Let's see why. By the time Anthony Powell managed to get his fifth pre-war novel published - the first not to be published by Duckworth, the firm he had slaved away for since leaving Oxford - it was about nothing less than working for Duckworth's.
Let that be said up front. As you can see from their portraits they looked similar. Right: Portrait of Thomas Balston by Mark Gertler, On the left, the staid, conservative owner; on the right, the younger guy hired to inject some modernity and oomph into the list. As Powell states in his novel: 'Hugh saw to it that Judkins and Judkins became a flourishing concern again.
It was through Tony that Evelyn Waugh was commissioned to write a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Duckworth's were lined up to publish Decline and Fall , Waugh's brilliantly original first novel. But something went wrong, and Duckworth went on publishing Waugh's non-fiction, while his more stylish, original and far more lucrative novels, from Decline and Fall , through Vile Bodies, Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust , went to another firm.
What went wrong? Or, put it another way. For peanuts. Duckworth's was haunted by its financial difficulties, its deep deep, deep red bottom line. Even in , on the home page of its website, Duckworth has Evelyn Waugh in its list of top five published authors Woolf, Lawrence, Belloc, Bainbridge and Waugh since its birth in Which is a joke, as we'll see.
Though in the end it is heroic, or not far off. An attack on Theosophy. A book of Welsh proverbs with lino-cuts. About Tibet. But Tibet may have been scheduled at some stage.
