"Damn them!" Horace Muir slammed down the telephone receiver. How dare they! How bloody dare they! That was just typical of that bunch of old women in Walton Street! Dr. Muir had just had some distinctly unpalatable news. Six months after commissioning him to produce an illustrated history of English literature the Oxford University Press had decided that they were not going ahead with the book. Muir had realised that matters had moved very slowly over the past couple of months and now he had received a phone call from Michael Morning, the managing editor of OUP, which confirmed his worst suspicions. Muir was absolutely furious. He did some calculations: it was 20 November - that meant that he had wasted more than nine months of his life working on a project that had now come to nothing. At first he had been promised the earth: potential UK sales of 10,000 a year, the possibility of sales in the lucrative US market... And now the editor who had shown such interest in the manuscript, the man he had been working with all along, had been shifted to another department and a woman editor - not even a woman, a girl - had taken over, declared that she did not like his manuscript and sunk the whole thing. They were offering financial compensation for the work Muir had already done, and suggested he offered the manuscript to another publisher. What kind of an insult was that! Muir felt this was typical of the way the Establishment treated him. At first they had thwarted him because of his political persuasions, then because of his sexual tendencies; but now that those things did not matter any more they still refused to give him his due. And OUP was, after all, an arm of the Establishment; they were all part of the same conspiracy. He had, in his time, suffered bitterly at the hands of the 'ruling clique'. Muir's most pressing problem was how to survive lunch that day with other members of the teaching staff at Magdalen. Someone was bound to ask how the book was coming along. They all showed such an interest in the progress of the manuscript; actually Muir suspected quite a few of them were jealous. And if this news got out the joke would be well and truly on him. He needed a stiff drink: there was nothing else for it... |
While Mockler advertised in The Spectator for similarly aggrieved authors to contact him, Hill's revenge took the form of guying OUP in his novel The Cuban Connection, which Robert Hale published last year. Hill, who wrote the novel under the pen name of Peter Pembroke, had an O-level English Language textbook killed by OUP after a change of editor there.
In The Cuban Connection, a don called Horace Muir curses "that bunch of old women in Walton Street" after a call from a Michael Morning at OUP cancelling a history of EngLit. There is a Michael Morrow at OUP and he is head of a department which includes books on English.
Let us hope that the verisimilitude does not go too far. Before Muir can fashion his revenge, he is bumped off, although not, I should hasten to add, by OUP. I know things are bad in the publishing business these days, but that would be taking things a little too far. Mind you, give it another year or so...