
volatile relationship such as I had with that infuriating loveable old autocrat
who changed my direction twice over.
Gwen Moffat
