Dreams of using my degree in American and English Literature to forge a career as a writer had foundered, debts had grown, and the law seemed sensible. But if I was going to be a lawyer, I’d be a libel lawyer, where words are all.
I'd read Carter-Ruck’s memoirs. While we didn’t share the same political sensibility, I admired how he’d helped see the UK edition of Lolita into print. First published in France in 1955, Nabokov’s novel was acclaimed by Graham Greene as one of that year’s best novels. Three years later the sales figures for its first American edition, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, vindicated Greene’s assessment: some 100,000 copies of Lolita were sold in three weeks, second only to Dr Zhivago.
By 1959, however, as Parliament debated what would become the Obscene Publications Act, there was antipathy to the book in Britain. The Sunday Express, august and influential in those days, castigated Lolita as “sheer unrestrained pornography”; customs officials were poised to seize copies entering the country. Nabokov’s publisher, George (later Lord) Weidenfeld, turned to Carter-Ruck to devise a way of publishing the book safely.
Carter-Ruck came up with a canny solution. He advised that the government should be informed, by letter, of the intention to distribute the book in this country. A small number of copies of Lolita were printed, and the letter was sent, but at a critical point: during the period that Parliament was dissolved before the general election. In other words, Carter-Ruck gambled that in the period of inactivity after Parliament’s dissolution no action would be taken by the Home Secretary. Parliament reassembled on October 27, and Carter-Ruck was proved right. Lolita was published on November 6, and neither author nor publisher were charged with any offense.
The Obscene Publications Act, enacted the same year, was subsequently wielded against Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Last Exit to Brooklyn — in both cases fruitlessly.
On the eve of joining Carter-Ruck and Partners in September 1992, I looked forward to meeting the man who had played such a subtle and significant role in the UK publication of Lolita, even if his efforts to persuade Nabokov to amend four sentences had been unsuccessful. “To him, Lolita was a work of art not to be mutilated in any way by the intrusion of legal advice,” Carter-Ruck wrote in Memoirs of a Libel Lawyer.
I was introduced to him on my first day.
“Mr Ward, welcome to the firm.”
I was then given my first job: walk from the eastern end of Fleet Street to the Soho offices of Private Eye and serve a writ.
Today, articled clerks are called trainees, plaintiffs are claimants, and writs are claim forms. But don’t be fooled by the prosaic. Or by the Defamation Act 2013, which continued the trend away from the show trials of the 1980s and 90s — when libel was a plaintiff-friendly lottery worth millions — to making life marginally more congenial for defendants.
Libel is still big business. Get it wrong, and the fate of Francis King looms. King's novel A Domestic Animal (1970) was pulped before publication, after Tom Skeffington-Lodge MP discerned himself in the creation of “Dame Winifred Harcourt.” King had to sell his house to pay his legal bills.
Many other writers have had cause to rue the libel laws:
Thomas Berhard's Woodcutters (1984) offended composer Gerhard Lampesberg, who sued after seeing himself as the boorish, alcoholic Auersberger.
D. J. Taylor's Real Life (1992) annoyed someone whose identity he’d inadvertently co-opted.
Malcolm Muggeridge's Picture Palace (1934) was halted by an injunction from his former employers at the Guardian.
Even Amanda Craig's A Vicious Circle (1996) was delayed after a threat of a libel claim.
Publishers do not like things like this. They cost money.
Ideally, the intrusion of legal advice will both prevent an unwelcome day in court and be felicitous, so that text is not, as Nabokov feared, mutilated. But discord is ever-present. No writer relishes a lawyer poring over their pages, amending one sentence after another — or the portentous verdicts that follow:
“The text is problematic in exposing the publishers to the risk of proceedings for contempt of court, an imprisonable offence.”
“Publication in its present form would provoke an indefensible and expensive claim for libel.”
Underpinning everything is the interrelationship of meaning and risk.
What do the words mean? How will they be interpreted? What risks do they pose, and what is the publisher’s threshold for risk?
Some publishers operate a zero-risk policy — unsurprising when a serious libel can cost up to £250,000 in damages and seven-figure legal fees. In Carter-Ruck's heyday, libel reading was a matter for editors and lawyers; today, lawyers also work directly with authors. Publishers increasingly push the cost of a legal read onto the author — who, amid pesky contractual small print, warrants that the manuscript is free of risk and indemnifies the publishing house.
I’ve spent a career coming and going as a lawyer, my goings animated by parallel lives as a freelance journalist and writer. I returned to the law two years ago with rather more commitment than I thought possible. Since then, I have libel-read at least sixty manuscripts, plus film scripts, magazine articles, and newspaper copy.
The author-as-have-a-go-hero pops up perhaps once a week — sometimes tired of rejection slips, sometimes bent on score-settling rather than storytelling. Motivation varies; so does quality. And the approach to risk can be confused.
This was brought home in a recent call with a would-be author — let’s call her Dolores.
“We were all scared of my father,” she said. “His presence hung over the whole family.”
“How so?” I asked.
“He murdered a prostitute. We all knew he'd strangled her to death.”
Dolores intended to include this in her memoir. Yet her father had never been tried or convicted — and was still alive. “Dad won't mind,” she said. “It's just that there are other bits in the book that are tricky.”
She'd been told to have the book libel-read so it could be deemed a “fair business risk” for publication.
A book alleging murder by her father — on her say-so that he wouldn’t mind?
Other recent books have gone more smoothly:
Alan Rusbridger's Breaking News, David Lynch's Room to Dream. A few tweaks, nothing major. Mark Hodkinson’'sThe Overcoat Men needed a keen eye on its football-boardroom drama. Alexander Lebedev, the Russian oligarch, read my report on Hunt the Banker and thanked me — but said he wouldn’t be making any changes.
But the notion that alleging murder, under those circumstances, could ever be a fair business risk confounded me.
I last spoke to Peter Carter-Ruck in 2003, shortly before his death.
“Mr Ward, such a pleasure to talk to you again after all these years,” he said.
He always called me Mr Ward. Perhaps he sensed my identity crisis — part lawyer, part writer — and that only the Mr Ward of his invention was worthy of his time.
When he died, I wrote his obituary for The Independent (now owned by Alexander Lebedev's son Evgeny).
Death, of course, is the writer’s friend: neither the dead nor their estates can sue for libel.
“The best books take time,” I said to Dolores. “Don’t rush it.”
