Bles in the Time of Narnia

[steepholm]

I’m back from the first of my Christmas jaunts, which was a flying visit to my mother, although tomorrow I’ll be packing my spotted hanky and going to London, partly to see fjm and chilperic, which I'm very much looking forward to.

Over coffee this morning my mother told me a little about her time working at the publisher Geoffrey Bles from 1949 to 1955, first as a secretary and later as an editor. These notes are a little ill assorted, but I think some of these memories are interesting both as giving an insight into the post-War publishing industry and specifically into C. S. Lewis’s main publisher. (My mother’s tenure there coincided more or less exactly with the publication of the Narnia books.)

Lewis would often appear in the office in a pall of smoke (from his pipe, nothing mephistopholean) to discuss his books – both the Narnia ones and the theological books Bles also published. He and Geoffrey Bles got on very well, and enjoyed chatting in ancient Greek.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was just a working title, at first. Lewis asked for better suggestions, and was persuaded that it was fine as was.

I will add, although my mother didn’t mention it today, that Lewis was eventually poached by the Bodley Head when his editor moved there, taking him with her. This was just before the publication of The Magician’s Nephew, and caused great resentment at the Bles offices (directed at her rather than at him). I may have mooted this private theory before, but I believe that this move lies behind the later re-ordering of the books (posthumously dubbed “The Chronicles of Narnia”) so as to make The Magician’s Nephew first in the series, thereby increasing its sales. I’ve no positive evidence for this theory other than my conviction that it’s the sort of thing a publisher might think of, but I feel obliged to promulgate it both because I hate that re-ordering, and by the noble tradition of blood feud.

In those smoggy, pre-Clean Air Act days every room had an open fire, which meant that in winter seven fires burned continually in the Bles offices. The job of maintaining them belonged to Mr Bowesfield, a cross-looking man, who would often bring his “quite large” son Victor to work. Victor had Down’s Syndrome, and would sit cross legged in the window all day, apparently quite content, as publishers and authors milled about him. Once a year Mr and Mrs Bowesfield, who were members of the Dickens society, would dress up as a Dickensian couple and set off in a carriage from Dickens’ house in Doughty Street, which was just two doors down the road. It was quite a sight.

My mother’s immediate boss was Jocelyn Gibb – a man I vaguely remember meeting when she took my brother and me to London one time in about 1969. (He was kind enough to look at some stories we had written - officially I suppose my first professional submission!) When she left to get married, they held an office party, and on running out of booze my mother remembered that she’d seen a case of champagne in Gibb’s office. She suggested they start in on that (Gibb himself being away at the time), and she’d replace it when she got back from honeymoon. Inevitably, when she did get back it turned out to have been the last existing case of some very rare vintage, which Gibb had just bought at enormous expense. She tremblingly confessed, but he laughed until his face was like a wet cloak ill laid up.

Bles was grand, but rather mean with money. They used to have to take the bus to their Christmas lunch: he would ask the conductor for “ten penny ha’pennies”. When he retired, in about 1954, Billy Collins took the firm over. The Collins lunches were far more lavish, with plenty of free booze, to the extent that several of the staff (most of whom were Cockneys of humble origin and not used to getting anything gratis) threw up before they even reached the food. At these meals she would find herself sitting next to Billy Collins, who was a lot of fun, and told her anecdotes about his life (he had an affair with Joy Adamson of Born Free fame – who knew?).

Comments

[sovay]

I’ve no positive evidence for this theory other than my conviction that it’s the sort of thing a publisher might think of, but I feel obliged to promulgate it both because I hate that re-ordering, and by the noble tradition of blood feud.

I have no family stake in the story, but since I yell randomly in bookstores about the reordering (usually triggered by parents buying copies for their children who have run out of J.K. Rowling, which apparently still happens), I'm perfectly willing to accept your theory.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I feel like a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, but it's hard to see how anyone could have made that decision on artistic grounds.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

I do that too. I HATE the reordering. I had to replace a couple of my Narnia books, and had to hunt down a used bookshop that had copies of the old ones.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I confess that in some point in adolescence I rearranged the seven (within the fancy cardboard box I had by then acquired, which helped to save the paperbacks from falling to pieces) in what seemed to me a more logical order. I would then read them in that order, though this required me to postpone the final chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe until I had completed The Horse and His Boy.

I suppose this means I have a rather literal mind.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

this required me to postpone the final chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe until I had completed The Horse and His Boy.

That's hardcore!

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. It's very interesting, but I don't think changing publishers to go along with his editor was the whole story.

