Queer Places:
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
Earls Terrace, Kensington, London W8 6LP, UK
City Park Cemetery
Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya
Charles
Harold (or Harris) Curtis Prentice (November 4, 1891 - June 30, 1949) was an
influential British publisher who worked for Chatto and Windus from 1914-1935,
where he replaced Percy Spalding as a senior partner from 1926. During his
years with the firm, he had a major impact on the careers of several
historically important writers, including
Wyndham Lewis,
Sylvia Townsend
Warner, Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner,
Aldous Huxley, and
David Garnett. Called ‘one of the most
brilliant publishers of his day’ by Derek Patmore, and singled out by
typographer Rauri McLean as responsible for some of the most well-designed
books of the Twenties, Prentice was a shrewd and knowledgeable businessman
whose lifelong interest in promoting what he considered to be quality
literature led to him becoming a key figure in the inter-war book trade.
Prentice was born on 4th November 1891 to Ada Norrish and
Alexander Reid Prentice, the latter a wealthy solicitor based in Greenock,
Scotland. He had two brothers and one sister. In September 1910, aged 18, he
was admitted to Oriel College, Oxford, to study Classics (‘Greats’). While it
was rumoured that he bickered with the College Provost, he finished with a
second-class degree, graduating in 1914. Shortly afterwards, he volunteered to
fight in the first World War I. Prentice obtained an officer’s commission,
likely through his father’s contacts, and joined the 3rd Highland Howitzer
Brigade as a 2nd Lieutenant. While he served until the end of the war, his
elder brother Alexander was killed at Arras in 1917.
In October 1913 Prentice was still a student when his father wrote to
Chatto and Windus about the possibility of his son becoming a partner.
Fortunately, an opening was available, since Andrew Chatto had died earlier in
the year and his widow, now a sleeping partner, was in the process of
withdrawing her shares in the company. After a
lengthy interrogation of the company’s finances, Alexander Prentice eventually
purchased a position for young Charles by signing the Deed of Partnership on
30th December. Pleased to acquire a new young talent, as well as his father’s
considerable capital, Spalding wrote to Alexander that Chatto would do their
best to make Charles ‘happy and comfortable’, and ‘teach him the business
through all its departments’. Charles began working
on reader’s reports almost immediately, but only took up his place in the
office fully after being demobilised in 1919.
The publishing house Prentice joined in 1919 was a mid-sized firm that had
begun its life as a bookshop owned by the entrepreneurial John Camden Hotton
in 1855. Prior to his arrival, it had a long association with the promotion of
up-and-coming writers, largely responsible for establishing the careers of
Algernon Charles Swinburne and R. L. Stevenson. While Chatto’s
was never strongly associated with what Q. D. Leavis would call the ‘absolute
best-seller’, throughout the interwar period it published between three and
four new books a month, predominately sold at the price of 7/6, ensuring its
books were affordable for middle-class buyers and attractive to lending
libraries. Prentice joined a team consisting of Percy Spalding,
Harold Raymond, and Geoffrey Whitworth, with the prolific critic and novelist
Frank Swinnerton acting as manuscript reader.
During his years at Chatto, Prentice was a beloved figure by the many
authors he ushered into print and formed particularly close friendships with
David Garnett and Sylvia Townsend Warner (whom he called ‘Bunny’ and ‘Lolly’
respectively), T. F. Powys, and Richard Aldington. Called a ‘genius in
eiderdown clothing’ by John Fothergill, Richard Aldington’s memoirs contain
the most complete portrait of Prentice that remains in print: Charles was a
shy and reserved man, gentle and almost hesitant in manner, often silent, with
a very clear complexion and benevolent expression … with Charles the great
difficulty was to restrain his lavish hospitality and generosity. His kindness
was genuine and disinterested. […] He was unmarried, living in lodgings in
Earl’s Terrace, Kensington, in a chaos of books, boxes of cigars, wines, and
pictures by Wyndham Lewis […] with sure instinct he chose the profession of a
publisher, for which he possessed something like genius.
Prentice’s amiability and kindness are preserved mainly through flashes of
description in the memoirs of the authors he published, indicating a blend of
business and pleasure that typified so many inter-war publishers. His
relationships were strong, and mostly lasted, particularly with Warner. The
pair first met in the autumn of 1923, and Prentice would become a regular
visitor at her cottage in Chalton. Described by Warner’s
biographer Claire Harman as her ‘escort’, Prentice’s relationship with Warner
was deep, but remained Platonic, despite
Valentine Ackland’s fears that he
might propose.
Prentice’s remarkable epistolary record with these writers is mainly
preserved through his business letters in the Chatto and Windus archive. They
reveal a genial and eloquent man, as gracious when writing to authors he would
reject as he was supportive and involved with those he accepted. Prentice’s
acumen with advertising and skill at draughtsmanship were also notable: as
well as being the lead typographer for Chatto in the field of book design, he
also crafted by hand many of Chatto’s advertisements for new books. His
reader’s reports, which he composed himself from the beginning to the end of
his career, reveal a deep interest in literature, art and philosophy.
‘Literary’ works were his speciality: when the intellectual qualities of an
unusual or difficult book were being debated by the firm’s partners, it was
Prentice who was trusted with making the final judgement over a book’s
permanent value to culture and the author’s potential to grow.
