Success on a short fuse, for ‘Carmen ain’t no fool’

Press, 16 March 1982, Page 14

Success on a short fuse, for ‘Carmen ain’t no fool’

The odd shiver of apprehension passed up some male publishers’ spines recently with the news .that Carmen Callil is to become ■ joint managing director of Chatto and Windus.

For Miss Callil, whose appointment is part of a takeover of her feminist firm Virago, is reputed to have a fuse as short as Virago’s list of male authors. Last autumn, Patricia Miller, a columnist with Publishing News, rang Callil to confirm reports of a merger with Chatto. Miss Callil abused her roundly and slammed the phone down. Later, at a party at Jonathan Cape, she cut Ms Miller dead.

Even Women In Publishing — a group which aims to eradicate prejudice against women in the trade, and which, of course, regards Callil with some awe — has not escaped her imperious way.

She refused to address a meeting of the group recently if there were other speakers on the platform. She demanded — and got — a solo performance.

In the decade since she started Virago with her two talented (though quieter) partners, Ursula Owen and Harriet Spicer, such stories have become an essential part of the Callil legend, placing her firmly among the rather bootfaced ladies in the movement who write long, humourless articles about the importance of Virago to their cause. It comes as a surprise, therefore, to discover that Callil is a very witty lady, brisk in manner but with a grin that takes the edge off her talent for well-observed malice. Reginald Davis Poynter, who worked with her in her early days in Granada’s publicity department, says: “Carmen can be very explosive, which she often regrets afterwards. But there’s no real hardness about her that you get with a lot of the women in ■■ publishing. She’s

actually very warm and kind.” On a professional level, her commitment to good writing and consideration towards her authors transcends all -isms, including feminism. Many of her male colleagues in the . business, who believe Women in Publishing has become a refuge for inadequate talent, do not regard her as a feminist at all. “Carmen . ain’t no fool,” said ,one of them. “Aftter she’d done publicity work on Geramaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, she realised there was lot tp .be made in the feminist book market, and was shrewd enough to be one of the first people to spot it. “There’s a fair amount of cynicism under that tough, abrasive sister. .

“If you look at Virago’s book list carefully, you’ll find it’s not really a tough feminist list at all. It’s mainly good writing from women who’ve been out of print for a decade or so.” Callil’s one regret is that although 35 per cent of Virago’s output is original work, she has not been able to produce much in the way of good new feminist novels. One reason could be that successful women writers enjoy fat-cat contracts with bigger publishing houses, and Virago simply cannot afford to compete. Another, more cynical, view is that after Greer and Kate Miller, there is nothing much, new to say about women’s liberation. Even so, Virago has been by general consensus, a suc-

Carmen Callil, founder of the British feminist publishing firm, Virago, is being promoted. PETER DUNN meets the legendary lady.

cess — although its offices, a small footnote of rooms in the huge marbled premises of -the Oxford University Press in London, testify to the shoe-string nature of the operation. There are few executive trappings. If Callil wants to summon a colleague to her tiny room, she raises her voice and bawls the name through the thin walls. Friends believe that her success with Virago has enabled her to come to terms once and for all with an adolescence which ■ was dominated and, for some years, shattered by the influence of Australian nuns. She was born in Melbourne in 1938, the third of four children. Her mother’s family was Irish; her father, bibliophile, barrister, and

lecturer, was descended from Lebanese Catholic immigrants, and died when she was eight.

asserted without beligerence. “I don't see it as something — that cuts you off from the rest of the world,” she says. “People who believe that are really saying that it takes losers to take up causes. I’m not, if I can help it, a loser.

Of the nuns at her convent school, she says today: “There’s nothing more dangerous than people who think that everything they believe in is right. It’s not being Catholic that’s wrong, but the ignorance they attached to it.”

“Once its philosophies had been made clear to me in the writings that sprang up in the seventies, it explained my life and the life of my menfriends in a way that I find totally rational. From that, I like to combine my belief in feminisim with my work.”

After university, she took a boat to England, and became briefly engaged to a sailor from Oklahoma who passed in the night. In London, where she saw herself as “a dumpy little thing with a colonial accent and an inferiority complex," a cousin equipped her with a tight dress and a drunken party at which she was instructed to lose her virginity. The experience, which to her everlasting regret, she recorded in full detail in an anthology on defloration published in 1975, was a sickening one.. -In the taxi back to her bedsitter, she felt only a great rage. “I gave up my religion in that taxi,” she wrote. “I ■ became a pub socialist, feminist, freethinker, and (temporarily) a sex fiend overnight. If hell existed, I’d lived through it.” Although distressed at the time, the experience proved the catharsis of her repressive Catholic childhood and she entered publishing as a publicist with an inflatable self-confidence. <

Her attachment to Utopian socialism — the nineteenth century philosophy of collective family life — causes smiles of affectionate disbelief among her friends. Few could imagine her in a commune without quickly teaching its members to jump to the Callil command. Miss Callil tends to foreclose discussions on such matters by saying dismissively she does not like labels. When I asked her how she would reconcile her socialism with being a managing direetor, she gave me a look of utter amazement. — “Sunday Times.”

Today, her life is full of cheerful friendships, as well as two cats she inherited from Germgine Greer.

Colleagues see her promotion as joint managing director of Chatto (she also becomes chairperson of Virago) as the due and rightful progress not of a feminist, but of a good publisher who happened to run a women’s publishing house rather well. Her belief in feminism is