Ghosting
Jennie Erdal Canongate, 273pp, £14.99
ISBN 1841955620
It was a Faustian deal. For more than a decade, a young Scottish academic wrote everything from acclaimed literary novels to love letters for Naim Attallah, the flamboyant Palestinian-born millionaire who at the time owned the Literary Review and a publishing house, Quartet Books. It began in 1981, when she was 32, a graduate in Russian and philosophy who had just translated the memoirs of Leonid Pasternak, father of Boris. Why, on meeting a potential publisher with a mad hairdo, bejewelled rings, a wild mink overcoat, bad English, a fetish for nude sunbathing and a tigerskin on his office wall, did she not run like hell?
He published her book and, against his posh-totty hiring policy, offered her a job as an editor at Quartet. Clearly bedazzled, she regarded him as her sheikh, her sultan, her bird of paradise and her emperor, finding it glamorous, rather than absurd, to serve a boss whose demands might include "Find me an orchid, darling". She seems also to have been hampered by a good heart. "There was still a lot of class about in those days," she observes drily, nevertheless taking a kind view of the girls in pearls who staffed the office - Davina, Sabrina, Cosima, Nigella and the rest, all with famous fathers and most with not even a tenth of Erdal's talent. If she was jealous, it doesn't show. And it is easy to see, in this eloquent account, what Attallah hired her for. Writing: a crap job, but somebody's got to do it.
Erdal describes her upbringing in a small mining community in Fife, daughter of a strictly Protestant family that was proud of owning the first indoor bathroom in town. However, she stops short of pro-testing that her past life did not equip her to navigate literary Soho. Without an ounce of self-pity, she charts her progress down the primrose path to a ghost-writing career. It was all downhill after her husband walked out on her and their three small children. When their house was about to be repossessed, the emperor seized the day. He gave her the job of writing his book about women.
Women, he announced to the great and good of the book world at his glittering launch party, had "so much mystique. You know, even their sexual organs are on the inside." Nobody muttered: "You don't say." Not an eyebrow was raised. Erdal saw in this "a kind of innocence", rather than a kind of manipulative insanity. He paid her £8,500. Nor does she have any hard words for her ex. Clearly, this woman is too nice for her own good.
By the time he wanted a great novel knocked out, her children were going to university. He installed a dedicated phone line at her house in Scotland, then took her off to his house in the Dordogne to write for a few hours, in between the naked lolling by the pool in which he could not swim. Her new husband had to lobby hard before she broke free, which she finally did when the empire was running out of cash and the emperor was talking about a third book. His farewell gift to her was a Mont Blanc pen. She cried at their parting. She was obviously way back in the queue when God was handing out cynicism.
Erdal's only protest was a passive one, making the novel's erotic content (which Attallah called the "fucky-fucky") so revolting that, she hoped, he would drop those scenes. Rather, he loved them. His own employee Auberon Waugh, who edited the Literary Review, had founded the Bad Sex prize but forbore to award it to the book. Attallah had been nicknamed "Disgusting" by Private Eye. And yet Erdal was not the only gullible one. The reviewers mostly grovelled. Mark Lawson and Germaine Greer were voices crying doubtfully in a wilderness - although it must be said that they were joined by another critic who is now deputy editor of the New Statesman.
Attallah, who is never actually named in Erdal's memoir, was the literary equivalent of Mohamed Al Fayed, a Middle Eastern plutocrat who owned what he mistakenly imagined to be a cornerstone of elite British society, but who did not understand how that society works and what its ethos is. His millions maintained a bond between aristocracy and literature that should have been broken many years earlier, and created the long false twilight of our Brideshead years. Up against the shrieks of the posh totty and chaps in tweeds, many small-town kids with big-time talents failed to get their voices heard, to the ultimate impoverishment of British culture. This writer survived to tell the tale, wittily and well. Perhaps now she will go back to writing her own books.
Celia Brayfield is a novelist and retired ghost-writer
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