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 By the time Anthony Powell managed to get his fifth pre-war novel published - the first not to be published by Duckworth, the firm he had slaved away for since leaving Oxford - it was about nothing less than working for Duckworth's. Let that be said up front.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. Though that sounds more like Robert Byron's bag. That other clever young man that Tony had met while up at the University.
