Friday, May 9, 2014

My hero / Deborah Rogers by Ian McEwan

 

'A fabulous spirit, generous, richly inventive, warm and funny' …
Ian McEwan with his agent Deborah Rogers


My hero: 

Deborah Rogers

by Ian McEwan

My agent was the least self-interested person I've ever met. Her families, the real one and the extensive one she created around her, are reeling at their loss


Friday 9 May 2014

Deborah Rogers, who died last week, became my agent and close friend in the mid 1970s. For almost 40 years, she watched over my writing life and many other aspects of my existence with such care that I could sometimes fool myself that I was her only client. She was the least self-interested person I've ever met – she gave everything to everyone.

To her writers she extended kindness, boundless hospitality, patience, fierce loyalty, very sound critical judgment and good taste. To the publishers she offered much the same, which was how she generally came away with what she wanted. To her colleagues, her employees, she gave the same again, and without quite planning to, made her agency into an alternative model for doing business – collaborative, non-adversarial, familial and highly effective. Family, in one form or another, was her essence. She was a lovely wife and mother, and from that core all else followed.

Deborah had three redeeming faults, to my knowledge. She was heroic and bountiful in her untidiness. Her office, especially her desk, piled dangerously to the ceiling, was a legend in literary London, a monument to a copious mind. The art director of a Woody Allen film thought her room might do for an eccentric publisher's office. The idea was later rejected as humanly improbable.

Secondly, she had a special talent for accidents, and was forever tossing herself down stairs or over parapets or tripping over feet, her own or other people's. Her most recent tumble was in a black cab at an intersection pile-up – she was hardly to blame, but I'm not sure it would have happened to anyone else. (I've worn a seat belt in London taxis ever since.) Typically, she never complained about her injuries, which were sometimes quite severe.

Finally, she wouldn't stop working. Hopeless at holidays, at lazing about. Her notion of catatonia was a three-hour bout of weeding on her knees. These last two defects may have been her undoing. But she never would have retired – dying in harness was what she would have wanted. She was a fabulous spirit, generous, richly inventive, warm and funny. As I write, her families, the real one and the extensive one she created around her, are reeling at their loss.







2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
054 My hero / Michael de Montaigne by Liyun Li
055 My hero / Michael Donaghy by Maggie O'Farrell
056 My hero / Richmal Crompton by Louise Crompton
057 My hero / Edward Thomas by David Constantine
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal
059 My hero / Sefton by Jilly Cooper

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 My hero / Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 My hero / Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson

102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill
111 My hero / Arnold Lobell by Julia Donaldson (23 December)

2012 (PAGE 9)
115 My hero / Nadime Gordimer by Tessa Hadley (27 January)

(PAGE 8)

2013

(PAGE 5)
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman (13 September)
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer (1 November)

(PAGE 4)



(PAGE 3)

2015
250 My hero John Bayley by Richard Eyre (22 January)
2016
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)