Prentice’s first major ‘discovery’ as a publisher was T. F. Powys. A virtual unknown in 1922, Prentice greatly assisted with the
publication of his first work of fiction, The Left Leg, and would go on to
play a key role in the development and maturation of Powys’ style, often
working with the author to revise drafts of his fiction. Along with Harold
Raymond, Frank Swinnerton, and later, Ian Parsons and Oliver Warner, Prentice
was also responsible for the cultivation of the careers of Aldous Huxley and
Sylvia Townsend Warner, championing their early work and creating the
conditions for their subsequent popularity.
Similarly, Prentice was key to the career of Wyndham Lewis. Lewis,
well-known in London as an oil painter and founder of Vorticism, had been
struggling to find a publisher for a series of political books when Prentice
accepted The Art of Being Ruled in 1925. The extent to which Prentice would
promote books he considered intellectually valuable, sometimes against the
grain of the market, is strongly evidenced by this title, which at 18/- was
not widely picked up by libraries, instead pitching itself to a narrow
literary readership. In order to protect the firm against loss, Prentice wrote
to the printer John Kirkpatrick to say the book was ‘by no means a commercial
proposition’ and arranged for a special discount of ten percent. As with Powys, Prentice would go on to form a strong personal
connection to Lewis, playing a significant editorial role in his later work,
before they broke in 1932 over a contractual dispute instigated by the author.
In addition to developing individual authors, Prentice played an important
role in the rise of a new form of bookmaking in the early 1930s: the low-price
pocket-book or ‘uniform edition’. The Phoenix Library (1928-49) and
Dolphin books (1931-33) were attempts by Prentice and the other Chatto
partners to sell books in larger volumes directly to wholesalers and
bookshops, and circumvent the reliance on subscription libraries.
While the success of the Phoenix Library was crucial in transforming authors
such as Powys and Lewis into better-known names, the short-lived Dolphin
series was also important, as Prentice used it to publish the work of Samuel
Beckett and Thomas McGreevy in Britain for the first time.
In 1935, Prentice decided to end his distinguished career with Chatto, and
received £13,750 from his shares in the company. In a letter to Harold
Raymond, he wrote, ‘I wish the good ship Chatto and Windus infinite voyages of
the richest profit and all happiness […] I hope that books and magazines will
sell always in their thousands’. He pursued his
long-held interest in Greek history and culture by moving to Greece for
several years, returning to Britain periodically, before the death of his
father in 1937 necessitated a move back to his birthplace of Greenock. Now a very wealthy bachelor, Prentice remained in touch with
Chatto and worked as an advisor, giving his opinion on manuscripts and
assisting in book production.
The end of Prentice’s life was, very much unlike his professional one,
shrouded in controversy and scandal. In 1941, he eloped with his
sister-in-law, Lynn Prentice, who went by the name Lynn Anderson. He explained
to David Garnett that it was ‘an odd story; we had known each other amicably
for 12 years, but suddenly a year ago there was an explosion. In December the
Nisi should be an Absolute. Here we are anchored, as I had to buy the place,
for the war anyhow – unless either of us is yanked out and applied to a lathe’. This situation did not end well. A marriage was
arranged for later in the year, at Caxton Hall, with A.S. Frere of Heinemann
acting as best man. However, the registrar refused to go through with the
ceremony on the grounds that it was illegal for a man to marry his brother’s
wife, and Frere ‘behaved disgustingly’, causing the reception to be cancelled
as well.
Lynn Anderson and Prentice moved around a great deal in the following
years, buying and renovating several cottages in the West Country but never
settling down for more than a few years, and frequently travelled back and
forth to various African countries, experiences which Prentice recounted in
his letters to British-based friends with amazement and delight. From 1945, he
worked as ‘a sort of get-up advisor to Penguin’, communicating via the post
from his constantly-changing lodgings.
In 1948, Lynn and Prentice made the decision to move permanently to
Nairobi, Kenya, where they were neighbours of William Powys, one of the 11
Powys siblings. Sadly, the scandal that had plagued Prentice’s attempted
marriage seven years earlier was to be eclipsed by the manner of his death. On
30th June, 1949, Lynn returned from shopping to their urban hotel to find
Prentice screaming in pain with his face covered by a sheet. Around his bed
lay the bottles of over 50 barbiturate-based sleeping tablets, all empty.
Despite the urgent attentions of a local doctor, he died soon afterwards. The
colonial police suspected Lynn of murder; she was under house arrest for over
a month. She was eventually let go, but in order to ‘keep up white prestige
among the Africans’, his obituary declared a death of pneumonia. It was only
in 1954, when David Garnett interviewed Lynn about Prentice’s death, that the
suicide itself became known to his immediate friends. Prentice appeared jovial
and happy in his final letters, and the motivation for his suicide remains a
mystery. Garnett seems to have harboured at least some suspicions that it may
have been murder after all. There was a distrust of Lynn that was common to
Prentice’s friends, who generally believed she was guilty, at least, of
exploiting his wealth and magnanimity.
Prentice’s legacy in the publishing trade is of significant literary
historical importance. He played a prominent role in many of the major trends
of the interwar book trade and shepherded several now-canonical writers into
print with his editorial nous and love of good writing. A neglected maestro of
publishing, Prentice stands as an important intermediary figure in the history
of literature between modernist writers and book marketplaces, as well as a
skilful typographical innovator, patron and editor.
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