First, Lewis did not abandon Bles altogether. They'd published all his apologetic and religious books (the first one of which had come out in 1940), and continued to do so, up to and including Letters to Malcolm which was in press at the time of his death. He also remained personal friends with Jocelyn Gibb.

Second, Lewis already had a standing relationship with the Bodley Head, which had published the Space Trilogy in 1938-45.

Third, I'm not sure who this editor would be. I haven't thoroughly checked through all the correspondence, but the letters I've seen relating to publication matters with Bles are with Bles himself or Gibb, depending on date.

According to Walter Hooper, who is not however a reliable witness, the change was occasioned by Lewis hiring Curtis Brown as a literary agent, and their mercenary ability to squeeze higher royalties out of the Bodley Head than Bles had given. Lewis rationalized this to himself in terms of his gratitude to the Bodley Head for having published the Space Trilogy (the first volume of which had been turned down by his previous publisher), and feeling they ought to share in the bounties that Narnia was bringing in. (Collected Letters, v. 3, p. 563-4)

If this is true, however, it was abrupt, as Lewis didn't hire Curtis Brown unti December 1954, and and he'd submitted The Magician's Nephew to "the publisher" (he didn't say which one) in March (v. 3, p. 442), though there were no delays in publication thereby, as the books were always planned to come out annually. (In fact, Nephew followed its predecessor by only eight months, as Bles had published in the fall while Bodley Head did them in the spring.)

The notion that Nephew was put first so as to increase its sales is amusing (and of course completely denied by the stated reasons, which are hogwash), but I have my doubts about that. First, the changed ordering wasn't promulgated until the last couple of decades, not back when rivalry among original publishers would have been intense.* Second, recent editions have all been from the same publisher. Third, that publisher is HarperCollins, which is the firm that swallowed Bles, not the one that swallowed the Bodley Head, which is Random House.

*I have a 1970 softcover edition of the set which explicitly numbers the books in publication order with Lion first, in contradiction to HarperCollins' current position which claims that was never done. This edition is from Macmillan, yet an entirely different publisher.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Okay, I've been back to my mother with some of these queries. As I mentioned, this isn't one of the things we talked about today, and some of the details were a bit hazy. I made two mistakes in particular.

By her account, the villain of the piece was Geoffrey Bles's secretary, Molly Waters (not an editor - my first mistake - but I guess she'd have seen all the correspondence you mention). When Bles retired, she left too - but rather than go to work for Bodley Head herself (that was my second mistake), she landed herself a job with a literary agency, on the strength of being able to bring Lewis with her. (My mother mentioned A. P. Watt, but from what you say above I'm guessing it was actually Curtis Brown. They're both big agencies, of course.) It was as his agent that she placed him with The Bodley Head.

How well does that tally with the information you have? When exactly did Bles retire, for example? (It was almost six decades ago, but my mother's memory is pretty good.)

When Bles was swallowed up it was as you say by Collins (which later merged with Harper & Row to form HarperCollins). The terms on which they got the rights to The Magician's Nephew and The Last Battle from The Bodley Head would be interesting to read. I'm reluctant to give up my conspiracy theory, and am now imagining a deal whereby Bodley let Collins publish "their" books on condition that they numbered The Magician's Nephew number one, and continued to pay them a percentage on sales. I've no idea whether Molly Waters would still have been around to oversee this butchery, but I'd love to know the exact terms on which publishing rights were ceded to Collins.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I'm drawing a blank on the name of Molly Waters in any of my biographical sources on Lewis. No letters from Lewis to Curtis Brown survive, though it's clear that he himself did much of the agency's business involving Lewis. But this would have been a small firm at the time, as were the publishers, and the head's personal involvement with the author's business was ordinary. (Tolkien had the same kind of relationship with Allen & Unwin.)

But the story you tell seems possible in this form. Bles retired in the spring of 1954 (Gibb wrote Lewis to introduce himself as the new manager, and to explain about Collins having bought control, on 14 April), and Hooper says that it was in response to Bles's retirement that Lewis sought out Curtis Brown as an agent. Ironically, if his doing so was prompted by a desire for a more commercially savvy publisher, Hooper also says that Bles under Collins' direction enjoyed major improvements in that department.

Hooper also says that Gibb, despite his continuing friendship and work with Lewis, remained puzzled and hurt by having the final Narnia books taken away. Lewis wrote an astonishing explanatory letter to Gibb on 20 Feb 1955, saying that "I was told by all my literary friends that I could probably do better" and adding that in the old days, employers were happy when their servants secured a better position. That shows a serious misunderstanding of the relationship between publisher and author in Lewis's time, but naivite in such matters was typical of Lewis.

