Visiting Penguin

by guest blogger Alain de Botton, author of The Architecture of Happiness

Few more exciting things can happen to a sedentary author than to be called in to the Penguin building for a meeting. It doesn’t really matter what the ostensible reason for the summons is. The real excitement is getting out of the house for something other than a visit to the Post Office. One feels released, reinvigorated, wanted… It is typical to arrive very early.

The fun begins as soon as you step into the imposing Strand building. Many people still like to imagine that publishing is run from fusty Georgian buildings in Bloomsbury. Penguin’s HQ on the Strand is a reminder that publishing is now firmly plugged into the global economy. I relish the mirrored lift, the marble hall and the absurdly formal reception area. I have no interest in traditional offices full of ‘character’; I want James Bond, and the Strand HQ obliges.

The arrival inside the office proper is even more heady. Immediately one notices that people are doing things. They are running down corridors to meetings. Phones are ringing. The atmosphere is purposive, friendly but serious. So much of the problem of being a writer is connected to a sense of indolence. A good working day might mean 500 to 1000 words. How tricky to return home and face the family after such an output. This isn’t laziness; it’s just the limitations of the mind. After a few sentences, the brain blows a fuse and needs to be rested, like a delicate machine.

By contrast, in an office, you can feel permanently purposeful, even if you aren’t doing very much. You can go to meetings, you can talk to colleagues, you can discuss strategy. You can plot and plan. You can have a brainstorm with people in another department and share the burdens of decision-making. How I envy the team in the Strand HQ. There are moments in writing when one is convinced that there are no jobs more important, but most of the time one feels like a miniaturist, a watercolourist in a world painted in broader strokes – and though I imagine that the Penguin team once in a while looks at writers and envies their ability to eat chocolate digestives in pyjamas at 11am and collect themselves in words, even more often, writers look over the fence and feel unashamed publisher-envy.

Then there is the neediness. Whatever the reason for the Penguin visit, the author really wants to know one thing: do you still love me? It’s an irrational feeling of course, but – isolated, self-doubting, self-hating, on the brink of disaster at all times – the author needs dramatic doses of reassurance in order to make it to the desk every morning. The subtext is undeniably there in every nervous exchange, in every casually raised question, like ‘So what are the plans for the launch?’ or ‘How have sales been?’ One wants to break down and sob like a child.

A side-effect of a visit to Penguin is the crushing realisation that the publishing house has many, many children – and some don’t perform as well as they should. There are cookery writers and crime writers and writers just like you – but a little more successful. Writing is beset by sibling rivalry and the jealousies are intense. To you and your mother, you are the only writers that matter, but out there in the real world, you are dust. What’s more, when you stumble and fail, the publishing house won’t sink with you. Your professional death can easily be survived – the house is a stately liner, cruising on, its engines richly stocked. Occasionally an author falls overboard and no one hears their screams over the sound of the clapping in the state room where another writer is being cheered at a prize ceremony.

Still, it’s always a treat to be invited in. Just spare a thought for the internal turmoil of those very peculiar characters whom you come to meet at reception. They are – whatever appearances may suggest – likely to be deeply sad that the roles aren’t reversed.

Alain de Botton’s full, unedited article will be published at Hamish Hamilton in early April.