I haven't been able to get a definitive date as to when HarperCollins began publishing Narnia. Library sources say 1983; Hooper's bibliography says 1992-4. It's possible that the library editions are backdated; this sometimes happens due to catalogers' differing interpretations of what to take as the publication date. If it is 1992-4, that is about the time that the series was renumbered to put Nephew first, so that would fit your theory.

The reason my 1970 paperbacks are from Macmillan is that they were the original U.S. publishers of all seven books; clearly they had no external compulsion about which came first.

The stated reason for putting Nephew first is that internal chronological order was Lewis's preference. Supposedly he told Walter Hooper this in 1963, but, like many things he supposedly told Walter Hooper in 1963, Hooper kept it private for many years. There's also a letter to a child reader in 1957 stating the same preference, but the letter is actually much more ambiguous than the reordering proponents claim. On top of which I know another then-child reader who says that Lewis wrote him saying the opposite, but unfortunately he didn't keep the letter. And lastly, of course, whether Lewis remembered this in 1957 or 1963 or not, he wrote the books with the clear assumption that they would be read Lion first, and unless they're rewritten to change this (and they have not been, even to this day), that trumps any later changes of mind by the author. Hooper and the publishers are virtually alone in their preference; for the Lewis Centenary Conference in 1998, scholar Peter Schakel, one of the most vehement opponents of the reordering, wanted to organize a debate, but he couldn't find any scholars to take the other side.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thank you - that's very helpful indeed!

As far as my theory goes, then, the key seems to be getting the date of the re-ordering and its relationship to the date at which HarperCollins (or possibly Collins, if it was pre-merger) started published all seven books. I shall hit the online second-hand shops and see what comes up.

I've googled for Molly Waters in vain, but under the spelling Mollie Waters (my mother was on the phone and didn't spell it out), a person of that name does indeed appear as an agent at Curtis Brown in the 1960s, writing to Robert Creeley, Brian Friel and others. It's entirely possible, of course, that she used Lewis as her "in" to the job and then had nothing more to do with him, in which case I would have reluctantly to give up my wish to make her the Evil Genius who directly inspired the re-ordering, but I'm still looking very suspiciously in the direction of The Bodley Head.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I've had a look on Abebooks, and they list editions of The Magician's Nephew published by Collins as early as 1980, which rather blows my theory out of the water, if the renumbering only happened in the '90s. (Are we sure about that?) Oh well. Is that when they also got the title 'The Chronicles of Narnia', do you know?

One useful lesson to be drawn from all this at least is that documentary correspondence doesn't always tell the whole story. If Mollie Waters was indeed the eminence grise behind Lewis's move (and I can' see why my mother would be wrong about that), the persuasion would presumably all have been done face to face - leaving his motives opaque to those who have to rely on letters alone. From what you say, Gibb didn't understand it either, but perhaps my mother's view from a little lower down the food chain was clearer.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

This is an important enough discussion that I'm turning to my other browser, the one I use to access f'd-up web sites.

I wanted to say that I've found an article specifically on the publication history of the Chronicles in Hooper's C.S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide. (And, incidentally, the title "The Chronicles of Narnia" is on my 1970 paperbacks, so it does predate the repackaging. I'm pretty sure Lewis expressed that form as a preference, though I don't remember where.)

It turns out that the Collins paperbacks were issued in 1980, and were the first time that a U.K. edition of the whole set was issued by either of the original publishers. (There had been a Puffin pb of all seven in the 60s, and the U.S. publisher of all seven was always Macmillan until HarperCollins took over in 1994, but Hooper implies clearly that he and the estate had no control over Macmillan's use of them.) A Collins hardcover followed in 1989.

Hooper also says that those Collins paperbacks were the first time the series was numbered Nephew-first, and he doesn't say why it was then and not earlier, if he'd known since 1963 that (as he claims) Lewis preferred this. This not only fits your theory that the renumbering was a contract provision that Bodley Head insisted on, it supports it with bells on. The renumbering must not have crossed the Atlantic until the U.S. publisher changed in 1994, and it was only then that it became a major issue in Lewis scholarship over here, so American provincialism is to blame for our not having noticed that it had been around for a while.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Aha - that is very interesting. And I retract my retraction, at least for the moment. Thanks for this extra information!

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Speaking of Hooper, I ran across an account by Douglas Gresham in the old Merelewis newsletter supporting Hooper's use of the term 'bonfire'. The Kilns had no proper trash pickup service, so they kept a trash fire going almost constantly, which the household called 'the Bonfire of the Vanities'.